Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Recommended Reading

Dahlia Lithwick on the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, the Texas man who was executed for arson. Experts now seem unanimous that the verdict was flawed and that Willingham was, as he insisted to his dying moment, an innocent man. But those who have a lot of emotion invested in the Death Penalty don't care...and if they continue to have their way, the prevailing attitude towards the wrongly-convicted will be: "Too bad. But you had your day in court and lost!"

I think it's enormously disingenuous for Justice Scalia and others to insist that no one has ever proven an innocent person has been put to death. The sheer number of wrongful convictions, including folks who would have been executed but for the relatively-new science of DNA testing, suggests there have probably been many. The trouble is that once the government executes someone, the people in that government have a compelling, almost desperate need to not allow innocence to be proven. So they make it darn near impossible.

• Posted at 4:11 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

My chum Robert Elisberg has a good piece up about the dismantling of the Motion Picture Home, a facility that has done so much good for folks in show biz who weren't wealthy and needed aid in their declining and ill years.

Take it as a dire sign that the Motion Picture and Television Fund folks don't think they can afford to keep that place open. It's bad enough that we have so many people in this country who can't afford and/or get health insurance. Even if all those people just die off (as some will do because they can't pay for doctors), the system is failing those who have Honest-to-God, real, paid-for health insurance...and I don't see a single projection that it won't get a lot worse unless something major is done.

• Posted at 2:32 PM · LINK

Tuesday Afternoon

Barack Obama gave his speech to school kids this afternoon. There's an elementary school down the block from me and I guess they heard it because all the students are out goose-stepping and wearing little Hitler mustaches. They're even demanding health care for all because as we all know, that's the first thing Nazis care about. And it's such an easy slippery-slope from "Stay in school" to "Don't be stupid, be a smarty..."

I'm not mad at the crazies. If anything, we should be grateful to them for driving the moderate voters towards the Democrats. I guess I'm a little disappointed in the "have it both way" statesmen like John McCain who want to preach sanity to their party but not in any way that's going to alienate the insane.

They remind me of those sixties' politicians who didn't want to side with the separatists and racists but also didn't want to lose their support. A lot of them learned to pronounce the name they used for the African-American race as "nigra." That way, they thought, the Equal Rights crowds would hear it as "negro" and the Klan voters would hear the other "n" word. It was like that scene in that Red Skelton Civil War movie where he walks between the warring troops with a two-sided flag — Union on the side facing that army, Confederate on the side facing them. John McCain thinks all this talk about "Death Panels" is nonsense...but of course, Sarah Palin is still a woman of great integrity.

• Posted at 2:03 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Matt Taibbi on how bad Health Care is in this country and how it won't get fixed.

• Posted at 3:04 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This one runs a little over a half hour but you might want to watch all or most of it. It's an episode from Great Britain of That Was The Week That Was, a satirical review that ran in the early sixties. It was hosted by David Frost — who's now Sir David Frost to the likes of you — and it featured a bevy of the best British comic actors and writers, including at times, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. This installment seems to be from around January of 1963.

The show lasted 'til the end of that year, which was about the time an American version (also hosted by Sir David) got going on NBC. It was not a big hit and it got a lot of Republicans angry. Back then during our elections, it used to be fairly common for political parties to buy an hour or a half-hour of prime-time TV for their advertising. During the '64 elections, the G.O.P. arranged to pre-empt TW3 (as everyone called it) almost every week, not so much because they wanted the time slot for their Goldwater ads but because they wanted to keep the show off the air. Amazingly, there wasn't a lot of outcry that this was censorship or suppression of anything of the sort. Imagine what would happen today if an advertiser bumped even one broadcast by Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann.

I remember the U.S. version as a great show. It certainly had incredible talent involved. Along with Frost, you had at times Tom Lehrer, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Henry Morgan, Alan Alda, Buck Henry, Woody Allen and many others. Puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, who'd been responsible for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, invented a new art form — a thing he did called "Hand Ballets," in which you just saw his hands miming a little story.

Of course, I haven't seen an episode since '64 so maybe it wouldn't seem as wonderful today. I hear conflicting things about whether tapes of those old broadcasts even exist. If they do, I wish someone would make them available. In the meantime, here's that episode of the British version...

• Posted at 12:55 AM · LINK