"John Oliver gets his own show — on HBO."

"HBO President Michael Lombardo said that the network wasn’t 'searching for another weekly talk show'..."

Oh, no? Because Bill Maher has been just awful.

"...  but aimed to snag Oliver after seeing him fill in as a guest host for Jon Stewart on 'The Daily Show' over the summer while Stewart directed a film."

True! Oliver deserves it, and I look forward to watching. 

Nice interview with Charles Krauthammer on "The Daily Show."

Video here. Krauthammer was good at connecting with the liberal Jon Stewart, in part because — as he says in the interview — he was once a liberal himself and in part because he had some ready and charming parries in the form of — this quote is from memory — "That's an excellent argument. Unfortunately, it's wrong...."

He was pushing his new book, "Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics," which comes out on October 30th.

"Breaking Bad – Lingering Questions."

I'm linking to this because after writing that last post, I want to follow Boring as Heck. There, I added it to my blogroll. I don't know if I've ever done that based on reading only one post, but I can't read this "Breaking Bad" post. Not just yet. After bitching about and resisting nudging to watch the show, especially in the week leading up to the finale, I started watching one episode at a time.

I'd captured the first 20 or so episodes when AMC was running the whole series, in order, and I have a slight tendency to sit down at a certain point in the evening with the feeling that it's time to consume about an hour of television. I used to watch "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," but the political topics of the day — insurance and budgets — have a dreariness that is not puffed into an amusing form by derision and head-slapping. I know comedy should hurt. I like edge.

But it's such a dull edge, and perhaps some fictional explosions and existential ennui would better enliven my hour in the comfy chair. So I've been dipping into the accumulated episodes of "Breaking Bad." I've gotten far enough that I wish I hadn't switched off its recording after 22. There's not endless space in that DVR box, and we had about 100 post-season baseball games to keep track of before the World Series even begins, and then there are all those football games. Meade would watch these things live, and I wouldn't watch them at all, but put us together and the DVR is needed to control the flow of commercials, which I can't face with passivity. Some of them — I'm talking to you, "Jeremy" — bother me even in fast-forward.

So, with the nudging to watch it gone, I'm quietly, slowly consuming "Breaking Bad." I'll eventually reach then end, where "Lingering Questions" will be relevant to my slowly-catching-up experience. But I wanted to pin down that Boring as Heck post and thought it might matter to those of you who are beyond spoiler alerts.

Has John Oliver been better than Jon Stewart...

... on "The Daily Show"?

("Daily Show" haters need not respond. )

"It's like watching someone have sex with your wife's desk."

Said Jon Stewart about watching John Oliver guest-host on "The Daily Show."

"Good News! You're Not Paranoid."

"The Daily Show" does a great job with the NSA story here, with John Oliver doing his first day substituting for Jon Stewart.

"I believe we may have reached 'peak bullshit.' And that increasingly, those who push back against the noise and nonsense..."

"... those who refuse to accept the untruths of politics and commerce and entertainment and government will be rewarded. That we are at the beginning of something important."

We see it across our culture, with not only popularity but hunger for the intellectual honesty of Jon Stewart or the raw sincerity of performers like Louis CK and Lena Dunham....

I believe Barack Obama represents this movement, that the rise of his candidacy was in part a consequence of the desire for greater authenticity in our public life.....

Shouldn't there be a special prosecutor in the IRS case?

Obama rejected the idea at his news conference today, saying "Between those investigations [by Congress and the Justice Department] I think we’re going to be able to figure out exactly what happened, who was involved, what went wrong, and we’re going to be able to implement steps to fix it."

He also said: "I promise you this, that the minute I found out about it, then my main focus was making sure that we get the thing fixed... I'm outraged by this in part because look, I'm a public figure, if a future administration is starting to use the tax laws to favor one party over another or one political view over another, obviously, we’re all vulnerable."

I still want a special prosecutor because I just don't trust them not to cover up. The minute I found out about it, then my main focus was making sure that we get the thing fixed. I don't think people believe that. I don't believe it. And when was "the minute [he] found out about it"? He keeps making statements about finding out things around about whenever we do... which is absurdly self-serving, as if the only problems are public relations problems. Apparently, nothing exists for him until we learn about it!

The absurdity is hilariously depicted in this "Daily Show" clip:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Me Talk Reluctantly One Day
www.thedailyshow.com
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"Republican senator John McCain is still raising questions and hackles."

Hackles again! Can't get enough hackles in the big media... when the topic is Republicans.

A few days ago, the NYT lit into Ted Cruz: "Texas Senator Goes on Attack and Raises Bipartisan Hackles." And now, it's John McCain who's ruffling the feathers of big media, whose meme is The GOP died. So, whenever a Republican Senator is anything by docile and deferential, the Death-of-the-GOP meme must be swapped out long enough to discipline the outlier. The standard message is: Nobody likes you. Metaphor of choice: Hackles. You're raising hackles.

Here's my meme for that media discipline: When they say hackles, I say hacks.
The article with the headline quoted in this post title is at The Washington Post. Here's some of the text:

The 76-year-old will be 80 when he is again up for reelection in Arizona in 2016. “I have seen a number of occasions around here where people have stayed too long,” McCain said during a recent interview in his Russell Senate Building office. “I have seen people who were real giants in this institution deteriorate, and unfortunately, we remember them at the end.”

Endings matter in politics. If McCain is approaching the exit, this term could determine how he will be remembered. (“In the way people think of him,” former GOP Arizona senator Jon Kyl said, “in the near term, it matters a great deal.”)

Right now, like it or not, the five-term senator is stuck in “get off my lawn” territory, lashing out at his friend-turned-foe Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary; incessantly tugging at what McCain is convinced is a coverup of the September attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya; lambasting the president; and railing against indiscriminate defense cuts. If hard-core conservatives feel burned by McCain’s resurgent reform spirit, the media that he once called his “base” have essentially written him off as an angry and sour loser who once went through a maverick phase but has, in the words of “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, gone on a “seven-year quest to negate every good thing he’d ever done.”

Wow. That's heavy-handed! They're saying: The GOP is supposed to be dead, and you're at the grave's edge, old man. Old, old man. You look old. Old men when the say what they mean and they say it with passion seem like they're saying "get off my lawn." Har harr. Old man! You're going to die soon.

You don't have to be a genius to extract the bias and see the real message: McCain is effective.

By the way, the hackles article about Cruz depicted him as too young — hadn't been around long enough to be speaking with intensity and passion. 

Hacks!

ADDED: I deleted a line that was in this post for a couple minutes: "by the way, hackles are not feathers." I based that on what I'd read — quickly — in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary when I wrote the "hackles" post about Cruz:

The hackles of a cock are erected when he is angry; hence with the hackles up, said also of a dog on the point of fighting when the hairs at the top of the neck stand up or of a hound when near the fox and on the point of killing him, also transf. of a man when aroused. Hence hackles is sometimes put for hair, whiskers, etc.

I pictured the cock's comb, but reading more of the OED entry "hackle," I see:

The long shining feathers on the neck of certain birds, as the domestic cock, peacock, pigeon, etc. Also, the feathers on the saddle of a cock. a cock of a different hackle, an opponent of a different character.

Al Gore performs a breathing exercise...

... when he realizes that Jon Stewart's use of the phrase "voracious over-eater" isn't going to turn into a reference to Gore's obesity:



(My edit, my interpretation of what's going on here.)

Why are gun-death statistics inflated with gun-suicide numbers?

"I thought we had a right to die...."

Obviously, one reason is: to get bigger numbers. But I think the people that lump gun deaths together believe (or want others to believe) that guns are really dangerous. When it comes to suicide, there are 2 ways to think about the deadly effectiveness of guns: 1. For those who really want to kill themselves, guns are a sensible choice, or 2. The scary deadliness of a gun tempts weak/impulsive persons to go ahead and do something that wouldn't happen otherwise.

You can easily see that those 2 ways to think represent the mindsets that lead to libertarian or authoritarian answers to all sorts of questions. #1 would allow the individual to make his own decisions and to take care of himself, and #2 thinks the individual — call her Julia — needs to be helped and protected (even from herself).

Sorry to go all gender-y, but I'm interested in talking about suicide and attitudes about guns in the context of gender difference, because 4x as many men as women commit suicide and 56% of male suicides use firearms compared to only 30% of female suicides. Those statistics are skewed by the fact that guns are an effective method. It might be that the gender disproportion is because men choose the method that leaves fewer survivors of attempts at suicide. I note that 40% of female suicides use "poisoning" (presumably, that includes drug overdosing). What's the proportion of females attempting suicide by poisoning to females succeeding in killing themselves with poison?

If you have a fantasy of rescuing those who are in the process of committing suicide, you might think taking guns away will give you a better shot.

ADDED: It occurred to me, after the Sandy Hook murders, that blaming guns is a secular substitute for blaming the devil. People find it too challenging to figure out why a human being would do this terrible thing and they latch on to the idea that the gun made it happen. Suicide presents a similar challenge, and one way to fathom it is to say: It was the gun. Isn't it like saying the devil made him do it? The gun/the devil is a great go-to answer, freeing you from wracking your brain about the workings of the human mind.