Saturday, October 9, 2004

Public Appeal

Within days of the 9/11 attack, the Broadway community rallied and taped a TV commercial starring everyone who was then appearing in a show, urging people to come back to the theaters. It had Nathan Lane up front and everyone was singing, "New York, New York." At one point, one of the cable channels (Bravo or Trio) was running a little five-minute filler showing not only the final commercial but shots from the set-up and pre-record and planning. I had it on a videotape but it seems to be lost. Does anyone out there have a copy of it? I'll settle for an online video. Drop me a note if you do. Thanks.

• Posted at 3:12 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

I need to clear my head of political and logical thought before I go back to writing Groo today so...

I'm not surprised that polls say Kerry did well with "undecided" voters last night. I'm surprised there are any undecided voters but not that they would have preferred Kerry. Bush went a long way to reassuring his supporters that he is not that frantic, testy little man that he was in the first debate. (There was some of that but not so much that if you're already on his side, you couldn't ignore it.) But if you weren't already for Bush, who is a known quantity, I can't see that he gave you much reason to suddenly decide for him. I think Kerry is winning by seeming presidential and quite unlike the caricature that his opponents have been trying to pass off as The Real John Kerry. I can imagine a lot of Americans looking at the mess in Iraq, looking at the staggering deficit and all the Bush predictions of job growth that have not come to pass...and thinking, "Bush doesn't even think those things are problems. At least the other guy will try to fix things."

I loved Bill Maher's opening joke on Real Time last night...

The last question, a lady said "Name three mistakes you've made," and Bush said, "This debate, the last debate and the next debate."

(He and his staff came up with that less than a half-hour after the debate. This is a good example of what I was talking about when I said that talk shows can and should have more immediacy, and why Leno and Letterman are wrong to tape ahead on nights like this. Maher had a very good show, by the way. It reruns many times throughout the week.)

Bush has set himself up for the talking point, "He thinks he's infallible and won't even consider changing course when the evidence changes or his plans just plain don't work." He couldn't name one thing and could only allude to having hired some of the wrong people, which is another way of saying, "I trusted a few people and they made mistakes." I think the question was a bit unfair but the answer probably lost some folks who might like to vote Republican but don't think everything's gone as well as it should have.

Okay, back to work.

• Posted at 2:30 PM · LINK

Short Subject

Turner Classic Movies doesn't run nearly enough classic movies to suit me but every month's schedule includes a few treasures. Obscure but wonderful footage can often be found on their Festival of Shorts, which hauls out rarely-seen short subjects. This month, they have a 1930 film called The Hard Guy starring Spencer Tracy in a talky melodrama and a 1935 Bob Hope short called The Old Grey Mayor. It's hokey stuff but Hope rises above his material and reminds us how good he could be when he wasn't reading off cue cards. You or your TiVo can catch these when they rerun at 5:30 AM (Eastern) tomorrow morning or again on October 28.

• Posted at 11:18 AM · LINK

More Fact-Checking

Here's an article in The Los Angeles Times about who got what wrong last night.

• Posted at 10:53 AM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Dennis Donohoe writes...

What really struck me was Kerry continually talking about his "plan" for everything. I think any rational person would wonder why he hasn't done anything in the last 20 years toward items in his plan and now he will. But then I'm a conservative (and not a reflexive Bush backer by any means). Did this strike you as overkill or just run-of-the-mill political speak?

It struck me as indicative of how little a person can say in 90-120 seconds. I can't imagine anyone having a worthwhile program for turning around the economy or fixing what's wrong in Iraq that could be summarized in under two minutes. Under that silly limitation of time, about all anyone could do was to announce that they have a solution, even if the restrictions don't allow them to discuss it in any depth.

That said, yeah, I was annoyed at that repetition. I think I even said during the Veep Debate how tired I was about hearing "John Kerry and I have a plan..." I didn't like Bush saying a lot of the same things over and over and over, either.

As I read over Kerry's record in the Senate, I don't find it as lacking as you seem to. I think "any rational person" would understand that there's a big difference between what you can accomplish as President of the United States and what you might have been able to do as Junior Senator from one state. A member of the Senate can only function on a few committees, and Kerry was confined to things like "affordable housing" and a lot of veterans' issues. A number of Kerry-Edwards "plans" are for things like the war in Iraq which have only recently become problems that needed fixing.

By the same token, one might ask why Bush is now talking about so many things he wants to do in the next four years that he could have done, in some cases with very little effort, in the last four years. How long would it have taken to tell a cabinet meeting, "Let's go ahead and let people buy prescription drugs from Canada"? I've always thought that all the excuses on that one were flat-out lies. You can buy wine from other countries, cheese from other countries, even fish from other countries and the health safeguards are deemed adequate. But if you need Celebrex in order to survive, you have to pay $360 for a hundred tablets in this country, instead of ordering from a Canadian retailer and paying $130 for the exact same medicine made in the exact same lab. There's no reason for this other than that Pfizer, which makes Celebrex and hundreds of other drugs, is the fourth-biggest donor to the Republican party.

I am not, as you may have noticed here, a huge fan of Mr. Kerry. For the umpteenth consecutive election, I find myself voting for someone primarily because he's the guy who can defeat the one I really don't want to see win. Worse, I don't even expect him to accomplish very much. If he wins, he'll probably spend a couple months fighting Republican challenges to the vote, then the G.O.P. leadership will convene and begin planning how to subvert every single thing he wants to accomplish and to launch investigations that could lead to impeachment. But even if Kerry has done nothing and can do nothing, I still think that's preferable to letting Bush do anything else. Too many Americans have already wound up in poverty in this country or dead in Iraq.

• Posted at 9:50 AM · LINK

Recommended Viewing

Here's a link to a better copy (a Quick Time file) of that brief speech I mentioned earlier by Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan.

• Posted at 1:43 AM · LINK