"Ninety-nine percent of people [back then] didn’t have their portrait painted. It does not mean they did not exist."

"They are central to the drama of the American Revolution. It might be a teenager: John Greenwood from Boston, or Joseph Plumb Martin from Connecticut. Or 10-year-old Betsy Ambler [from Yorktown] or the Native Americans or Spanish or French or Hessian soldiers. At the end, we say the Continental Army is just filled with teenagers and ne’er-do-wells, second and third sons who aren’t due an inheritance, felons, and recent immigrants. That’s who wins the war, and that’s why democracy is not an object of the revolution, it’s a consequence—because you realize at the end, they did the fighting and dying. We’re going to have to give them something. John Greenwood is a footnote? Betsy Ambler is a footnote? Follow the trail. And when you get Maya Hawke reading Betsy Ambler, it comes alive."

Says Ken Burns, in a Vanity Fair interview. He's talking about his new PBS documentary, "The American Revolution," and Vanity Fair makes its headline spicier than the quote: "Ken Burns Knows Who Won the American Revolution: 'Ne’er-Do-Wells, Felons, and Immigrants.'"

Is VF making the show more about present-day politics than it deserves or is the show pushing a political agenda? I have a feeling Burns does very restrained interviews — in line with the PBS presentation of itself. So maybe the VF headline is helpfully apt. Rereading that Burns quote, I find it plainly political.

I cringe at the sentiment "when you get Maya Hawke reading Betsy Ambler, it comes alive." Hand me a history book and spare me the lively readings of nepo-babies.

I believe I've only ever watched one of Burns's shows, the first one: "Brooklyn Bridge," from back in 1981. I've actively avoided them. And I love documentary film.

By the way, of all the American wars, did the Revolutionary War have the highest percentage of teenagers doing the fighting?

Does "We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status" = "he is stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status"?

I'm reading the NY Post:

"President Trump said Friday he is stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status.

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” he said in a Truth Social post.

I think the post is losing something in the paraphrase. Trump's post speaks of doing something in the future. The NY Post portrays him as in the process of doing it now.

In any event, this is a big deal. Also a big deal in the news this morning: "Trump orders end to federal funding for NPR and PBS" (NPR). 

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," the nation's primary public broadcasters. Trump contends that news coverage by NPR and PBS contains a left-wing bias. The federal funding for NPR and PBS is appropriated by Congress....

"Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter," the executive order says. "What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens."

"The DOGE Plan to Reform Government" — by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Read it in The Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:

We are entrepreneurs, not politicians.... We'll cut costs.... We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden's tenure.

"Eight women say Charlie Rose sexually harassed them — with nudity, groping and lewd calls."

WaPo reports on the inner workings of Charlie Rose Inc., where if you didn't like the boss's behavior, your only recourse was the executive producer Yvette Vega:

Multiple women said they had at first been reassured by the presence of Vega, Rose’s executive producer, who has worked with him for decades. Two women who spoke to The Post said they repeatedly reported Rose’s inappropriate sexual behavior to Vega.

But:

“I explained how he inappropriately spoke to me during those times,” Godfrey-Ryan said. “She would just shrug and just say, ‘That’s just Charlie being Charlie.’"...

“I should have stood up for them,” said Vega, 52, who has worked with Rose since the show was created in 1991. “I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.”...

It's a very long article, and I won't undertake to describe Rose's alleged modus operandi, using his small (15-person) operation to bring vulnerable women into his orbit and to isolate them in his remote beach house where Rose (we're told) used the mating technique of walking around naked.

PBS and Bloomberg LP have distanced themselves from Charlie Rose Inc., which is a separate entity. They tell the Post they knew nothing, nothing. And they've suspended distribution of the show.

The most up-voted comment at WaPo is: "Is Trump the only man in the world that is not being held accountable?"

A liberal icon crashes to the ground and what can a liberal do but scream at the sky — Trump!!?

"As changing technologies and preferences make government-funded broadcasting increasingly preposterous, such broadcasting actually becomes useful by illustrating two dismal facts."

"One is the immortality of entitlements that especially benefit those among society’s articulate upper reaches who feel entitled. The other fact is how impervious government programs are to evidence incompatible with their premises.... America, which is entertaining itself to inanition, has never experienced a scarcity of entertainment. Or a need for government-subsidized journalism that reports on the government."

Writes George Will in The Washington Post. 

PBS's "Frontline" showed "An examination of the key moments that shaped President-elect Donald Trump."

"Interviews drawn from The Choice 2016 with advisors, business associates and biographers reveal how Trump transformed himself from real estate developer to reality TV star to president."

You can watch the whole thing at the link. We watched it. It's sort of like 2 documentaries edited together, one made by a someone who wanted a glossy, neutralish story of how Trump became President and another by someone with some edge who wanted to bring out the ominous dark side. Almost as if the show is based on sort of an "alternative facts" concept.

Here's the NYT review of the show.

As the program runs through Mr. Trump’s greatest hits — “They’re rapists,” “He’s a war hero because he was captured,” “Blood coming out of her wherever,” “I moved on her like a bitch” — his strategists recall how they believed that each new gaffe would be the one that finally ended his campaign. They do not, however, express any disagreement with his statements, and they describe approvingly how Mr. Trump would “double down” each time he seemed to have crossed another inviolable line.

There is also a Greek chorus of reporters and writers, who recount the fear and surprises of the campaign trail and discuss how Mr. Trump manipulated the news media without getting into how the media allowed itself to be manipulated. Most of them project an air of getting on with it, except for Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, whose agony in discussing Mr. Trump’s rise is palpable.

"In one scene, viewers witness 'children being taught how to kill people, how to behead, and how to become suicide bombers.'"

"Even for a journalist who has covered war close-up since 2001, Naj told me that what he saw in the course of recording this documentary shook him. 'That was a shocking moment to see those children learning jihad; it was the most horrible moment I felt ever in my journalism life.' That moment, he said, gave him a glimpse into the future, a look at a new generation of warriors who would have no concept of living in peace. 'I cannot see any bright future for Afghanistan,' he said."



PBS is broadcasting "ISIS in Afghanistan" tonight. Set your DVR. Another excerpt, "Teenagers in Training as ISIS Suicide Bombers":



IN THE COMMENTS: The consensus seems to be fake, fake, fake.

PBS might drop Henry Louis Gates for doing a show about Ben Affleck that avoided the unpretty news that he had slave-owning ancestors.

A PBS internal review has concluded that Gates (the eminent Harvard professor) used "improper judgment" helping the big movie star avoid an unpleasant confrontation with the information that might be seen as harmful to his image. I don't really see why it would hurt him, since we are not our ancestors, and Affleck could have used the occasion to show us the right way to respond to the legacy of slavery.

If he'd handled it well, it would have been to his credit. Affleck didn't know his email would be leaked, but we now know he just said he was "embarrassed." Embarrassed. That's so pathetic. So weak. To hear that his reaction was embarrassment and that he would prevail upon Gates to censor the information to spare him embarrassment... that's embarrassing.

UPDATE: "PBS will not run the show’s third season until staffing changes are made, including hiring a fact checker...."

"Ben Affleck has admitted he was 'embarrassed' about a slave-owning ancestor..."

"... and said that’s why he lobbied television chiefs to hide his story in a documentary about his heritage."

The Hollywood star said he regretted trying to influence what went into the programme and was now glad that his family history would be part of the discussion about the impact of slavery in America....

Affleck spoke out after hacked emails from film studio Sony Pictures Entertainment, leaked online, revealed that he had asked producers of the television programme Finding Your Roots to suppress details of the ancestor. The revelations have provoked a censorship scandal in the US: the programme’s producer, Henry Louis Gates, a history professor at Harvard, had to issue a statement insisting he retained “editorial control.”

Affleck's efforts to control PR are what you'd expect from an actor. The focus should be on Gates. He's the one with the serious obligations here.

PBS Newshour looks at racial disparities in Madison, Wisconsin.

Gwen Ifill begins: "The college town of Madison, Wisconsin is not the sort of place that leaps to mind when it comes to the discussion of racial disparities."

First of all, it's not a town. It's a city. And why isn't it "the sort of place that leaps to mind"? There's zero attention to that question. The word "liberal" does not appear in the report. Can we infer that Madison's strongly liberal politics have caused the disparities? The segment proceeds to highlight the efforts of the well-meaning white people of Madison, such as sending a social worker into the homes of young black mothers to help them play with their toddlers properly. 

We see a black middle school principal, and he says with quiet confidence and a smile: "When a student identifies a purpose for being in the classroom, and you enhance that with a culturally relevant curriculum, that’s when the light comes on. That’s when the education truly happens."

Have we, the liberal people of Madison, Wisconsin failed to show students that there is a purpose to education and failed to provide a culturally relevant curriculum, so that these are new things that could be done? The principal's statement is anodyne.

And we see a black minister — who has a program called "Justified Anger" — but his most substantive complaint is that black people are "rarely asked what we think, and that doesn’t dignify us."

So we’re the topic of every discussion, we’re the subject of every report, and we don’t get to interject, we don’t get to submit, we don’t get to say anything.

But what does he think should be done?

If you're going to come to Madison to cover the topic of racial disparities, you ought to have some meat about why Madison, specifically, has this problem. Everybody's so damned polite, including the get-angry guy.

"Meet The Press" has run out of time, right?

Politico has an item titled "NBC's 'Meet The Press' hits historic lows in the final quarter of 2013":

It's no secret that NBC's "Meet The Press" has been in bad shape of late. Indeed, the show has been on the decline since David Gregory took over in 2008. But the most recent numbers are especially troubling.

This is no mystery! The show is completely different without Tim Russert, who challenged his guests — "guests" seems like the wrong word — with questions, often built on a series of quotes — displayed on screen — that would box them in painfully. We at home enjoyed the tension and pain. Gregory expects us to look on as the respected elite of Washington are made comfortable while they deliver the speeches they arrived with. And Gregory plays favorites, shoring up liberal commentators when they seem to be stumbling, supplying arguments and glossing over rough spots for them. Russert would go in for the kill.

The erosion of the Elmo brand.

The Daily News has a story about Charla Nash, the woman whose face and hands were ripped off by a chimpanzee back in 2009. She just settled her lawsuit against the estate of the chimp's owner. She's getting a mere $4 million from the estate, but wants $150 from the state. The state, her claim says, ought to have seized the dangerous animal, which according to the Daily News "could eat at the table, drink wine from a stemmed glass, use the toilet and bathe and dress itself."

Yes, horrible and bizarre, but what's that got to do with Elmo? I wouldn't have thought about Elmo if it hadn't been for this Elmo story in the sidebar next to the picture of the chimp:



"Hairstylist claims he had sex with Elmo puppeteer, too" links to "Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash was a 'gentleman,' says former Long Island lover amidst 'Sesame Street' star's underage sex scandal."

He said he saw Clash about 30 times over a two-year period and that the puppeteer wined him and dined him, and even once sent a car to Long Island to pick him up for a date.

“I feel someone who is a liar and a molester will just keep on the pattern. That’s not the type of guy I met... He was straightforward and if I wanted to have sex and have a hookup then that was my choice....”

That's an interesting example of someone trying to provide helpful evidence and not seeing the way the other side will use it. How to successfully woo a very young guy? Send a nice car over to fetch him. Let him sit at the dinner table and drink wine from a stemmed glass.

Suddenly, I remember Elmo's role in the Charla Nash story. Nash had come over to help the owner, Sandy Herold, get the 200-pound animal into the house, and here's how The Daily News describes it:

Herold has said Travis attacked because he was being protective of her and didn't recognize Nash, who had recently changed her hairstyle, was driving a different car and waved a red Elmo doll at him.

Oddly, the long Wikipedia article on Travis the chimp doesn't mention Elmo.  In fact, the Elmo detail is missing from old articles where I would expect to see it. (For example, this Time piece focusing on the owner's explanation: "Nash arrived in an unfamiliar car and emerged with her hair done in a radically different style from what Travis was familiar with. Herold speculates that perhaps the chimp didn’t recognize Nash and viewed her as a threat.") Maybe PBS got the bad Elmo publicity scrubbed from various websites. The Elmo mention I found was in The Daily News, the news site that put the new Elmo story in the sidebar right next to the picture of the chimp that was crazed (perhaps) by Elmo.

But Elmo himself did nothing wrong. He's only a puppet/doll. A brand.

"Give it a little touch, a little push/Make love to the canvas."

"There are no limits here... this is your world... you're the Creator..."

It's the 70th birthday of the late Bob Ross... which I noticed because Google has a doodle about it.

Is "horses and bayonets" Obama's new thing — after Big Bird and Binders Full of Women?

Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams says these things aren't working:

Where are those glorious debate memes of times gone by?...

There was Battleship. And there was the night’s biggest winner, Obama’s smooth dis to Romney, “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.” Faster than you could tweet “Oh, snap!,” the inevitable Tumblr was born.

Yet the whole thing felt less fun this time around, and a lot more forced. 

Big Bird and Binders Full of Women were words that came out of Romney's mouth. "Horses and bayonets" was inserted by Obama. It's one thing to have fun with Romneyisms, quite another to accept a faux-Romneyism cooked up by Obama... especially when Obama is making fun of the military and what comes out of his head is an old children's game — suggesting that he thinks this real-life killing and dying is some kind of game — and an image of the historical military — which seems to be about the movies he's watched, not anything that about Romney.

Bob Schieffer was a little doddering, but couldn’t match Jim Lehrer for FAIL worthiness. Josh Romney did not make with the crazy eyes. In short, as we all learned long ago from “Mean Girls,” you can’t make a thing a thing any more than you can plan for spontaneity.

Speaking of movies, I've never seen "Mean Girls." I don't get the reference. I'm not in your "we all." Is it the making a thing a thing thing or the plan for spontaneity thing?

But back to the landscape of Obama's mind — where kids fiddle with plastic Hasbro toys and old war movies play, from which he concocted a Romney gaffe that Romney never gaffed — why is there no picture there of the horse soldiers of the Afghanistan War?

The U.S. special operations teams that led the American invasion in Afghanistan a decade ago did something that no American military had done since the last century: ride horses into combat.

"It was like out of the Old Testament," says Lt. Col. Max Bowers, retired Green Beret, who commanded the three horseback teams.

"You expected Cecil B. DeMille to be filming and Charlton Heston to walk out."

It was like a movie, but it really happened, and those men were heroes. Is it so hard to call them to mind, now — in these days of unmanned drones, who kill when you point at a name on a card, or hover overhead and watch as — it can't be real — our ambassador fights for his life for 7 hours?

"Let me give you a quote that he said just four years ago: ‘If you don’t have any fresh ideas, use stale tactics to scare people'..."

"... If you don’t have a record to run on, paint your opponent as someone people should run from. Make a big election about small things... That’s what Barack Obama said when he was running for president in 2008. That’s exactly what Barack Obama has become now that he is president in 2012, and we’re going to change it."

Said Paul Ryan, last night, in Daytona Beach, Florida. I think that's a bit unfair. What about Big Bird? Big Bird isn't little. It goes without saying: Big Bird is big.

Hey, remember that great old Neil Young song about Big Bird?

Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise
Big Bird flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless

The chains are locked and tied across the door... put y'all back in chains....

Obama makes an O.J. Simpson joke and he can't get the name of the SUV right.

"Elmo has been seen in a white Suburban!"

He turned the Ford into a Chevy. Maybe that was intentional, since he saved General Motors and not Ford.

Or did he pick Suburban because he hates suburbia? Stanley Kurtz has written a whole book on that subject, which he summarizes here. Excerpt:

The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.

But jokes about "Sesame Street" characters are so much more fun to play around with right now... la la la... as we run up to the election.

Obama’s former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions. That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.

Big Bird... tee hee... Elmo... ha ha... woman with a slashed throat... blood everywhere....

PBS effort to expand arts coverage yields "the usual safety-first pledge-week fare."

Says Terry Teachout (in a very amusing WSJ column). Excerpt:

This week the network launches its new arts initiative with a "festival" of nine arts-related programs... 

Except for [one dance show], all nine programs are carefully designed to please those members of the gray-ponytail set who prefer politically correct popular culture to high art. Straight plays? Who needs 'em? Jazz? Bor-ing. As for the visual arts, they don't even exist in the unserious, unchallenging world of the PBS Arts Fall Festival. Instead we get recycled Puccini, goosed-up Gilbert and Sullivan and yesterday's grunge rock....

[I]n theory, PBS isn't commercial—except, of course, that it really is. It's an audience-driven business that dons the discreet fig leaf of public service in order to justify the government subsidies, corporate contributions, foundation grants and individual donations that keep it afloat. And what do we get for all that money? "Antiques Roadshow" and "Masterpiece Mystery!"

Ha. I'm on the same page as Teachout, including being kinda interested in "Give Me the Banjo."