Quick Takes

• "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is 40 years old this month. I watched the first broadcast-- I was 11 years old-- and loved it. Did you have any idea, as Factmonster reports and Mary Katharine Ham notes, that the show almost wasn't aired because some considered it too overtly religious? (Remember - Linus quotes from Luke 2.)
  

• Hugh Hewitt gets PBS right today:

PBS is without question an elitist, left-of-center, Beltway establishmentarian media organization, which occasionally produces high quality broadcasts. It is in deep denial about its core bias, and always has been.

No intellectually honest person can quibble with that conclusion.

• Will the 9/11 Commission ever go away? Or are we doomed to continual hectoring by that deeply flawed collection of self-important former politicians?

• Does Celebrity Heinous Murderer of the Week Tookie Wiliams deserve to live? Read this and tell me if you think so.

• In our "unintentional humor" category, we note this L.A. Times report that Valerie Plame is leaving the CIA:

Plame, 42, worked undercover for the CIA tracking weapons proliferation but
saw her clandestine career imperiled after she was identified as an agency
operative in the summer of 2003 in a syndicated column by Robert
Novak.

Friends said the mother of 5-year-old twins wanted to spend more time with her family, and that although she agreed to be photographed last year with her husband for an article about the case in Vanity Fair magazine, she had no plans to speak out.

From Vanity Fair, January 2004 (HT: Slate)

"Clandestine career imperiled?" Really? And that shot in Vanity Fair was, well, just something that happened. No harm to her clandestine career there, was there? "No plans to speak out." Yup.

• More unintentional humor: Mary Mapes has a (deeply dishonest) long piece in Vanity Fair about how she was really right about those Bush National Guard memos and all those right-wing meanie bloggers were wrong.

Gotta love Vanity Fair. I'll bet many of its readers actually believe everything Mapes says.

• Finally, if you want to see some attempted satire that fails because it just hits too hard and becomes mean, check out Joel Stein's piece in today's L.A. Times. Excerpt:

We Jews find it a little embarrassing that adults can still make such a big fuss over Christmas. To us, Jesus was just a cool guy everyone liked because he died young. And even 16-year-old girls eventually take down their James Dean posters. . . . So please, go nuts with your celebration, with your lying to children about where presents come from and your beverages made from raw eggs and your desperate use of greenery to get women to kiss you.

Does the Times have anyone willing to serve as an editor?