Jaywalking with Fred

Jay Leno, once a great stand-up comedian, made a political choice when he became host of “The Tonight Show”: He made himself non-threatening and folksy. Fred Thompson, who officially announced his candidacy for president on Leno’s show Wednesday night, is a different breed: Folksy but threatening.

Thompson, speaking like this was the second act of a “Law & Order” episode, called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “a fellow who is not put together well upstairs.” He also said: “The enemy is ruthless.  Al Qaeda is here in this country.  National intelligence estimates tell us that. They are strong. They're trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.”

As you can see, there was none of that Schwarzenegger joie de vivre in his sullen trip to Jayville to make a previously announced surprise political announcement.

Rather, this was just the first official stop in what Thompson exudes as the enormous chore of running for the highest office in the land. Forget about all the months of waiting; by the time Thompson said those eight words — “I’m running for president of the United States” — you’d already had to sit through a segment of “Jaywalking.”

Should he have been in New Hampshire, rumbling in debate with his GOP opponents? Thompson is banking on the nation’s indifference to the cacophony, playing both sides of the cynicism fence — refusing to engage in the media circus of a TV debate on the same night he uses an entertainment show to join the circus.

The appearance coincided with the release of a video on Thompson’s campaign website, www.Fred08.com, in which Thompson appears to be standing in the library of his estate in the wilds of either Tennessee or Bel-Air.

There you can see on display the world-weary, been-there, done-that plain-spokenness that Thompson has fine-tuned in TV and movies playing government heavies and in real life as, um, a government heavy.

Say this, Thompson no doubt spoke to a bigger TV audience Wednesday than his GOP opponents did. And while Thompson was cooling his jets in Jay’s green room, his opponents were in New Hampshire debating — or, more accurately, trying to swat away — Ron Paul.

“We’ve dug a hole for ourselves and we’ve dug a hole for our party!” Paul yelled about staying the course in Iraq. “We’re losing elections and we’re going down next year if we don’t change it, and it has all to do with foreign policy, and we have to wake up to this fact.”

Meanwhile, in Burbank, Thompson shook Leno’s hand and walked offstage, toward Iowa.

-- Paul Brownfield

HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” returned Friday night, back with a vengeance (and technical difficulties).

Maher’s mike went out at the top of his monologue. On any other show this might be a conspicuous gaffe, but “Real Time” is kind of a messy show, anyway—a topical salon of the fast-and-loose opinion, interrupted by comedy bits that recall Carson’s more old-school, vaudevillian approach.

“Real Time” might not be as silky smooth in its rhetoric as Comedy Central’s “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” or “The Colbert Report,” but the show also comes down a little farther from a perch of above-it-all remove.

To wit—the somewhat painful sketch in the cold open Friday that had Maher riffing on missing U.S. weaponry in Iraq, playing a Crazy-Eddy-in-Sadr-City type, selling guns in a “back to surge sale.”

Mercifully, the bit was short.

The panel featured the liberal flame-throwing actor Tim Robbins (''the American people were suckered into this war with false information and with propaganda”), who was off-set by National Public Radio’s Michel Martin and The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, the latter cast in that lonely, difficult “Real Time” role of the conservative whoever facing down the crowd-pleasing movie star.

Robbins and Hayes got into it on the specter of pre-9/11 ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda,  Maher finally turning the temperature down by bringing on another bit—a faux baby shower gift basket for President Bush’s daughter Jenna, set to be married amid speculation that she’s preggers.

I kind of liked the “Interrogate Me Elmo” doll and the little baby port-o-potty that reads “Mission Accomplished” when you lift the seat.

Later, new Republican presidential darling Mike Huckabee made a repeat appearance via satellite. Having finished a surprising second behind Mitt “Daddy Warbucks” Romney in the Iowa straw poll, Huckabee, celebrating a birthday Friday, seemed to be feeling his oats.

“How old are you, governor?” Maher asked.

“I’m 52 years old. Please say I look younger. Do me a favor, give me that birthday present and tell me I don’t look that old.”

Maher, for once, kept his tongue.

--Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy HBO)

The Comedy Central press release made it sound like a broadcasting watershed, possibly even akin to Walter Cronkite declaring the Vietnam War a lost cause.

“Operation Silent Thunder: ‘The Daily Show’ in Iraq.”

Jon Stewart and his merry band of faux reporters are not, however, in Baghdad this week. One of them is—or was, correspondent Rob Riggle, who visited various military bases as part of a USO tour of comics, performing sketches for the troops.

In the tradition of Bob Hope, comedians have been entertaining the troops in Iraq for years, arriving by military aircraft (Kathy Griffin made an episode of her Bravo series “My Life on the D-list” out of one such trip). 

“The Daily Show” refers to the Iraq War as “Mess O’Potamia.” Monday night, Riggle filed the first of his reports from Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad, seeking to confirm that, yes, he was actually in Iraq (as opposed to fellow “senior Baghdad correspondent” Aasif Mandvi, who was only stealing his spotlight via green screen).

“Jon, I’m on a C-130 flying into Iraq. Right now,” Riggle proved in a taped report.

He was also actually on a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter. And actually on a boat in the Persian Gulf.

Riggle described weather conditions as “hot as hell." You believed him.

“It’s a dry hell, though,” he said.

--Paul Brownfield

Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel is to these many Democratic primary debates and forums what Uncle Charley was to “My Three Sons”: a cantankerous observer of the misbehavior around him, by turns grumpy, sage-like and loving.

And so it was again Sunday morning on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Gravel coming out of the kitchen in his figurative apron at the first sanctioned debate of the Iowa primary.

“Stop and think,” he'll preface his Uncle Charley-ish churlishness. Gravel even bears a subtle resemblance to William Demarest, who played the character on that long-running series.

“Stop and think,” Gravel said Sunday morning, when the issue before the Dems was merit pay for teachers. “Here, uh, Iran. Not Iran. Uh, uh, Spain. Norway. Finland. These countries, they’re not the superpower of the world, but they pay for their children from childhood to PhD levels. Why can’t Americans put education as the top priority, and you can’t do it when you want to expand” — he was gaining steam now — “as he wants to expand 100,000 more troops. Who are we gonna nuke, who are we gonna fight next?”

As Delaware Sen. Joe Biden and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson pantomimed which one between them Gravel was singling out, the audience at Drake University burst into gales of laughter.

Gravel was smiling too. In the Washington Post/ABC News poll flashed at the beginning of the debate, Gravel was shown polling at a naked 0% in Iowa (on the other hand, it’s only a percentage point behind Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, and 2 percentage points behind Biden and Dennis Kucinich).

Thus Gravel is veritably off the grid while taking away valuable, 30-second nuggets of promise-making time from well-heeled front-runners Sen. Barack Obama (the poll leader at 27% in Iowa) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards (tied at 26%).

Is it time for Gravel to step aside?  The one he hurts the most up there is probably Kucinich, who would otherwise occupy the unapologetically left-of-all-of-you role.

To the rest of them, Gravel’s either a nuisance or an enviably plain speaker with nothing to lose. Gravel — a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War who, according to the bio on his website, read 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers into the official Senate record — is easily the most theatrical, decrying the misbegotten involvement in Iraq or the misbegotten war on drugs or the misbegotten coziness between his opponents and their campaign war chests.

All family sitcoms need the wacky neighbor, the kooky elder. In that context Gravel makes the Dems seem a more inclusive extended brood. Perhaps the analogy is less “My Three Sons” than “Little Miss Sunshine,” Gravel as Alan Arkin’s freethinking Grandpa, sitting in the back seat of a VW bus taking a little girl to a popularity contest.

Stop and think.

— Paul Brownfield

The Democrats showed up on the MTV-run gay and lesbian cable channel Logo TV on Thursday night for a historic, first-time-ever televised presidential forum on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) issues.

What anyone watching Logo (which is carried in some 27 million homes) saw was a series of one-on-ones — each candidate interviewed, for 20 minutes or so, in the order in which their campaigns accepted the invite to the forum (Barack Obama first and Hillary Rodham Clinton last).

Call it a job interview, writ rather large, the candidates answering pointed questions from a moderator (Bloomberg News' Margaret Carlson) and three panelists about their LGBT bonafides.

Now here was a show, the candidates in comfy chairs on a hardwood-floor stage, with rug.  In contrast to the raucous AFL-CIO-sponsored debate on MSNBC on Tuesday night, live from Soldier Field in Chicago, the two-hour LGBT forum, live from some small studio in L.A., played like a closed-circuit broadcast of a living-room fundraiser in the Hancock Park manse of Hollywood money.

Hey, wasn’t that liberal mover-and-shaker/Hollywood producer Steve Bing in the audience?  I know I saw two of the TV-monied — "How I Met Your Mother” co-star Neil Patrick Harris and “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick. 

Meanwhile, one of the panelists was rock star Melissa Etheridge, whose "I Need to Wake Up" written for "An Inconvenient Truth" won her an Oscar.

“I have heard that you have said in the past that you feel uncomfortable around gay people,” she said to Sen. John Edwards. “Are you OK right now?” she joked.

“I'm perfectly comfortable,” Edwards said, begging to add that she had it wrong, he said, because the offending comment was a misquote spread by a rival political consultant.

It seemed like the Democrats were in concert Tuesday, live on MSNBC from Soldier Field in Chicago, the stage resting on the home turf of ‘da Bears” (and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama).

At the CNN/YouTube debate a few weeks ago, Obama said he'd meet with purported enemies like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. And yet Tuesday night he would not commit to meeting with Barry Bonds.

That question came from moderator Keith Olbermann who, in his role as presidential debate referee, couldn't resist a little miscreant behavior.

Like an announcer hoping to be heard over the roar of raucous fans, Olbermann quickly called attention to how little he could control some 15,000 union workers and supporters in the stadium (the forum was sponsored by the AFL-CIO).

Never mind 30-second “lightning rounds,” the evening took on the aspect of a true stump—a competition to see which candidate could whip the crowd into the loudest frenzy.

No surprise that “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” had a field day doing next-night satire of Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“This debate will come at you in six dimensions,” Stewart said, googly-eyeing the camera to lampoon CNN’s insistence that, with this techno-political miracle, they’d not only landed on Mars but opened a coffee bar.

I’m all for the service “The Daily Show” provides at a breathtaking four-nights-a-week clip — the news for people who tangentially follow the news but nevertheless want to remain intellectually above it and thus go back to not following it.

To that end, “The Daily Show” sort of took one tack about the YouTube debate — you missed nothing, except for CNN's ridiculous hype (a comedic sweet spot, to be sure).

But here's something that nags at me: Was this a case where "The Daily Show" stoops to mocking the powerless, in this case the uploaders who participated in the YouTube debate?

Seen through the show's funhouse mirror, none of them looked any too smart--the North Carolina pastor,for instance, who was present in the audience for a follow-up to his question of Sen. John Edwards about gay marriage. 

“So, was CNN able to take the debate process and youth-anize it?” was how Stewart introduced a piece by John Oliver about the Youth of Today watching the debate as a drinking game, sipping on common references like “Bush,” gulping on less-common ones like “torture” and “gay marriage.”

Better, and less defeating, was the “gotcha” the show pulled on Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), shown reacting with evident feeling during the debate to the lesbian couple in Brooklyn who asked about gay marriage.

Except, as “The Daily Show” illustrated, he’d given the same talking point at a previous debate, saying he and his wife ask themselves, “How would I want my two daughters treated if they grew up and had a different sexual orientation [from] their parents?”

“Apparently you would like them treated as hypothetical debate lesbians,” Stewart said.

— Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy Comedy Central)

Here was a job not so much about two Americas but the one that loves Regis, or Matt.

Here was Sen. John Edwards, kicking off a "national poverty tour," and creamy GMA co-host Diane Sawyer sitting before an Oprah-sized gathering in the New Orleans town hall where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

The medium is the message, someone said. So, when Sawyer teased of Edwards: "He says you can end poverty in America in 30 years if America sets it's mind to it," it sounded like she was talking about the War on Carbs.

The network morning shows are always town halls, in a sense-average folks (i.e. tourists in New York City) vying to stand behind Al while he does the weather. The Edwards colloquy had more seriousness of purpose, though talk of Iraq and Pakistan and health are and how to help working people living at the poverty line was tabled for news and weather breaks and the new report suggesting teen-age girls make themselves more anxious, talking about their problems all the time.

"Does teenage gab lead to anxiety?" GMA was asking from New York. Back in New Orleans, what was going on, during these long breaks? Was Edwards actually conversing with the town hall folks? Sawyer didn't put the question to the candidate.

"I have to wedge in a political question here," she said, in the 7 o'clock hour. "All right, the whisper heard 'round the Democratic presidential race," she giggled, and asked about the video bite last week showing Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, onstage after an NAACP forum, appearing to collude on a plan to winnow out the pretenders in the Democratic primary.

The video didn't make all that much hay last week in the echo chamber, beyond playing to anyone wanting to interpret Edwards and Clinton as Beltway limousine liberals.

That subtext bled through the question asked by one of the town hall participants: "Senator, I was just wondering, since you're on this national poverty tour, how do you justify spending $400 on a haircut?"

"I don't. No excuses, but can I just tell you, some lessons you learn the hard way. I've learned my lesson. I gotta a very cheap haircut the other day and I'm gonna keep cheap haircuts."

Laughter, ephemera. A morning show in its element.

--Paul Brownfield

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

Jenna's 'baby' with Maher's bathwater

HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” returned Friday night, back with a vengeance (and technical difficulties).

Maher’s mike went out at the top of his monologue. On any other show this might be a conspicuous gaffe, but “Real Time” is kind of a messy show, anyway—a topical salon of the fast-and-loose opinion, interrupted by comedy bits that recall Carson’s more old-school, vaudevillian approach.

“Real Time” might not be as silky smooth in its rhetoric as Comedy Central’s “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” or “The Colbert Report,” but the show also comes down a little farther from a perch of above-it-all remove.

To wit—the somewhat painful sketch in the cold open Friday that had Maher riffing on missing U.S. weaponry in Iraq, playing a Crazy-Eddy-in-Sadr-City type, selling guns in a “back to surge sale.”

Mercifully, the bit was short.

The panel featured the liberal flame-throwing actor Tim Robbins (''the American people were suckered into this war with false information and with propaganda”), who was off-set by National Public Radio’s Michel Martin and The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, the latter cast in that lonely, difficult “Real Time” role of the conservative whoever facing down the crowd-pleasing movie star.

Robbins and Hayes got into it on the specter of pre-9/11 ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda,  Maher finally turning the temperature down by bringing on another bit—a faux baby shower gift basket for President Bush’s daughter Jenna, set to be married amid speculation that she’s preggers.

I kind of liked the “Interrogate Me Elmo” doll and the little baby port-o-potty that reads “Mission Accomplished” when you lift the seat.

Later, new Republican presidential darling Mike Huckabee made a repeat appearance via satellite. Having finished a surprising second behind Mitt “Daddy Warbucks” Romney in the Iowa straw poll, Huckabee, celebrating a birthday Friday, seemed to be feeling his oats.

“How old are you, governor?” Maher asked.

“I’m 52 years old. Please say I look younger. Do me a favor, give me that birthday present and tell me I don’t look that old.”

Maher, for once, kept his tongue.

--Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy HBO)

The Comedy Central press release made it sound like a broadcasting watershed, possibly even akin to Walter Cronkite declaring the Vietnam War a lost cause.

“Operation Silent Thunder: ‘The Daily Show’ in Iraq.”

Jon Stewart and his merry band of faux reporters are not, however, in Baghdad this week. One of them is—or was, correspondent Rob Riggle, who visited various military bases as part of a USO tour of comics, performing sketches for the troops.

In the tradition of Bob Hope, comedians have been entertaining the troops in Iraq for years, arriving by military aircraft (Kathy Griffin made an episode of her Bravo series “My Life on the D-list” out of one such trip). 

“The Daily Show” refers to the Iraq War as “Mess O’Potamia.” Monday night, Riggle filed the first of his reports from Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad, seeking to confirm that, yes, he was actually in Iraq (as opposed to fellow “senior Baghdad correspondent” Aasif Mandvi, who was only stealing his spotlight via green screen).

“Jon, I’m on a C-130 flying into Iraq. Right now,” Riggle proved in a taped report.

He was also actually on a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter. And actually on a boat in the Persian Gulf.

Riggle described weather conditions as “hot as hell." You believed him.

“It’s a dry hell, though,” he said.

--Paul Brownfield

Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel is to these many Democratic primary debates and forums what Uncle Charley was to “My Three Sons”: a cantankerous observer of the misbehavior around him, by turns grumpy, sage-like and loving.

And so it was again Sunday morning on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Gravel coming out of the kitchen in his figurative apron at the first sanctioned debate of the Iowa primary.

“Stop and think,” he'll preface his Uncle Charley-ish churlishness. Gravel even bears a subtle resemblance to William Demarest, who played the character on that long-running series.

“Stop and think,” Gravel said Sunday morning, when the issue before the Dems was merit pay for teachers. “Here, uh, Iran. Not Iran. Uh, uh, Spain. Norway. Finland. These countries, they’re not the superpower of the world, but they pay for their children from childhood to PhD levels. Why can’t Americans put education as the top priority, and you can’t do it when you want to expand” — he was gaining steam now — “as he wants to expand 100,000 more troops. Who are we gonna nuke, who are we gonna fight next?”

As Delaware Sen. Joe Biden and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson pantomimed which one between them Gravel was singling out, the audience at Drake University burst into gales of laughter.

Gravel was smiling too. In the Washington Post/ABC News poll flashed at the beginning of the debate, Gravel was shown polling at a naked 0% in Iowa (on the other hand, it’s only a percentage point behind Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, and 2 percentage points behind Biden and Dennis Kucinich).

Thus Gravel is veritably off the grid while taking away valuable, 30-second nuggets of promise-making time from well-heeled front-runners Sen. Barack Obama (the poll leader at 27% in Iowa) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards (tied at 26%).

Is it time for Gravel to step aside?  The one he hurts the most up there is probably Kucinich, who would otherwise occupy the unapologetically left-of-all-of-you role.

To the rest of them, Gravel’s either a nuisance or an enviably plain speaker with nothing to lose. Gravel — a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War who, according to the bio on his website, read 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers into the official Senate record — is easily the most theatrical, decrying the misbegotten involvement in Iraq or the misbegotten war on drugs or the misbegotten coziness between his opponents and their campaign war chests.

All family sitcoms need the wacky neighbor, the kooky elder. In that context Gravel makes the Dems seem a more inclusive extended brood. Perhaps the analogy is less “My Three Sons” than “Little Miss Sunshine,” Gravel as Alan Arkin’s freethinking Grandpa, sitting in the back seat of a VW bus taking a little girl to a popularity contest.

Stop and think.

— Paul Brownfield

The Democrats showed up on the MTV-run gay and lesbian cable channel Logo TV on Thursday night for a historic, first-time-ever televised presidential forum on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) issues.

What anyone watching Logo (which is carried in some 27 million homes) saw was a series of one-on-ones — each candidate interviewed, for 20 minutes or so, in the order in which their campaigns accepted the invite to the forum (Barack Obama first and Hillary Rodham Clinton last).

Call it a job interview, writ rather large, the candidates answering pointed questions from a moderator (Bloomberg News' Margaret Carlson) and three panelists about their LGBT bonafides.

Now here was a show, the candidates in comfy chairs on a hardwood-floor stage, with rug.  In contrast to the raucous AFL-CIO-sponsored debate on MSNBC on Tuesday night, live from Soldier Field in Chicago, the two-hour LGBT forum, live from some small studio in L.A., played like a closed-circuit broadcast of a living-room fundraiser in the Hancock Park manse of Hollywood money.

Hey, wasn’t that liberal mover-and-shaker/Hollywood producer Steve Bing in the audience?  I know I saw two of the TV-monied — "How I Met Your Mother” co-star Neil Patrick Harris and “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick. 

Meanwhile, one of the panelists was rock star Melissa Etheridge, whose "I Need to Wake Up" written for "An Inconvenient Truth" won her an Oscar.

“I have heard that you have said in the past that you feel uncomfortable around gay people,” she said to Sen. John Edwards. “Are you OK right now?” she joked.

“I'm perfectly comfortable,” Edwards said, begging to add that she had it wrong, he said, because the offending comment was a misquote spread by a rival political consultant.

It seemed like the Democrats were in concert Tuesday, live on MSNBC from Soldier Field in Chicago, the stage resting on the home turf of ‘da Bears” (and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama).

At the CNN/YouTube debate a few weeks ago, Obama said he'd meet with purported enemies like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. And yet Tuesday night he would not commit to meeting with Barry Bonds.

That question came from moderator Keith Olbermann who, in his role as presidential debate referee, couldn't resist a little miscreant behavior.

Like an announcer hoping to be heard over the roar of raucous fans, Olbermann quickly called attention to how little he could control some 15,000 union workers and supporters in the stadium (the forum was sponsored by the AFL-CIO).

Never mind 30-second “lightning rounds,” the evening took on the aspect of a true stump—a competition to see which candidate could whip the crowd into the loudest frenzy.

No surprise that “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” had a field day doing next-night satire of Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“This debate will come at you in six dimensions,” Stewart said, googly-eyeing the camera to lampoon CNN’s insistence that, with this techno-political miracle, they’d not only landed on Mars but opened a coffee bar.

I’m all for the service “The Daily Show” provides at a breathtaking four-nights-a-week clip — the news for people who tangentially follow the news but nevertheless want to remain intellectually above it and thus go back to not following it.

To that end, “The Daily Show” sort of took one tack about the YouTube debate — you missed nothing, except for CNN's ridiculous hype (a comedic sweet spot, to be sure).

But here's something that nags at me: Was this a case where "The Daily Show" stoops to mocking the powerless, in this case the uploaders who participated in the YouTube debate?

Seen through the show's funhouse mirror, none of them looked any too smart--the North Carolina pastor,for instance, who was present in the audience for a follow-up to his question of Sen. John Edwards about gay marriage. 

“So, was CNN able to take the debate process and youth-anize it?” was how Stewart introduced a piece by John Oliver about the Youth of Today watching the debate as a drinking game, sipping on common references like “Bush,” gulping on less-common ones like “torture” and “gay marriage.”

Better, and less defeating, was the “gotcha” the show pulled on Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), shown reacting with evident feeling during the debate to the lesbian couple in Brooklyn who asked about gay marriage.

Except, as “The Daily Show” illustrated, he’d given the same talking point at a previous debate, saying he and his wife ask themselves, “How would I want my two daughters treated if they grew up and had a different sexual orientation [from] their parents?”

“Apparently you would like them treated as hypothetical debate lesbians,” Stewart said.

— Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy Comedy Central)

Here was a job not so much about two Americas but the one that loves Regis, or Matt.

Here was Sen. John Edwards, kicking off a "national poverty tour," and creamy GMA co-host Diane Sawyer sitting before an Oprah-sized gathering in the New Orleans town hall where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

The medium is the message, someone said. So, when Sawyer teased of Edwards: "He says you can end poverty in America in 30 years if America sets it's mind to it," it sounded like she was talking about the War on Carbs.

The network morning shows are always town halls, in a sense-average folks (i.e. tourists in New York City) vying to stand behind Al while he does the weather. The Edwards colloquy had more seriousness of purpose, though talk of Iraq and Pakistan and health are and how to help working people living at the poverty line was tabled for news and weather breaks and the new report suggesting teen-age girls make themselves more anxious, talking about their problems all the time.

"Does teenage gab lead to anxiety?" GMA was asking from New York. Back in New Orleans, what was going on, during these long breaks? Was Edwards actually conversing with the town hall folks? Sawyer didn't put the question to the candidate.

"I have to wedge in a political question here," she said, in the 7 o'clock hour. "All right, the whisper heard 'round the Democratic presidential race," she giggled, and asked about the video bite last week showing Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, onstage after an NAACP forum, appearing to collude on a plan to winnow out the pretenders in the Democratic primary.

The video didn't make all that much hay last week in the echo chamber, beyond playing to anyone wanting to interpret Edwards and Clinton as Beltway limousine liberals.

That subtext bled through the question asked by one of the town hall participants: "Senator, I was just wondering, since you're on this national poverty tour, how do you justify spending $400 on a haircut?"

"I don't. No excuses, but can I just tell you, some lessons you learn the hard way. I've learned my lesson. I gotta a very cheap haircut the other day and I'm gonna keep cheap haircuts."

Laughter, ephemera. A morning show in its element.

--Paul Brownfield

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

'The Daily Show' in Iraq (kinda, sorta)

The Comedy Central press release made it sound like a broadcasting watershed, possibly even akin to Walter Cronkite declaring the Vietnam War a lost cause.

“Operation Silent Thunder: ‘The Daily Show’ in Iraq.”

Jon Stewart and his merry band of faux reporters are not, however, in Baghdad this week. One of them is—or was, correspondent Rob Riggle, who visited various military bases as part of a USO tour of comics, performing sketches for the troops.

In the tradition of Bob Hope, comedians have been entertaining the troops in Iraq for years, arriving by military aircraft (Kathy Griffin made an episode of her Bravo series “My Life on the D-list” out of one such trip). 

“The Daily Show” refers to the Iraq War as “Mess O’Potamia.” Monday night, Riggle filed the first of his reports from Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad, seeking to confirm that, yes, he was actually in Iraq (as opposed to fellow “senior Baghdad correspondent” Aasif Mandvi, who was only stealing his spotlight via green screen).

“Jon, I’m on a C-130 flying into Iraq. Right now,” Riggle proved in a taped report.

He was also actually on a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter. And actually on a boat in the Persian Gulf.

Riggle described weather conditions as “hot as hell." You believed him.

“It’s a dry hell, though,” he said.

--Paul Brownfield

Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel is to these many Democratic primary debates and forums what Uncle Charley was to “My Three Sons”: a cantankerous observer of the misbehavior around him, by turns grumpy, sage-like and loving.

And so it was again Sunday morning on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Gravel coming out of the kitchen in his figurative apron at the first sanctioned debate of the Iowa primary.

“Stop and think,” he'll preface his Uncle Charley-ish churlishness. Gravel even bears a subtle resemblance to William Demarest, who played the character on that long-running series.

“Stop and think,” Gravel said Sunday morning, when the issue before the Dems was merit pay for teachers. “Here, uh, Iran. Not Iran. Uh, uh, Spain. Norway. Finland. These countries, they’re not the superpower of the world, but they pay for their children from childhood to PhD levels. Why can’t Americans put education as the top priority, and you can’t do it when you want to expand” — he was gaining steam now — “as he wants to expand 100,000 more troops. Who are we gonna nuke, who are we gonna fight next?”

As Delaware Sen. Joe Biden and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson pantomimed which one between them Gravel was singling out, the audience at Drake University burst into gales of laughter.

Gravel was smiling too. In the Washington Post/ABC News poll flashed at the beginning of the debate, Gravel was shown polling at a naked 0% in Iowa (on the other hand, it’s only a percentage point behind Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, and 2 percentage points behind Biden and Dennis Kucinich).

Thus Gravel is veritably off the grid while taking away valuable, 30-second nuggets of promise-making time from well-heeled front-runners Sen. Barack Obama (the poll leader at 27% in Iowa) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards (tied at 26%).

Is it time for Gravel to step aside?  The one he hurts the most up there is probably Kucinich, who would otherwise occupy the unapologetically left-of-all-of-you role.

To the rest of them, Gravel’s either a nuisance or an enviably plain speaker with nothing to lose. Gravel — a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War who, according to the bio on his website, read 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers into the official Senate record — is easily the most theatrical, decrying the misbegotten involvement in Iraq or the misbegotten war on drugs or the misbegotten coziness between his opponents and their campaign war chests.

All family sitcoms need the wacky neighbor, the kooky elder. In that context Gravel makes the Dems seem a more inclusive extended brood. Perhaps the analogy is less “My Three Sons” than “Little Miss Sunshine,” Gravel as Alan Arkin’s freethinking Grandpa, sitting in the back seat of a VW bus taking a little girl to a popularity contest.

Stop and think.

— Paul Brownfield

The Democrats showed up on the MTV-run gay and lesbian cable channel Logo TV on Thursday night for a historic, first-time-ever televised presidential forum on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) issues.

What anyone watching Logo (which is carried in some 27 million homes) saw was a series of one-on-ones — each candidate interviewed, for 20 minutes or so, in the order in which their campaigns accepted the invite to the forum (Barack Obama first and Hillary Rodham Clinton last).

Call it a job interview, writ rather large, the candidates answering pointed questions from a moderator (Bloomberg News' Margaret Carlson) and three panelists about their LGBT bonafides.

Now here was a show, the candidates in comfy chairs on a hardwood-floor stage, with rug.  In contrast to the raucous AFL-CIO-sponsored debate on MSNBC on Tuesday night, live from Soldier Field in Chicago, the two-hour LGBT forum, live from some small studio in L.A., played like a closed-circuit broadcast of a living-room fundraiser in the Hancock Park manse of Hollywood money.

Hey, wasn’t that liberal mover-and-shaker/Hollywood producer Steve Bing in the audience?  I know I saw two of the TV-monied — "How I Met Your Mother” co-star Neil Patrick Harris and “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick. 

Meanwhile, one of the panelists was rock star Melissa Etheridge, whose "I Need to Wake Up" written for "An Inconvenient Truth" won her an Oscar.

“I have heard that you have said in the past that you feel uncomfortable around gay people,” she said to Sen. John Edwards. “Are you OK right now?” she joked.

“I'm perfectly comfortable,” Edwards said, begging to add that she had it wrong, he said, because the offending comment was a misquote spread by a rival political consultant.

It seemed like the Democrats were in concert Tuesday, live on MSNBC from Soldier Field in Chicago, the stage resting on the home turf of ‘da Bears” (and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama).

At the CNN/YouTube debate a few weeks ago, Obama said he'd meet with purported enemies like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. And yet Tuesday night he would not commit to meeting with Barry Bonds.

That question came from moderator Keith Olbermann who, in his role as presidential debate referee, couldn't resist a little miscreant behavior.

Like an announcer hoping to be heard over the roar of raucous fans, Olbermann quickly called attention to how little he could control some 15,000 union workers and supporters in the stadium (the forum was sponsored by the AFL-CIO).

Never mind 30-second “lightning rounds,” the evening took on the aspect of a true stump—a competition to see which candidate could whip the crowd into the loudest frenzy.

No surprise that “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” had a field day doing next-night satire of Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“This debate will come at you in six dimensions,” Stewart said, googly-eyeing the camera to lampoon CNN’s insistence that, with this techno-political miracle, they’d not only landed on Mars but opened a coffee bar.

I’m all for the service “The Daily Show” provides at a breathtaking four-nights-a-week clip — the news for people who tangentially follow the news but nevertheless want to remain intellectually above it and thus go back to not following it.

To that end, “The Daily Show” sort of took one tack about the YouTube debate — you missed nothing, except for CNN's ridiculous hype (a comedic sweet spot, to be sure).

But here's something that nags at me: Was this a case where "The Daily Show" stoops to mocking the powerless, in this case the uploaders who participated in the YouTube debate?

Seen through the show's funhouse mirror, none of them looked any too smart--the North Carolina pastor,for instance, who was present in the audience for a follow-up to his question of Sen. John Edwards about gay marriage. 

“So, was CNN able to take the debate process and youth-anize it?” was how Stewart introduced a piece by John Oliver about the Youth of Today watching the debate as a drinking game, sipping on common references like “Bush,” gulping on less-common ones like “torture” and “gay marriage.”

Better, and less defeating, was the “gotcha” the show pulled on Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), shown reacting with evident feeling during the debate to the lesbian couple in Brooklyn who asked about gay marriage.

Except, as “The Daily Show” illustrated, he’d given the same talking point at a previous debate, saying he and his wife ask themselves, “How would I want my two daughters treated if they grew up and had a different sexual orientation [from] their parents?”

“Apparently you would like them treated as hypothetical debate lesbians,” Stewart said.

— Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy Comedy Central)

Here was a job not so much about two Americas but the one that loves Regis, or Matt.

Here was Sen. John Edwards, kicking off a "national poverty tour," and creamy GMA co-host Diane Sawyer sitting before an Oprah-sized gathering in the New Orleans town hall where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

The medium is the message, someone said. So, when Sawyer teased of Edwards: "He says you can end poverty in America in 30 years if America sets it's mind to it," it sounded like she was talking about the War on Carbs.

The network morning shows are always town halls, in a sense-average folks (i.e. tourists in New York City) vying to stand behind Al while he does the weather. The Edwards colloquy had more seriousness of purpose, though talk of Iraq and Pakistan and health are and how to help working people living at the poverty line was tabled for news and weather breaks and the new report suggesting teen-age girls make themselves more anxious, talking about their problems all the time.

"Does teenage gab lead to anxiety?" GMA was asking from New York. Back in New Orleans, what was going on, during these long breaks? Was Edwards actually conversing with the town hall folks? Sawyer didn't put the question to the candidate.

"I have to wedge in a political question here," she said, in the 7 o'clock hour. "All right, the whisper heard 'round the Democratic presidential race," she giggled, and asked about the video bite last week showing Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, onstage after an NAACP forum, appearing to collude on a plan to winnow out the pretenders in the Democratic primary.

The video didn't make all that much hay last week in the echo chamber, beyond playing to anyone wanting to interpret Edwards and Clinton as Beltway limousine liberals.

That subtext bled through the question asked by one of the town hall participants: "Senator, I was just wondering, since you're on this national poverty tour, how do you justify spending $400 on a haircut?"

"I don't. No excuses, but can I just tell you, some lessons you learn the hard way. I've learned my lesson. I gotta a very cheap haircut the other day and I'm gonna keep cheap haircuts."

Laughter, ephemera. A morning show in its element.

--Paul Brownfield

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

The 0% solution

Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel is to these many Democratic primary debates and forums what Uncle Charley was to “My Three Sons”: a cantankerous observer of the misbehavior around him, by turns grumpy, sage-like and loving.

And so it was again Sunday morning on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Gravel coming out of the kitchen in his figurative apron at the first sanctioned debate of the Iowa primary.

“Stop and think,” he'll preface his Uncle Charley-ish churlishness. Gravel even bears a subtle resemblance to William Demarest, who played the character on that long-running series.

“Stop and think,” Gravel said Sunday morning, when the issue before the Dems was merit pay for teachers. “Here, uh, Iran. Not Iran. Uh, uh, Spain. Norway. Finland. These countries, they’re not the superpower of the world, but they pay for their children from childhood to PhD levels. Why can’t Americans put education as the top priority, and you can’t do it when you want to expand” — he was gaining steam now — “as he wants to expand 100,000 more troops. Who are we gonna nuke, who are we gonna fight next?”

As Delaware Sen. Joe Biden and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson pantomimed which one between them Gravel was singling out, the audience at Drake University burst into gales of laughter.

Gravel was smiling too. In the Washington Post/ABC News poll flashed at the beginning of the debate, Gravel was shown polling at a naked 0% in Iowa (on the other hand, it’s only a percentage point behind Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, and 2 percentage points behind Biden and Dennis Kucinich).

Thus Gravel is veritably off the grid while taking away valuable, 30-second nuggets of promise-making time from well-heeled front-runners Sen. Barack Obama (the poll leader at 27% in Iowa) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards (tied at 26%).

Is it time for Gravel to step aside?  The one he hurts the most up there is probably Kucinich, who would otherwise occupy the unapologetically left-of-all-of-you role.

To the rest of them, Gravel’s either a nuisance or an enviably plain speaker with nothing to lose. Gravel — a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War who, according to the bio on his website, read 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers into the official Senate record — is easily the most theatrical, decrying the misbegotten involvement in Iraq or the misbegotten war on drugs or the misbegotten coziness between his opponents and their campaign war chests.

All family sitcoms need the wacky neighbor, the kooky elder. In that context Gravel makes the Dems seem a more inclusive extended brood. Perhaps the analogy is less “My Three Sons” than “Little Miss Sunshine,” Gravel as Alan Arkin’s freethinking Grandpa, sitting in the back seat of a VW bus taking a little girl to a popularity contest.

Stop and think.

— Paul Brownfield

The Democrats showed up on the MTV-run gay and lesbian cable channel Logo TV on Thursday night for a historic, first-time-ever televised presidential forum on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) issues.

What anyone watching Logo (which is carried in some 27 million homes) saw was a series of one-on-ones — each candidate interviewed, for 20 minutes or so, in the order in which their campaigns accepted the invite to the forum (Barack Obama first and Hillary Rodham Clinton last).

Call it a job interview, writ rather large, the candidates answering pointed questions from a moderator (Bloomberg News' Margaret Carlson) and three panelists about their LGBT bonafides.

Now here was a show, the candidates in comfy chairs on a hardwood-floor stage, with rug.  In contrast to the raucous AFL-CIO-sponsored debate on MSNBC on Tuesday night, live from Soldier Field in Chicago, the two-hour LGBT forum, live from some small studio in L.A., played like a closed-circuit broadcast of a living-room fundraiser in the Hancock Park manse of Hollywood money.

Hey, wasn’t that liberal mover-and-shaker/Hollywood producer Steve Bing in the audience?  I know I saw two of the TV-monied — "How I Met Your Mother” co-star Neil Patrick Harris and “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick. 

Meanwhile, one of the panelists was rock star Melissa Etheridge, whose "I Need to Wake Up" written for "An Inconvenient Truth" won her an Oscar.

“I have heard that you have said in the past that you feel uncomfortable around gay people,” she said to Sen. John Edwards. “Are you OK right now?” she joked.

“I'm perfectly comfortable,” Edwards said, begging to add that she had it wrong, he said, because the offending comment was a misquote spread by a rival political consultant.

It seemed like the Democrats were in concert Tuesday, live on MSNBC from Soldier Field in Chicago, the stage resting on the home turf of ‘da Bears” (and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama).

At the CNN/YouTube debate a few weeks ago, Obama said he'd meet with purported enemies like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. And yet Tuesday night he would not commit to meeting with Barry Bonds.

That question came from moderator Keith Olbermann who, in his role as presidential debate referee, couldn't resist a little miscreant behavior.

Like an announcer hoping to be heard over the roar of raucous fans, Olbermann quickly called attention to how little he could control some 15,000 union workers and supporters in the stadium (the forum was sponsored by the AFL-CIO).

Never mind 30-second “lightning rounds,” the evening took on the aspect of a true stump—a competition to see which candidate could whip the crowd into the loudest frenzy.

No surprise that “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” had a field day doing next-night satire of Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“This debate will come at you in six dimensions,” Stewart said, googly-eyeing the camera to lampoon CNN’s insistence that, with this techno-political miracle, they’d not only landed on Mars but opened a coffee bar.

I’m all for the service “The Daily Show” provides at a breathtaking four-nights-a-week clip — the news for people who tangentially follow the news but nevertheless want to remain intellectually above it and thus go back to not following it.

To that end, “The Daily Show” sort of took one tack about the YouTube debate — you missed nothing, except for CNN's ridiculous hype (a comedic sweet spot, to be sure).

But here's something that nags at me: Was this a case where "The Daily Show" stoops to mocking the powerless, in this case the uploaders who participated in the YouTube debate?

Seen through the show's funhouse mirror, none of them looked any too smart--the North Carolina pastor,for instance, who was present in the audience for a follow-up to his question of Sen. John Edwards about gay marriage. 

“So, was CNN able to take the debate process and youth-anize it?” was how Stewart introduced a piece by John Oliver about the Youth of Today watching the debate as a drinking game, sipping on common references like “Bush,” gulping on less-common ones like “torture” and “gay marriage.”

Better, and less defeating, was the “gotcha” the show pulled on Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), shown reacting with evident feeling during the debate to the lesbian couple in Brooklyn who asked about gay marriage.

Except, as “The Daily Show” illustrated, he’d given the same talking point at a previous debate, saying he and his wife ask themselves, “How would I want my two daughters treated if they grew up and had a different sexual orientation [from] their parents?”

“Apparently you would like them treated as hypothetical debate lesbians,” Stewart said.

— Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy Comedy Central)

Here was a job not so much about two Americas but the one that loves Regis, or Matt.

Here was Sen. John Edwards, kicking off a "national poverty tour," and creamy GMA co-host Diane Sawyer sitting before an Oprah-sized gathering in the New Orleans town hall where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

The medium is the message, someone said. So, when Sawyer teased of Edwards: "He says you can end poverty in America in 30 years if America sets it's mind to it," it sounded like she was talking about the War on Carbs.

The network morning shows are always town halls, in a sense-average folks (i.e. tourists in New York City) vying to stand behind Al while he does the weather. The Edwards colloquy had more seriousness of purpose, though talk of Iraq and Pakistan and health are and how to help working people living at the poverty line was tabled for news and weather breaks and the new report suggesting teen-age girls make themselves more anxious, talking about their problems all the time.

"Does teenage gab lead to anxiety?" GMA was asking from New York. Back in New Orleans, what was going on, during these long breaks? Was Edwards actually conversing with the town hall folks? Sawyer didn't put the question to the candidate.

"I have to wedge in a political question here," she said, in the 7 o'clock hour. "All right, the whisper heard 'round the Democratic presidential race," she giggled, and asked about the video bite last week showing Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, onstage after an NAACP forum, appearing to collude on a plan to winnow out the pretenders in the Democratic primary.

The video didn't make all that much hay last week in the echo chamber, beyond playing to anyone wanting to interpret Edwards and Clinton as Beltway limousine liberals.

That subtext bled through the question asked by one of the town hall participants: "Senator, I was just wondering, since you're on this national poverty tour, how do you justify spending $400 on a haircut?"

"I don't. No excuses, but can I just tell you, some lessons you learn the hard way. I've learned my lesson. I gotta a very cheap haircut the other day and I'm gonna keep cheap haircuts."

Laughter, ephemera. A morning show in its element.

--Paul Brownfield

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

Gays put Dems on the spot

The Democrats showed up on the MTV-run gay and lesbian cable channel Logo TV on Thursday night for a historic, first-time-ever televised presidential forum on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) issues.

What anyone watching Logo (which is carried in some 27 million homes) saw was a series of one-on-ones — each candidate interviewed, for 20 minutes or so, in the order in which their campaigns accepted the invite to the forum (Barack Obama first and Hillary Rodham Clinton last).

Call it a job interview, writ rather large, the candidates answering pointed questions from a moderator (Bloomberg News' Margaret Carlson) and three panelists about their LGBT bonafides.

Now here was a show, the candidates in comfy chairs on a hardwood-floor stage, with rug.  In contrast to the raucous AFL-CIO-sponsored debate on MSNBC on Tuesday night, live from Soldier Field in Chicago, the two-hour LGBT forum, live from some small studio in L.A., played like a closed-circuit broadcast of a living-room fundraiser in the Hancock Park manse of Hollywood money.

Hey, wasn’t that liberal mover-and-shaker/Hollywood producer Steve Bing in the audience?  I know I saw two of the TV-monied — "How I Met Your Mother” co-star Neil Patrick Harris and “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick. 

Meanwhile, one of the panelists was rock star Melissa Etheridge, whose "I Need to Wake Up" written for "An Inconvenient Truth" won her an Oscar.

“I have heard that you have said in the past that you feel uncomfortable around gay people,” she said to Sen. John Edwards. “Are you OK right now?” she joked.

“I'm perfectly comfortable,” Edwards said, begging to add that she had it wrong, he said, because the offending comment was a misquote spread by a rival political consultant.

It seemed like the Democrats were in concert Tuesday, live on MSNBC from Soldier Field in Chicago, the stage resting on the home turf of ‘da Bears” (and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama).

At the CNN/YouTube debate a few weeks ago, Obama said he'd meet with purported enemies like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. And yet Tuesday night he would not commit to meeting with Barry Bonds.

That question came from moderator Keith Olbermann who, in his role as presidential debate referee, couldn't resist a little miscreant behavior.

Like an announcer hoping to be heard over the roar of raucous fans, Olbermann quickly called attention to how little he could control some 15,000 union workers and supporters in the stadium (the forum was sponsored by the AFL-CIO).

Never mind 30-second “lightning rounds,” the evening took on the aspect of a true stump—a competition to see which candidate could whip the crowd into the loudest frenzy.

No surprise that “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” had a field day doing next-night satire of Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“This debate will come at you in six dimensions,” Stewart said, googly-eyeing the camera to lampoon CNN’s insistence that, with this techno-political miracle, they’d not only landed on Mars but opened a coffee bar.

I’m all for the service “The Daily Show” provides at a breathtaking four-nights-a-week clip — the news for people who tangentially follow the news but nevertheless want to remain intellectually above it and thus go back to not following it.

To that end, “The Daily Show” sort of took one tack about the YouTube debate — you missed nothing, except for CNN's ridiculous hype (a comedic sweet spot, to be sure).

But here's something that nags at me: Was this a case where "The Daily Show" stoops to mocking the powerless, in this case the uploaders who participated in the YouTube debate?

Seen through the show's funhouse mirror, none of them looked any too smart--the North Carolina pastor,for instance, who was present in the audience for a follow-up to his question of Sen. John Edwards about gay marriage. 

“So, was CNN able to take the debate process and youth-anize it?” was how Stewart introduced a piece by John Oliver about the Youth of Today watching the debate as a drinking game, sipping on common references like “Bush,” gulping on less-common ones like “torture” and “gay marriage.”

Better, and less defeating, was the “gotcha” the show pulled on Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), shown reacting with evident feeling during the debate to the lesbian couple in Brooklyn who asked about gay marriage.

Except, as “The Daily Show” illustrated, he’d given the same talking point at a previous debate, saying he and his wife ask themselves, “How would I want my two daughters treated if they grew up and had a different sexual orientation [from] their parents?”

“Apparently you would like them treated as hypothetical debate lesbians,” Stewart said.

— Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy Comedy Central)

Here was a job not so much about two Americas but the one that loves Regis, or Matt.

Here was Sen. John Edwards, kicking off a "national poverty tour," and creamy GMA co-host Diane Sawyer sitting before an Oprah-sized gathering in the New Orleans town hall where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

The medium is the message, someone said. So, when Sawyer teased of Edwards: "He says you can end poverty in America in 30 years if America sets it's mind to it," it sounded like she was talking about the War on Carbs.

The network morning shows are always town halls, in a sense-average folks (i.e. tourists in New York City) vying to stand behind Al while he does the weather. The Edwards colloquy had more seriousness of purpose, though talk of Iraq and Pakistan and health are and how to help working people living at the poverty line was tabled for news and weather breaks and the new report suggesting teen-age girls make themselves more anxious, talking about their problems all the time.

"Does teenage gab lead to anxiety?" GMA was asking from New York. Back in New Orleans, what was going on, during these long breaks? Was Edwards actually conversing with the town hall folks? Sawyer didn't put the question to the candidate.

"I have to wedge in a political question here," she said, in the 7 o'clock hour. "All right, the whisper heard 'round the Democratic presidential race," she giggled, and asked about the video bite last week showing Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, onstage after an NAACP forum, appearing to collude on a plan to winnow out the pretenders in the Democratic primary.

The video didn't make all that much hay last week in the echo chamber, beyond playing to anyone wanting to interpret Edwards and Clinton as Beltway limousine liberals.

That subtext bled through the question asked by one of the town hall participants: "Senator, I was just wondering, since you're on this national poverty tour, how do you justify spending $400 on a haircut?"

"I don't. No excuses, but can I just tell you, some lessons you learn the hard way. I've learned my lesson. I gotta a very cheap haircut the other day and I'm gonna keep cheap haircuts."

Laughter, ephemera. A morning show in its element.

--Paul Brownfield

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

Dems pay their union dues

It seemed like the Democrats were in concert Tuesday, live on MSNBC from Soldier Field in Chicago, the stage resting on the home turf of ‘da Bears” (and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama).

At the CNN/YouTube debate a few weeks ago, Obama said he'd meet with purported enemies like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. And yet Tuesday night he would not commit to meeting with Barry Bonds.

That question came from moderator Keith Olbermann who, in his role as presidential debate referee, couldn't resist a little miscreant behavior.

Like an announcer hoping to be heard over the roar of raucous fans, Olbermann quickly called attention to how little he could control some 15,000 union workers and supporters in the stadium (the forum was sponsored by the AFL-CIO).

Never mind 30-second “lightning rounds,” the evening took on the aspect of a true stump—a competition to see which candidate could whip the crowd into the loudest frenzy.

No surprise that “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” had a field day doing next-night satire of Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“This debate will come at you in six dimensions,” Stewart said, googly-eyeing the camera to lampoon CNN’s insistence that, with this techno-political miracle, they’d not only landed on Mars but opened a coffee bar.

I’m all for the service “The Daily Show” provides at a breathtaking four-nights-a-week clip — the news for people who tangentially follow the news but nevertheless want to remain intellectually above it and thus go back to not following it.

To that end, “The Daily Show” sort of took one tack about the YouTube debate — you missed nothing, except for CNN's ridiculous hype (a comedic sweet spot, to be sure).

But here's something that nags at me: Was this a case where "The Daily Show" stoops to mocking the powerless, in this case the uploaders who participated in the YouTube debate?

Seen through the show's funhouse mirror, none of them looked any too smart--the North Carolina pastor,for instance, who was present in the audience for a follow-up to his question of Sen. John Edwards about gay marriage. 

“So, was CNN able to take the debate process and youth-anize it?” was how Stewart introduced a piece by John Oliver about the Youth of Today watching the debate as a drinking game, sipping on common references like “Bush,” gulping on less-common ones like “torture” and “gay marriage.”

Better, and less defeating, was the “gotcha” the show pulled on Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), shown reacting with evident feeling during the debate to the lesbian couple in Brooklyn who asked about gay marriage.

Except, as “The Daily Show” illustrated, he’d given the same talking point at a previous debate, saying he and his wife ask themselves, “How would I want my two daughters treated if they grew up and had a different sexual orientation [from] their parents?”

“Apparently you would like them treated as hypothetical debate lesbians,” Stewart said.

— Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy Comedy Central)

Here was a job not so much about two Americas but the one that loves Regis, or Matt.

Here was Sen. John Edwards, kicking off a "national poverty tour," and creamy GMA co-host Diane Sawyer sitting before an Oprah-sized gathering in the New Orleans town hall where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

The medium is the message, someone said. So, when Sawyer teased of Edwards: "He says you can end poverty in America in 30 years if America sets it's mind to it," it sounded like she was talking about the War on Carbs.

The network morning shows are always town halls, in a sense-average folks (i.e. tourists in New York City) vying to stand behind Al while he does the weather. The Edwards colloquy had more seriousness of purpose, though talk of Iraq and Pakistan and health are and how to help working people living at the poverty line was tabled for news and weather breaks and the new report suggesting teen-age girls make themselves more anxious, talking about their problems all the time.

"Does teenage gab lead to anxiety?" GMA was asking from New York. Back in New Orleans, what was going on, during these long breaks? Was Edwards actually conversing with the town hall folks? Sawyer didn't put the question to the candidate.

"I have to wedge in a political question here," she said, in the 7 o'clock hour. "All right, the whisper heard 'round the Democratic presidential race," she giggled, and asked about the video bite last week showing Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, onstage after an NAACP forum, appearing to collude on a plan to winnow out the pretenders in the Democratic primary.

The video didn't make all that much hay last week in the echo chamber, beyond playing to anyone wanting to interpret Edwards and Clinton as Beltway limousine liberals.

That subtext bled through the question asked by one of the town hall participants: "Senator, I was just wondering, since you're on this national poverty tour, how do you justify spending $400 on a haircut?"

"I don't. No excuses, but can I just tell you, some lessons you learn the hard way. I've learned my lesson. I gotta a very cheap haircut the other day and I'm gonna keep cheap haircuts."

Laughter, ephemera. A morning show in its element.

--Paul Brownfield

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

'Daily Show' meets YouTube debate

No surprise that “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” had a field day doing next-night satire of Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“This debate will come at you in six dimensions,” Stewart said, googly-eyeing the camera to lampoon CNN’s insistence that, with this techno-political miracle, they’d not only landed on Mars but opened a coffee bar.

I’m all for the service “The Daily Show” provides at a breathtaking four-nights-a-week clip — the news for people who tangentially follow the news but nevertheless want to remain intellectually above it and thus go back to not following it.

To that end, “The Daily Show” sort of took one tack about the YouTube debate — you missed nothing, except for CNN's ridiculous hype (a comedic sweet spot, to be sure).

But here's something that nags at me: Was this a case where "The Daily Show" stoops to mocking the powerless, in this case the uploaders who participated in the YouTube debate?

Seen through the show's funhouse mirror, none of them looked any too smart--the North Carolina pastor,for instance, who was present in the audience for a follow-up to his question of Sen. John Edwards about gay marriage. 

“So, was CNN able to take the debate process and youth-anize it?” was how Stewart introduced a piece by John Oliver about the Youth of Today watching the debate as a drinking game, sipping on common references like “Bush,” gulping on less-common ones like “torture” and “gay marriage.”

Better, and less defeating, was the “gotcha” the show pulled on Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), shown reacting with evident feeling during the debate to the lesbian couple in Brooklyn who asked about gay marriage.

Except, as “The Daily Show” illustrated, he’d given the same talking point at a previous debate, saying he and his wife ask themselves, “How would I want my two daughters treated if they grew up and had a different sexual orientation [from] their parents?”

“Apparently you would like them treated as hypothetical debate lesbians,” Stewart said.

— Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy Comedy Central)

Here was a job not so much about two Americas but the one that loves Regis, or Matt.

Here was Sen. John Edwards, kicking off a "national poverty tour," and creamy GMA co-host Diane Sawyer sitting before an Oprah-sized gathering in the New Orleans town hall where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

The medium is the message, someone said. So, when Sawyer teased of Edwards: "He says you can end poverty in America in 30 years if America sets it's mind to it," it sounded like she was talking about the War on Carbs.

The network morning shows are always town halls, in a sense-average folks (i.e. tourists in New York City) vying to stand behind Al while he does the weather. The Edwards colloquy had more seriousness of purpose, though talk of Iraq and Pakistan and health are and how to help working people living at the poverty line was tabled for news and weather breaks and the new report suggesting teen-age girls make themselves more anxious, talking about their problems all the time.

"Does teenage gab lead to anxiety?" GMA was asking from New York. Back in New Orleans, what was going on, during these long breaks? Was Edwards actually conversing with the town hall folks? Sawyer didn't put the question to the candidate.

"I have to wedge in a political question here," she said, in the 7 o'clock hour. "All right, the whisper heard 'round the Democratic presidential race," she giggled, and asked about the video bite last week showing Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, onstage after an NAACP forum, appearing to collude on a plan to winnow out the pretenders in the Democratic primary.

The video didn't make all that much hay last week in the echo chamber, beyond playing to anyone wanting to interpret Edwards and Clinton as Beltway limousine liberals.

That subtext bled through the question asked by one of the town hall participants: "Senator, I was just wondering, since you're on this national poverty tour, how do you justify spending $400 on a haircut?"

"I don't. No excuses, but can I just tell you, some lessons you learn the hard way. I've learned my lesson. I gotta a very cheap haircut the other day and I'm gonna keep cheap haircuts."

Laughter, ephemera. A morning show in its element.

--Paul Brownfield

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

Election 2008: Edwards in the morning

Here was a job not so much about two Americas but the one that loves Regis, or Matt.

Here was Sen. John Edwards, kicking off a "national poverty tour," and creamy GMA co-host Diane Sawyer sitting before an Oprah-sized gathering in the New Orleans town hall where the Louisiana Purchase was signed.

The medium is the message, someone said. So, when Sawyer teased of Edwards: "He says you can end poverty in America in 30 years if America sets it's mind to it," it sounded like she was talking about the War on Carbs.

The network morning shows are always town halls, in a sense-average folks (i.e. tourists in New York City) vying to stand behind Al while he does the weather. The Edwards colloquy had more seriousness of purpose, though talk of Iraq and Pakistan and health are and how to help working people living at the poverty line was tabled for news and weather breaks and the new report suggesting teen-age girls make themselves more anxious, talking about their problems all the time.

"Does teenage gab lead to anxiety?" GMA was asking from New York. Back in New Orleans, what was going on, during these long breaks? Was Edwards actually conversing with the town hall folks? Sawyer didn't put the question to the candidate.

"I have to wedge in a political question here," she said, in the 7 o'clock hour. "All right, the whisper heard 'round the Democratic presidential race," she giggled, and asked about the video bite last week showing Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton, onstage after an NAACP forum, appearing to collude on a plan to winnow out the pretenders in the Democratic primary.

The video didn't make all that much hay last week in the echo chamber, beyond playing to anyone wanting to interpret Edwards and Clinton as Beltway limousine liberals.

That subtext bled through the question asked by one of the town hall participants: "Senator, I was just wondering, since you're on this national poverty tour, how do you justify spending $400 on a haircut?"

"I don't. No excuses, but can I just tell you, some lessons you learn the hard way. I've learned my lesson. I gotta a very cheap haircut the other day and I'm gonna keep cheap haircuts."

Laughter, ephemera. A morning show in its element.

--Paul Brownfield

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

Election 2008: The CNN/YouTube debate thing

Had breakfast with Jon Klein, president of CNN, to talk about this CNN/YouTube debate thing on July 23.

"The subtext of everything we do is innovation," Klein noted.

I had nice fruit in front me, which helped, assuming the conversation would continue like this. We were sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton, in one of those hotel “salons.” (The CNN people are in town as part of Press Tour.)

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?

Election 2008: Terror Town

A friend of mine calls Rudy Giuliani the Mayor of Terror Town. I find this to be a clarifying and possibly break-out nickname. Why, just this morning on CNN I saw the chilling headline: “Al Qaeda Resurgence?” This was accompanied by B-roll of presumed Al Qaeda trainees practicing their kick-boxing techniques!

Mayor of Terror Town, won’t you help?