Tuesday, October 7, 2003

Back From Voting

Well, the exit polls tell me that I just wasted my time walking close to two miles to and from my polling place. Then again, I did get some exercise.

The polling place wasn't crowded, and everyone was joking about chads on the punchcard ballots. One elderly woman was asking for assistance, not because she didn't know how to use the voting machine but because she said, "I want to be sure I vote how I want to vote." You wonder how difficult it would be in this computer age for someone to design a voting machine that gives you a little paper printout of your vote to check and take home with you. With so much suspicion about the accuracy of these devices, it might help keep the system honest.

I can't help but feel that no matter how the vote comes out, everyone loses a little. None of them — Davis, Arnold, Cruz or McClintock — strikes me as someone who will ultimately please voters. I voted as I did (against the recall) because I believe it's a very bad system, and if a recall is mounted against Governor Schwarzenegger, we'll hear all the people who now defend it do a fast backflip and decide that. It might make sense if it had been used to remove a bad executive and insert a good one, but it looks like it's going to install a man of no experience. You wouldn't let an inexperienced doctor operate on you, you wouldn't let an inexperienced lawyer defend you in court...but somehow, some people have decided that the state is in deep, deep trouble and what it needs is a guy who has never spent one day in a real government position. I don't understand how casually people can brush that aside or even see it as a positive. I could have voted for Dick Riordan, or even for Peter Ueberroth, who has at least done this kind of work. But I couldn't get behind Arnold for the same reason I could never cast a presidential vote for Jesse Jackson, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, Al Sharpton, Ross Perot or anyone else trying to make an important job into an entry-level position. Experience isn't everything but it also isn't nothing.

• Posted at 5:12 PM · LINK

Rush to Judgment

Here's a pretty interesting article about the comments that got Rush Limbaugh fired from ESPN. (Yeah, I know. He resigned. In TV, when someone quits a good-paying job and doesn't fill the void immediately with a more lucrative one, they were fired or about to be fired.)

I don't know from football but it seems to me that Rush got a bit of a raw deal here. He may have been wrong in his thesis but it sounds to me like ESPN was more worried about future comments and the reaction to them. My guess is that when they hired Limbaugh, they figured he would draw in a certain additional audience without alienating their base, and this controversy made them decide they were wrong; that if he said something more controversial, even if he said it over on his radio show, it would upset the core ESPN audience. In other words, it wasn't that they were shocked that he acted like Rush Limbaugh but that they found out that had a downside.

A number of articles have compared the controversy to what happened with Al Campanis, and I don't think that's fair, either. In case you don't remember, Al Campanis was an executive within the Dodgers organization who went on Nightline back in '87 and suggested there was perhaps some genetic reason why blacks weren't fit for leadership positions in sports. It was an odd interview because Ted Koppel tried to help the man out of the hole he was digging for himself but Mr. Campanis, exhibiting a certain cluelessness, took it deeper. There was an outcry there too but the situation was quite different from the one with Limbaugh. Campanis was in the Dodgers front office. He had apparently had a say in selecting which of the team's two coaches had succeeded Walt Alston as manager, and they'd picked Tommy Lasorda (Caucasian) over Jim Gilliam (Afro-American). The choice was ostensibly on the grounds that Lasorda was a tad more qualified...and Campanis's remarks suggested the difference may have been skin color. That's a big difference from the matter with Limbaugh, who was and is completely outside any team's decision-making process. Even if the statement was racist — and I'm not saying it was — it's one thing just to be racist, quite another to hire with race as a criterion.

That said, every time I've heard Rush, I thought he was misquoting and distorting the positions of others, so I'm not too worked up over this. Besides, I have to go vote.

• Posted at 1:40 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's an amazing (to me) article over on the Newsweek site. A reporter who has covered the California recall election writes about how bad the coverage has been.

• Posted at 11:52 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Over on Salon, Eric Boehlert makes a very good point about the current downtrend in the popularity of George W. Bush. It's that it started on September 7 when he unveiled the price tag for rebuilding Iraq: $87 billion...

Within days of Bush's prime-time address, his approval ratings, and the support for his reconstruction plans in Iraq, began a steep decline. In retrospect, it's clear the speech became an unlikely presidential turning point — and possible tipping point — and one the White House has yet to recover from. Pollster Stan Greenberg told the Wall Street Journal he couldn't "find a parallel moment" in history when a president's approval rating dropped so dramatically following a nationally televised debate.

Here's the full article which I think is correct. Iraq sounded like a great American triumph to many until they started to realize what it will end up costing us to have deposed Saddam Hussein. I'm sure we're in for a roller coaster ride of viewpoints on this, as well as a lot of up and down on Bush's favorability rating. But it's interesting to note that, like so many things in this world, people change their minds about a war when they find out there's no money in it.

• Posted at 10:53 AM · LINK

More Vital Information

I am informed by several folks who seem to know that the Australian DVD release of Hellzapoppin' is region-free but it's also in PAL, meaning that it won't play on most American equipment. If you have a machine that will play PAL format, fine. If not, you'll just have to either buy one of the VHS bootlegs that abound or wait for Universal, which owns the film, to put out a DVD in our format. As far as I know, there are no plans in the offing for this.

• Posted at 10:40 AM · LINK

Funny Film Forecast

In an attempt to appease the never-ending demand for Olsen and Johnson movies, Trio is running their 1943 film Crazy House this week and next in multiple airings. And it may take you multiple viewings to figure out all that's going on it, and to savor the amazing supporting cast of comedic actors. The roster includes Billy Gilbert, Shemp Howard, Edgar Kennedy, Hans Conried, Franklin Pangborn...well, lots of good people. In fact, everyone's funny in this movie except its stars, Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. Well no, I take that back. They're sort of funny. But what's really funny is the frenetic pace as they appear in a movie about them appearing in a movie about them appearing in a movie. Ole and Chic were the masters of keeping it moving and keeping it silly, and they not only broke the fourth wall but would sometimes erect a fifth or sixth wall, just so they could knock them down, as well. Trio also runs old episodes of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and that show was an obvious descendant of the Olsen and Johnson style, as seen in several movies and Broadway shows, most notably Hellzapoppin'.

I think. It's been a good thirty-something years since I've seen Hellzapoppin', which is among the most famous allegedly-great comedies that almost no one has ever seen. Apparently, some legal problem has kept it off TV and home video for decades but no longer. It's recently been released in Australia on a DVD which is alleged to be "region-free," meaning it should play on players in this country. I'm going to find out what I can about this and report back to you here.

While I've got you here: Early Wednesday morning, Turner Classic Movies is running the 1931 Parlor, Bedroom and Bath. This is one of those early talkies that Buster Keaton made as his career and sanity were deserting him and the first half is pretty slow. Near the end, it gets a lot better but you have to really like Keaton to make it that far.

• Posted at 12:35 AM · LINK