Copious Notes

Appreciation: George Carlin

George Carlin performs in 2007 at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. Copyrighted Associated Press photo by E. Pablo Kosmicki.

George Carlin's legacy will be as a counter-culture figure who pushed boundaries along with folks like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, ushering in an era of topical humor that now finds a home in living rooms across the country with works like The Daily Show.

His essence though, was in tamer skits such as the comparison of football and baseball (the following from Baseball Almanac):

In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.

In baseball the object is to go home!

Or, my personal favorites was A Place for My Stuff, where he observed that your stuff is stuff and other people's stuff is crap (sometimes, he used a different word).

That was Carlin's gift. He was an observer. Jerry Seinfeld was as much a inheritor of of his mantle as Jon Stewart or Bill Maher. Observation is one of the most basic elements of comedy. Carlin observed his life. He observed the world. He observed a lot of crap. And he spun all of that observation into routines that were side-splittingly funny, and he didn't worry a whole lot about who he offended along the way.

Carlin crossed the line on purpose.

Maybe most to his credit, he never stopped doing that. Yes, he mellowed with age. His Thomas the Tank Engine character was his loveliest creation. I remember watching it with one of my children and thinking, as many parents probably did, "I'm watching the guy who did the seven words you can't say on television on a kids show."

But he never took his eye off our world, and boiled it down into routines that would crack you up, make you think, maybe even offend you.

Carlin not only made us laugh, he made us observers, and he changed his art form. That's a legacy few people who pick up a microphone to tell jokes can claim.

Read: The New York Times thorough obituary of George Carlin.

Tim Russert

Tim Russert doing what he did best, interviewing the most powerful figures in American politics. Photo of Russert and President George W. Bush by White House photographer Eric Draper | AP. Below: Russert by Kathy Willens | AP.

I read that Tim Russert died while I was in the midst of covering a severe thunderstorm passing over the Ichthus Festival last Friday, so there was only a minute to take in the shock and the loss before getting back to work.

Over the last week, there's been plenty of time to absorb my own feelings and those of many others. The consensus, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is that we have lost a smart, objective and incisive voice in political journalism. He was instructive and challenging in an era where both pundits and viewers seem more and more inclined to scurry to their ideological corners.

 As a self-proclaimed political junkie, I'll miss Russert, and it's a particularly cruel twist of fate to us and him that we lose him in the midst of the most historic Presidential election in most of our lifetimes.

But Russert's passing has also served as a wake-up call to me, and I would guess maybe others.

It's a call I made to my doctor.

Russert suffered from heart disease. No, this isn't the story of a middle-aged, overweight workaholic that didn't take care of himself. By most accounts, including NBC News medical editor Nancy Snyderman on the Today show, he was aware of what ailed him and he was treated for it, exercised and watched what he ate.

But either something was missed, or something was going to happen no matter what.

"This is a very sad statement that underscores the humbleness and the humility of medicine," Snyderman said on Today, "that as much as we want to do right by every patient, there are some things that slip by us, and perhaps this is the reminder to all of us that there's a higher order."

The saddest thing in Russert's passing is not the loss to politics or journalism. It's the loss to a family that by all accounts had a great husband, father and son. Russert had a life of professional accomplishment and family harmony so many of us aspire to, and we want those lives to be complete.

My father died of a heart attack when I was 12, and since then I have missed him more than anyone knows. I missed him at graduations, seeing me get my first job, my wedding, the births of my children, and I have simply missed his presence, love and counsel, though God has blessed me with a great father in-law and brother in-law.

This is not a family history I want to repeat, and reviewing the life of Russert, I know there are things he wanted to see and experience with his family. You think about the future when a little pain swells in your chest or you have a few minutes where a deep breath is out of your reach.

Maybe sometimes we are over reliant on celebrity tragedies as reminders to take care of ourselves when we know, for instance, millions of people die from heart disease every year, and we know what's going on inside ourselves.

But better that than no wake up call. So I am going to talk to my doctor about a few things maybe I have been ignoring too long. There will probably be others that will do the same, taking cues from Russert's passing. ABC News reports doctors are already seeing a Russert effect.

It's the little something we can gain from this tragic loss.

Primary coverage: Same as it ever was

Rachel Boca-Vaughn votes Tuesday, May 20, 2008, in the Kentucky primary election in Bowling Green, Ky. Copyrighted AP Photo by Joe Imel of the Bowling Green Daily News.

For a little while during Tuesday’s coverage of the Kentucky presidential primary, it looked as if the national cable news networks might give viewers a little more of Kentucky than they gave folks West Virginia last week.

CNN actually had Candy Crowley doing reports from Louisville with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, and we saw footage of things such as Jerry Lundergan of Lexington, Clinton’s Kentucky campaign chairman, ­firing up the crowd for the senator from New York.

Maybe the momentousness of the night — in which Illinois Sen. Barack Obama seemed to be claiming some semblance of victory or dealing with his second consecutive drubbing in an Appalachian state, or both — re-energized the talking heads. But pretty soon, it was back to the talking heads.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t talk about us.

They talked plenty about Kentucky, trying to discern why the Bluegrass State overwhelmingly supported Clinton, in what appears to be a lost cause. They used election returns and exit poll data but, from what I saw flipping back and forth, never actually talked to a Kentuckian.

So we were politely generalized as an uneducated state with a race problem — for more impolite characterizations, visit the comments section of The New York Times’ political blog.

Chris, Anderson, Keith, etc. probably aren't coming

This was about as much of West Virginia as the nation saw in last night's coverage of the West Virginia primary. Copyrighted AP photo by Jeff Gentner.

Flipping between CNN and MSNBC last night to watch coverage of the West Virginia primary, it occurred to me that I was seeing nary a West Virginian, save for the ones surrounding Hillary Clinton during her victory speech. That probably does not bode well for Kentucky, which at one point was savoring the idea of mattering and being in the national spotlight for our primary, May 20.

Back in January and February, we were watching national media outlets -- particularly the cable news networks -- pulling up roots every week to broadcast from the newest battleground. There was CNN's Ali Velshi in Texas sporting a cowboy hat and MSNBC's Morning Joe broadcasting from some down-home restaurant in South Carolina. The remotes yielded one of my favorite moments in recent cable newsdom when sirens in Charleston, S.C., kept interrupting CNN's John King during a panel discussion on The Situation Room, leading Jack Cafferty to rant about the silliness of outdoor remotes.

Alas, we do have a beautiful outside in Kentucky they could show. But with our race all but a foregone conclusion in favor of the unlikely nominee, we'll probably have to be happy hearing our state named over and over again in interminable banter from panels of pundits. CNN did air a report questioning whether Barack Obama's strategy of blowing off the Appalachian state primaries in favor of a soft opening to his general election campaign may backfire on him in said general election, and MSNBC's Chris Matthews hinted that maybe Kentucky would be closer than people think, though he didn't offer any reason why. I also liked that at least NBC political director Chuck Todd said that while Obama's drubbing in West Virginia probably won't hurt his chances at securing the Democratic nomination, he still should answer for why he lost so badly in the Mountain State.

Another problem for the Bluegrass State in terms of getting attention is that we share our day with Oregon -- hey Stephen and Suzi -- which will be more likely to help Obama close in on the elusive magic number, somewhere between 2,025 and 2,209 depending on whether you're listening to Howard Wolfson or anyone else.

We'll probably get more out of watching KET's election coverage, particularly with a Senate primary in play. That actually may give the national pundits a few more minutes to mull over Kentucky and the possibilities of a challenge to Mitch McConnell in November. Last night, MSNBC in particular devoted some time to actual news out of Mississippi, that Democrat Travis Childers had taken yet another seat in the House of Representatives out of a reliably Republican district. In an otherwise uneventful night, it gave Tim Russert something to talk about.

But it was supposed to be West Virginia's night. And next week was supposed to be ours.

Maybe in 2012.

SNL-Hillary honeymoon over?

As expected, Saturday Night Live opened this week's episode with politics, specifically Hillary Clinton's increasingly unlikely bid to be the Democratic nominee for President. What was not so expected was that the show and brilliant Clinton impersonator Amy Poehler seemingly picked up a Louisville Slugger and went after the New York Senator who, just a few weeks ago, seemed to have her campaign buoyed by a few sympathetic portrayals on SNL. Clinton even appeared alongside Poehler one night. But after Saturday, it's hard to imagine that again. Do you go back on a show after it has, with no subtlety at all, portrayed you as a sore loser with no personal ethics whose supporters are racists?

After the fun of routines such as the Halloween party, in which Barack Obama actually appeared, the debate sketches and the faux 3 a.m. phone call ad, Poehler blatantly stating to supposed superdelgates that the sore loserness, racists, and lack of ethics are why they should vote for her was a dark and uncreative turn. Yes, some people will find truth in some or all of those points, but we've come to expect more finesse and humor from the crew. This take definitely was not yet ready for prime time.

Later in the show, on Weekend Update, Poehler did have a great line about the increase in the price of stamps from 41 cents to 42 cents: "'Aw, that's cute,' said oil." And Louisville's My Morning Jacket had a fantastic appearance, ending its first number in a glorious feedback duel.

BTW, we had fun talking to political comic Paula Poundstone for a story in yesterday's paper. Click the link, if you missed it.

If you are a political junkie like me, you may enjoy this profile of NBC's political director Chuck Todd by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz.

NBC is announcing today that former SNL star Jimmy Fallon will succeed Conan O'Brien as the host of Late Night when Conan succeeds Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show next year. The Jimmy Fallon-Tina Fey Weekend Update duo was easily among the best ever in that segment, so it was hard to see Fallon struggle in his attempt at a film career. Maybe this will be a good move for him. (AP photo by Evan Agostini.)

SNL has My Morning Jacket this week, and hopefully more great political humor

Louisville's My Morning Jacket is the musical guest on Saturday Night Live this week, providing guest host Shia LaBeouf and Mr. SNL Digital Short Andy Samberg with a wonderfully cheesy joke in the video, above.

Of course, we've also come to expect great political humor from SNL lately, Amy Poehler's Hillary Clinton impression being the biggest reason why.  For some reason, I keep thinking this week, it would be funny to remake the Thing that Wouldn't Leave sketch -- a faux horror movie trailer in which John Belushi is an annoying dinner guest who won't take a hint that it's time to go, leading to anguished screams from his hosts -- and frame it in the context of the Democratic primaries. Maybe I just want to hear Fred Armisen scream as Obama. Whatever the professional sketch writers come up with, we'll probably be talking about it Monday morning.

(By the way, the Jimmy Carter clip that comes up in the video menu after Andy and Shia is another classic.)

Note: On Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me this morning, they played the newsmaker countdown, in which they play a song inspired by someone who was in the news during the week, and then the contestant has to guess who inspired it. The song inspired by Hillary Clinton: that Dreamgirls showstopper, And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going. The show repeats at noon Sunday on WUKY-91.3 FM or you can hear it at Wait Wait's website.

If he'd stayed with the bow tie . . .

MSNBC has reportedly canceled Tucker Carlson's show which was on at . . . uh, I think it was . . . Anyway, the blogosphere is filled with commentary on this and why his show didn't work. My opinion: He turned his back on bow ties. Tucker used to be one of the few prominent bow tie wearers in media, but somewhere along the way, he abandoned them in favor of open collars and straight ties. You know, loyalty counts. If he'd stayed with the bow tie, maybe things would have been different. Of course, maybe Tucker could turn his fortunes around going back to the bow tie. You know, once you learn to tie one, you never forget.

Did SNL boost Hillary?

If you go by what some folks are saying about this week's Super Tuesday Jr. primary, Barack Obama might wish the writers were still on strike.

In an effort to explain how they screwed up predictions . . . uh, I mean, contextualize Sen. Hillary Clinton's surprisingly strong showing in Texas and Ohio, even prestigious outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and The Baltimore Sun are intimating that Saturday Night Live's skits the past two weeks parodying the recent Democratic debates and Clinton's appearance on last week's show helped drive her victories. In the skits, questioners from both MSNBC and CNN are portrayed as pampering Sen. Barack Obama and attacking Clinton. Then, last Saturday, Clinton appeared on SNL with Amy Poehler, who does a brilliant Clinton impression -- check the part in the video, above, where she talks about how she'll annoy special interest groups into bending to her will.

It's all been funny. But has it helped Clinton?

Did journalists get tougher on Obama after feeling shamed by the satire of them going easy on the Illinois Senator? Did Clinton's self-deprecating appearance help primary voters warm up to her?

Part of me wants to say that the fact this is even a story is further evidence we are watching the shallowest political coverage in history.

But the part of me that treasures satire loves the fact that people are paying attention to this. Good satire provokes thought and even affects change. So, if Will Forte's portrayal of John King asking Obama if he needs a pillow and Clinton demonstrating an ability to laugh at herself made some voters give her a second look, cool. That said, I sure hope the electorate isn't out there choosing candidates soley based on Saturday Night Live skits.

The bigger question may be for the FCC -- not that we really want to provoke the FCC to meddle in anything else -- and whether all these late night talk and sketch comedy show appearances by candidates  violate any fairness rules. You've gotta believe Obama would like to be on SNL again (alert reader Kevin Hall reminded me he appeared before the strike, in that great Halloween party skit) sometime between now and April 22. They might also rally for a better Obama impersonator than Fred Armisen.

Appreciation: William F. Buckley, 1925-2008

William F. Buckley and his wife, Patricia, at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball in 1966. Copyrighted AP photo by David Pickoff. Below, Buckley, photographed during a 2004 interview. AP Photo by Frank Franklin II.

William F. Buckley was a part of my parents' household as long as I can remember. I saw his name on the spines of books; the masthead of The National Review, which mom and dad subscribed to; and I saw him on Firing Line.

They always seemed to celebrate him as a man of accomplishment as much, if not more, than as the father of the modern conservative movement. There was someone to emulate there: Buckley was facile with words, knowledgeable about the arts (he aspired to be a harpsichord player, but never felt his public performances were good), and eager to pursue life. In an exchange of e-mails about Buckley's death Wednesday, my sister wrote, "I do remember people asking me where I, 'got my good vocabulary.' My response was that I didn't think I really had one. But my parents did have a subscription to National Review."

Of course, I grew up and moved away from home, both physically and ideologically. But Buckley remained. I certainly appreciated his writing about writing, and while the field of punditry filled with clowns on the right and the left, Buckley was almost unique in the manner he approached political discourse. I often disagreed with him, but enjoyed hearing what he thought and how he expressed those thoughts. On The Huffington Post, Bill Curry, a two-time Democratic candidate for governor of Connecticut, wrote:

"Buckley loved debate. Unlike today's cowardly conservatives, he debated the best minds he could entice on to a stage. He never used his opponents as props or punch lines for fixed fights. He liked them. Loving his own ideas, not just hating theirs, left room for liking them.

"What a long sad fall from Bill Buckley to Bill O' Reilly."

Or, this week, Bill Cunningham.

On MSNBC's The Morning Joe, today, former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan observed that when Buckley sat down to dinner, he didn't want to talk about politics. He enjoyed discussing music and literature and his many other interests.

The past couple of days, Charlie Rose and others have also talked about Buckley's generosity to young writers, several of whom ended up sitting on opposite ideological fences from him. Wall Street Journal theater scribe Terry Teachout posted a particularly lovely tribute on his About Last Night blog.

A couple of Buckley tomes are now on my must-read list, including his faith memoir, Nearer My God, from his catalog of more than 40 fiction and non-fiction books.

Rose, whose show was the top place I got to know Buckley as an adult, ran an hour-long retrospective on Buckley (video, below) the other night. In one of the clips, Rose asked Buckley if there was anyone with his same sort of position in political discourse today. He modestly said it would have to be a young person espousing something currently unpopular, as conservatism apparently was when Buckley began to champion it. But in the sound-bite era, the public stage is really absent any others as thoughtful about where they stand, eloquent in the way they express it, and well-rounded in their lives beyond he political arena.

Some of this reality TV is pretty good

With his touchdown pass to Plaxico Burress with 35 seconds left in Super Bowl XLII, Eli Manning created great drama sans writers. Copyrighted AP photo by David J. Phillip.

It had compelling characters: A man once the underdog, now the golden boy, versus a new underdog, carrying the weight of family pride. It had a grand goal: perfection, but also a compelling redemption tale. It had drama, a surprise twist at the end, and for once, we are talking about the Super Bowl.

The writers' strike looks like it may actually be coming to an end. But we have to say, the past few weeks, this real reality TV has been pretty darned good.

No, we are not talking Idol, Loser or
The Moment of Truth, which looks like it could be in the running for most morally reprehensible "reality" show of all time. Between some great sports and compelling presidential primaries, this has been a pretty good month for TV, even though many of the major series were on the shelf -- my lovely bride was thrilled to see a new House after the Super Bowl, though that continuous, "drill a hole in her skull," preview made me opt to pass.

But as a sports fan, if my favorite team isn't in the big game, I can still be lured by storylines, and there were a bunch here, like the New England Patriots pursuit of perfection -- culture vultures, did you love that Russell Crowe's pregame narration on perfection invoked great violinists as a comparison? -- the New York Giants return from the dead earlier in the season and Peyton Manning's little brother Eli stepping into the Championship spotlight. And then Eli delivered with his pass to Virginia Beach, Va.'s own Plaxico Burress to with the game in the last minute. Script that.

Earlier in the weekend, a CNN anchor identified herself as more of a commercials and half-time show person when it came to the Super Bowl, and that's often the most interesting thing about the game. But this year, the main event was the main event.

And the news has been pretty interesting too, with a tightening race for the Democratic nomination for
President and an increasingly colorful contest in the Republic party. The Super Bowl came just a few nights after some intriguing debates -- despite what the desperate-for-a-fight pundits tell you, the Democratic debate was quite interesting and substantive -- and two days before a cliffhanger of a Super Tuesday.

We kind of need today as a breather from all this unscripted drama.

Electoral lattes

Here in Kentucky, we are deprived of the opportunity to weigh in on the Presidential primaries until our votes will be a moot point. But you could always cast your vote in coffee at Third Street Stuff, or maybe just pick your favorite concoction.

Could my hardcore Republican sister actually like the Chillary Clinton? Would a left winger savor the Mint Romney? Quick, get Tim Russert on the horn.

Also on the menu are the:

~ John McCandycain

~ Mac Huckabee

~ Obama-nable Snowman

There was a Giuliani latte on the menu yesterday afternoon, but the consensus seemed to be it would be coming off. Third Street Stuff owner Pat Gerhard said the Presidential drinks seemed like a fun idea, but she and the staff had not been keeping track of which latte was leading.

Hmmmmm, a coffee caucus. Maybe this is a way for us to get in on Super Tuesday.

We need Jon Stewart

The Daily Show host Jon Stewart in a 2006 photo by Ken Fitzsimons, courtesy of Comedy Central.

More than Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, the return of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart seemed rife with peril. After all, the guy sits at a desk for half-an hour doing largely scripted material. Without his striking writers, and apparently being barred from writing himself, as he's a member of the Writers' Guild, what exactly would he do?

Stewart's first night back since the beginning of the strike, Jan. 7, was a little painful. The host fell into the trap of thinking everyone was as preoccupied with strike as he was, and he used a segment with Cornell University labor relations professor Ronald Seeber to vent his frustrations at not being able to strike a David Letterman-esque deal to get his writers back to work.

But better than anyone else in television, Stewart knows when he's bad, and judging by the opening of his second show, a lot of people also told him as much after that first show back.

The past two nights, he has been much more on his game, not only at being funny, but also at picking apart the news of the day.