Arrianna/Colbert make Time's "100 Most Influential People" list

[CatWoman]

Arianna Huffington
The Woman Who Made a Sharp Left
By AL FRANKEN

I first met Arianna in 1995 at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. We had both been invited by the Washington Times, and I insisted on sitting next to the striking Greek-born redhead (though not, strictly speaking, redheaded-born Greek). We hit it off. Arianna introduced me to her friend Newt Gingrich. I told her the Gingrich revolution was a fraud. Arianna had signed on for the part of the revolution that wanted to unravel the social safety net and replace it with faith-based programs. She took the mission very seriously but soon discovered that the Gingrich Republicans did not.

"Effective compassion" was just a fig leaf for closing down the Department of Education, cutting Medicare and getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency. A disillusioned Arianna took to bed—with me—in our "Strange Bedfellows" segment on the TV show Politically Incorrect. No doubt because of my (persuasive) prowess and Arianna's intellectual openness, she switched, becoming a lefty. With her indefatigable persistence, resourcefulness and good humor, Arianna, 55, has gone from ambitious project to ambitious project with varying degrees of success, finding herself the proprietor of the widely read, hugely influential liberal blog Huffington Post.

None of this would have happened were it not for me. And it seems oddly ironic that it is Arianna, not I, who has been named one of TIME's 100 most annoying (sorry, influential) people. Arianna should be writing about me.

Franken is a humorist and an author as well as a talk-show host on Air America Radio




Stephen Colbert
What's So Funny About This Guy?
By BRIAN WILLIAMS
Many people are surprised to learn that Stephen Colbert was born in France. As a young boy in the town of Fronsac in the Bordeaux region, he would go home each day after school and work for his parents on the family farm. After his father's goat-cheese business failed, Colbert went by boat to the U.S. To help make ends meet (and egged on by friends who adored his Franco-American delivery and comic timing), Colbert performed at a small comedy club in New York City one Friday night on a lark. As the French say, "Il a tue !" You know the rest of the story.

Actually, none of that is true. I made the whole thing up. And in that, this piece has a lot in common with The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Colbert, 41, is the bawdy counterweight to cable-news talking heads who each night, just a few channels away, deliver a fresh supply of material for parody. In Colbert Country, a guest is more of a foil than a source of intelligence. The high and mighty drop by anyway, along with the mediocre and recently demoted. As a spin-off graduate of the Jon Stewart school of comedy, Colbert launched under intense scrutiny and quickly delivered. While his nightly audience is tiny (forgive me here) by network-evening-news standards—1 million viewers a night vs. roughly 25 million to 30 million watching the networks—Colbert is sitting atop a ratings gold mine, as his young viewers make up the demographic most attractive to advertisers.

My friends tell me that Colbert's mimicry of the narcissistic, preening, puffed-up personalities who inhabit TV news these days is spot on. Personally, I don't see it, but they find him very funny.

Williams is the anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News


http://www.time.com/time/2006/time100/

[ShortnFiery]

1. Excellent News! I admire both persons :-) eom

[katinmn]

2. Hooray!

well deserved.

[jsamuel]

3. thanks for this :)

[REP]

4. What? No Mention of Balls?

Well!

[CatWoman]

7. that's "balls-o-licious" to you!!!

:D

[REP]

10. Colbert is Most Balls-o-licious in His Sailor Suit

Or are me and my mom the only ones who remember how good he looked in that TDS piece? Mmmmmm, sailor ballsolicious.

[NYCGirl]

5. I'm glad that Al Franken got to write Arianna's article! NT

[Phx_Dem]

6. anyone surprised that williams "doesn't get it" ?

we need about a thousand more coberts, huffingtons and stewarts....

[CatWoman]

8. yeah, I saw that

fucking dweeb.

[Phx_Dem]

13. williams typifies the very people colbert skewers! nt

[ticapnews]

11. He was joking...

Brian Williams gets it.

[Phx_Dem]

14. really? I did not think he was being sarcastic

but maybe he was.

[KittyWampus]

19. Yes, I believe Willliams is an "It-Getter"! :-D

[glitch]

23. Yeah, he gets it. Facetious wit is difficult to portray in writing

You kind of need the tongue-in-cheek facial expression for clues.

[Dora]

17. I suspect that if Williams had posted that text here on DU,

He probably would have used the :sarcasm: tag.

I think he was trying to be funny.

[KittyWampus]

18. he might be engaging in a bit of oblique, sardonic humor there.

and thus ultimately having a pull at the readers' legs.

[Phx_Dem]

22. little too oblique for me I guess! nt

[CatWoman]

9. look at who else made the list

Al Gore
America Takes a Fresh Look at "Ozone Man"
By KAREN TUMULTY
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore's political consultants counseled him to quit talking about the issue that, since his college days, had stirred his passions more than any other. Voters didn't care about global warming, his political brain trust told the then Vice President, and going on about it would make him look like the kind of fuzzy-headed extremist that George Herbert Walker Bush had once mocked as "Ozone Man."

Gore took that advice, which may help explain why he came up short in that race. It also may account for the zeal that the man who describes himself as a "recovering politician" has displayed in his second act. Rather than retire to the sidelines of public life, Gore has stayed in the game by continuing to fight for the environment and other causes close to his heart—whether as a teacher, an investor whose fund puts its money in socially responsible ventures or an entrepreneur who founded a youth-oriented television network.

Gore, 58, now finds himself in his unlikeliest role yet: movie star. The lecture on global warming that he has been giving for decades to any audience that would let him set up his flip charts has been turned into the indie documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The movie got raves at the Sundance Film Festival in January and will begin rolling out in theaters across the country in late May. In Los Angeles theaters, the trailers have been getting ovations.

There could hardly be a more opportune time for the country to be giving Gore another look, given that the man who edged past him in Florida is at his all-time low in the polls. But while Gore has not entirely shut the door on another run for President, he insists that he is "not planning" to be a candidate again. After all, 2008 is still a long way away. And in the meantime, Gore has decided, there's a planet to save.

[Phx_Dem]

12. I hope Gore runs

He has won once, just think how much better he could than '00 with a good VP candidate.

[Gabi Hayes]

29. ahhhhhh....Tumulty....gives me a chance to highlight a REAL journalist:

Matt Taibbi on Karen Tumulty....viciousness alert.....in which Taibbi stages a tournament of the worst of the worst journalists covering the 04 election, staged in a Wimbledon-like format:



Karen Tumulty is Lendl in his prime. Mortals don't stand a chance against her. She is the standard-bearer for a new breed of campaign journalist: the reporter who is incapable of comprehending the election as anything other than a horse race. She appears quite honestly not to understand that it might have some other significance. In the old days, reporters used to lapse into poll-watching and political sportswriting on the campaign trail when they got tired or lazy. Thanks to shameless hacks like Tumulty, the sportswriting has actually replaced issue politics as the only meaningful story of the race.

Tumulty's articles are all the same; they are all about momentum, who has it and why. Every piece is essentially a reaction dealt in response to some new poll, often commissioned by Time and limited to a few dozen mysterious respondents (a recent widely cited Time poll showing Bush ahead had just 857 respondents). The deck to a typical Tumulty piece reads something like this: "A new poll shows Kerry trailing Bush by nine points in four key battleground states. TIME looks at why the Kerry campaign was fucked from the start—and what it must do now to convince us it takes our poll numbers seriously."

Tumulty's most delicious moments of happiness come when she can report on those panicked reactions by the candidates—as she did here on a recent panel appearance on CNN:

What we're seeing is a lot more aggressiveness out of the Kerry campaign and they're continuing to drive this message. They have lost the timidity that a lot of Democrats were criticizing them for. And of course the Bush campaign is ready for it and they're going to hit back just as hard.

Aggressiveness...timidity...ready for it...hit back just as hard... Is she talking about a football game, or an election? This is as full-of-shit and meaningless as political journalism gets.


...............

if you liked that, try this....the entire series


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1078448

[shireen]

15. Brian's piece about Big Balls

My friends tell me that Colbert's mimicry of the narcissistic, preening, puffed-up personalities who inhabit TV news these days is spot on. Personally, I don't see it, but they find him very funny.

No Brian, you would not get it. You're a narcissistic, preening, puffed-up news anchor.

[KittyWampus]

20. Um, Williams is joking there... and he can definately say "Gotcha"

:)

[Beaverhausen]

16. I saw Arianna speak on Sunday at the Los Angeles Book Festival

This was the panel she was on:

No Boundaries: Media and the Freedom of Ideas

Moderator Ms. Karen Grigsby Bates
Ms. Arianna Huffington
Mr. Chris Mooney
Ms. Catherine Seipp
Mr. Jules Witcover

It was really interesting. Lots of criticism not only of politicians but of the press, most of whom have blood on their hands over Iraq. And boy, Arianna does NOT like Judith Miller. There was fire coming out of her ears every time she mentioned her.

[underpants]

21. Are there printable transcripts of his speech available??

I've seen the video but I am trying to find a printable version.

[grace0418]

24. Here's a link to some transcripts...

http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=2819#more-2819

[wiley]

26. Hey, I'd do Colbert, unless he has those rotting Roquefort stained

teeth all those French people have. I thought Brian Williams was very funny. He trashed his preening self with a straight face. Back to the National Disaster in Ohio....

[wiley]

27. Sorry!. Missed the post!

[MilesColtrane]

25. I'd do Arianna despite her nasal, Grecian, Minny Mouse voice.

Let's not smack down the converted silver spooners.

[Gabi Hayes]

28. so did Tyra Banks!

what an idiotic list

[NJ Democrats]

30. Also making it was

Gore and Clinton!!!