Lisa and I watched the first episode of T1/2HNH last night. I thought it was weak and lame, a pale imitation of TDS. I can't imagine it surviving unless they can find a way to actually make it funny. The weekend-update-style alternating short news items from the anchors was OK for one segment, but I winced when they returned to it again for the next segment. None of the other segments were too impressive either. The faux ACLU PSAs were OK as satire and commentary, but they weren't funny (I was left thinking, "Yes, sometimes while protecting everyone's rights we have to protect the rights of people with despicable views and actions"...ironic, but not exactly a barrel of laughs).. Also, as I've mentioned before, I can't stand laugh tracks. The running Ed Begley, Jr. gag was a dud too. Frankly, until I heard Begley's commitment to environmentalism mentioned twice in one weekend (on Real Time too), I had no idea about him.

Maybe the problem is that comedy isn't Surnow's specialty and that the show really needs to be infused with someone else's comic vision. The connection to reality that TDS has through the in-studio guest (where Stewart is forced to initiate a reasonable discussion with the guest...even if the guest is O'Reilly or McCain or Buchanan) was conspicuously missing too. I was left with the feel that I had just watched a collection of political-sketch rejects from SNL or In Living Color rather than a spunky, funny, yet coherent fake news show. If these first two pilots aren't lame enough to kill it, maybe they'll give it an overall makeover and new comic vision when it becomes an actual series.

The two satellite radio companies want to merge. Sounds like a good idea to me as long as we get the best of both...NFL games on Sirius, XM/DirecTV integration, and my two favorite XM channels: Fred and Big Tracks.

From an article of the same title in today's Washington Post:

Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. More interestingly...Feldman also found that liars tend to be more popular than honest people.

"It is not that lying makes you popular, but knowing when to say something and not be completely blunt is in fact a social skill," Feldman said. "We don't want to hear hurtful things, so a person who is totally honest may not be as popular as someone who lies. This is not to say lying is a good thing, but it is the way the social world operates."

Everyone would agree that telling a Nazi knocking at your door that you are not harboring Jews is a lie worth telling -- a heroic, necessary lie. What is harder to understand is that many people who lie for what we feel are contemptible reasons see themselves in the same heroic light.

"We want everyone to be honest, but it is not clear what to do when honesty bumps up against other values -- caring about another person, their feelings," said Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "People say they want to hear the truth, but that is in the abstract. Would you tell someone, 'Tell me all the things about me you don't like, all the things that annoy you'?"

It's supposed to be simple, right? Honesty is the best policy. It's wrong to lie. But then there's those little white lies and the classic Nazi knocking on the door dilemma. Honesty is sometimes called brutal for a reason. I don't know what I think about rationalization of dishonesty.

Today Greg Fielder discusses David Kuo's book Tempting Faith : An Inside Story of Political Seduction including a lengthy quote from the book evaluating the fruit of the political engagement of evangelical Christians. This line that Kuo quotes from a pastor jumped out at me:

What we've done is turn a mission field into a battlefield.