1.  Les Crane.  Novemeber 1964 – February 1965.  ABC.  *
“The Bad Boy of Late Night Television“, Les Crane had a rollicking time in the wee hours of 1 am, where he would take in phone calls and berate the callers.  There is a shcok formula in his act, and plopped at 11:15 against Johnny Carson, ABC wanted it both ways with him: tone down his act as he did an ordinary talk show, and provide moments of controversy.  Perhaps he was not going to last and his “shock” would get old and wear out its welcome, and perhaps it’s a feeble effort to have a 1 am gig moved to 11.  The difference wasn’t adequately split.  He appears to have had a solid and good career — claims to have given us Top 40 Radio but there’s a long line for such claims, and more regretfully voiced a spoken voice one hit in the 1970s which was refashioned in 1999 and re-popularized into email spam fame mistakenly under Kurt Vonnegut’s name.  Anyways, his career highlights, commercially or artistically, apparently doesn’t include this 14 week effort at late night talk variety.

2.  Joey Bishop.  April 1967 – December 1969.  ABC.  **
I have no good feeler for the cultural context or reads on Joey Bishop.  He was Carson’s regular guest host, than he was his competitor for a few years.  The youtube clips available are heavy on one of lasting gifts to us all — Regis Philbin, his sidekick.  Jack Paar clearly favored him over Carson.  I guess he slumped back to Carson’s guest host role, did some game shows, hung out with the “Rat Pack”.  Somebody tell me what I’m looking at when I’m looking at Joey Bishop.

3.  Merv Griffin.  August 1969 – February 1972.  CBS. **
He had done his show in syndication and locally before CBS signed him up.  He did so again after CBS dropped him.  I gather stations slotted him in late night less often the second time through, and he found his rhthym in the morning.  Years later, Cosmo Kramer made use of his show’s trappings and kept the Merv Griffin Show alive.

4.  Dick Cavett.  December 1969 – December 1972.  ABC ***
I think he should have been allowed to roll through most of the decade of the 1970s with his talk show effort.  He developed a cultural cachet and relevance for the times quite apart from Carson, and the list of his notable shows on youtube is telling.  His big fault was that he made less money for ABC shareholders than Carson made for NBC shareholders.  But he’s one of the few on this list that you can sell on dvd.

5.  Alan Thicke.  1983 – 1984.  Syndication, Metromedia. *
Was there any point in launching with an ad campaign about taking on Johnny Carson?  Maybe Alan Thicke could have had something good working here, but his set up sounds rather counter-productive.  Apparently the show was filmed twice in week in sets of three, and then aired as late as ten days after filming.  Metromedia’s lunges at fourth television network sure were Mickey Mouse efforts.

6.  Joan Rivers.  Fox.  1986-1987.  **
I’ve already tapped this one, defended it feigntly.  Fox needed to make a splash to clear affiliates.  She did.  If her ratings weren’t all that good, it could be pointed out she was on a programming island on the best non-network television station in each market.  As for the show itself — a lot of show business glitz, I suppose.

7.  David Brenner.  1986 – 1987.  Syndicated.  *
The low point apparently came when his guests didn’t show up for a program, so he extended his monolouge for an entire program and post-hoc labeled it a Daring New Experiment in Television.  Brenner went on with a good relationship with Cason, who didn’t take his shot against him personally.

8.  Ross Shafer.  Fox.  1988. *
Slot him into this mix because he was settled on at the end of this run as host.  Falling low in the ratings, he filled his show out with gimmicks — all kind of interesting enough.  Though why would I want to watch a Reunion of the Gilligan’s Island cast when I could just go ahead and watch Gilligan’s Island?

9. Pat Sajak.  CBS.  * 1989-1990.
I both see what CBS thought it was doing, and appreciate the Mediocrity of the purpose.  Carson had been a game show host who could provide a breezy late night format.  Sajak?  He’s a game show host with some of the same skill!  Why, once Carson retires, he’ll be right there for people to turn over toward.  And so with his promise to “not looking to raise the level of TV”, he delivered the lack of interesting programming that he promised to deliver.

10.  Arsenio Hall.  Syndication.  1989 – 1994.  ***
Too obsequitious to his guests, too preening to female guests, and for the life of me I don’t remember any skit he did.  But for a moment he filled this vacuum, a vacuum excentered by his spot in syndication.  He moved into his host of Fox affiliates, buffered by a good selection of ABC and CBS.  The schedulinig advantage fell apart when the vacuum became glut — CBS signed Letterman, Fox screwed things up with Chevy Chase, but before then Hall threw out a lot of academic scholars, forcing his audience to think a tad.  He provided ample peiod pieces for VH1 reminisces: it is Milli Vanilli for the first time singing and not lip-syncing the song their name was attached to.  And Bill Clinton on the saxophone.

11.  Rick Dees.  1991.  ABC.  *
My brother used to tape various interviews with Star Trek actors, mixed in or at the end of his taped Star Trek collection.  So I have one image of Rick Dees interviewing — probably William Shatner, and doing a riff on how his show is “No Budget!”  (Similarly, a Jonathan Frazen appearance on Chevy Chase in recorded — where Commander Riker appears to be high, but I imagine all of Chase’s guests ended up that way.) I kind of don’t know what ABC thought they had with Rick Dees.  Maybe they threw him up with the “Just Because” school of thought — fill time.

12.  Dennis Miller.  Jan – July 1992.  syndication. *
Dennis Miller has certainly had a long and varied career.  He rejuveniated a Saturday Night Live staple — “Weekend Update” — with a large supply of obscure pop cultural references.  He took his supply of obscure pop cultural references to his dreamed about late night talk show (supposedly a more eclectic guest line up — at the time he sold that idea by offering up that he had as a guest the pre-veep selection Al Gore) — and since there is apparently only a limited audience for that, it took him onto cable.  Then Monday Night Football saw good use for his obscure pop cultural references and hired him for a year in service for football play.  Since about 9/11, he has used his supply of obscure pop cultural references in service to the Republican Party, which I guess badly needs them.

Well, this is an interesting turn of rhetoric.

It is all starting to make sense.  The Texas Board of Education placing Jefferson Davis’s inaugural speech alongside Lincoln’s — I suppose there’s some historical context to be gleaned from such a thing.  Our current frenzy of the Calhounist Nullification Movement.

The South Shall Rise Again!

It’s sort of about there that I understand Dennis Kucinich’s switch.  He’s up against this crap and would just as well prefer not to have these allies, the troubles this brings to the “Overton Window” and his desire to move it be damned.  I myself am slightly annoyed by Kucinich’s embrace of the act, as against opting to vote for it, I suppose for Overton Window reasons as well where my parcels of admiration to Kucinich springs from.  I’d like to hope he’s lost his Alex Jones base about here   — we’ll see.

I see this pop up about Lyndon Johnson.

he probably stole his own election to the Senate.

Well, Johnson’s defenders — I’m pretty sure this is what you’ll get if you bring up the 1948 Senate election at the Johnson Presidential Library for instance — have/had always maintained that his ultra-conservative strait-laced opponent Coke Stevenson had just as egregious a hand in voting improprieties.  This is not quite right — Johnson’s post-midnight manufactured votes stick out like a sore thumb.

More to the point, Johnson probably “legitimately” won the Senate seat in the Special election of 1941 against sentimental country and western singer and radio personality W Lee O’Daniel, as much as legitimacy can be ascertained in these elections.  Johnson failed to steal the last vote, and his backers in the Liquor Lobby double-crossed Johnson, opting to get the “Dry” O’Daniel out of the state and thus out of their hairs.

So, really, as you can see, four wrongs make a right or two.

“Anyone who endorses this strategy will be forever remembered for trying to claim they didn’t vote for something they did.  It will go down as one of the most extraordinary legislative sleights of hand in history.” — Mitch McConnell.

Such is the manner Mr. McConnell characterizes the “Self Exeuting Rule”, the rule in which the House is seeking to pass the Senate Health Care Plan — without passing such measures as, oh, the Big bad oh so evil package for Nebraska and Senator Ben Nelson.  A few steps down the process, the Senate will get to vote again — stripped of, for instance, the bad little Ben Nelson vote getter — for the vote count that had it been allowed would have kept our sanity in the first place.

51.  Or, actually 50 and faithful Joe Biden.

McConnell is not correct.  To be correct, his statement would have to be tied to these measures, such as Ben Nelson’s Nebraska pork item, becoming the law of the land.  Or, they’re voting for a “this bill but”.

I’m sure there is a hyperbolic way to characterize this process, but this isn’t yet it.

The parting shot lobbed toward Dennis Kucinich.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who flew with Obama, then walked into an Ohio senior citizen center with the chief executive in time to hear a voice from the audience yell out, “Vote yes.”

A smiling Obama turned to the liberal lawmaker and said, “Did you hear that, Dennis?” Then, turning back to the audience, he added, “Go ahead, say that again.”

“Vote yes!” came back the reply.

I think that was too subtle.  Obama should have marched out with the “Dennis Kucinich Arm Twisting Marching Band” — consisting of half a dozen drummers — and devoted copious amounts of speech time to “Vegan Congressmen”, “two time presidential candidates who seem inclined toward a third and fourth run” and “shorties”.  Also he might have phrased these with the word “some” as in “There are some Vegan Congressmen who would make the perfect the enemy of the good.”

To turn my attention to other opponents of the Health care push by Obama… there are certainly some weird people out there.

why, hell, sooner or later you dumb bastards will be expecting to actually have the right to vote for them to put them in congress, instead of just leaving it up to the greater wisdom of bill gates, george soros, bill ayers or bill maher.  or, that they explain themselves to you.  hell, who can be bothered with all that?

they do not publish e-mail.  they have web-sites that accept email from their districts only.  far be it for the lazy fucks to actually have to read what their “constituents” say.

i doubt these will be read by my illustrious representatives, but i have sent the following missives anyway, which i thought i would publish here, in case any of them are washington rebel readers.

friends, buy guns and buy ammo, and lay in a proper store of potables, canned veggies, canned meats, and other fat laden edibles.  and, i would also suggest all the rice, flour, pastas and canned butter substitutes you can lay your hands on: butter flavored crisco will do.  buy gallons and gallons of olive & soy oil, and more peanut butter than you could ever conceive of eating, in two lifetimes.  and, do not forget dehydrated potatoes, … , mashed, au gratin or scalloped.  ummers.

it is going to come to that. […]

dear speaker pelosi:
if the house of representative “passes” health care “reform” on the “slaughter solution,” please be advised that such will be in derogation of your obligations as a member of congress to entered a recorded vote on the merits of such a “bill.”
i believe the process patently unconstitutional.
i also believe it to be a usurpation of dictatorial power by the democratic party.
it will not stand.  and, you incite civil war.

dear representative inslee:
jay, i practiced law w/ you in yakima county, before you sought more hospitable climes for your politics on the wet side.
you court civil war with this “slaughter solution” maneuver.  it is unwise in the extreme.

Well, I guess he’s the one who will be voting that-away.  And… stock-piling his ammo and seeds for the coming Civil War incited by Jay Inslee and Nancy Pelosi, but not stopped by Doc Hastings.

What would the American equivalent to this story be?

A fake news report in Georgia about a Russian invasion ignited widespread panic and now anger at the perpetrators.

The 20-minute broadcast Saturday night on the Imedi TV station showed footage of tanks rolling into Georgia taken from the 2008 invasion and said that Saakashvili had been assassinated. The station introduced the program as a simulation, but many who tuned in mid-way were convinced the news was real.

The Georgian opposition, depicted in the broadcast as assisting the fake Russian invasion, accused President Mikhael Saakashvili of signing off on the program in a bid to stoke fear and tarnish their image. The director of Imedi is a former Saakashvili government official. US and Russian officials have denounced the bogus report (see video clips from the report below)

“People went into a panic,” Bidzina Baratashvili, a former director of Imedi, told The New York Times, comparing the mock news broadcast to Orson Welles’s 1939 adaptation of “War of the Worlds,” which depicted an alien invasion and panicked many radio listeners.

People in villages bordering South Ossetia, which was invaded in the brief Russo-Georgian war two years ago, began evacuati and calls to emergency services skyrocketed, reports The Georgian Times. According to other reports, people placed emergency calls reporting heart attacks and rushed in a panic to buy bread.

I suppose the best idea might be if a broadcast had happened during the Cold War, during Walter Cronkite’s CBS News, of the Soviets sending a nuclear device into a city in the United States — say, a news-style focus of this “Day Called X“.  That would certainly have scared the multitudes.

A better grasp would align it to a partisan broadcast.  This is being characterized by the Georgian opposition as a political scare tactic by the Georgian government in the days leading to election.  So, I guess, in today’s terms…

… around about October 30, Fox News broadcasts a “simulation” news-cast that the California Appellate Court has mandated marriage licenses be allowed for Human — Horse partnerships.  Round table discussions on the implications of this ruling following — and oh boy is Sean Hannity mad.  Bill O’Donohue expresses his outrage, but alas this was the inevitable slippery slope.

Okay.  Presented is the first whole bundle of digits to pi.  What… is… the next digit?

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028
84197169399375105820974944592307816
40628620899862803482534211706798214
80865132823066470938446095505822317
25359408128481117450284102701938521
10555964462294895493038196442881097
56659334461284756482337867831652712
01909145648566923460348610454326648
21339360726024914127372458700660631
55881748815209209628292540917153643
67892590360011330530548820466521384
14695194151160943305727036575959195
30921861173819326117931051185480744
62379962749567351885752724891227938
18301194912983367336244065664308602
13949463952247371907021798609437027
70539217176293176752384674818467669
40513200056812714526356082778577134
27577896091736371787214684409012249
53430146549585371050792279689258923
54201995611212902196086403441815981
36297747713099605187072113499999983
72978049951059731732816096318595024
45945534690830264252230825334468503
52619311881710100031378387528865875
33208381420617177669147303598253490
42875546873115956286388235378759375
19577818577805321712268066130019278
76611195909216420198938095257201065
48586327886593615338182796823030195
20353018529689957736225994138912497
21775283479131515574857242454150695
95082953311686172785588907509838175

Okay.  I’ll make it a multiple choice problem.  The answer is either: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, or 9.

Texas Department of Education drops Thomas Jefferson from their (nationally influential) curriculum.

Widely regarded as one of the most important of all the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson received a demotion of sorts Friday thanks to the Texas Board of Education.

According to Texas Freedom Network, a group that opposes many of the changes put in place by the Board of Education, the original curriculum asked students to “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.”

That emphasis did not sit well with board member Cynthia Dunbar, who, during Friday’s meeting, explained the rationale for changing it. “The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Dunbar said.  (Heh heh heh heh.)

The new standard, passed at the meeting in a 10-5 vote, now reads, “Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.”

By dropping mention of revolution, and substituting figures such as Aquinas and Calvin for Jefferson, Texas Freedom Network argues, the board had chosen to embrace religious teachings over those of Jefferson, the man who coined the phrase “separation between church and state.”

According to USA Today, the board also voted to strike the word “democratic” from references to the U.S. form of government, replacing it with the term “constitutional republic.” Texas textbooks will contain references to “laws of nature and nature’s God” in passages that discuss major political ideas.

It is a long time in coming, but really this partisan battle has been raging.  The Federalist Party, assumed to have folded its tents in their embrace of James Monroe and the “Era of Good Feeling” after disgracing themselves at the ill-fated Hartford Convention, have re-emerged and taken their first scalp — the long time nemesis, Thomas Jefferson.