PSoTD

Did you see his lineup on Meet the Press today?

Broder,Brooks,Safire,Woodruff

Two of those four are only going to gloss over the Libby charges with Republican talking points. The other two are lost in the haze of inside DC baseball. Russert knows this. Why not have real investigative reporters on his roundtable? Why these hacks? Russert knew where this "roundtable" would go with the story.

I honestly would not be surprised if this is the last time Timmeh covers the Libby story with any open discussion for at least a month. He's not acting like someone in search for the truth. He's acting like someone afraid of the truth.

Sylvester Stallone set to do sequel as an older Sgt. Joe Bomowski in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot II.

Well, close enough.

One of the things that the MSM does not seem to grasp in the Plame case is that the news media was a crucial pawn in a Bush Administration political pushback operation, and more importantly, apparently an illegally used one - and that is the meat of the story.

You would think they'd therefore be more careful about being used in blowback by the Bush Administration at this point in general, but particularly, on the Plame story.

We'll see. But I'm skeptical.

It must be weird to be Tim Russert right about now (even weirder than usual). He's really the crux of Libby getting caught up in trying to deceive Fitzgerald, and Libby must have made a calculated gamble that Fitzgerald would more likely believe Libby than Russert, if no other testimony was available.

Considering that Libby talked to other reporters as well - reporters that Libby could have said told him about Plame - Libby must have seen Russert as the weak link in the credibility chain. I wonder if Russert realizes that.

Others weighing in on Russert: Roger Ailes; Taegan Goddard's Political Wire; The Next Hurrah

I just heard him "marvel about how slow the wheels of justice move" on CNN concerning the Plame case. He was baffled as to why Rove would still be under investigation although not indicted today. After two years, who was left to question, etc.

Please, don't tell me that CNN is losing interest in this story already. Please, don't tell me that Miles O'Brien has never watched an episode of Perry Mason, that he doesn't realize that during one criminal prosecution evidence may come out that could lead to another criminal prosecution. Please, don't tell me that Miles O'Brien expects the Department of Justice to work at the same pathetic standards as the corporate news media, such as CNN's ability to pronounce a determination simply after being told by powerful sources that something was so, all the while being able to retract their determinations on a later date with little to no penalty.

Please, CNN and Miles O'Brien, don't expect the Department of Justice to use your standards for depth of inquiry and patience to determine the truth. Because if that were to happen, we'd all be completely screwed.

I'm not a big Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation fan. Chris Matthews likes to have her on his show, and then "Hardball" her, more than just about anyone else I have seen on his show. Tonight was just plain ridiculous, challenging her to have evidence that Cheney *knew* he was giving Libby classified information when he told Libby about Plame.

Seriously, is that vanden Heuvel's responsibility? What about Cheney's responsibility to admit he did this months or years ago? Why is it news today? Because Cheney and Libby hid this information.

Matthews picks vanden Heuvel primarily to discount her comments, I think, because she doesn't particularly present herself sympathetically to the audience. He can play up the Republican side against a partisan from the other side and maybe he thinks that makes the position moderate. He's no Russert, but he's quite the strawman putz.

I just saw that CNN had three newscasters standing out in Hurricane Wilma's publicized 100 mile per hour winds. Anderson Cooper and Miles O'Brien were among the three. How long until one of these folks ends up getting hurt in these winds? Is CNN saying that it's worth the risk of having a shingle or stick going through their high-priced news folks in order to get a shot of them being blown by wind?

Frank Rich, while you're on Meet the Press talking about the Fitzgerald investigation, can you ask Timmeh the hard questions about his involvement in the Plame case?

Happy Birthday, Jerome Lester Horwitz.

Although most of you may only know him as Curly Howard.

From Froomkin:

Matthews also had this to say about press secretary Scott McClellan: "How can he come out day after day like a figure on a Schwarzwarld [cuckoo] clock and just come out and make these chirpings, these announcements that turn out not to be true and then continue to do the job? Don't they just laugh at him down there?"

Whoa. One of the most oblivious talking heads on television actually noticed that Scott McClellan, is not a capable press secretary?

Bad news for Scotty, because when Chris Matthews notices that you suck at your job, then everyone other than George W. Bush has noticed.

30 years of the movie. Tis the season, too.

What's your favorite line?

Don't act like you've never watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's been thirty years? How could you have missed it? And now, here's your chance to play the game...

It's obvious to me that a lot of so-called entertainment now goes under the guise of "bleeping". When I was in Bakersfield, I caught a commercial for something, I forget what the product was, but the whole premise was to use the "bleep" in a suggestive way to make you think something "forbidden" was being said. On a commercial.

You see this on some television shows now also. These are scripted bleeps - everyone knows that the audience is going to hear a bleep, and not the word, and the bleep is the punchline. The word isn't even the punchline. The bleep is the punchline.

It's sad that television writing has sunk to the point of using the censor to fill time and quality. It's one thing if the word is the point of the joke - but it's entirely different if the "bleep" is the point of the joke. A bleep doesn't even shock an audience. A scripted bleep is the writer's way of saying that he or she didn't have the skills or take the effort to write a line that you could actually hear - but instead uses the censor's sound as a crutch to lazily get out of doing it.

I'm no highbrow, and I don't think language has to be sanitized for intelligent adults, but television writing should be a profession that requires enough skill with language to avoid using the bleep as a cheap out. Where's the pride of craft?

Because they are spot on (as is Tim Goodman with the San Francisco Chronicle):

"CNN, looking to exploit the post-Katrina face of caring, personal, passionate, youthful, hip, modern and really good looking journalism, has now further marginalized Aaron Brown and nearly ruined Brown's show, "News-Night," by throwing Cooper into the mix."

He calls it "yet another in a long line of terrible CNN decisions." He says it's "an upper-management tactic that has lessened "NewsNight" even more from the first ill-advised rejiggering of content, when it took Brown's folksy-if-eccentric take on the news of the day and turned it into a kind of hybrid magazine show. Now it's something else entirely, and it's clear that something is a work in progress.

Result so far: It's not working."

I like Aaron Brown. Anderson Cooper is okay, too, but not at the expense of Aaron Brown's quirky presentation of the news. CNN is pissing away probably their best onscreen news asset with Brown.

While everybody seems to be talking about Google and Sun and Office today, this little nugget from yesterday seems more interesting to me...

Open Content Alliance Rises to the Challenge of Google Print

What a great idea! Why didn’t we think of that? Google Print’s ambitious effort to digitize the world’s book literature has inspired others to initiate their own effort. And, with the Google Print program caught in the snag of a copyright lawsuit, the sight of a relay race handoff keeps hope burning for a brighter digital future. The just announced Open Content Alliance (OCA; http://www.opencontentalliance.org) creates an international network of academics, libraries, publishers, technological firms, and a major search engine competitor to Google—all working on a new mass book digitization initiative. The goal of the effort is to establish a flexible, open infrastructure for bringing large collections of digitized material into the open Web. Permanently archived digital content, which is selected for its value by librarians, should offer a new model for collaborative library collection building, according to one OCA member. While openness will characterize content in the program, the OCA will also adhere to protection of the rights of copyright holders.

OCA founding members include the Internet Archive; Yahoo! Search; Hewlett-Packard Labs; Adobe Systems; the University of California; the University of Toronto; the European Archive; the National Archives (U.K.); O’Reilly Media, Inc.; and Prelinger Archives.

This competition between Google and the others may be the greatest thing for struggling writers in a long time. How long until they fight for the right to digitize for search unpublished manuscripts? I've got some stuff...

Okay, I watched about a half an hour of it Saturday night. That, in itself, is a compliment over the past several seasons, where I couldn't even watch that much. I'm still of the faith that believes the show should be put out of its misery, and maybe they could find a new way to do a "we've been cancelled" final show. Apparently, funny people are finding other employers more enticing than SNL.

Is it just me? Nah. Some other voices around the blogosphere:

Once in a Blue... Lamp:

Dear Saturday Night Live Production Staff,

If your writers can't find a way to make Steve Carell funny, you NEED NEW WRITERS.

Thank you.

Eye of Polyphemus

From the season premiere, it is obvious I am going to miss Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. It’s not just because she is attractive--she has a certain Dana Scully nerdy but sexy thing going on--but SNL has to have a new head writer due to her maternity leave. Her absence was felt here bigtime. I barely cracked a smile throughout the first hour, which is generally when the best sketches occur.

KeithBoykin.com

The season premiere of Saturday Night Live was almost all about Hurricane Katrina and, as usual, almost funny.