Sunday early afternoon toons: Lauer-ing the bar, monetizing the memory

The sad part is that, just as Trump will apparently never be able to blurt out something so toxic that he can't recover from it (assuming it doesn't increase his approval rating from the get-go), my guess is that Matt Lauer's terrible job as the overmatched host of the Commander in Chief forum last week will soon disappear down the memory hole. Using one third of his time with Clinton rehashing the asked-and-answered "questions" the emails? Ignoring the Dye-Blond Buffoon's lies, evasions, and inaccuracies? Pffft. Put Matt back on the Today show for a week and let him land that day's "get" – perhaps a collie who rescued a boy from a mine by running to town for the sheriff – and all will not only be forgiven, it'll be forgotten.

And, for the record, I'm with Brother Pierce: I object to calling it the "Commander In Chief Forum," because the country is slowly but surely coming to think that the Presidency has no other function, and that being CinC makes the president the boss of me. (Spoiler: Nope.) And, although Pierce doesn't mention this himself, I object to the symbolism of holding it on an aircraft carrier. Have we really forgotten the last time a big press draw like this was held on an aircraft carrier? A Facebook commenter said yeah, but what about veterans' issues, to which I should have replied (but didn't, alas) that Veterans' Affairs is a cabinet post (hence, part of the Executive branch), not a wartime responsibility of the CinC, and so we don't need the invocation of the latter role to expect presidential candidates to answer policy questions on the topic. If I really wanted gratuitous military symbolism, I'd be watching an NFL game right now. Unfortunately, I imagine the CinC Forum is here to stay as a part of the presidential election ritual.

Also, what's the big deal about athletes kneeling during the national anthem, rather than standing at attention with hand over heart? First amendment issues aside, we're once again confusing football and soccer uniforms with military uniforms, and the standards of behavior appropriate to each. Besides, kneeling is also a way to show respect, and even subservience – ask Zod.

And finally, our highest honors to to ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman for recognizing that we will never forget the meaning of today's anniversary until the last advertising account manager no longer remembers. As a parallel piece, Comic Strip of the Day looks back at what was not political cartooning's finest hour.

Today's toons were selected by an underqualified morning talk show host from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, The Nib, and other fine sources of cartoon goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Jeff Danziger, John Deering, Lisa Benson, Tim Eagan, SigneWilkinson, Jeff Stahler, Matt Weurker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Matt Davies.

p3 Legion of Merit: Stuart Carlson.

p3 Medal of Mandatory Freedom (tie): Jim Morin and Brian McFadden.

Ann Telnaes is relieved: Trump does have a plan after all.

Mark Fiore presents Suzie Newsykins, whose only summer mistake was listening to grown-ups.

Tom Tomorrow has too nearly captured the essence of my Twitter feed.

Keith Knight asks an interesting question, but it's hard to tell which answers (if any) are made up.

Reuben Bolling wins the Saul Steinberg Prize.

Carol Lay returns to a theme she owns: the search for the perfect Other. Once again: happy ending or not?

Red Meat celebrates a generational rite of passage: summer camp.

The Comic Curmudgeon salutes Six Chicks for committing.

Sometimes it seems like Comic Strip of the Day and Sophie Yanow are about the only ones out there in the Tooniverse paying attention to Standing Rock. Although I suppose that may change if Amy Goodman is indeed arrested. To be clear, I'm a fan of both Goodman and the First Amendment, but I suppose I feel the same way about Standing Rock and the prospect of its white First Amendment martyr as I used to feel about the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association: If a spectacle like this is what it takes to get some action on the problem, then so be it.

Read the label! As a shout-out to a friend, here's "Hopalong Casualty," directed in 1960 by Chuck Jones from his own story. I usually don't feature Warner Bros cartoons from beyond the mid-1950s because the production values got poorer and poorer (and you can see it happening here), but this is a gem, mainly because Jones is a master of timing and understood the logic of the Coyote and Road Runner (his own creations, after all) so well. Almost half of this toon is taken up with the "Acme Earthquake Pills" gag, which is one of the funniest bits in all of cartoondom. If you Google "acme earthquake pills" you'll find there are two or three clips of just that three-minute bit, but they're all ruined by the same well-meaning but thoroughly misguided overdubbing of music director Milt Franklyn's minimalist soft-tympani-roll driven build-up and use of bizarre sound effects – and silences, which always signaled something worse was to come – with someone's heavy-handed use of "creeepy music" that only occasionally syncs with the mood of the exact moment. (No links.) Enjoy Hopalong Casualty at Vimeo.

The Magnificent Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman observes that everyone in Casablanca has problems. Maybe theirs will work out.

Documented Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen watches as the world reacts to the EpiPen scandal in the US.

Matt Bors hits it on the nose: This election though, am I right?

Jesse Springer looks on with concern at the latest symptom of Oregon's seemingly perpetual budget woes.

Test your toon-captioning mojo at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

Saturday morning tunes: Don't know where, don't know when

Stephen Colbert wrapped up "The Colbert Report" Thursday night with this classic 1939 World War II song made immortal by Dame Vera Lynn (probably by coincidence, it was also the music to the ending of Stanley Kubrik's 1964 dark, dark, dark classic "Dr. Strangelove") 

Colbert's version features . . . everybody.

If you need a cheat sheet for most of the guest singers, it's here. It's probably the first and last time that Sir Patrick Stewart has stood within arm's length of Dr. Henry "The Butcher of Cambodia" Kissinger.

We wish the lad good luck with his new show. He seems to have prospects.

(Also, 39 years ago tomorrow, Harry Chapin hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with "Cat's in the Cradle." We gave it the p3 treatment in 2012.)

And conservatives still don't get The Colbert Report

See for yourself.

Of course, the Twitter tweet that started the outrage was only a one-liner fragment of the longer segment from the show it was drawn from. But honestly, given the linkbait advantages to pulling something out of context, and the Colbert Report's energetic use of social media, it's probably a miracle this hasn't happened before.

Seven years ago this week in p3: Remember The Half-Hour News Hour?

Of course you don't. And there's a reason.

That week I was writing the second in a series of pieces about why conservative satire – like that sad and short-lived entry by the Fox News Channel – isn't terribly humorous. Part of it was that they learned the wrong lessons from the success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

But part of it is that American conservatism, as it's constituted these days, simply lacks a crucial ability without which satire becomes, as Saint Molly memorably put it, crude and vulgar.

What's missing is the capacity to retain at least a tiny smidgen of charity; first, that is, to attack the strong, not the weak; and second, to understand that once you're incapable of seeing your opponent – your victim, if you will – as anything but a monster, you still have a wide range of tools with which to go after them, but satire is no longer one of them.

There are people out there on the political scene that I consider monsters. I tend to avoid jokes about them directly, and if I fail to avoid that the result is probably not that funny, anyway.  Conservatives have a tough time seeing anyone who disagrees with them  – or might do so at some point – as anything but a monster. Great for message discipline; death for satire.

And the funny part, so to speak, is that seven years later, conservatives still don't understand, to say nothing of appreciate, Colbert's satire.

Read more of my posts on satire from the link on the p3 List.

Six years ago at p3: I liked Colbert, but didn't get him

Yup, this week marks the sixth anniversary of the launch of The Colbert Report.

I didn't completely get it. That's painful, because I'm a major fan and student of satire and irony. But I didn't get it. I accept that now. I do.

I wanted it to be good, and while I couldn't ignore some of the shakedown problems, I could certainly excuse them. My main problem was that I never watched Bill O'Reilly, so I wasn't prepared to recognize -- let alone appreciate -- a pitch perfect parody of him.

Also I was slow -- as were a lot of right-wingers like Dinesh D'Souza, Bill Kristol, and Tony Perkins, I'm delighted to remind you -- to realize that Colbert's character could be lethal as an interlocutor. Many are the irony-challenged interviewees who thought that Colbert was a safe haven, only to find them unwittingly led by his siren call to make even worse-sounding claims than the ones in the book they were there to promote.

So yeah.  My bad.

A Peabody, one-and-a-half-Emmys, and countless nominations and special recognitions later, the Report is going strong. And with gambits like his characters absolutely-real superPAC, he's taking satire into the highwiare, wait-is-this-a-joke? regions that nobody's quite sure what to make of.

He has the thanks of a grateful nation, and Nation.

"A contagion of courage"

When Kissinger was playing Iago to President Nixon's Richard III, all the elements proper to a royal drama were present. But Kissinger wasn't simply the paragon of something past. He also used the modern techniques [of manipulating rational, bureaucratic structure] with a determined and narrow genius.

What isn't clear is whether he ever believed he would be serving the public interest. We don't know what went through his mind during his first months as President Nixon's National Security Council Advisor. Perhaps he underwent a sudden private revelation that he craved power and had the manipulative talents to gain it. Perhaps, in the adrenaline rush of that revelation, he forgot about the nature of public service.

John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards:
The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

With thanks to DL buddy Nick, without whose nudging I would have let the opportunity pass, last night I saw the "The Most Dangerous Man in America," the documentary on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, at Cinema 21 in Portland, and listened to Ellsberg himself in a Q&A session with the audience afterward.

It was an amazing experience, if by "amazing" we mean: "likely to make you feel like you're wasting oxygen that better people than you could be putting to use right now."

Or: "likely to make you realize that even people who are really smart and have pretty clear values don't have all the answers and can't always make everything have a happy ending."

There's a story Ellsberg tells in the film (it's also in his 2003 book Secrets) about a meeting he had with Henry Kissinger not long before Richard Nixon took office. Kissinger would be Nixon's National Security Advisor, and Ellsberg at that time held a high-security clearance position in the State Department. Ellsberg explained to Kissinger the cycle of reactions he would experience as he gained access to highly classified government secrets. First, said Ellsberg, you feel elation: You're now privy to the most closely guarded secrets the government holds. Apart from the ego gratification of that, there's the content itself--the things you'll now know that you didn't, and couldn't, before.

That leads to the second stage: You'll feel foolish, embarrassed to realize how naïve you had been, how many things you had recently believed that you now know simply aren't so.

Finally, Ellsberg told Kissinger, you'll come to feel that the American people are the foolish ones, since they aren't in the know like you and your cohort. Inevitably, you'll feel contempt for the people you're supposed to be serving.

Ellsberg notes that Kissinger originally favored a quick diplomatic end to the Vietnam war--essentially giving the US a "decent interval" by which to save diplomatic face and get our troops out. But the thought of anything other than unambiguous victory in Vietnam (whatever that might be) was anathema to Nixon, and Kissinger (who would later famously remark that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac") was more interested in the power that came from manipulating the President than in preventing a wider war in Indochina.

You may remember the results.

In the Q & A session after the film, several audience members raised variations of the same question: Why do our leaders sacrifice thousands upon thousands of (others') lives pursuing treasury-breaking wars with no connection to our national interest--and why are we so helpless to stop it?

Ellsberg, a Marine officer in the early 1960s, noted that courage--the willingness to take risk when the stakes are extraordinarily high--is not all that unusual on the battlefield, but much rarer when those soldiers return to serve their country civilian life. He specifically and unflatteringly referred to Colin Powell as one of those who were unable to break free of the cult of the secret and the pursuit of insider power through palace intrigues.

In fact, he wasn't terribly charitable to any of the players on the national stage right now: Not White House advisors; not the Congress charged with constitutional responsibilities of oversight; not the news media which, except for a rare interval lasting from the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the NYTimes and over a dozen other papers in defiance of the Nixon administration's efforts to invoke prior restraint, to the investigation and coverage of Watergate, has always been much more comfortable with access journalism than adversarial journalism.

And not the American public who, said Ellsberg, "must have the courage to face responsibly what we're doing in the world."

It was a very mixed experience: Ellsberg seemed genuinely appreciative of the chance to talk with people about the issues he has given himself to for forty years. (There were two moments, one in the film and one during Ellsberg's remarks, when the local audience reacted warmly to praise for Oregon's Senator Wayne Morse.) His own determination to continue his own political activism was evident and inspiring. But it would be impossible to miss his distinct lack of optimism about the future. He voted for Obama, and assumed he would do so again--at a couple of points he referred to Obama's re-election in 2012 as if it were a fait accompli. And yet he expressed little hope that Obama would end the war in Afghanistan--indeed he predicted an escalation of US troop involvement. Although he added somewhat wistfully, almost as an afterthought, that it's still early in Obama's first term; perhaps there's time for him to change direction.

Ellsberg nurtures no great expectations for the anti-war movement in connection with Iraq and Afghanistan (and as audience members noted, there's no draft and no Vietnam-equivalent daily media coverage to provide the added push this time around), yet he considers it necessary work. The anti-war movement, he pointed out, finally prevailed in the case of the Vietnam war . . . but it took ten years.

We need, he said, "a contagion of courage." And that's where things were left hanging.

(Ellsberg will be present for Q & A sessions with the audience after both showings tonight, and the film will be at Cinema 21 through next week.)

This post is brought to you by the makers of Hostess Twinkies, who approve its content

Sigh.

Okay, people, let's review:

• Speech is speech. Money is commerce.


• Citizens are people. Corporations are financial fictions of convenience.

This morning's Supreme Court decision was utterly predictable--ordained, one might even say--given the current composition of the Court (a state of affairs that Senate Dems bargained away any influence over, but let that pass). But it's no less harmful to the republic for that.

I take a back seat to no one in my support of the First Amendment. But whatever it is you don't like about America, I assure you that this will not fix it. Even if you believe that corporations can never be too free, this morning's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will not make things better. At most it gives that side an ephemeral advantage, since the same ruling took the cuffs off of trade unions and their Communist masters.

Here. Watch this (again).

Colbert explains, as only he can, two of the most damaging Supreme Court decisions in US history

I'm little late in getting to this, but as Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars reminded us this morning, the question of corporate personhood is, alas, not going anywhere.

Another p3 political pop quiz

South Carolina newspaper The State got a look at (still-)Governor Mark Sanford's press secretary's email traffic during those awkward days last month when the Governor's whereabouts were still unknown.

Via TPM Muckraker come the following excerpts from those emails, each written by a media site using the prospect of an obviously impending scandal (exact details still unknown) to get on the good side of Governor's (and, at the time, presidential hopeful's) office.

But one isn't like the other three: Can you spot which one?

First:

Having known the Governor for years and even worked with him when he would host radio shows for me -- I find this story and the media frenzy surrounding it to be absolutely ridiculous! Please give him my best.

And:

If you all want to speak on this publicly, you're welcome to Washington Times Radio. You know that you will be on friendly ground here!

And finally:

If the governor is looking for a friendly place to make light of what I think is a small story that got blown out of scale I would be happy to have him on. In person here, on the phone, or in South Carolina.

Stay strong,

The first two quotes are from a Fox News correspondent and a Washington Times staffer, respectively.

The third is from Stephen Colbert.

You can't tell the right-wing whores without a score card.

Does this mean we can retire "I am not a crook"?

(Updated below.)

Freshman US Representative Bill Posey of Florida violated the cardinal rule of media statements: Never repeat their punch-line words in your denial.

Quoth Posey, in the Orlando Sentinal:

There is no reason to say that I'm the illegitimate grandson of an alligator.

Background:

[...] U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, introduced legislation last month that would require all presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate when qualifying to run. Posey said the intent was to prevent a repeat of what happened last year, when fringe critics of then-candidate Barack Obama questioned his citizenship.

Instead, the bill fell flat — it has yet to attract a co-sponsor — and Posey took a beating from late-night comedy-show hosts and liberal media, who accused him of kowtowing to extremists in his party.

In fairness, I should point out that it would be wrong to interpret this quote as a denial that he is the illegitimate grandson of an alligator. In fact, as the context makes clear, Posey was simply insisting that it would be "name-calling and personal denigration" to actually say he is the illegitimate son of an alligator--a point that all of us, including alligators, can probably agree on.

Freshmen. Sheesh.


(Update: I had forgotten it this morning, but that whole Posey's-grandmother-and-alligator story didn't just fall out of the sky:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bill Posey Alligator Rumors
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

As I've said before, Colbert is a much greater threat to conservative guests than Stewart is; trusting Colbert's faux-conservative persona, they blithely follow him much farther into the quicksand.)

Colbert ratchets up the treatment for Limbaugh and GOP

The Colbert Report let a good bit of its usual ironic distance slip in last night's edition of "The Wørd." The topic was Colbert's celebration of the new leader of the Republican party: sexual tourist and hillbilly heroin addict Rush Limbaugh.

But even Colbert's cheerful-idiot manqué doesn't do much to soften the blow of some of this material. It's still funny as hell, but considerably harsher than usual.

This, for example, is one of the nicer moments from the segment:

[Colbert plays Limbaugh's voice, which is now the ringtone on his phone:]

Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.

[Colbert continues:]

So true! It's kind of like what talk radio does for unattractive men.

And then he starts playing rough. See for yourself:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Army of One

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Paul McCartney Appearance

Funny Political Videos
More Funny Videos

The sign that the gloves were off for this one: Several of the deepest cuts were delivered not by the ironic alter-ego voice of the Wørd beside him on-screen, which usually slips in the subversive punchline to Colbert's unself-aware set-ups, but en claire by Colbert himself.

Oppositional television in the age of Obama

After the defeat of McCain and Palin in November, a lot of folks wondered aloud if "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" could survive without a Republican in the White House.

I was never worried: The point of satire is to ridicule the excesses, vanities, hypocrisy, and dishonesty of those in power. It's true that Second Age of Bush provided an embarrassment of riches for the two shows' writers to work with. But to imagine that the Obama administration, or any administration, will give them nothing to work with--would be so transparent, modest, self-consistent, unerring, and uniformly benificent that there'll be nothing for satirists to sink their teeth into--is to have a fundamentalist's faith and trust in our government that is almost un-American.

And, of course, the armory of the contemporary American satirist is by no means limited to barbs about the executive branch of the government: There are the antedeluvian minds of the Senate Republicans. There is the endless jockeying of interests and agendas in the House. There's the Supreme Court--why, the continued existence on this earth of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas alone amounts to a Full Employment Program for Comedy Writers. There's Big Banking. Big Media. Big Pharma. And so on.

Anyone who sits at the far end of the gap of mystery and miracle that separates the power elite from the rest of us will always be fair game for satirists. Don't worry for them. If there's enough material out there to keep even Leno going in prime time five nights a week, certainly there's plenty of work for good purveyors of topical humor, too.

If you want to know the fellow whose future I'm more concerned about, it's Keith Olbermann.

He's not really a satirist, of course, although he gets in his share of snark and ridicule in. But when his "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" took off following the first of his "Special Reports" in August of 2006--Rumsfeld had compared opponents of the Iraq war with the "appeasers" of Hitler in the 1930s, and Olbermann went ballistic--he became one of the more highly-positioned voices of opposition in the mainstream media.

A lot of that clout got squandered over the next couple of years, I think. He's often mentioned his worry that airing his first Special Report might cost him his job; as time went on I think that worry was replaced by the worry that not airing Special Reports might cost him his ratings bump. By last spring his Special Reports were too often about ephemera like his objections to how Hillary was campaigning that week.

In part that's because the "Countdown" format and formula call for the rapid descent each night from the important (usually Story #5, presented first) to the silly (the remaining four stories of the evening). As Doctor Beyond pointed out to me last week, by the night before the Obama inauguration, KO was directing his trademark bombast toward the fact that . . . wait for it . . . Obama was going to leave the carpet (famously designed by Laura Bush) in the Oval Office. (In fairness, the Special Report that night was about prosecuting the Bush administration personnel involved in the practice of torture.)

That's why I was especially pleased last week to see "Countdown" break the two-part story of government whistleblower Russell Tice, who revealed that the NSA had been spying on American journalists and news agencies, plus "tens of thousands" of other Americans. (Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.)

While I'm not worried about the satirists on Comedy Central, I'm waiting to see what happens to Olbermann under a non-Bush administration. "Countdown" format notwithstanding, he's not as liberal (certainly not progressive) as suggested by those "Special Comment" segments; he was, like a lot of Americans, disgusted by the incompetence and dishonesty of Bush and his administration, and unlike the rest of us he had a platform. He was right, of course, but what now? On MSNBC, Maddow will lead the charge to keep Obama pushed to the left as much as possible--but will Olbermann do much more than kibbitz? Will the left be as fond of him when he doesn't have Bush to kick around anymore?

Time will tell. I'd like to see him continue to thrive, if only to keep pushing O'Reilly into gratifyingly foolish outbursts, but time will tell.

The GOP's prop-gag politics

Perhaps, after three years, Republicans are finally learning that, when Stephen Colbert's conservative-manqué character takes up one of their ideas and gleefully runs with it, it's time to re-evaluate:

Now the McCain campaign appears to be stepping back from one of its more childish school-yard taunts:

Republican John McCain appeared to back down on Tuesday in his dispute with his opponent Barack Obama over tire pressure.

Last week in St. Louis, Obama told an audience that steps such as inflating tires to the correct levels could make a difference when it comes to conserving fuel.

Cue gleeful mockery from McCain. Obama was naive, inexperienced and not talking straight to the American people about energy, he said.

His campaign went further, distributing to reporters tire gauges engraved with the words “Obama’s energy plan.”

Predictably, Obama hit back calling McCain’s mockery “ignorant,” arguing his plans were being misrepresented and saying that experts backed his call over tire pressure. Equally predictably, McCain’s camp hit back.

The surprise came during a telephone town hall meeting McCain held on Tuesday with voters in Pennsylvania.

“Obama said a couple of days ago says we all should inflate our tires. I don’t disagree with that. The American Automobile Association strongly recommends it,” McCain said.

But he kept up his broad criticism of Obama on energy: “I … don’t think that that (inflating tires) is a way to become energy independent.”

(The fact that Obama's claim was uncontroversially true, and that the Washington press corps knew it as well as any drivers education student, didn't stop the big media from treating this foolishness as "news" for several days. Republicans learned the effectiveness of purile ploys like this, and likelihood of the press's willing participation, with the "purple heart" Band-Aids mocking Kerry's war service in 2004.)

That being said, now that the bottom seems to be dropping out of the Obama Tire Gauge market, I want one for my car. If anyone reading this has the right connections to the GOP and can bag one for me, please let me know.

For reasons I can't explain, the modern GOP goes for these prop gag-driven gimmicks like it was the Party of Carrot Top--tire gauges, Band-aids, "flip-flop" beach sandals, jelly beans, and on and on. And there's one other, on which a favorite family story hangs:

In 1989, my uncle and aunt, both staunch Republicans and the aunt related to the Quayle family by marriage, were thrilled to be invited to the Bush/Quayle inaugural celebrations. One nighttime event gathered everyone on the Mall to celebrate Peggy Noonan's campaign slogan "a thousand points of light" (each point of light was theorized to represent one of the private or nonprofit entities that would step forward to pick up the slack caused by a decade of Republican domestic budget slashing).

At the culmination of the ceremony, when Bush uttered the tag line, each guest was to light and hold aloft one of the 40,000 commemorative Maglight flashlights donated by the manufacturer, each engraved with Bush and Quayle's names, the date, and "A Thousand Points of Light" (the flashlights were the points of light--get it?).

Think of it as a "Goodbye Norma Jean" moment for the non-Elton crowd.

All well and good--until my kinfolk discovered to their outrage that they were expected to shell out close to twenty bucks for their Maglight. Like all good Reagan Republicans, they were foursquare behind the whole thousand-points-of-light thing as long as it was clearly understood that it wasn't going to involve any outlay on their part. Out of affection and tact, the Democrats in our family only teased them about this story a little.

Stewart and Colbert come to Hulu

Wish you could watch The Daily Show and the Colbert Report without having to deal with Comedy Central's astonishingly clunky websites? Grateful for the heroic work of Crooks and Liars making clips available, but sometimes have a hankering to see a segment that they didn't happen to preserve?

Then good news is here: Viacom, parent of the Comedy Channel, has struck a deal with Hulu.com, the joint venture of NBC Universal and The News Corp. (which owns FOX) (got all that?), to make much of its content--including Stewart and Colbert--available online in free streaming full-episode format.

Execs at Viacom apparently took a solemn vow years ago to hound any clips of its own properties off of YouTube--which is why you can find, say, close to 2000 hits for "The West Wing" on YouTube but pretty much nothing for America's Anchors from Comedy Central except a lot of "content removed at request of copyright owner" messages.

You can also mark out custom clips to share on MySpace and Facebook--although I have yet to figure out how to get said clips into Blogger. When I finally get it figured out, you'll know.

One other limitation: At the moment, Hulu is only making the most recent dozen or so episodes of each show available. Not sure yet if this means that new episodes will push old ones off, or if they'll gradually build an archive library for viewers. Obviously, the latter is devoutly to be wished, but we'll have to see.

Hulu also has p3 faves Arrested Development, 30 Rock, and the first two seasons (so far) of Babylon 5.

(Image via Rolling Stone.)

Colbert and Perkins: "Why do these judges keep seeing gay things in the Constitution?"

There have been two famous Tony Perkinses. Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed the scarier of the two, the head of the conservative Christian think-tank the Family Research Council.

I was slow coming around to the Colbert Report interviews. Part of the reason, I now understand, is that I never watched O'Reilly, so I never really appreciated what a lovingly detailed skewering of that program the Colbert Report was. My loss.

But one of the mysteries of the Report is that right-wingers continue to come on as guests. I would be fascinated to understand the thinking behind their decision to do so. Is it that Colbert's access to the 18-35 demo is simply too good to pass up, regardless of the personal price? Is it that they imagine they can outwit and outmaneuver one of the top satirists currently in the business? Is it that they don't understand that it is satire, incorrectly imagining that the Report is safe haven--and thus are unprepared for a host who will gleefully drag them to an even more extreme-right position, if he can?

Whatever the reason, last night Perkins appeared on the Report to promote his new book. The result--centering around a discussion of gay marriage--can't have done Perkins much good, although it was funny as hell. (Scroll down to the Perkins interview.)




Perkins can't have sold a single copy of his book with this appearance; what was the idea?

In any case, Perkins' mounted head will be hanging next to Bill Kristol and Dinesh D'Souza, among others, in Colbert's trophy room.

(Note: Now that Viacom has bullied all Report and Daily Show clips off of YouTube, the least they could do is add the code so that they can be embedded from their proprietary sites. They can't seriously imagine that it would hurt ad revenue or viewership to get free promotion from the blog world--especially since the video clips have built-in commercials [viewers may be exposed to the oxygen-wasting Mo Rocca following the Colbert clip, for which I can only express my sincere regrets]?)

(Hat tip to Doctor TV, who noted "Perkins looks like he doesn't know what hit him.")

What I missed because I was at Drinking Liberally last night bemoaning with friends the fact that John Edwards dropped out of the race

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Hollywood update

The WGA strike ended on Wednesday, and it's been interesting to watch the industry putting the pieces back together. I find it a little odd that it was apparently the impending Oscars that may have pushed AMPTP to sit down seriously at the table. If ever there was an event that cried out more for "less talk!", I'm at a loss to name it. But let it pass.

On television, the strike-imposed blackout had the side effect of clearing out the undergrowth so that oddities like Reaper could bloom, while it wiped out a lot of struggling shows, and left some, like Pushing Dasies and Bionic Woman, in limbo. In one of the more unexpected results, it may have found a broadcast audience for the ultra-darkly fascinating Dexter, whose first-season episodes from Showtime are now running on CBS.

And I can watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report again--I wasn't that interested in all-interview shows, particularly when interviewees were crossing picket lines to be there.

Of course, the strike also added to the already-burgeoning ranks of no-union-writer shows (aka "reality" shows--as if dreck like Moment of Truth anything to do with reality). Forty years ago, many Americans were mortified to think that the image that other countries had of us was through international syndication of The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. Now--in addition to the overseas adventures of George W. Bush--our neighbors around the world can use American Gladiator and Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? to form their opinions of us. We get Jane Austen from them; they get Jeff Foxworthy from us. Couldn't be prouder.

Still, the WGA members did hang in there, and good for them. Nice to see the media corporations dragged kicking and screaming into the late 20th Century. Hats off to all the other unions that honored the strike, too. The successful outcome of this strike, plus the SEIU successfully organizing the historically un-organizable janitors in several large cities around the country in the last couple of years, mark two all-too-rare large-scale victories for labor.

I haven't seen anyone connecting the theme to this famous image (although I certainly don't fault the WGA for it), but the WGA produced a series of great viral videos to promote their cause, collectively titled "Speechless."

The gist isn't complicated: Without writers, actors can't talk. Some of the videos were pretty straight-forward: (Here and here.) Some were clever mash-ups on the theme, like this and this.

But my all-time favorite is the one by indie queen Illeana Douglas (recently seen on cable in a Law & Order: SVU episode as a defense attorney who has to wear the ugliest shoes she can find so that her client, who is--among other things--a shoe fetishist, will pay attention when she talks to him). Douglas's video is funny as hell--it's her very own "Springsteen Unplugged" moment:

Clearly, there's silence, and then again there's, you know, silence.

Douglas, by the way, is in The Year of Getting to Know Us, featured at the Sundance Film Festival last month. And--if I may bask in someone's reflected glory for a moment--a friend of mine, whose brother was a producer, attended Sundance. At my request--hint? wheedling?--she brought me back a menu from the catered dinner thrown by the producers, with a beautiful lipstick kiss print and an inscription from la Illeana herself. Woof.

But don't take my word for it (by all means, click to enlarge):

I hereby officially declare Illeana Douglas the p3 "It" Girl.

WGA strike: Good news and bad news

Letterman, unlike the rest of the late night line-up, owns his own show (and Craig Ferguson's show), so he's been able to make a separate peace with the Writers Guild that will bring new Letterman episodes to the air next week:

The company announced two weeks ago that it was seeking a separate deal with the guild that would permit the two World Wide Pants show to return to the air. The talks seemed to be at an impasse until today when the deal was completed.

A spokesman for Mr. Letterman’s company declined to comment.

Beyond the obvious advantage of having writers to supply comedy material that other shows will not have, Mr. Letterman’s and Mr. Ferguson’s shows will likely gain a benefit by being able to book guests who will not appear on shows still being struck by the Writers Guild.

It's good news for two reasons: First, it gets some of the union writers back to work. Second, it gets some new late-night material back on the air.

It's bad news because this inevitably weakens to some extent support for the rest of the striking Guild members trying to force the producers and their corporate masters back to the negotiating table.

"The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," among others, will start airing new episodes again in January, but without writers. That means a lot of interviews, I gather. As Stewart and Colbert said in a joint statement:

"We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence."

I can't find the article now, but some time since the WGA strike began I read someone floating the idea that "Daily Show" and "Colbert" writers should be under the same contract as news writers. That makes sense to me, although I don't know the legal demarcation ins and outs of it.

I mean, you tell me: Which of these is the product of a clueless news writer hack working off Karl Rove's fax machine, and which is the product of a writer of satire who clearly inhales the news from multiple sources on a daily basis?

Katie Couric, "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric," September 2007:

Jon Stewart, "The Daily Show," November 2007

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.


(By the way: Were you good this year? Yes? Then here's a special treat for you.)

“You don’t get a different set of rules because you’re running as a joke”

(Updated below.)

So says DC election lawyer Marc Elias--and who are we to point out the 2000 election to prove him wrong?

The subject was the entry into the 2008 presidential primary--in South Carolina only, but as both a Democrat and a Republican--by Stephen Colbert. (Announcement here, obligatory face-off with Russert on Meet the Press here.)

Colbert's campaign--self-promotional stunt? sweeps month ploy? or fairly daring bit of satire aimed straight at the inconsistencies of our current election finance laws?--is going to have its interesting moments, if only for the fun of watching him dance around the FEC rules concerning advertising.

It might end here, or it might go farther. It appears that Colbert will flirt with violating the law, or build a piece or two around the flirtation, but since he has hired [DC election law firm] Wiley Rein, he seems also prepared to keep to the legal side of the line—mostly. If he just walks the line from time to time—as visible as the line can be—regulators will have little appetite for challenging Colbert. His best bet is to avoid flagrancy, and this, Wiley Rein on the other end of the line, he (and even more, his corporate sponsors) may be committed to doing.

For a sample of the Colbert Soft Shoe concerning filing fees and corporate sponsorships, see here.

Now the funny part--and you can decide for yourself if it's "funny ha-ha" or "funny hmm"--is Colbert's faux campaign may reach a point where it's too small for the FEC to fiddle with, but too big to comfortably ignore: A national poll last weekend found Colbert polling ahead of Gravel, Kucinich, and Richardson, and just a whisker behind Biden.

Stunning, you say? Perhaps. Unprecedented? Actually no: Pat Paulson (deadpan comic and writer for the Smothers Brothers' various TV incarnations) ran for president six times between 1968 and 1996, getting on the ballot more than once, finishing second behind George H.W. Bush in North Dakota in 1992 and second behind Bill Clinton in New Hampshire in 1996. (Admittedly, it was a distant second in both cases. But still.)

But Paulson's campaigns lacked the cut-throat instinct for parody that Colbert brings to the game, or the conservative manqué of his character, which has made it tough for real conservatives to get a bead on him. And there's another difference: It's 2007, and as many young voters are getting their information from late-night talk shows as from the "straight" network news programs.

Wouldn't the biggest laugh of all be if Colbert tuned in an audience of young voters to the ridiculous state of our campaign and campaign finance laws?

(Update: Meanwhile, FOX's "Half-Hour News Hour"--still dead.)

(Update #2: On "Countdown" tonight, George Carlin said that Professor Irwin Corey ran for president in 1960, but I haven't been able to verify that. Anyone?)

(Update #3: Corey campaign confirmed. Thanks, Doctor TV.)

(Image via Yahoo! TV.)

Fair is fair: Perhaps I've been too rough on Dowd

After the first three paragraphs in her latest Times column, which were frankly pretty threadbare, the rest of the column is by far the best work I've seen in her space on the Times Opinion page in ten years.

More like this, MoDo!