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If your cable or satellite receives The Biography Channel…and if you're a fan of Sesame Street and/or the Muppets, you might want to set your TiVo or VCR for the wee small hours of next Saturday morn. They're rerunning a two-part "Biography for Kids" that Harry Smith did, visiting the set and interviewing the folks behind, in and under the Muppets. Special attention is given to Kevin Clash (who performs the role of Elmo), Carroll Spinney (who plays Big Bird and Oscar) and Steve Whitmire (who took over the roles of Kermit and Ernie after the death of Jim Henson). It's a really good look at how the show is made. Part One airs at 4:00 AM on my satellite dish with Part Two following at 5:00 AM. Your time zone or cable company may differ.

As my e-mail buddy Ben Varkentine notes on his blog, a lot of the publicity surrounding Al Franken's new liberal radio show is coming from right-wingers complaining that Al Franken's new liberal radio show is getting too much publicity. One such complaint comes from Hugh Hewitt setting up the (false, to me) premise that if the show doesn't succeed, it can only be because America really isn't interested in that message.

Why I think that's a false premise: A radio show can succeed or fail for any of a number of reasons, including whether or not the parent company can clear enough powerful stations. Most new radio endeavors do fail, regardless of their political message, and some take years to become viable. The odds are that Franken's show will tank, at least at first, because too many established radio franchises have all the key stations locked up. There are plenty of cities where it and the rest of the Air America Radio line-up won't be on at all.

Also, Al Franken might not be very good or very effective on radio. A lot of folks who are funny and successful in one venue do not translate well to another medium. There's a skill to being effective on the radio and it often requires years of practice — which Franken hasn't had — in small, unnoticed markets. Rush Limbaugh was on radio for years before he had any sort of following. And now, whatever else you may think of him, he's very good at what he does…very good at keeping people interested and listening. Hundreds of Rush imitators offering the same political rhetoric have failed. There was nothing uncommercial about their message but they didn't have the broadcasting skill to succeed.

Years ago, I did a TV show with Vince McMahon and a batch of W.W.F. wrestlers including Hulk Hogan and "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. Piper was the big star at the moment despite the fact that, by his own admission, he wasn't much of a wrestler. He wasn't huge, he wasn't brawny, he couldn't even lift his opponents off the mat…but he sure could fill arenas. I remember McMahon (who certainly knows his industry) remarking that Roddy was a star because of his showmanship. It was easy, Vince said, to find a guy who was 6'10" with rippling muscles and the ability to do all the physical moves. It was rare to find someone who could work the crowd as well as Piper, getting them fired-up and excited and entertained. It had nothing to do with wrestling and everything to do with selling tickets. I think Talk Radio is the exact same business.

Just got an e-mail from a reader of this site who happens to work at the Mirage. He says the big Siegfried and Roy sign is still up but that — rumor has it — it will be changed next Wednesday to Danny Gans, the impressionist who headlines the hotel's other showroom. The person who told me it was already changed told me that had occurred last Wednesday. So apparently there was some breakdown in communication somewhere along the line.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (that's the commission before which Richard Clarke testified) has a website where you can read various reports and materials as they release them. You'll need Adobe Reader for most of what's there.

I am told that the Mirage Hotel in Vegas just took down the huge Siegfried and Roy illuminated sign out front. On the other hand, I'm also told that Roy's condition is improving at a more rapid clip than expected, and that a huge "welcome back" TV special will be scheduled soon.

Frank Rich on how today's supposed journalists aren't all that different from the ones who are inarguable frauds.

Sometimes called "the perfect musical," My Fair Lady was staged on Broadway with a cast of thirty. If you pick up any book on staging regional productions, you will usually see the advice that the Lerner-and-Loewe classic is not something that can be mounted on a shoestring; that if you don't have the budget to afford all those actors and sets and costumes and especially a full orchestra, you shouldn't mess with My Fair Lady. And that always sounded like good advice to me.

But now I'm reading good reviews (like this one or this one) of a production in Florida that is being staged with ten (10) actors and only two musicians, both playing pianos. It's at the Palm Beach Playhouse in Jupiter, which was formerly known as the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater. When Burt's name was up there, it was famous for productions of widely-varying quality that ranged from Broadway-quality tryouts to sloppy vanity productions starring outta-work sitcom stars. Hearing that a ten-player My Fair Lady was being done in those halls made me shudder but apparently, it's pretty good and I'm sorry I can't get down there to take in a performance.

It's interesting to figure how the ten actors are deployed. The ones playing Higgins, Eliza, Doolittle, Pickering and Freddie only play those roles. Five other actors cover all the other parts, which means that the Ascot isn't particularly crowded and when Liza comes out at the ball, she impresses a pretty small assemblage. Still, I can see how it could be done, and I wish I could see how it is done. It's a touring company so maybe it'll tour in my direction.

I don't know what it is but certain phrases seem to suddenly pop up on my TV whenever politicians are giving speeches or pundits are discussing politics. During the impeachment mess, there was a sudden flurry of sentences that began with "At the end of the day…" At the end of the day, I was sick of hearing about the end of the day.

The one I'm noticing a lot lately is "It's been an amazing journey" used by people who haven't physically gone anywhere. Every process, every event is now a journey and most of them are amazing. The ones that aren't amazing are incredible or exciting. John Kerry is the worst offender I've noticed. Everything he does is now a journey unless he actually goes someplace.

One of these days, I'm going to hear someone say, "You know, at the end of the day, it's been an amazing journey." You'll know when this happens because you'll hear the sound of a paperweight going through the screen of my TV.

Julia Turner gives us a summary of Richard Clarke's book.

Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind? That feels wrong to me. Franz ought to have that quality in his eyes that suggests he's crazy and not in a cute way. Will Ferrell always strikes me as crazy in a cute way. It might work but I'd have tried for someone like Jack Black or Dan Aykroyd. And maybe they did.

Two folks wrote to ask me if I really thought the Bush forces would be using Richard Clarke's testimony to defend their boss. Well, maybe not his testimony, though it was nowhere near as negative about Bush as the news briefs indicated. But the excerpts I read from Clarke's book were generally supportive of Bush's actions on 9/11, and that's probably the next firestorm. Bush's foes are starting to charge that on that morning, Bush was no leader; that he was confused and not in control, and that a lot of his subsequent accounts of his day are simply fiction.

The Wall Street Journal (not exactly a liberal paper) recently ran an article that made Bush look pretty bad. One cannot link directly to the piece on the WSJ site but some of the anti-Bush sites are reusing it (here's one) and columnists like Gene Lyons are starting to cite it.

Back when Al Gore was running, every factual discrepancy in his statements was seized upon by his enemies as proof that the man was a pathological liar. Now you have this case where Bush has claimed he was watching live TV and saw the first plane crash into the World Trade Center…but it wasn't televised. So now we'll see all the folks who defended Gore for "understandable mistakes" say that this proves Bush is a congenital fibber…and all the folks who attacked Gore four years ago say, "Oh, come on…like you never misspoke?" If you follow politics long enough, you eventually see everyone switch sides.

Through the magic of TiVo, I'm watching Richard Clarke's interview last night on Larry King Live. Here, he pretty much says what I said he should have said in his testimony…

I didn't praise them. What you're referring to is this background briefing that the White House leaked today in violation of the rules on background briefings. When I was a special assistant to the president — here's what happened. Time Magazine came out with a very explosive story saying, that, in fact, the White House hasn't done everything it could have done. That in fact, that the administration had been handed a plan by me at the beginning of the administration to deal with al Qaeda and that they ignored it. Remember this, this was the cover story on Time and said they had a plan.

Well, that hurt the White House a lot for obvious reasons. It was true. And they asked me to try to help them out. I was working for the president of the United States at the time. And I said, well, look, I'm not going to lie. And they said, look, can't you at least emphasize the things that we did do? Emphasize the positive? Well, you had no other choice at that moment. There are three things you can do. You can resign rather than do it, you can lie and say the administration did all these things it didn't do. Or, if you want to stay inside the government and try to continue to change it from inside, you can stay on, do what they ask you to do, give a background briefing to the press and emphasize those things which they had done. And I chose to do that.

But, you know, it seems very ironic to me that what the White House is sort of saying is they don't understand why I, as a special assistant to the president of the United States, didn't criticize the president to the press. If I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant, I would have been fired within an hour. They know that.

The whole interview (transcript here) is pretty good, given that it's being conducted by Larry "I don't prepare" King. Also, for those of you who don't want to sit through the video of Clarke's testimony, here's a transcript of the whole session.

I have to get back to a deadline but here's a thought I need to write down here in order to get it out of my mind for a while…

One of the tricks I learned when I was on a couple of Debate Teams back in the sixties was to seize on one of your opponent's errors — or even something that could be sold as an error through artful interpretation. Everyone gets something wrong…some trivial statistic or arguable fact. So if they're hammering you on 23 points you can't refute, you seize on this little anomaly and you say, "Well, if my opponent can't tell the difference between Oscar Mayer Bologna and Oscar Mayer Salami, we obviously can't believe a word he says about these other 23 points so I won't waste your time discussing them." The idea is to dismiss the entire person rather than address points you don't want to address.

Richard Clarke is a smart guy and given his years of service to multiple presidents, I don't think what he says about terrorism can be quickly dismissed…or should be. Is he right? I dunno. I'd like to hear an actual counter-argument to his charges rather than a wholesale attack on his character. If Clarke was out of the loop, who was in it? I'd also like to see folks stop trying to define this controversy down to "Bush good" or "Bush bad." Right now on CNN, as people talk about Clarke's testimony, the superimposed blurb reads, "Fmr. Bush, Clinton Terror Czar Claims Bush Failed to Stop 9/11." That's an unfair oversimplification of Mr. Clarke's position, and that kind of thinking is not going to help anyone.

It's getting harder and harder to tell the real world apart from a Monty Python sketch. Take a look.