Stick this one out past the first clever-but-kind-of-dumb intro. After that it is really worth the effort.

Kids these days….they’ve figured out that adults—especially adults over about 30—can’t hear high frequencies.  So they have adopted a tone that was originially intended to drive teens away from a store to use as a cellphone ringtone.  In situations where they are not supposed to be using a cellphone—in class, for example—they use the ringtone to let them know when they have a call or a text message.

Give it a try–play the tone below.  If you’re a grownup you might be able to hear it if you are close to your computer, but step away or off to the side and you probably will not.  Bring a teenager into the room however, and they’ll cover their ears because it’s so loud.

Michael Winship

Last week, I attended a reunion of “The 51st State,” a robust, local public television news and public affairs program that graced the airwaves of New York City’s Channel Thirteen back in the early 1970’s. I didn’t have the pleasure of working on the show — it went off the air shortly after my arrival in Manhattan — but a lot of my friends and colleagues did, and it was a treat to see all of them again.

The reason for the gathering was the launch of an effort by Thirteen to rescue and restore old videotape from its four-and-a-half decade past. Better late than never. Over the years, as a frequent public television writer/producer and a sometime television historian, I’ve bemoaned the loss of thousands of hours of videotape, significant history, much of it erased or simply tossed into dumpsters.

Clips were shown from old “51st State” broadcasts, eliciting hoots of recognition, laughter, pride and not a few tears. What we saw was a raucous, lively, offbeat, iconoclastic, funny, rough and tumble TV program, a newscast not unlike the city it covered but totally unlike any local television news show since.
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The Independent reports that a British government report on the wall the Israeli’s have built around the occupied territories is making it difficult, if not impossible, for Palestinians to live their daily lives.

The barriers are cutting off Palestinians access to markets, employment and health care, according to the report. The Independent says the investigation looked at two kinds of enclaves. The smaller “seam enclaves” in the West Bank hold about 8,000 Palestinians, largely cut off from the other 2.5 million Palestinians who live there.

(There is a decent map of the organized territories here, which is helpful while reading the story.)

The second ­ and larger ­ category are “internal enclaves” which are bound in, sometimes virtually encircled, by the barrier and roads forbidden to Palestinians to protect “fingers” of occupied territory inhabited by Jewish settlers and to ensure the settlers’ access to Israel proper.

The report cites the example of the Bir Nabala enclave in which residents of five villages traditionally linked to Jerusalemwill have only two ways out, through tunnels, to Ramallah or the area of the West Bank village of Biddu.

And Jimmy Carter has been taking all this heat for using the word “apartheid?”

I admit it, I’m completely in the tank for Jim Webb. I know he isn’t the most liberal member of Congress by a long shot, but he sure strikes me as one of the most sincere. More importantly, I think he’s talking about an issue that doesn’t get the attention it deserves: the growing wealth gap. It was the subject of the first half of the Democratic Response to the State of the Union that he gave last night. (You can watch an excerpt below.) Read more

Just as I predicted yesterday, President Bush gave a shout-out to global warming in his State of the Union. And just as we feared, it may not amount to much.

As part of their “Fact Check” segments this morning, CNN looked at what the president’s calls for conservation and clean energy development might really mean. You can watch part of that segment here (and note that they show collapsing glaciers, exactly as we described yesterday.)

I suppose there are moments in the President’s speech that should be judged significant: his mention of global warming and a balanced budget as if he really believed in those things, for example. But the speech seemed artificial and the president distant. It was only when newly minted Sen. Jim Webb came on to give the Democratic response did you feel that you were listening to someone who not only understood the problems that confront us, but actually connected with those of us who don’t live in a cocoon of wealth and privilege.

In talking about the economy Webb mentioned the record highs of the stock market, but, he said “these benefits are not being fairly shared.” The average CEO, he pointed out, makes in a day what it takes the average worker over a year to earn.

This is not chest-thumping populism or class warfare. This is a politician recognizing and having the courage to talk about one of the fundamental problems of our society. The growing gap between the wealthy and everyone else, between the privileged and the underprivileged is, more than anything else, what betrays the true spirit of this country.

Webb also gave us one of the most straightforward and compelling indictments of this President’s reckless and incompetent war in Iraq. He had just shown the picture of his father, who had served in the military during the Berlin airlift. It was a picture, Webb said, that he took to bed every night as a boy while his father was deployed overseas.

Watch what he said next:

The revelation by Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, that in 2003 Iran offered much of what the US is now demanding but was turned down by Vice President Cheney has become a hot news story. What’s amazing to me is not that Cheney and the neocons would put their own, twisted vision of a New World Order above the interests of peace and diplomacy–I’m not that naive–but that this is a news story now.

Wilkerson was talking about this nearly a year ago–in March of 2006–and it was being reported. Granted, there weren’t a lot of people on the story then, but it was out there. The Inter Press Service reported on his comments, for example. And I even stumbled upon the story in the course of doing my radio show (previous life.)

I had a chance to have a long chat with Wilkerson about Powell, the Bush Administration and his professional life last fall. You can listen to the whole interview here (it’s about twenty minutes long) or if you want to get right to a money quote, listen to his assessment of the Bush Administration’s handling of national security issues (hint: no gold stars are involved.)

Update: I just got an email from Wilkerson and he said he thinks the reason the story may have taken this time around is the spin the journalist who reported for the BBC put on it, making it seem like Iran was a little closer to an agreement than they really were. But, he also didn’t understand why it’s news now: “I agree with you and was somewhat perplexed myself that there is so much interest when the story is quite old.”

Michael Winship

At the end of their careers, the actors David Niven and Peter Sellers were too ill to finish work on their final films (in fact, Sellers died while his was still in production). To dub their voices for the last few scenes, Hollywood hired impressionist and comic Rich Little.

So there seemed a certain fearful symmetry to last week’s announcement that Mr. Little will provide the entertainment at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, an annual ritual of establishment Washington. As the presidency of George Bush grows increasingly moribund, his approval rating at 33 percent, who better to jest the court and its scribes than someone skilled at impersonating the deceased?

Besides, Abbott and Costello aren’t available to do their “Who’s on First?” routine.
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It’s pretty amazing, really, how quickly we’ve passed the tipping point on global warming. There are a few climate change skeptics left–Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe, for example–but for the most part business, government and the public have seen one too many pictures of an ice shelf collapse to doubt that it’s for real.

(The influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is set to release it’s newest report on global warming in about a week, and it’s conservative forecast is that we’re really screwed.) Read more

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