The Hillster's Chickens Come Home To Roost

Between 1992-1997, Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick co-anchored "Sports Center" on ESPN. Olbermann left ESPN (followed by Patrick some years later) and ultimately turned up as "the talent" (as they say in TV-land) on "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" on weeknights on MSNBC. As his former partner, Dan Patrick, describes it, Olbermann "saves democracy" with his commentary. In the recent aftermath of The Hillster's gaffe about the 1968 RFK assassination (during a Democrat primary campaign, hint hint), The Keithster took off the gloves and administered the verbal equivalent of corporal punishment to The Hillster. If this is (fair & balanced) excoriation, so be it.

[x MSNBC]
Countdown With Keith Olbermann, May 23, 2008
"Senator Clinton, You Invoked A Nightmare"

[Keith Olbermann currently hosts "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" on MSNBC, an hour-long nightly newscast that reviews the top news stories of the day along with political commentary by Olbermann. A native New Yorker, Olbermann received a bachelor of science degree in communications arts from Cornell University in 1979.]

Copyright © 2008 Microsoft

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A Frank Rich Bitch Finds A Niche

The Richster cannot comment on HBO offerings? "Big Love" begins shooting for its third season on HBO at a time when life imitates art. The State of Texas has managed to create its own polygynist melodrama with its knee-jerk raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Deep West Texas. Here is a case where The Richster will be standing at the intersection of Culture & News and he can't even shout: "Read All About It." When it comes to HBO's "Big Love," The Richster will be struck dumb? It's hard to believe that the "Butcher of Broadway" would ever go into the tank for HBO. Let The Richster write whatever and wherever he will. He can file a 'full disclosure" statement before he sticks it to HBO — or any other media corporation, like The New York Times Company. Unmuzzle The Richster! If this is (fair & balanced) muckraking, so be it.

[x Slate]
My Frank Rich Bitch: Will The Times' Ethics Cops Please Leave Him Be?
By Jack Shafer

The only phrase that inflicts more trauma upon my press critic ears than "conflict of interest" is "potential conflict of interest."

Not everybody reacts the way I do. There's an entire subcaucus of ethicists who prowl the news pages and the airwaves searching to expose journalists who have competing professional or personal interests. While it might be the right thing for writer John Doe to forever recuse himself from writing about Acme Industries because he worked for the firm X years ago, or because his brother works for one of its co-ventures now, or because his son just won an Acme Industries scholarship, or because he owns a few shares in Acme Industries, I tend not to mind as long as Doe discloses his gnarliest entanglements. I care more about assessing what Doe actually writes than unraveling every snag, loop, and knot from his life in search of a gotcha.

Which brings us to New York Times columnist Frank Rich. The Times and HBO announced this week that HBO has hired Rich as a "creative consultant" but that he will continue as a Times columnist. According to the Reuters story, "Rich will contribute to the network's original programming development, and could become a producer on any projects he helps shepherd."

The Times reports that it will prohibit Rich "from writing in his column … about either HBO or its parent company, Time Warner," but not from discussing Time Warner properties, Time magazine or CNN, nor its "primary competitor, Fox News Channel." As Rich and his boss, Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, explained it to Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña, "for a political column, such material remains fair game."

In other words, Rich will continue to write the "Week in Review" opinion column about the "intersection of culture and news" that he's contributed to since April 2005. The only change will be no mentions of HBO and Time Warner the corporation.

Is such censorship necessary? Advisable? And will Rich be able to pull it off?

First, the censorship question. Is the man who contains more opinions than the Gallup Poll so inherently corruptible that his editors must strike the letters HBO from his vocabulary? Do we really think that the former "Butcher of Broadway" would play the ringer for the channel or the corporation that owns it? I could be persuaded that Rich needed gagging if he wrote news stories, but he's an opinion columnist! Opinions are subjective! Their origins and justifications are messy! As long as a disclaimer accompanies any mention of HBO or Time Warner in Rich's copy and a similar disclaimer rests at the bottom of his pieces, why not let him sound off about them? If he hits his head and turns into a shill for his new corporate masters, a Times editor can kill those pieces or fire him.

Is the ban advisable? For the embargo to be meaningful, it would have to extend to any mention of HBO shows. In recent years, the channel has produced a lineup of undeniably great programs that have woven themselves into our culture, including "The Sopranos, "The Wire, "Sex and the City, "Big Love, "Curb Your Enthusiasm, "Deadwood, "Da Ali G Show, "Carnivale, "OZ, "Six Feet Under, and "Lucky Louie" (just kidding). And that's not even mentioning its documentaries. If Rich's column is really supposed to be about the "intersection of culture and news," denying him references to the HBO canon would be like forcing him to write with only his pinky fingers. He'd still get his columns out, but would they be any good?

The more you think about it, blotting HBO and Time Warner out of Rich's column would probably prove impossible. HBO isn't just a cable channel that broadcasts lots of great TV series and Hollywood movies before they're shipped via DVD, it's a producer of theatrical films, it's a sports channel, and in the past it has partnered with other film companies to distribute feature films. Does the Times really want to block Rich from writing about any Hollywood production that may have brushed against HBO while in development? Also, a recurring topic in Rich's columns over the past decade has been media conglomerates (he's sorta against them). If he's forbidden to write about Time Warner—one of the largest media conglomerates—will it be possible for him to revisit media conglomeration?

Serve me my Frank Rich uncut, or not at all.

[Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large. Before joining Slate, he was editor for two city weeklies, Washington City Paper and SF Weekly. Much of Shafer's writing focuses on what he sees as a lack of precision and rigor in reporting by the mainstream media. One frequent topic is media coverage of the War on Drugs, which according to Shafer is often unfair and alarmist.]

Copyright © 2008 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

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The Butcher On Broadway?

As the drama critic for the NY Fishwrap, The Butcher (On Broadway) was infamous for his reviews of Broadway shows. Today — standing at the intersection of Culture & News — a kinder, gentler drama critic (except when it comes to mention of The Dubster) emerges with his review of the Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "South Pacific." However, today's Butcher goes beyond theater criticism to offer a meditation on the meaning of "South Pacific" on Memorial Day 2008 — more than a half-century after the show opened. If this is a (fair & balanced) plea for the United States to take its place in a multicultural world, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Memorial Day at "South Pacific"
By Frank Rich

New York is a ghost town on Memorial Day weekend. But two distinct groups are hanging tight: sailors delighting in the timeless shore-leave rituals of Fleet Week, and theatergoers clutching nearly impossible-to-get tickets for “South Pacific.”

Some of those sailors served in a war that has now lasted longer than American involvement in World War II but is largely out of sight and mind as civilians panic about gas prices at home. “South Pacific” has its sailors too: this 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical tells of those who served in what we now call “the good war.”

The Lincoln Center revival of this old chestnut is surely the most unexpected cultural sensation the city has experienced in a while. In 2008, when 80-plus percent of Americans believe their country is in a ditch, there wouldn’t seem to be a big market for a show whose heroine, the Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, is a self-described “cockeyed optimist” who sings of being “as corny as Kansas in August.”

Yet last week one man stood outside the theater with a stack of $100 bills offering $1,000 for a $120 ticket. Inside, audiences start to tear up as soon as they hear the overture, even before they meet the men and women stationed in the remote islands of the New Hebrides. Among those who’ve been enraptured by this “South Pacific” the most common refrain is, “I couldn’t stop myself — I was sobbing.”

This would include me, and I have been trying to figure out why ever since I first saw this production in March. It certainly wasn’t nostalgia. I was born two months before the show’s Broadway premiere in April 1949 and had never before seen “South Pacific” on stage. It was mainly a musty parental inheritance from my boomer childhood. My father had served in the Pacific theater for 26 months, and my mother replayed the hit show tunes incessantly on 78s as our new postwar family settled into the suburbs.

Like countless others, I did see Hollywood’s glossy 1958 film version. As the British World War II historian Max Hastings writes in Retribution, his unsparing new book about the war’s grisly endgame in the Pacific, “Many of us gained our first, wonderfully romantic notion of the war against Japan by watching the movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘South Pacific.’ ” But the movie of “South Pacific,” a candy-colored idyll dominated by wide-screen tourist vistas, is not the show. Its lush extravagance evokes the 1950s boom more than war.

In the 1960s, after the movie had come and gone, Vietnam pushed “South Pacific” into a cultural black hole. No one wanted to see a musical about war unless it was “Hair.” Unlike its Rodgers and Hammerstein siblings “Oklahoma!” and “The Sound of Music,” it never received a full Broadway revival.

Today everyone thinks they’ve seen the genuine “South Pacific” only because its songs reside in the collective American unconscious. “Some Enchanted Evening.” “Younger Than Springtime.” “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame.” But few Americans born after V-J Day did see the real thing, which is one reason why audiences are ambushed by the revival. They expect corn, but in a year when war and race are at center stage in the national conversation, this relic turns out to have a great deal to say.

Though it contains a romance, “South Pacific” is not at all romantic about war. The troops are variously bored, randy, juvenile and conniving. They are not prone to jingoistic posturing. When American officers try to recruit Emile de Becque, a worldly French expatriate, in a dangerous reconnaissance operation, they tell him he must do so because “we’re against the Japs.” De Becque, who is the show’s hero, snaps at them: “I know what you’re against. What are you for?” No one bothers to answer his question. The men have been given a job to do, and they do it.

“South Pacific” isn’t pro-war or antiwar. But it makes you think about the costs. When, after months of often slovenly idling, the troops ship out for the action they’ve been craving, the azure tropical sky darkens to a gunpowder gray. Their likely mission is to storm the beach at Tarawa, where in November 1943 more than 1,000 Americans and 4,600 Japanese would die in less than 76 hours in one of the war’s deadliest battles.

This is a more fatalistic World War II than some we’ve seen lately. When America was sleepwalking on the eve of 9/11, the good war was repositioned as an uplifting brand. Nostalgia kicked in. Perhaps we wanted to glom onto an earlier America’s noble mission because we, unlike “the greatest generation,” had none of our own. The real “South Pacific” returns us to the war as its contemporaries saw it, when the wounds were too raw to be healed by sentiment.

That reflects the show’s provenance. It was hot off the press: a nearly instantaneous adaptation of Tales of the South Pacific, the 1947 novel in which the previously unknown James A. Michener set down his own wartime experiences in the Pacific.

Many theatergoers who saw “South Pacific” in 1949 had sons and brothers who had not returned home. Just 10 days after it opened at the Majestic Theater on 44th Street, The New York Times carried a small story datelined Honolulu. A ship had arrived there bearing “the bodies of 120 American war dead,” the remains of men missing in action since 1943. “Thus ended the last general search for the men who fell in the South Pacific war,” the article said.

Watching “South Pacific” now, we’re forced to contemplate Iraq, which we’re otherwise pretty skilled at avoiding. Most of us don’t have family over there. Most of us long ago decided the war was a mistake and tuned out. Most of us have stopped listening to the president who ginned it up. This month, in case you missed it, he told an interviewer that he had made the ultimate sacrifice of giving up golf for the war’s duration because “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf.”

“South Pacific” reminds us that those whose memory we honor tomorrow — including those who served in Vietnam — are always at the mercy of the leaders who send them into battle. It increases our admiration for the selflessness of Americans fighting in Iraq. They, unlike their counterparts in World War II, do their duty despite answering to a commander in chief who has been both reckless and narcissistic. You can’t watch “South Pacific” without meditating on their sacrifices for this blunderer, whose wife last year claimed that “no one suffers more” over Iraq than she and her husband do.

The show’s racial conflicts are also startlingly alive. Nellie Forbush, far from her hometown of Little Rock, recoils from de Becque when she learns that he fathered two children by a Polynesian woman. In the original script, Nellie denigrates de Becque’s late wife as “colored.” (Michener gave Nellie a more incendiary word in his book.) “Colored” was cut in rehearsals then but has been restored now, and it lands like a brick in the theater. It’s not only upsetting in itself. It’s upsetting because Nellie isn’t some cracker stereotype — she’s lovable (especially as embodied by the actress Kelli O’Hara). But how can we love a racist? And how can she not love Emile’s young mixed-race children?

Michener would work out this story in his own life. In 1949, he moved to Hawaii, where he would eventually make a third, long-lived marriage with a Japanese-American who had been held in an internment camp during the war. “South Pacific” works through this American dilemma for the audience, too. Years before Little Rock’s 1957 racial explosion, Nellie moves beyond her prejudices, propelled by life and love and the circumstances of war. She charts a path that much of America, North and South, would haltingly begin to follow. (In the script, we also hear of racism in Philadelphia’s Main Line.) “South Pacific” opened as President Truman was implementing the desegregation of America’s armed forces — against the backdrop of Ku Klux Klan beatings of black veterans.

Then and now, the show concludes with the most classic of American tableaus: Emile, Nellie and the two kids sitting down to a family meal. It’s hard for us to imagine how this coda must have struck audiences in 1949, when interracial marriage was still illegal in many states (as it would be in 16 until 1967). But nearly 60 years later, this multiracial family portrait has another context. The audiences watching “South Pacific” in this intense election year are being asked daily to take stock of just how far along we are on Nellie’s path and how much further we still have to go.

And so as we watch that family gather at the end of “South Pacific,” both their future and their country’s destiny yet to be written, we weep for the same reason we often do when we experience a catharsis at the theater. We grieve deeply for our losses and our failings, even as we feel an undertow of cockeyed optimism about the possibilities of healing and redemption that may yet lie ahead. Ω

[Frank Rich is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times who writes a weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news. Rich has been at the paper since 1980. His columns and articles for the Week in Review, the Arts & Leisure section and the Magazine draw from his background as a theater critic (known as "The Butcher On Broadway") and observer of art, entertainment and politics. Before joining The Times, Rich was a film critic at Time magazine, the New York Post, and New Times magazine. He was a founding editor of the Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s. Rich is the author of a childhood memoir, Ghost Light (2000), a collection of drama reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993 (1998), and The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson (with Lisa Aronson, 1987). Rich is a graduate of the Washington, DC public schools. He earned a BA degree in American History and Literature from Harvard College in 1971.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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In Memorium: Matthew T. Morris (1984-2008)

No snark, no smartass. Tomorrow is the day to remember Matthew T. Morris and all of the young people like him. Hooah! If this is (fair & balanced) respect, so be it.

[x Austin American-Statesman]
Photo By Larry Kolvoord



Pallbearers carry Spc. Matthew T. Morris' casket. He died in Iraq and was buried in Central Texas State Veterans Cemetery in Killeen, TX.

[x Austin American-Statesman]
Spc. Matthew T. Morris Was Killed April 6 In Iraq
By Sue Banerjee

Relatives said he was supposed to propose to his high school sweetheart this week in mid-April.



Instead, Army Spc. Matthew T. Morris, 23, who died in Iraq on April 6, was brought home to Central Texas on Monday morning in a flag-draped casket.

"I always remembered how he would be looking at me across a crowded room and wink and blow a kiss to me," said Julia Richardson, his girlfriend of three years whom he met at Cedar Park High School.

Morris was assigned to the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, at Fort Hood. He died when an explosive detonated near his vehicle in Balad, Iraq.

Morris' body arrived at the National Guard facility at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport on Monday and was placed in a hearse headed for the Beck Funeral Home in Cedar Park. The procession included family members; 75 to 100 members of the Patriot Guard, a group of motorcyclists who ride to honor slain soldiers; and members of the Austin police and Travis County sheriff's departments.

Family members said the motorcyclists were an appropriate farewell for Morris who had a passion for his own bike.

"He loved to ride it, and the louder the better," said his mother, Lisa Morris of Cedar Park.

Before enlisting in the Army in 2005, Morris attended the Fishburne Military School in Waynesboro, Va., for more than a year. There, he met a history teacher who inspired him to want to become an educator.

"After his service, he wanted to go back to school and get a four-year degree to become a teacher," his mother said. "He wanted to make a difference and give back to the community."

His friends remembered him as someone who loved to play video games, barbecue and go for trips on the lake.

"He would always be there for somebody and was always the highlight of a night," said Robert Dolcelli, his best friend of eight years.

Morris' father was also an Army man. Glenn Morris was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Morris said his son believed that serving in the military would make his parents proud.

"He was a very creative kid, and when he wasn't in a challenging environment, he tried to make life interesting," Glenn Morris said. "He excelled in a military school structure and in a team environment."

Morris joined the military as a power-generation equipment repairer and was deployed to Iraq in November. He became a driver for a team that trained Iraqi soldiers.

"He was embedded with the Iraqi army," his father said.

His mother said Morris enjoyed his duties and respected his service to the country.

"He was so proud to wear his uniform that he walked taller in it, and you could see the pride he had in his service even when he was in a T-shirt and shorts."

Copyright © 2008 Austin American-Statesman

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'Sup, Blog?

Forget the Old School Swift Boat Veterans. Say hello to "Minnesota Democrats Exposed" as the blogosphere will likely be the political battleground in Campaign '08. The Hopester had better get ready because the Righty attack dogs are going on the Internet.

Copyright © 1993 Peter Steiner and The New Yorker

Actually, the 2008-caption should read, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're an attack dog." If this is (fair & balanced) techno-terrorism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Senate Race in Minnesota Shows Power of Bloggers

By Monica Davey

On a laptop at a kitchen table in a Twin Cities suburb, headlines ripping into Al Franken, the satirist whose campaign for the United States Senate is seen as one of the most competitive in the nation, are written up day after day for Minnesota Democrats Exposed, a political blog created by a former Republican Party researcher.

The Future? Blogger Brodkorb, slaving over a hot keyboard.

Michael B. Brodkorb, the blog’s creator, has worked on the campaigns of some of this state’s top Republicans. Mr. Brodkorb’s critics say the Web site’s claims, screamed in red uppercase letters, are often breathless, far-fetched and painfully partisan.

But Minnesota Democrats Exposed has dealt several blows to Mr. Franken’s campaign lately: revelations that he owed $25,000 to the State of New York for failing to pay workers’ compensation insurance and that his corporation was in forfeiture in California.

With only weeks until the state Democratic Party’s convention, where Mr. Franken is expected to win the party’s endorsement to run against Senator Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, people here disagree about how much these financial questions will matter to voters in the fall.

What Mr. Franken’s circumstance has proven, though, is that no Minnesota candidate this fall can afford to ignore Mr. Brodkorb, or the rest of the state’s universe of Web sites devoted to local politics. Experts here say the abundance of these blogs is a mirror onto this state, its partisan split in recent years and its long tradition of intense political activism (by some measures, voter turnout here was the highest in the nation in 2006). That said, they are anything but Minnesota Nice.

Eric Pusey’s liberal-leaning mnblue, for instance, tracks Mr. Coleman’s moves on a “Weasel Meter.” Some blog live from the smallest of political meetings and the forgotten campaign stops. Enough of these writers have cropped up here now to make a Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, better known here as the Mob.

“We’ve kind of got a center of gravity going on up here,” said Mitch Berg, part of a group that started a True North Web site in 2007.

The Franken campaign has played down the significance of the revelations first raised on Mr. Brodkorb’s site, but there are signs the tax problems may be trouble for Mr. Franken, a former comedian who has worked hard to show voters that his campaign is serious. A recent poll of voters by The Minneapolis Star Tribune that showed Mr. Coleman leading Mr. Franken (though within the margin of error) also found that 42 percent of those polled were not satisfied with Mr. Franken’s explanations of his tax problems; 28 percent said the problems made them less likely to vote for him.

“This looks like random incompetence mostly,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “But Franken has taken a pounding, getting tattooed by story after story, which is preventing him from making this a referendum on the incumbent.”

In March, Mr. Brodkorb reported that Mr. Franken’s corporation, Alan Franken Inc., owed a penalty of $25,000 to the state compensation board in New York for failing to carry workers’ compensation insurance from 2002 to 2005. State officials said they sent Mr. Franken 12 letters on the matter, but received no answer.

Mr. Franken, who has since paid the debt, declined an interview on the issue. Andy Barr, a spokesman for the campaign, said Mr. Franken had not known of the oversight by the corporation (which consisted of Mr. Franken, his wife, Franni, and an assistant or two), and received none of the letters. The state’s letters were sent to the Frankens’ New York apartment, officials there say; the couple moved to Minnesota at the end of 2005, though the family still owns the apartment.

In April, Mr. Brodkorb wrote that Mr. Franken’s company was in forfeiture in California. Other reporters found the reason: California authorities said Mr. Franken’s company had failed to pay franchise tax fees from 2003 to 2006, and owed nearly $5,000, which Mr. Franken has since paid. Mr. Franken’s company paid no franchise taxes to the state in those years, Mr. Barr said, because Mr. Franken believed his accounting firm had shut down the corporation after 2002.

The reports led Mr. Franken to hire a new team of financial advisers to review his finances. Late last month, Mr. Franken announced the findings: although he had paid state income tax on his earnings, his accountant had, in some cases, paid it to the wrong states. Like professional athletes, entertainers are, in some instances, required to pay taxes to states where they earn money. He had paid more than $917,000 in state taxes to New York and Minnesota from 2003 to 2006, but should have sent parts of that sum (the total would actually have been about $4,000 higher) to 17 other states where he performed. Mr. Franken’s supporters, and several Democratic-leaning blogs, have dismissed the problems as meaningless, an accountant’s bureaucratic errors.

“We’re in two wars and a recession,” Mr. Barr said. “This is not the time to try to have an election about something else.”

Still, the campaign was clearly worried: it created an emergency phone bank one evening to call the more than 2,500 Democratic convention delegates and alternates and deliver the news before it came out the next day in the newspapers.

Many state Democrats (here, the party is known as the D.F.L., for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) dismiss Mr. Brodkorb as a mouthpiece for accusations the Republicans dig up and want to present in a way more likely to catch on than a news release. Indeed, Mr. Brodkorb, 34, once worked on the campaigns of Republican leaders including Mr. Coleman, and last year managed, without pay, the campaign of Ron Carey to be re-elected the state’s Republican chairman.

Mr. Brodkorb began his blog anonymously in 2004 when he was still working for the state party, then identified himself in 2006. “Look,” he said in an interview in his kitchen, “while my perspective is through partisan blinders, I think it passes the smell test every day.”

But Mr. Brodkorb insists that he gets tips from Democrats, too, and is not paid by the state party or any candidate. Tom Erickson, a spokesman for Mr. Coleman’s campaign, said it had not provided leads connected to Mr. Franken’s tax woes, adding, “Michael has an extensive network of sources.”

Republicans have seized on the slow trickle of developments, questioning Mr. Franken’s explanations and suggesting that more issues might emerge.

“There are so many unanswered questions,” said Mr. Carey, the state Republican chairman. “What resonates with people is, ‘I pay my taxes. Why shouldn’t he pay his?’ And it’s one of those things we’re probably at the opening chapters of the book in this story.”

Then again, already, there were other stories bubbling forth.

D.F.L.-leaning sites like MNPublius, the creation of Matt Martin, 23, had turned to claims that Mr. Coleman might face his own financial embarrassment: Mr. Coleman this month declined a D.F.L. demand that he return campaign donations from workers at a firm that once lobbied on behalf of a faction of Myanmar’s military government. Other sites raised questions about the state Republican Party’s own financial reporting issues; state party officials acknowledge they are reviewing Federal Election Commission filings since 2002, but argue that their sort of errors have been common among state party organizations.

[Monica Davey is the NYT's Chicago bureau chief.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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