This from the trusty WSJ e-mail news alert service:

Walt Disney and Cablevision struck a deal late Sunday to end their financial feud, restoring Disney’s New York-area ABC station for millions of homes less than 15 minutes after the start of the Academy Awards broadcast.

In doing so, both companies missed a huge opportunity to, however inadvertently, teach millions of northeasterners that they could live without the Oscars.  An enlightening unintended consequence of their business spat was, alas, not to be.

The winner of this year’s Oscar for obsessive interest in things trivial and distracting from the myriad problems that we face…… is us.

                          

“Broadcasts of the New York ABC television station weren’t available early Sunday to customers of Cablevision, after Cablevision and ABC owner Walt Disney apparently failed to resolve a financial dispute over monthly subscription fees.”

This is wonderful news.  A small but important start; may the stand-off endure.  Considering how innocuous pop culture is, how downright destructive it’s been to our national intellect, and the otherwise productive people-hours we Americans waste watching two dimensional reality TV instead of living and enlarging our own three dimensional lives, the positive impact of removing a small but important fraction of the mind-numbing input that assaults us daily is cause for celebration.

And tonight, ABC is scheduled to broadcast the Oscars!

Risky strategic timing by both sides, and hopefully neither buckles under pressure.  No red carpets, no designer dresses, no crocodile tears on the podium.

No televised hypocrisy from the Hollywood political dilettantes, who narcissistically spend millions of dollars to pat themselves on the back while the leftover scraps from their post-award events could feed what’s left of the Haitian people for a week.  (And to the usual retort that points out the good works the stars’ charitable foundations are doing, one has to wonder whether they donate because their PR people see it as a necessary evil, and whether their donations are as big a percentage of their incomes as the working stiffs who either tithe on Sundays or are moved to send in a larger check to the Red Cross than they can comfortably afford.)

One down, around 500 more channels to go.

                          

Funny Or Die has a great video up today that “brings together the Saturday Night Live actors who have played every American president since Gerald Ford” (plus a not-to-miss guest spot by Jim Carrey playing “The Gipper”). In the video, Barack Obama gets a visit from the ex-Presidents to get a few tips about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

By now we’ve learned there is no Invisible Hand Of The Market and there is no such thing as Utopian Socialism. Like the presidents before him, Obama has to balance capitalism and socialism. That’s a pretty tall order. So criticize him if you must – and I guess we must – but remember that the handful of presidents before him couldn’t do it either. If they had, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.

                          

Obama and crew ran the campaign as well as they’ve run the government poorly. Even Dems don’t understand the current substance or long range implications of the health care bill that Pelosi and Reid, using string, glue and Parliamentary backdoor maneuvers, are attempting to cobble together.

As for Charlie, he’s not stupid so it must be pride that fueled his resistance, until a few minutes ago, to exiting gracefully rather than in handcuffs.

Either that, or he’s in need of low doses of Aricept.

Congress as a whole would take a baby step towards regaining the public’s trust if they’d pass a modest and somewhat bipartisan bill without the shenanigans, embodying the Republican points that Obama’s in accord with, as per this morning’s NYTimes.

And the one and only productive move Pelosi’s made in the past year was to finally wrestle the gavel out of Charlie’s hands. If you wanted to precipitate a geometric increase in the number of Tea Party members, there’d have been no better way than to leave a guy with tax problems in charge of taxing the rest of us.

                          

Last night, a strident, rude, but constitutionally astute fellow brought to my attention a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Judiciary committee, confirming that some of the recent appointees to prominent posts in the department had previously defended a number of Gitmo detainees.

Now I’m aware that theoretically a lawyer’s job is to to provide the best advocacy possible for their client, regardless of their own personal biases, whether that client is a terror suspect or the United States of America (the client who pays the bills at Justice).  It doesn’t, however, take much more than a smidgen of common sense to come to the conclusion that an attorney willing to defend detainees, whether they’re guilty as charged or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time during a random sweep, probably leans at least a  little left of center.  In the same respect, an attorney whose political bent leans to the right, would, while acknowledging the rights of these defendants to competent representation, almost certainly not volunteer for the gig.

There are precious few of us who can be “Fair Witnesses”‘, the fictional arbiters in Robert Heinlein’s classic “Stranger In A Strange Land”.  These characters underwent intense training in disciplines ranging from pure logic to the intricacies of psychology before being certified as being able, with complete and utter neutrality, to see all sides of a picture and then resolve a dispute in an objective and fair manner.

But we, alas, are not Fair Witnesses.  Swear as we might, with the sincerest of intentions , to an oath of neutrality and relentless advocacy, our beliefs and biases can’t be so thoroughly compartmentalized that they don’t play some role in our behavior.  I hate to break it to you, but those attorneys on TV pursuing justice regardless of their own feelings are fictional characters.

At the very least, current Justice Department personnel who recently defended detainees or terror suspects should recuse themselves from cases involving defendants similar to their former clients, if for no other reason than appearance’s sake.  And appearance aside, can they prosecute, with the same zeal, those whose cohorts they defended by choice?

If Gitmo prisoners or other terror suspects have civilian trials rather than military tribunals, the impartiality of all concerned should be as above reproach as we imperfect mortals, we less than fair witnesses, can muster.