Jonathan's blog

Lisa and I watched the first episode of T1/2HNH last night. I thought it was weak and lame, a pale imitation of TDS. I can't imagine it surviving unless they can find a way to actually make it funny. The weekend-update-style alternating short news items from the anchors was OK for one segment, but I winced when they returned to it again for the next segment. None of the other segments were too impressive either. The faux ACLU PSAs were OK as satire and commentary, but they weren't funny (I was left thinking, "Yes, sometimes while protecting everyone's rights we have to protect the rights of people with despicable views and actions"...ironic, but not exactly a barrel of laughs).. Also, as I've mentioned before, I can't stand laugh tracks. The running Ed Begley, Jr. gag was a dud too. Frankly, until I heard Begley's commitment to environmentalism mentioned twice in one weekend (on Real Time too), I had no idea about him. Maybe the problem is that comedy isn't Surnow's specialty and that the show really needs to be infused with someone else's comic vision. The connection to reality that TDS has through the in-studio guest (where Stewart is forced to initiate a reasonable discussion with the guest...even if the guest is O'Reilly or McCain or Buchanan) was conspicuously missing too. I was left with the feel that I had just watched a collection of political-sketch rejects from SNL or In Living Color rather than a spunky, funny, yet coherent fake news show. If these first two pilots aren't lame enough to kill it, maybe they'll give it an overall makeover and new comic vision when it becomes an actual series.

The two satellite radio companies want to merge. Sounds like a good idea to me as long as we get the best of both...NFL games on Sirius, XM/DirecTV integration, and my two favorite XM channels: Fred and Big Tracks.

From an article of the same title in today's Washington Post:

Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. More interestingly...Feldman also found that liars tend to be more popular than honest people. "It is not that lying makes you popular, but knowing when to say something and not be completely blunt is in fact a social skill," Feldman said. "We don't want to hear hurtful things, so a person who is totally honest may not be as popular as someone who lies. This is not to say lying is a good thing, but it is the way the social world operates."

Everyone would agree that telling a Nazi knocking at your door that you are not harboring Jews is a lie worth telling -- a heroic, necessary lie. What is harder to understand is that many people who lie for what we feel are contemptible reasons see themselves in the same heroic light.

"We want everyone to be honest, but it is not clear what to do when honesty bumps up against other values -- caring about another person, their feelings," said Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "People say they want to hear the truth, but that is in the abstract. Would you tell someone, 'Tell me all the things about me you don't like, all the things that annoy you'?"

It's supposed to be simple, right? Honesty is the best policy. It's wrong to lie. But then there's those little white lies and the classic Nazi knocking on the door dilemma. Honesty is sometimes called brutal for a reason. I don't know what I think about rationalization of dishonesty.

Today Greg Fielder discusses David Kuo's book Tempting Faith : An Inside Story of Political Seduction including a lengthy quote from the book evaluating the fruit of the political engagement of evangelical Christians. This line that Kuo quotes from a pastor jumped out at me:

What we've done is turn a mission field into a battlefield.

First they said they would bring courtesy to the capitol. Then they said they had be bullies for the first 100 hours (to get their agenda through and to give the Republicans a taste of what it feels like), but afterwards they would run things the right way (to hear some of this rationalizing, listen to Act Three of Episode 325 of This American Life). Now this: from an article in today's Washington Post by Lyndsey Layton titled "In Majority, Democrats Run Hill Much as GOP Did":

In May, months before her party won control of Congress and she became speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said "bills should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open, full and fair debate consisting of a full amendment process that grants the minority the right to offer its alternatives, including a substitute." After the election, Pelosi told the Associated Press: "The principle of civility and respect for minority participation in this House is something we promised the American people. It's the right thing to do." In the first weeks of the new Congress, however, Democrats bypassed the usual legislative committees, refused to allow any amendments and took their agenda straight to the floor for passage. They said they needed a clear path to pass a handful of popular measures that were the basis of their successful November campaign, including expanded money for stem cell research, an increase in the federal minimum wage and implementation of recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. Democrats said they would impose "regular order," the rules that permit the minority to participate more widely, in short order. But even after passing their domestic agenda, Democratic leaders have continued to marginalize Republicans, preventing them from having a voice in legislation such as a bill to withhold federal pensions from lawmakers convicted of ethics felonies and a $463 billion bill to fund the federal government for the rest of this fiscal year.

"It sounds like we're not doing what we said we would do -- I understand that," House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday. "Here, however, we believe we are very justified in one of the most important issues confronting the country, which clearly was a huge issue in the election and which got bottled up in the Senate." Republican leaders have been complaining daily about being pushed to the margins. "It's hypocritical because they campaigned on openness and bipartisanship," said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), adding that shutting out the minority hurts Congress. "It stifles debate and ideas and also manipulates the outcome."

Let me paraphrase: "It sounds like we're not doing what we said we would do...because we are not doing what we said we would do." Help me, Obi wan Obama, you're my only hope!