Monthly Archives: August 2006

Many economists no longer believe that a hike in the Minimum Wage means a drop in the number of available jobs. Read all about it.

I hope he'll forgive me for mentioning the number but it's not exactly a secret on the Internet. One of my personal heroes, Stan Freberg (seen above with his lovely spouse, Hunter) is eighty years old today. He is, as everyone knows, a fine actor, satirist, writer, voice actor, advertising genius, etc. He's also a very nice man whose friendship I treasure. It's a joy when one of your idols turns out to be as fine a human being as you could ever want him to be.

Stan, if you're reading this, I'd like to suggest that you have a mid-life crisis. It's not that I want to cause you any anxiety but I kinda like the idea that this is the middle of your life and that we'll have you around for another eighty. Happy Day. Eat some cake, hug your friends and for God's sake, turn off the bubble machine.

Another song Tom Lehrer wrote and performed for The Electric Company!

The polls say that on Tuesday, Ned Lamont is going to defeat Joe Lieberman for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Connecticut. That's fine by me. As longtime readers of this page know, I didn't think much of Mr. Lieberman even when he was Al Gore's running mate. In fact, especially when he was Al Gore's running mate.

A lot of weblogs and pundits are now speculating as to what a Lamont victory will demonstrate about the power of the Liberal weblogs that have been advancing the challenger's candidacy. Some act like Lamont's whole campaign derives from that blogosphere. Some suggest "…the drive to oust Lieberman is really the next big test of the bloggers' political clout." Others write that "…if Joe goes down this week, I dont think that blogs will have had all that much to do with it."

I'm kind of with that last guy. In fact, I don't think the bloggers matter much either way. I think a large number of Democrats in Connecticut have been itching to strike a blow against the Bush administration, and voting against Joe Lieberman is the first chance they've had to do anything that resembles that. And that's all I think the vote will mean.

We'll find out how many of those Connecticut Democrats are angry enough at Bush to throw out an incumbent who has often cozied up to White House policies and parroted Republican talking points. But we won't know a thing about the power of weblogs.

We need to break a habit, people. Our favorite TV show is being released on DVD in complete seasons and we, like jerks, go out and buy Season One and then later on, we buy Season Two and Season Three and so on. We have to stop doing this.

Why? Because most of these are later going to come out in complete sets with more bonus material. This article lists some of the forthcoming such releases and I'll quote one here…

Not to be outdone, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment is wrapping up its series of "complete season" sets of M*A*S*H with a 36-disc boxed set that contains all 11 seasons, the M*A*S*H film, and two bonus discs of never-before-seen extras, including a trivia game, a featurette on the show's fan base, and a 30th anniversary reunion of cast and crew. The Martinis and Medicine Collection is due November 7 at a suggested retail price of $199.98; season 11 comes out individually the same day.

Okay: Let's say you've always loved M*A*S*H and when they started releasing them on DVD, you raced to your local video shop and bought each of the first ten volumes. Assuming any sort of decent discounting, that's around $240 you've invested in those ten sets. On November 7, you can pay another $24 and get Volume 11 (for a total expenditure of $264) and you'll have all the episodes but you won't have the two bonus discs of never-before-seen extras, the trivia game, the featurette on the show's fan base, or the 30th anniversary reunion of cast and crew.

Won't you wish you'd waited and just bought the two hundred dollar version that includes all that, plus a copy of the original movie?

This is not just unfortunate timing on your part. Even as you read this, top execs at home video companies are huddling in meetings, discussing ways to package and repackage their wares so that you'll buy them more than once. There will be fans of M*A*S*H who will leave their old DVD volumes on the shelves and buy the new collection just to have everything in one nice package, thereby purchasing much of this material twice. That's the idea. (Appealing to the same mindset, there are companies that deliberately plan to release feature motion pictures at least twice. First, they bring out the standard video release and later — a year or two down the pike — they come out with the Platinum or Silver or Deluxe or Whatever They Call It Edition that includes the film letterboxed and with commentary tracks and documentary material and outtakes and such. Some people who didn't get the first release will buy this one but the big expectation is that many who did buy the previous release will buy it again.)

Well, you can fall for it but I won't. We're now about to see season-by-season releases of a number of great TV shows including The Addams Family, The Odd Couple, Get Smart and Whose Line Is It Anyway? I ain't buyin' any of 'em season-by-season. True, there's a risk that they won't eventually be collected into deluxe sets but I don't think any of them will be that difficult to pick up later as individual releases. The first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was released on DVD four years ago and you can still snag it and the others that have been released from Amazon, some of them for half-price. Season One of All in the Family on DVD even before that and all the collections to date are all still in print, some of them at discounted prices. If there's never a complete-in-one set of The Odd Couple, I can pick up the single volumes at some point in the future.

This kind of thing — repackaging reissues in a way designed to coerce loyal fans into buying the same thing again — hurt the comic book business greatly. A lot of readers eventually learned that when a story is released as a four-issue mini-series, it's better to wait and buy it when it's collected in a one-volume trade paperback. DVD buyers will eventually catch on the same way and the practice will cease…but until it does, we have to be smarter than they think we are. I've already bought a lot of movies several times — once on Beta, again on VHS, then in the deluxe, remastered VHS release, then on Laserdisc, then on DVD, etc. It's time to stop.

I haven't had a Tom Lehrer link for quite a while. Here's one of the songs he composed and performed for the TV series, The Electric Company. It's been nicely animated, too.

Esther Snyder and her husband Harry (who passed away several years ago) founded the In-n-Out Burger chain that dots California, Nevada and Arizona. If you have to eat a burger at a fast food restaurant, that's the place to have one. Everything's fresh (never frozen) and you can even see the workers slicing the potatoes for the french fries. As this obit explains, Ms. Snyder has passed away at the age of 86.

One hopes this is not the beginning of the end of our favorite fast food burger chain. As we discussed back here, there have been family squabbles in the organization that suggested the company might undergo changes. We hope they leave well enough alone.

Norman Lear and Robert W. McChesney object to new regulations that will allow media conglomerates to get even more powerful by swallowing up smaller companies.

An old pal of mine, Bob Cosgrove, sends the following in response to my earlier posting about people who drink and then get behind the wheel of an automobile…

When I was a law student, I took a course in "trial practice." One day, my professor called with an unusual request — could I show up at his office a few hours before class and have some scotchs? The evening's lesson was cross-examining an expert witness, in this case, a breathalyzer operator. I did my part and continued to drink right through class (probably the only time the "defendant" was ever identified in court as "the guy over there sipping scotch"). I'd downed about three glasses in the course of a few hours, then took the test. I weighed in at about 190 at the time, and blew a .06. At the time, a jury could have convicted me with that number, but in order to infer, based solely on my BT score, that I was under the influence, I would have had to blow a .10. I took the subway home a few hours later, and by the time I got back to my car, was sober. But I never would have driven feeling as I felt with the "low" score of .06. My class experience made me the last person a defense attorney would want on a jury.

At the time, I had no particular thought of going into criminal law. Later, as a prosecutor, I must have tried around a hundred or more OUI cases. With respect, I think you have a layman's conception of how to deal with "drunk drivers." (Or — forgive me — a politician's). A side note: most states, perhaps all states, and I suspect your own state, don't require that a defendant be "drunk" — merely that the defendant's ability to drive be impaired, or alternatively, that the blood alcohol be over a certain level. So "drunk driving" is something of a misnomer.

Most people are all for toughening "drunk" driving laws. Throw the book at them! Look at what might have happened — someone might have been killed. Then they get into court, and on a journey. There's the defendant, in his suit and tie, looking quite different from the obnoxious loudmouth the cops describe. (And there's the cops — looking pretty much like they did that time they pulled you over, even though you were only going a few miles over the speed limit when you went through that light that really was yellow when you first started through). Sitting behind the defendant are his wife and adorable three kids. Suddenly, the hypothetical "victims" whose lives the drunk driver may have claimed fade into pale, forgotten abstractions. You won't hear that the defendant refused to take a breathalyzer, because you can't tell a jury that (at least in my state). (That, by the way, is why I, unlike most prosecutors, always liked to have people who had been convicted of "drunk driving" on my juries, at least when they had pled guilty — they all knew exactly what it meant when they heard nothing about any breath test: the defendant had refused to take it because he thought it would show he was intoxicated). The jurors have heard about the new tough penalties — they know if they convict, the defendant is going to have to pony up a few thousand for an alcohol rehabilitation program, pay fines and probation fees, lose his license — by the way, defense counsel has slipped in that he's a truck driver, and his livelihood depends on that license — and perhaps do some jail time. All because he had one drink too many at a party and slipped up for the first time in his life. (They won't find out that this is his third arrest for "drunk" driving — the previous two, by the way, resulted in "not guilty" findings). There, half the jury will be thinking, but for the grace of God go I. In some ways, it's easier to convict someone of murder than drunk driving. Nobody's sitting in the jury box thinking, "Gee, if they had caught me chopping up my wife with an ax, that could be me there."

The high penalties will also scare the hell out of the defendant. He'll pay the high fees necessary to get a good lawyer, and tell that lawyer to fight like hell. The defense bar's continued opposition to increased drunk driving penalties is a tribute to their integrity; every jacking up of the penalties ought to be called the "Defense Attorney Employment Act of (year)."

Do you really want to give some guy with one too many drinks a year in jail? I'd be surprised if the first break-in to a home in your state typically gets a year — but we should do it for OUI (as it's called in my state: DWI most other places)?

My own preference would be for a change in the rules of evidence that would put more information before juries and make it easier to convict — and at the same time to lower the penalties for first offenses, also to encourage easier convictions that would put the defendants in line for treatment for alcohol problems. Raising the penalties sounds tough — and no doubt it is tough — on the increasingly smaller percentage of those found guilty of the crime.

Yeah, I'm not proud of it but I do think I want to give some guy with one too many drinks a year in jail…or maybe a lesser sentence that still involves staring at metal bars. The fact that the penalty for a first break-in may be too low isn't a rationale for eliminating the penalty for some other crime.

I understand what you're saying about how difficult it is to get a conviction and I agree with you about changing the rules of evidence to include some of the things you say are excluded. I also understand what you're saying about juries identifying with a defendant and feeling compassion towards him…and I think that's just the nature of the jury system. Which is why I made reference to a "mandatory sentence." Maybe that would prompt a few more jurors to say, "Hey, the guy drove drunk. I don't like sending him to the slammer but the law's the law."

Obviously, I'm looking at this less as a matter of properly punishing drunk drivers than I am as establishing a more solid deterrent. I do think there's a value to that kind of punishment. You're correct, I'm sure, that jurors don't identify with ax murderers…but this is the kind of crime that too many people think isn't one. They need to be reminded and I think stronger sentences could do wonders. I've had a few friends who really screwed up their own lives with alcohol abuse — by driving while tipsy or otherwise — and it's been my experience that they serve as good bad examples. Hearing about the disasters they bring on themselves does a lot to discourage others from making the same mistakes. Maybe it's naïve of me but I think learning that an acquaintance did hard time for driving drunk would go a long way towards preventing most folks from committing the same sin.

Thanks for taking the time to write all that out, Bob. Nice to hear from someone who's in the middle of the problem.

Here's one minute from The Lucy Show, the series Lucille Ball did from 1962 to 1968. This scene features Lucy, guest star Ann Sothern and a surprise cameo guest…and that's all I should tell you about it in advance. Watch and enjoy.

Give a read to this article by a gent named Wade Sanders, who is the Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy. It's all about the new tactic of attacking the military records of your political opponents.

Cartoonist Bob Thaves, best known for his Frank and Ernest strip, has died at the age of 81. A multiple winner of National Cartoonist's Society awards, Thaves is said to have been the first cartoonist to do a single panel cartoon in a horizontal strip format. Frank and Ernest began in 1972 as an outgrowth of his magazine cartooning work and became a very popular feature. In the late eighties, Thaves launched a second strip — King Baloo — which did not fare as well.

His family announced his passing in this message on the Frank and Ernest website.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have released a report that basically indicts the Bush administration on an array of power abuses and violations of Constitutional law. You can read it here and marvel that these allegations do not (yet) warrant the filing of a Bill of Impeachment. It's especially amazing when you consider how low Republicans set the bar when they had feeble evidence that William Jefferson Clinton had fudged the truth in a deposition over a matter that had nothing to do with presidential power or getting people killed.

Why are so many people of all political stripes calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation?

I'm not asking why they think he's a failure in his job. That should be obvious by now. I'm asking why the demand isn't for George W. Bush to fire the guy.

A Secretary of Defense serves at the pleasure of the president. If I were in the Cabinet and I one day realized I was screwing things up beyond belief, I'd go to the Chief Exec and tell him how I felt…and then I'd resign if and when he told me it was the right time. He might not agree I'd messed up, in which case I would certainly not ignore his opinion. Or he might concur but feel that my resignation should wait until things were more stable or a suitable successor was in place or certain events had occurred. Whatever, I'd quit when he felt it was best for the country.

Public figures as disparate as Hillary Clinton, William Kristol, John McCain and Michael Moore have said that Rumsfeld should go. I get the feeling that even most folks who want to "stay the course" think Rumsfeld has made too many clumsy, untrue predictions and statements to be effective in his position and would welcome a fresh face there. It's hard to believe Bush is even keeping him there for any reason other than to avoid the admission that major mistakes have been made.

But ultimately, isn't it Bush's call that we need a new Secretary of Defense? And if he doesn't think so, isn't that the problem?

In the thirties, Variety used to have a column called "Released Jokes." It was an ongoing list of jokes that the paper's reviewers felt should be retired because they had just been repeated too many times by stage performers. Legend has it that the column was eventually removed from the paper because the editors realized that too many new comedians were getting their material from it, thinking that the name meant these were jokes that had been "released" into the public domain or something of the sort.

It was a bad title but a good idea. There are some quips that I'm just tired of hearing…so I'm going to start listing them here. These are jokes that were once clever and funny but have simply been done to death. I'll start with three…

• The most dangerous place in the world is not [name of war-torn locale]. It's anywhere between [name of publicity-seeking celebrity] and a camera. (As in: "The most dangerous place in the world is not downtown Baghdad. It's anywhere between the Reverend Al Sharpton and a camera.")
• Person A asks about something that's supposed to be a secret. Person B replies, "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you!"
• Squirrel nut double-entendres. (As in: "It was so cold, I saw a squirrel warming his nuts" or "It was so hot, I saw a squirrel packing his nuts in ice.")

And while we're at it, I'm also tired of political comments that use the phrase, "At the end of the day," as in, "At the end of the day, the voters will decide" or "At the end of the day, Bush is still president." What about the beginning of the day? What about the middle of the day? Doesn't it matter what happens then?

More of these as they occur to me or you send them in.