television

Maybe I'm just not enough of a Super Bowl watcher, but here I hear all this about the first time an African American head coach leads an NFL team into the Super Bowl -- not once, but two times over -- and yet as I watch this game, I wonder where the camera shots of the coaches are.

You'd think these players were just going on their own.

I can remember games of yore, seeing Landry and Ditka and Parcells and all those other coaches running teams at Super Bowls.

So where are Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith?

Is CBS afraid of showing America the coaches of this game? What's up, CBS?

2nd Quarter Update: Okay, so they finally mentioned Dungy and Smith. They even gave them each about a second of screen time. No talk about game plans, though. Or game strategy.

I haven't watched the Super Bowl in a few years, except for occasional check-ins on the commercials. But has the game changed so much that coaches just don't matter any more?

Still watching....

4th Quarter update: The coaches have arrived. Or at least Tony Dungy has arrived.

Wow, even a little bio close-up!

The fantasy comes in many forms. There's the notion that 9/11 was planned by Saddam Hussein, that popular non-fact suggested as true by the Bush Administration and held as gospel by many Americans even today.

There's the fantasy that terrorism is best fought by bombing civilian neighborhoods rather than international police work.

There's the fantasy that terrorist without industry, without nations, without centralized control are "fascists" while nations that suspend civil liberties and quash dissent and torture prisoners and kill civilians in bloody occupations somehow could never be "fascist."

There's the fantasy that patriotism can be measured by winning a political argument, like, say, sticking it out in Iraq, rather than winning this war on terror, whose goal is in conflict with the Iraq occupation.

There's the fantasy that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and don't apply to America.

There's the fantasy that being "strong" can make up for being stupid.

And there's even the fantasy that, while thousands are dying in a bloody, smoky, burning hell, nobody uses four-letter words.

"This is example No. 1," said Martin Franks, executive vice president of CBS Corp., of the decision by two dozen CBS affiliates to replace or delay "9/11" — which has already aired twice without controversy — over concerns about some of the language used by the firefighters in it.

"We don't think it's appropriate to sanitize the reality of the hell of Sept. 11th," Franks said. "It shows the incredible stress that these heroes were under. To sanitize it in some way robs it of the horror they faced."

The stations, including Fox Television Stations Inc. and Sinclair, cite the FCC's large and arbitrarily enforced censorship laws. However, the political views of Fox and Sinclair are not exactly secret.

Still it's hard to argue with a bunch of FCC boobs who got all upset over Janet Jackson's boob -- or the boobs in Congress who facilitated such overreaction.

Congress recently boosted the maximum fines the FCC can impose for indecency from $32,500 to $325,000.

So far, about a dozen CBS affiliates have indicated they won't show the documentary, another dozen say they will delay it until later at night and two dozen others are considering what to do.

So on this upcoming 5-year anniversary of 9/11, we can reflect on how tough the US government has gotten on the terror of four-letter words uttered by true American heroes.

...we share this recent classic.

Note: I browsed through all the YouTube offerings of this clip, and the sound quality ranges from the marginal here to the downright awful on some others. Still, please, click on Play and watch. These are six minutes and 41 seconds you won't regret.

The Reclusive Leftist points to yet another example of how sexist chauvinism is accepted in ways that would never be tolerated by decent folks when it comes to racism.

Imagine if the host of a popular TV show on dog training had made the following remarks:

“Black people are the only species that is wired different from the rest. They always apply affection before discipline. White people apply discipline then affection, so we’re more psychological than emotional. All animals follow dominant leaders; they don’t follow lovable leaders.”

Of course, if we were to ask sometimes-funny but always-self-important culture critic Bill Maher about this, Diane Dees points out that he'd dismiss us for not focusing on the important shit.

Tonight on Real Time, Maher said something about what the Bush administration had done to "the working man." Mary Frances Berry, one of the panelists, said "The working woman, too. You said just 'the working man.'"

Then he said it: "There are so many more important issues. Don't hang me up here."

No wonder we're seeing self-labeled "progressives" willing to advocate forced pregnancy pragmatism in pursuit of power. Self-autonomy and equal rights don't pass the hill-of-beans test.

Just shut up, girls, and go make us some sandwiches. You know we're on your side, right?

Uh huh.

Now isn't this fall's election just so full of promise?

I'd heard about this but never bothered to go look. I was browsing YouTube this morning and saw the video, and thought that maybe I'm not the only one who hasn't seen it yet.

So here ya go.

A little Googling reveals that Josh Kornbluth was told about bathroom mic protocol on his first day in the business — but had forgotten about the second mic. Eep!