Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Recommended Reading

Is it true that allowing offshore drilling would bring down the cost of gasoline significantly in the near future? This article says no and explains why not.

• Posted at 11:37 AM · LINK

Tuesday Morning

Here's something I couldn't help but notice...

NEW YORK -- Former Justice Department officials will not face prosecution for letting improper political considerations drive hirings of prosecutors, immigration judges and other career government lawyers, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said today. Mukasey used his sharpest words yet to criticize the senior leaders who took part in or failed to stop illegal hiring practices during the tenure of his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales.

But, he told delegates to the American Bar Association annual meeting, "not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws."

Did the Attorney General of the United States actually say, "...not...every violation of the law is a crime"? There's a sense in which that's true but it would have been a little more proper if he'd said, "Not every violation of the law is a prosecutable crime" or something to that effect. I mean, obviously it's not in the public's interest to prosecute every possible breach of any statute...but "violation of the law" is kind of the dictionary definition of the word "crime," isn't it?

I suspect what Mr. Mukasey actually meant was, "I was selected to make sure that there was as little prosecution as possible of Bush administration officials who break laws." Billions of dollars of our tax money that was supposed to go for the Iraq effort has instead gone into someone's pocket and that's probably not a crime now, either.

Remember the good ol' days when if a person in power (elected or appointed) had said something like that, he would have been called "soft on crime" and his resignation would have been demanded by most Republicans and even a lot of Democrats? A friend of mine said, back when it looked like Hillary Clinton might be our next president, "Five minutes after she's sworn in, the G.O.P. will demand a new Special Prosecutor to reopen the Filegate case."

• Posted at 10:26 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This one runs an hour and I don't expect you to watch it all...but someone posted to YouTube, an entire David Letterman Show from September 12, 1980. This was Dave's morning show, the one he did for NBC that went largely unwatched...and I don't think it's hard to see why. He's the wrong guy for the time slot and he's also a little too smartass. You get the feeling that he doesn't even take his own show seriously so why should you? Plus, he feels all alone out there...no sidekick, no bandleader with whom he has any rapport, etc. Doesn't it feel like half the staff didn't show up for work that day but they made Dave go out and do his show anyway? Add to this the largely non-responsive studio audience and you have a rather cold, impersonal program that probably wouldn't work in any daypart but was certainly all wrong for weekday morns. And just to really finish it off, you had these news breaks that often led to awkward transititions back to comedy and light banter.

A year or two earlier, I'd become a big fan of Mr. Letterman's, seeing him act as emcee (or sometimes just a performer) at The Comedy Store up on Sunset. On that stage, he came off as polished and professional, especially compared to some of the other comics...and of course, it was amusing to see him act like we were all foolish to be there and it was even more ridiculous for a grown man to be doing what he was doing. That was The Comedy Store and it was late and half the audience was drunk, anyway. On NBC's daytime schedule, the same attitude drove viewers to reruns of The Jeffersons or whatever was over on CBS.

(I just checked and I was right: Reruns of The Jeffersons. Dave's show started as 90 minutes on June 23, 1980 and was cut to 60 minutes after about six weeks. It ran as an hour show until October 24 of that year, whereupon its time slot was handed over to two game shows, Las Vegas Gambit and Blockbuster. After that, NBC kept Letterman on the payroll until February 1, 1982 when he took over Tom Snyder's spot after Mr. Carson.)

So this is an interesting bit of history and like I said, I don't expect you to watch the whole thing. It's in seven parts and they should play, one after the other, in the player I've embedded below. You might watch a little of the opening and then leap ahead to the start of Part Four where Dave does a remote segment with some New York street vendors. Take a gander.

• Posted at 8:50 AM · LINK