Category: Everything Else

So I missed the very first episode of “The Colbert Report” (it is still on the TiVo), but caught the next two. And so far I’ve enjoyed it. Last night, Scott & I watched the episode together and I laughed more. This is very unusual in our household. Generally I find stuff less funny that he does.

Ezra has a point, though:

It is much tougher to sustain. What’s great about Stewart is..well..Stewart. He seems like our voice in the media. A sane, intelligent, skeptical, well-meaning paladin for the people. We like to watch him because his interviews and humor bring us in on the jokes. Colbert, on the other hand, is the joke, trapped in a self-consciously disagreeable persona for the duration of his program.

And this is very much why I was worried for the show before it aired. But so far he has not laid it on as thickly as he did in his “Daily Show” segments. Color me pleased and hopeful.

Woe betide the high school radio station that has a broadcast frequency coveted by Christian broadcasters. The Boston Herald reports:

Maynard High School’s radio frequency, 91.7 FM, is being seized by a network of Christian broadcasting stations that the Federal Communications Commission has ruled is a better use of the public airwaves.

“People are furious,” said faculty adviser Joe Magno.

Maynard High’s WAVM, which has been broadcasting from the school for 35 years, found itself in this David vs. Goliath battle when it applied to increase its transmitter signal from 10 to 250 watts.

According to Magno, that “opens the floodgates for any other station to challenge the station’s license and take its frequency.”

Using a point scale that considers such factors as audience size, the FCC ruled the Christian broadcasting network the better applicant. WAVM is given 30 days to appeal, and has done so.

If the FCC refuses to overturn its decision, WAVM will fall silent.

You’d think providing an educational experience for high school kids would be considered valuable, but I suppose given the FCC we’ve got, that would be asking too much.

I’m sure the station management is justifying this by saying they’re afraid they will lose their license if they deny the Klan access to public TV, but this seems wrong:

“The Colbert Report” hits the airwaves soon.

Frankly, I tended to fast-forward through many of Colbert’s bits on “The Daily Show”. I get that what he’s doing is intended to be funny, but at least half the time it just made me feel impatient: ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re skewering self-important, ill-informed newscasters with big egos. Point made. Move on.’

That’s just me, though, and as my husband can tell you, I have a somewhat deficient sense of humor at times. I’ll TiVo the first week to see if he can extend the joke to a full half-hour (less commercials).

Here’s why this matters, even if I don’t find Colbert funny:

When Colbert talks about skewering hypocrites, he makes clear that, like Stewart, he cares about politics as more than a punch line. He recalls Vice President Cheney, in a CNBC interview last year, being asked about having said it was “pretty well confirmed” that terrorist Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi official in Prague — part of a White House attempt to demonstrate a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Cheney denied making the comment, but “The Daily Show” later aired a tape of a 2001 “Meet the Press” interview in which the vice president had said the Atta meeting was “pretty well confirmed.”

“When Dick Cheney says, ‘I never said that,’ and then we play the tape, why did we do it?” Colbert says. “Why wasn’t it done broadly? Because he wasn’t speaking about something inconsequential. It wasn’t like we were playing gotcha journalism over some quibble. It was over weapons of mass destruction. That’s not advocacy journalism. That’s objectivity in its most raw form.”

So why don’t more working journalists do what Stewart and Colbert are doing? Perhaps, Colbert says, “there’s a sense that if they engaged in what we do at ‘The Daily Show,’ they’d be accused of being too aggressive.”

As it happens, a member of my family has worked for the IAEA at 2 different times over the past 25 years, so I’m quite pleased to see this today:

The Nobel Committee praised the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and ElBaradei, a 63-year-old Egyptian, for their battle to stop states and terrorists acquiring the atom bomb, and to ensure safe civilian use of nuclear energy.

Bravo.

I can’t help wondering, though, what are they going to do with the $1.3 million dollar prize? That would buy one heck of a staff pizza party….

Four decades after a U.S. president declared war on poverty, more than 37 million people in the world’s richest country are officially classified as poor and their number has been on the rise for years.

Last year, according to government statistics, 1.1 million Americans fell below the poverty line. That equals the entire population of a major city like Dallas or Prague.

Since 2000, the ranks of the poor have increased year by year by almost 5.5 million in total.

Per Yahoo/Reuters.