Not Even Many Bright Shiny Objects For The Base

The ruling elite didn't even have the decency to throw in an extension of unemployment benefits as a sweetener to cowed Democrats in Congress. I guess they figured they could use that as a backup if too many House Democrats decided to follow their consciences... instead of their Conservative Consensus president who already lost them their majority last year and is guaranteeing they won't win it back in 2012. That won't be necessary though, will it?

Yesterday MoveOn asked its members if the organization should support the sugarcoated Satan Sandwich or not.

As you've probably read, Republicans are holding our country's credit hostage and demanding major spending cuts to critical programs without ending tax breaks for the wealthy. If a deal isn't reached by tomorrow night-- or a short-term extension isn't passed by then-- the nation will default on its debts.

President Obama just announced an agreement with congressional leaders. We want to see what MoveOn members think of the deal. (For more information on the details of the deal, see below.) 

Supporting the deal means we would encourage Congress to vote for it and avert default. Opposing the deal means we would encourage members of Congress to vote no and demand that the deal be improved before it's passed.

Can you let us know what you think? Should MoveOn support the deal to raise the debt ceiling?

Progressive Members of Congress, led by Bernie Sanders in the Senate and Raul Grijalva in the House, have been adamantly opposed, although the Democratic Party's ultimate corporate shill and suckup, Steny Hoyer, immediately promised to provide however many Democrats Boehner needs to make up for GOP defections. As Steve Benen, normally a dependable voice for the White House point of view, raged in his column yesterday, the deal can't even be called a "compromise."

The debt-reduction framework isn’t a compromise; it’s a ransom. If one were to draw up two lists-- one with all the concessions Democrats made, the other with the concessions the GOP made-- the one-sided image would be striking. Of course, that’s what happens when one party has a gun to the head of its hostage-- in this case, the nation and its economy-- and the other party wants to prevent their rivals from pulling the trigger.

...[T]here’s nothing in this deal to promote economic growth and nothing to create jobs. We’re still stuck in the wrong conversation, focusing on a crisis that doesn’t exist, and ignoring the immediate crisis that confronts the nation. Indeed, all available evidence suggests the agreement will make the economy and job losses worse, not better. That Republicans wanted to take a huge step backwards, and Democrats negotiated to make it a more modest step backwards is cold comfort.

Two and a half hours later Benen was paraphrasing Neil Young: The ceiling and the damage done, and seemingly absolving Obama from all blame for this hideous deal he could have prevented.

The United States, thanks entirely to the right’s breathtaking stunt, is now seen as a less-safe bet and a less-attractive place for investment. The nation is now seen as more dysfunctional and less responsible. We’ve been made to look like fools on the global stage, and China has sought to exploit the Republican crisis, to the GOP’s indifference.

I’m reminded of something Felix Salmon wrote a few weeks ago: “The base-case scenario is, still, that the debt ceiling will be raised, somehow. But already an enormous amount of damage has been done: the US Congress has demonstrated clearly that it can’t be trusted to govern the country in a responsible manner. And the tail-risk implications for markets are huge.”

I don’t know if Republican lawmakers are aware of any of this. Worse, I also don’t know if they care. But American leadership on the global stage rests on certain pillars that took generations to build and strengthen-- credibility, reliability, stability, the integrity of our institutions, sound judgment. The Republican Party severely undermined these pillars in the Bush era, most notably in areas of foreign policy and the use of military force. The Republican Party is now severely undermining them again.

The world has been watching and thanks to GOP madness, the sanity of the world’s greatest superpower is very much in doubt.

The White House has been pushing back with a pathetic effort to make Democrats think the deal Boehner, Grover Norquist and Eric Erickson are pimping is great for ordinary working families. It's really sad. Time gave them a platform for their fumbling excuses:

Here’s why some liberals are actually happy with this deal:

The 2012 budget: At one point in the negotiations, the 2012 budget was to be slashed by $36 billion. The final number of cuts: just $7 billion. And just to ensure we don’t have another bruising government shutdown fight over cuts in September, the deal deems and passes the 2012 budget. Yes, that’s right, the old Gephardt Rule or Slaughter Solution, is back. What’s deem and pass? It’s a legislative trick that essentially means that Congress will consider the budget passed without ever actually having to vote on it.

The trigger: This is counterintuitive, but the trigger is actually pretty good for Democrats. For all that MoveOn thinks that it would force benefit cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, it actually wouldn’t trigger benefit cuts to any entitlements. The only cuts it would force would be a 2% or more haircut for Medicare providers. And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, along with most Democrats, has never opposed provider cuts. Not only that, most progressives actually want the Pentagon cuts. So if the committee deadlocks and the trigger is pulled, Democrats won’t be miserable.

The commission: Again, for all the liberal carping about a “Super Congress,” the commission of 12 members-- three from each party in each chamber-- set up to find the second phase of $1.5 trillion in cuts by Thanksgiving is actually rigged to force some revenue increases. Yes, the Bush tax cuts are off the table. But there are plenty of loopholes, subsidies and other corporate welfare programs that are on the table. And with such a strong trigger, it’s hard to imagine at least one Republican not voting to kill corporate jet subsidies over slashing $500 billion from the defense budget-- even if the revenues aren’t offset. The question is: who are Republicans more afraid of, Grover Norquist or the joint chiefs? Democrats’ money is on the joint chiefs.

The immediate cuts: It may seem like a lot, but the $917 billion in the first phase of cuts were carefully negotiated by Vice President Joe Biden and his group. They include $350 billion in Pentagon cuts-- a win for liberals. They don’t touch entitlement benefits, another win. And they set top line numbers for the next decade of budgets that aren’t draconian. It still cuts where liberals might prefer to spend, but most of the savings are backloaded to avoid extreme austerity in next few years of fragile economic recovery. Just $7 billion would be cut in 2012, and only $3 billion in 2013. And of that combined $10 billion, half would come from the Pentagon. On top of that, the discretionary spending caps on budgets in future Congresses are subject to revision by those bodies.

The debt ceiling: Raising the debt ceiling through 2013 will not be contingent on the second round of cuts. There will merely be a vote of disapproval. This avoids another messy fight in January and another round of painful forced cuts.

Happy yet? No? Well, the White House is also promising to back same sex marriage to shut some people up and insisting that insurers must cover birth control with no copays. Nice... but nothing will ever change the fact that Barack Obama, whose most salient personality defect is his fear of losing a fight, which prevents him from ever getting into one-- has been an absolute catastrophe for ordinary working families in this country. Here are two typical statements from progressive activist organizations. First from the Center for Community Change:

This deal worsens the serious imbalance in this country between wealthy Americans who get to retain their huge tax breaks while lawmakers slash spending on the backs of working Americans.

“There is no attempt at shared sacrifice in the debt plan, nothing that addresses how to create more jobs in this country, and this plan offers only more insecurity to families already on the brink of financial catastrophe, rather than offering any type of assistance to them,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change.

In thousands of house meetings held last month across the country, Americans fed up with waiting for elected lawmakers to help turn the economy around came together to talk about ways to create jobs to help rebuild the country.

“Washington is clearly broken and our elected officials are playing only petty political games,” Bhargava said. “Together we can succeed but it would be a lot easier if Congress would just listen to their constituents who want the rich to pay their fair share, pass serious legislation to create jobs and protect those most vulnerable from cuts to critical programs.”

And then, from Justin Ruben, Executive Director of MoveOn: “This is a bad deal for our fragile economic recovery, a bad deal for the middle class and a bad deal for tackling our real long-term budget problems. It forces deep cuts to important programs that protect the middle class, but asks nothing of big corporations and millionaires. And though it does not require cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid benefits, it opens the door for these down the road via an unaccountable Congressional committee. We surveyed our 5 million members and the vast majority oppose the deal because it unfairly asks seniors and the middle class to bear the burden of the debt deal. Congress should do what it should have done long ago and what it has done dozens of times before-- pass a clean debt ceiling bill.” And, in case you haven't heard, Blue America won't be endorsing or raising money for any incumbents who vote for the SatanSandwich. We haven't had an Olbermann Special Comment for quite a while; it's time:

"The problem with the mainstream media is they're desperate to get access . . . they don't challenge power" (Cenk Uygur)

Why Cenk Uygur Left MSNBC, Part 1

"I'm holding onto the story that I've been talking about the whole time on The Young Turks, about how the problem with the mainstream media is they're desperate to get access, they don't challenge the government, they don't challenge power. . . .

"If I take the money, and I get a reduced role, and I just do whatever I do with it, and maybe I even rise up in the ranks again, what's the point? The point of this show was truth-telling. That's what we're supposed to do. And we're supposed to challenge the government. That's the role of the media."

-- Cenk Uygur, explaining his decision not to accept MSNBC's offer of twice the money for a much-reduced role as a power-respecting "insider"

by Ken

Look again at the short version of Cenk's quote that I've made the title of this post, or better the fuller version I've pulled out in the quote above. Then ask yourself how many professional media people would say "amen," as opposed to how many would sidle away until it's safe to break into an open trot. Of course right-wing media have no trouble challenging government when it's not being right-wing enough for their tastes, but that doesn't count. One thing that certainly isn't about is "challenging power."

In my other life as a scribbler about music, a quote I carried in my head was one from composer Virgil Thomson concerning his long service as a daily music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, in which he described criticism as "our only antidote to paid publicity." Again, this isn't how most, or even many, practitioners see their role. I think back to my most important editorial job covering the classical music business, when my boss had to explain to me that "we're part of the music business." And at this remove, I have to own that he was right, and maybe if we had been a more enthusiastically energetic part of the music business, the magazine would still be around. (Not really, but we can have that discussion some other time.) The question would be whether the magazine would have any reason for continuing to exist.

Think about it: our only antidote to paid publicity.

Shift the discussion to general news and public affairs, and the stakes become starker. It's not just "paid publicity" we have to be concerned with, it's the crushing weight of the political and financial establishment, where it's now understood that the role of "news" media is to serve it. Central to the whole concept of "the Village," or the "Inside the Beltway" mentality, is that politicos and journos are really all in it together, that they are one industry, or one something.

And again, this seamless alliance seems to me one of the issues that's most truly troubling about the News International scandal: the extent to which Master Murdoch's Minions, in this case at his four British newspapers (now only three, of course, with the shuttering of the embattled News of the World) have been intertwined in successive British governments. It's important to note that while the arrangement may be more open and egregious with a Conservative prime minister, it's far from exclusive. The former Labour government and the News International swells courted each other pretty assiduously, and the early years of the cover-up of the News of the World phone-hacking allegations were overseen by that Labour government.

The video clips at the top and bottom of this post have been popping up all over the Internet, and rightly so: In his characteristically bluntly eloquent way, Cenk takes us through his view of what happened to him at MSNBC: basically, that he had to be yanked from that evening time slot because "people in Washington" were complaining to his boss, "the head of MSNBC" (Phil Griffin, whom he doesn't bother to name), as he was informed in a meeting he describes pretty vividly in Part 1, that they "were concerned about his tone."

Here's how Glenn Greenwald interprets the objection in an excellent Salon piece, "Cenk Uygur and the ethos of corporate-owned media":

Uygur often refused to treat members of the political and media establishment with deference and respect. He didn't politely imply with disguised subtleties when he thought a politician or media figure was lying or corrupt, but instead said it outright. In interviews, he was sometimes unusually aggressive with leading Washington figures, subjecting them to civil though hostile treatment to which they were plainly unaccustomed.

In case you were assuming, when you heard about Cenk being canned as interim host of the MSNBC 6pm show, that the problem was ratings, it turns out: not at all. Cenk goes into the numbers in some detail in Part 1. In fact, as of April, when (a) the crush of world breaking-news stories, which draw viewers to CNN, subsided, and (b) especially when Cenk decided to ignore the notes he'd been getting from his superiors and do the show his way, his ratings were fine and growing steadily.

JUST TO BE CLEAR, CENK ISN'T NECESSARILY
KNOCKING OTHERS ON THE MSNBC LINEUP

In the Part 2 clip, he stresses that the circumstances are different for everyone, in terms of contract (he didn't even have one) and the things that give an individual the kind of clout you can stare down even a cable network with. He makes it clear how much he admires the job Rachel Maddow has done, explaining that she has shrewdly marshaled the clout she has built up by doing the show her way and leveraging the terrific ratings she's developed. It probably helped too that when her show went on the air she enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Keith Olbermann, who still had lots of clout of his own at MSNBC.

Glenn Greenwald recollects an interview Rachel did last week with Bill Moyers,

who for years -- based on experience -- has been explaining that the corporate climate that preveails at large media companies significantly restricts and constrains what can be said. In response, Maddow said:

I mean, I work at a big corporate conglomerate controlled media outlet. And I feel like the way to handle this as an individual journalist for me is that I have carved out a sphere here of editorial independence.

And on MSNBC, my deal with the company is I will do shows on MSNBC, and you will not tell me what to say. And they are very comfortable with that. And I think a lot of individual journalists find ways to do that.

Glenn notes too Moyers' stress on the factor of self-censorship that develops in the corporate media cauldron.

I served time at CBS News, enjoyed it, seven years in all. I was here at MSNBC for the launch of it 15 years ago. I worked at NBC.

But I saw in every one of those environments the growth of the shadow of self censorship when -- I mean, I happen to know that when I was here, Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger did their best to mute my influence on "The Nightly News" because of the freedom and independence Andy Lack, who was then the president of NBC News, had given me. It's up there all the time, like gathering storm clouds.

You do a terrific job of maintaining your independence. And I must say out of the Murdoch scandal has come a reminder of the importance of a free and independent press.

Bill and Rachel then point out that the story was finally broken by the Guardian, which is run by, as Rachel explains it, "a public trust, set up by the founding family to make sure that 'The Guardian' would always be commercially and editorially independent."

Tim Karr did an excellent summary of what he billed as "Cenk Uygur vs. 'The Club,'" and in response to a commenter who noted that Cenk is to be a guest tonight on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, another refugee from MSNBC, Tim muses: "Curious about the level of Comcast involvement in this decision. MSNBC's new owner is deeply embedded among the 'Corporate Democrats' in Washington. Cenk's braver brand of journalism would no doubt put them on the defensive."

Do watch Cenk's clips. You'll especially want to hear him talking about the money MSNBC offered him to be a good soldier in the army of the establishment -- not to mention the "perks" with which infotainment noozers are customarily seduced from any sense of journalistic mission. Right now I'm going to watch Cenk on Countdown -- and you may still be able to catch one of the rebroadcasts. I'm sure there will soon be clips up. But Cenk has already laid out the basic structure of the situation.

Why Cenk Uygur Left MSNBC, Part 2

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From Keith Olbermann comes a perspective on Tim Russert which really alters my perception of him

Keith O, from the Rolling Stone interview

"I don't know that there's going to be anything hugely different that's visible to the viewer. It's not going to be like, 'I'm going to do the last half of the show topless.' But the freedom from the wear and tear of having to get past a bunch of people mumbling, 'Oh, I don't know . . .' It's the key to the operation, it really is."

-- Keith Olbermann, in Rolling Stone,
on the new Current TV incarnation of Countdown

by Ken

I don't mean to become a shill for Keith Olbermann, although I suppose there are worse things a person could become a shill for. But I really was surprised by how satisfying the Thurber celebration he ringmastered from his wheelchair (for his broken foot) Sunday night at the 92nd Street Y was. His own reading, with projections of the drawings, of the whole of the "parable in pictures" The Last Flower, one of the supremely great books ever to find its way into print, left me kind of shivery. (It was, by the way, E. B. White -- I couldn't remember whether it was White or Thurber -- who pronounced this his favorite Thurber book.)

ONE THING I MEANT TO MENTION SUNDAY . . .

Rosie and Keith backstage at the 92nd Street Y Sunday

The Last Flower also has one of the all-time great book dedications. Published as World War II was breaking out, it was dedicated: "For Rosemary. In the wistful hope that her world will be better than mine." What I didn't know is that the latest edition of The Last Flower, from the University of Iowa Press, was designed by Rosie's daughter, Thurber's granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers. Both she and her mother signed copies afterward.

Rosie, by the way, among other contributions, read the great fable "The Little Girl and the Wolf" (which we read here), which she recalled first reading at about the same time she found out that Thurber was her father, when she was eight, and was delighted to find that it was her father who had written the moral, "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be," and understood this about what little girls understood.

I do want to make sure everyone knows that the new Countdown with Keith Olbermann debuts on Current TV this coming Monday at 8pm. How many people will be able to watch is another question, and one that Keith is clearly agonizing over. In the question period of the Thurber program, an audience member expressed the hope that he would soon be able to see Current TV on Cablevision, and Keith wished him luck. Evidently there have been discussions with "Mr. Dolan" and his people which haven't been terribly fruitful.

NOW, ABOUT KEITH O AND TIM RUSSERT (AND
ALSO, NOT TO HIS CREDIT, TOM BROKAW)

Anyway, none of this is why I brought Keith up again. It's because of some things he says which I found fascinating in a recent interview with Mark Binelli in the June 23 Rolling Stone. If you haven't read the interview, you really should -- and also the selection of "outtakes" from the interview published online. 

Here's the thread that particularly got my attention:

When did things start to change for you at MSNBC?

It was three years ago, when Tim Russert died. One of the reasons I got as far as I got was that Tim was there to run interference for me. He never made a big deal out of the fact that he probably was my biggest supporter within the network. He used to go to them and say, "Leave him alone, we can handle the blowback, I'll take care of it." After he died, Maureen, his wife, told me that she used to have to wrest the channel-changer away from him every night, because he loved to watch the show. She said, "You deal with this all day and you have to watch it again?" He said, "I have to see what he's saying about it, it's the best." I teared up and said, "I didn't know that." She said, "He thought you already had a big enough head."

Mark asks Keith about Tom Brokaw's public criticism of him "for 'going too far' in injecting commentary into your campaign coverage," and apparently before he gets Brokaw's name out, at the words "during the 2008 election," Keith is fetching a piece of paper from his wallet.

Let me read this to you. You can see how old it is -- it already came apart. March 5, 2008, Wednesday morning, 9:45 a.m. "Keith, game ball goes to you for last night. I've been at this for 40 years and have a full appreciation for how tricky it is to go from commentator to anchor, get the news out, manage the many egos, make sure lots of different points of view are represented, maintain your own place in the proceedings, you did it all splendidly." You can see the name of who sent that [Tom Brokaw].

So there you have it. I've never shared that with anybody before. Now you have a private comment that he didn't seem to remember when he made his public comment five months later.

Originally, Keith says, he carried this note around because --

it was confirmation from somebody I had great respect for. What he said there was that you can be a commentator and an anchor, you can get your points across and yet be neutral when you're supposed to be neutral. From one of the best in the business, it meant a great deal to me. Then what it meant to me is, "Wow, things change fast after people like Russert die."

I have to say, what Keith has to say about Tim Russert really does change my view of the guy. Not of his performance on the air, which still seems to me to have been cowardly and self-serving, but of what we learn here about his impact behind the scenes, where he really does seem to have extended himself to make it possible for NBC News people to be, well, less cowardly and self-serving than the pressures of the business would otherwise have permitted.

Is it possible that this effort was so heroic as to confuse him into thinking he was being heroic on the air? Because my very strong image of Russert as a journalist is that he was the consummate, perhaps even ultimate, Village Insider, using those considerable smarts and that quick verbal agility to enforce the conventional wisdom of the status quo. In fact, the very fact that he came to Big Media from the political world (first as chief of staff to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later as counsel to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo) seems to have helped cement the alliance of Beltway politics and media.

I don't suppose Russert was necessarily beloved of the pols who trooped onto Meet the Press and ran into his "gotcha" buzzsaw. But I think even the stumblingest victims understood that he was on their side, that they were in it together -- and unfortunately they were in it together largely against us, the unwashed and unserious masses. That he was as good at what he did as he was made it on the whole worse.

Nothing Keith says here changes my opinion about any of that. But that there was more to what Tim Russert was and did, that someone like Keith thought of him as both an inspiration and a protector -- well, this really adds a dimension to my image of him.

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Thurber Tonight -- special edition: At the 92nd Street Y Thurber "do," Keith O gives a virtuoso performance

"I am trying to use reason and intelligence," said the strange new mongoose.

"Reason is six-sevenths of treason," said one of his neighbors.

"Intelligence is what the enemy uses," said another.

-- from Thurber's "The Peacelike Mongoose"

by Ken

I'm just back from the "celebration" of Thurber I mentioned the other day, with Keith Olbermann and friends Rosemary Thurber, the author's daughter (who is extremely wary of public events, and hadn't been in New York in a lot of years before coming for this event); Bob Mankoff, the cartoonist and cartoon editor of The New Yorker; and longtime New Yorker reporter and humorist Calvin Trillin. The moderator, political comic Scott Blakeman, noted that with Keith's new version of Countdown going on the Current TV air a week from tomorrow, June 20, he was taking time out from what is probably the busiest week of his career -- and that on top of having to wheel himself out in a wheelchair as a result of breaking his foot.

It was actually, to my surprise, really nice. There was even a stretch -- when Keith read Thurber's The Last Flower (which either Thurber or E. B. White, I forget which, declared his favorite Thurber book) while the crucial drawings of this words-and-drawings book were projected. I couldn't imagine that this would work very well, The Last Flower being such a "booky" kind of book, but the projections of the drawings projected them surprisingly successfully, and in combination Keith read the text splendidly.


I'll probably have more to say about the event, but for tonight, I'm pushing back the scheduled "Perelman Tonight" in order to bring you the story that has become one of Keith's most important readings -- and, as we'll see, non-readings. It was the fable "The Peacelike Mongoose" that was the first Thurber text Keith read on Countdown, at the urging of his hospital-bound father, to whom he had been reading everything he could think of, including (much to his father's pleasure) Thurber, going through (he said) pretty much the whole of the big Library of America Thurber volume.

Keith launched the on-air Thurber reading with great trepidation, but immediately won some important supporters. It was how he discovered that both Rosemary Thurber and her daughter, Sara Thurber Sauers, were regular Countdown viewers, and had seen the reading, and were thrilled. Keith had worried about the copyright situation, and Rosemary solved that by granting him permission to read whatever of her father's works he wished.

What's more, the timing proved eerily fortuitous. It turned out that at that very moment Rosemary was negotiating with an English textbook publisher for the right to include "The Peacelike Mongoose" (from Thurber's second volume of fables, Further Fables for Our Time) in a textbook, something she hoped to be able to accomplish, because she likes the idea of students reading Thurber. However, the publisher was insisting on the right to edit the text, which is pretty silly in the case of a writer who writes as meticulously as JT (earlier, Keith had read a long-time favorite piece of his, "A Box to Hide In" from The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, and noted that while it was written for the page rather than performance, it couldn't be more successful as a performance piece if it had been written for it -- the sentences, the cadences, the words all being calculated with astounding precision for maximum performance effect). The bottom-line sticking point was what most readers would describe as one of the piece's particular glories, the word mongoosexual. Once Keith had uttered the dreaded word on the air, it became a non-issue.

But that early on-ar reading of "Mongoose" was only half the reason for its significance to Keith. Because he had planned to read it again the night of his last MSNBC Countdown. Only he was asked by people at MSNBC not to read it. He left it to the audience to imagine what nerve the piece might have touched with his former employers.


WHAT SPOOKED THOSE MSNBC EXECS ABOUT
"THE PEACELIKE MONGOOSE"? CLICK HERE


TOMORROW IN PERELMAN TONIGHT: Part 1 of "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth"


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Attention, NY-area Thurber fans: Sunday evening Keith Olbermann & Friends are celebrating our guy at the 92nd Street Y

From "The War Between Men and Women" (yes, you
can click on it to enlarge it!) [from DWT, June 1]

by Ken

I was working furiously on some hopefully final thoughts on Weinergate, having already put off the results of The New Yorker's search for a universal cartoon caption to tomorrow, when I realized that I really should have mentioned this Sunday-evening event, which I should have done in last night's "Perelman Tonight" post, but I just didn't think of it. I don't normally think of myself as being in the event-promotion business. Still . . .

Since it was a "Your perfect weekend" item by Time Out New York's "This Week in New York" Editor Amy Pitt which jogged my awareness yesterday to the point of springing the credit card out of my wallet, here's a TONY link, although it's not to the Amy Pitt item, which I'll be darned if I can find online!

Here, for the record, is the "Your perfect weekend" item (disclosure: I had to make my own graphic, not being able to reproduce TONY's creepy itty-bitty cutout of Keith O's head):

Even though Keith Olbermann (92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave between 91st and 92nd Sts; 212-415-5500, 92y.org; 7:30pm; $29) is starting his new gig as the host of a relaunched Countdown with Keith Olbermann on June 20, it's unlikely that he'll delve into the show too much tonight. Instead, the former MSNBC talking head will discuss humorist James Thurber, who regularly penned pieces for The New Yorker before his death in 1961. Olbermann isn't the only one celebrating Thurber tonight: New Yorker contributors Calvin Trillin and Robert Mankoff will also be there, as will Thurber's daughter, Rosemary. -- Amy Pitt

For what it's worth, the TONY item I've linked to above lists "comic Scott Blakeman" as a participant as well. No, I don't know who that is. I'm sure he's very comical, though, in addition to having much to say about Thurber.

Normally I would just provide a link to the 92nd Street Y website, but as it happens, 92Y.org is in hibernation till Monday, as the org transitions to a new and presumably much-improved site. All that's accessible at the moment is the 92Y Online blog, which advises that you can still purchase event tickets by phone, but even with additional customer service representatives on duty, "call times might be longer than usual." The box office is open Saturday 5pm-9pm and Sunday from 10am. (Oh wait, I guess it's not obvious from the name "92nd Street Y" that it's a YMHA.)

I finally broke down yesterday after being confronted by the TONY item, and via the still-operational Y website shelled out my $31 ($29 for the ticket plus the "online discounted" $2 fee for buying the damned ticket, something that once upon a time was assumed to be, you know, part of the price of the ticket -- ah, days of innocence!). I'm a really, really huge fan of Calvin Trillin (I may have mentioned at some point that he's probably my favorite living writer), and as readers may have noticed I'm a growing fan these days of New Yorker cartoonist and cartoon editor Bob Mankoff (he of the quest for the universal cartoon caption, my report on which is now shoved back to Sunday).

But I think maybe what sealed the deal for me is the scheduled participation of Rosemary T, James Thurber's only child. If I'm reading my source right (and have done the arithmetic right), she turns 80 in October, and it may sound corny, but I think it was the thought of being in the same auditorium with her that turned me into a customer. As of yesterday, at least, there were still tickets available. Remember, the box office reopens tomorrow (Saturday) at 5pm.

Again, from "The War Between Men and Women" (again,
you can click on it to enlarge it) [from DWT, June 2]
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