Month: August 2005

He died at his New York home this evening. I knew it was going to be fast for him. Lung cancer is tough to beat. And when he took himself off air a few months ago, it had to be bad. Television is like the blood in the veins of these people. They HAVE to be on camera. It is their life. When they voluntarily take themselves out of the anchor chair, they are either crazy or they are dying. Dying from cancer is not a pretty thing. You can’t control the effects it has on your body. It was good that Jennings took himself off the TV when he did. Otherwise, we would have noticed the changes. It’s kind of like seeing someone dead in a casket. They never really look like they did when they were alive. You never get that last image out of your head. At least now, we’ll all get to remember Peter Jennings as he was on the set of ABC News.

TV Newser: A Life in Photos

How ABC Announced Jennings Death On-Air:

Charlie Gibson broke the news on ABC at 11:41pm ET. He spoke with Ted Koppel over the phone. “He was a warm and loving and surprisingly sentimental man,” said Koppel. And then Barbara Walters. “We all knew how sick Peter was, but tonight when we heard the news, I think it’s heartbreaking for all of us. We, we just prayed he would make it,” said an emotional Walters. “He just died much too young.” Gibson then turned to Dianne Sawyer, live in studio. “I just hope that Kayce and Elizabeth and Christopher really know that we’re family too, and that he really did make us raise our sights,” Sawyer said. “It’s customary to say, he will not come again. Peter Jennings will not come again.” Sawyer looked away with tears in her eyes. Then Gibson signed off, “He was a graceful, he was an elegant man. He was a man of manners. He was also a terrific reporter and a great anchor for ABC News, as we say, our leader. And he is gone. I’m Charles Gibson in New York.” (h/t newsmonger)

Now the question remains – who will be the next anchor for ABC? I’m sure they’re not too far from an announcement. It’s likely that when Jennings announced that he was going to leave the air, he already knew he was going to die. I bet they’ve been working behind the scenes for weeks now finding his replacement. Who’s it going to be?

I was thinking exactly the same thing myself.

I’m heading out of town today. Blogging will commence tomorrow.

At 11:27 PM Pacific Time, my Site Meter logged 500,000 unique visitors to this blog. Reader number 500K lives in the Central Time Zone and was accessing the blog using WebTV.

Thanks to all of you who read PunditGuy regularly.

Now, on to 1 million.

Guess who’s playing at the Montana State Fair tonight?

“As soon as someone wants to ban perfection, I have to squash ’em,” he said with a laugh. “I have to just crush ’em, and I crush ’em by promoting the beauty and the perfection of hunting, fishing and trapping and the Second Amendment.

“I have a standard policy that any time I hear the words ‘animal’ and ‘rights’ in the same sentence, I’m killing a hundred of something, and it brings them much, much anguish, and I couldn’t be more pleased.”

Ted.Nugent.

The Motor City Madman warns tonight’s fairgoers to be ready for a wild show that will include Black Panther military weapons on stage.

“There’ll be no Montana State Fair like this one, I promise you,” he said.

It’s a beautiful thing.

I knew Steven Tyler from Aerosmith was getting up there in age, but wow, he’s 57 now, which isn’t really that old if you’re a Business CEO, a lawyer, or a Farmer, or maybe a Real Estate Agent, or some desk occupation like that.

But, when you’re a rock star, and your concerts are populated by kids aged 10 and up, well…

Go here and look at the photo. Pay particular attention to Tyler’s neck. That’s a old man’s neck if I’ve ever seen one.

There’s nothing worse than a messy Wiki.

Wikipedia, the Web encyclopaedia written and edited by Internet users from all over the world, plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying on Friday.

Wales, who launched Wikipedia with partner Larry Sanger in 2001, said it needed to find a balance between protecting information from abuse and providing open access to improve entries.

“There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we’d freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed,” he said.

Citing a recent example of vandalism, Wales recalled how following the election of the new Pope Benedict in April, a user substituted the pontiff’s photo on the Wikipedia site with that of the evil emperor from the Star Wars film series.

“The picture was only on the page for a minute. But whoever opens the article at this moment will get annoyed — and therefore doubt our credibility,” he told the paper.

 He said that setting up a form of “commission” might be one way of deciding which entries could be “frozen” in perpetuity.

Hey, I can completely understand his gripe. I have a hard enough time dealing with trackback and comment SPAM on this blog…I can only imagine what it is like for the Wikipedia folks. I’m sure there are plenty of jerks out there whose sole purpose in life is to deface wiki articles. Everything possible should be done to stop that kind of activity.

Hopefully though, their intention is only to deal with the vandals, and not start editing factual content or restricting access.

Deal with the thugs, but keep Wikipedia free and open.

I’m sure they’re working as fast as they can, but…

Network of sonar sensors to provide tsunami warnings for 27 countries.

A network of sonar sensors able to instantly transmit data from the Indian Ocean floor to tsunami warning centers in 27 countries could be in place within a year, international experts said on Friday. UNESCO is establishing the system through its Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission’s Intergovernmental Coordination Group (ICG), and is on track to finish it by mid-2006.

They need to do whatever possible, technically and scientifically, to put a reliable system in place before the next tragedy occurs.

Arthur Chrenkoff will stop blogging soon. He’s got a new job and it requires that he give up his personal blog as a result. While I’m happy for Arthur and his future, I’m sad that his regular reports on Iraq will end. Throughout the blogosphere, there was nothing as comprehensive and current as his information.

He’s also been a great promoter of this blog, and has given me a huge amount of support.

He’ll be missed.  

And oops, the way he talks! Columnist and talking head Robert Novak said a bad word and walked off the set in the middle of a rant with James Carville on CNN’s Inside Politics today.

Bob should switch to decaf. And Carville is lucky he didn’t get punched.

Video can be viewed here, or here.

UPDATE: CNN has given Bob a little instant vacation.

“Bob Novak’s behavior on CNN today was inexcusable and unacceptable. Mr. Novak has apologized to CNN, and CNN apologizes to its viewers for his language and actions. We’ve asked Mr. Novak to take some time off,” a CNN spokeswoman told us.

But, (as of 4:30 PM PDT) they keep the video of his escapade on the CNN homepage, milking it for all its worth. Oh yeah, and their version bleeps out the bad word. Heh.

MORE: Novak calms down. (via NY Daily News Dish)

A calmer Novak said later: “He (Carville) said I was trying to please the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal. I thought that was an unacceptable questioning of my integrity. I overreacted.

“I’ve gotten into a lot of shouting matches with James when I’m unable to outshout him. I just got a little frustrated.”

CNN host Ed Henry said on the air that he’d hoped to ask Novak about the grand jury inquiry into his column revealing the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, but Novak denied that’s why he bailed out.

“I knew what he was going to ask,” he told us, “and I knew the answer I was going to give.”

Getting frustrated with James Carville during a discussion/debate is COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE as far as I’m concerned. The guy drives me nuts. I don’t know how Mary Matalin does it.

STILL MORE: Now, an official apology from Bob. Carville should come out and say that his shot below the belt was inappropriate and that he’s sorry.

You’re next James.

MORE MORE: Carville speaks, with Josh Marshall. I’m copying the whole thing here, since The Coffee House server is being overrun with traffic.

Like a lot of you, I’ve been trying to figure out just what on earth happened with Bob Novak yesterday on Inside Politics.  So today I talked to James Carville and got to ask him a few of the questions about just what happened.

Atrios has a post on his site in which he suggests that Carville’s comment — which seems on the surface not to have been something that would have generated such an over-the-top response — may have been a reference to something more specific that only Carville and Novak or other insiders knew about.

That made a lot of sense to me.  So I asked. 

But Carville said, nope.  Nothing more than what it seemed like on the surface.  And he had no idea why it would have set Novak off. It didn’t seem like a big deal to him either. “At the time I thought it was like a 2.5 [on the scale on pundit show smackdowns].  But when I heard it again later, I thought, no, it’s more like a 1.5.”

Carville also told me that he didn’t get any sense during the interview or in anything that happened off the air that “something was building” or any other sense that the guy was about to snap.  It was as out of the blue to him as it was to everyone watching.

In general, Carville seemed to have the same reaction when I talked to him — a mix of genuinely not knowing what to make of the whole thing, mixed with genuine bemusement and maybe some latent hints of laughter — that he does on the tape as Henry gamely tries to continue the interview as though nothing had happened.

What Carville did say was that the tension seemed entirely to do with Ed Henry, not with him, as many others have pointed out.  And I’ve also learned that when the copy of Who’s Who was sitting there on the table, Henry apparently had it bookmarked with a Post-It note to right about where you’d expect to find Wilson’s entry.

All that together makes me think that the real money quote isn’t the barnyard epithet that sent Novak to the CNN penalty box, but the “Just let it go!” he barked at Ed Henry as he started to bolt the stage. 

To my eyes that line seemed to have a lot more uummmph behind it than the BS headliner.  And maybe that’s why Novak — or I guess, yet another reason why Novak — stomped down to the 9th floor to talk to the CNN brass after he left the set.

Spoken like a true liberal, thanks Josh.

What-eh-vah.