So long, Elliot Spitzer

Oh, he may not quit, and probably won't be impeached, or whatever you might do to a wayward governor. But he's as gone as if he'd just signed on for a one-way trip to the space station. The most painful thing to watch yesterday was Governor Spitzer's good wife standing by his side as he read his soulless apology to assembled news types. No, she didn't look like the stand-by-your-man type. She looked solid and unbending. She was not presenting the loyal wife face. Still, there she was, showing up for public humiliation. Elliot's stupidity doesn't top Bill Clinton's, only on the basis of rank. Just once, however, I'd like to see one of these bastards show up for his press conference without the wife. She shoulda said no. You're on you own, dude.

Buckley. From the time when conservatives had brains and a conscience.

Cheap shot? It's mine. I'll miss this conservative. He could laugh.

Yes, there's good hype. See Starbucks.

Nobody ever called Howard Schultz stupid. Yesterday's very public training shutdown got Starbucks gazillions of dollars in media coverage, as befits an iconic company. He got the full attention of all his employees, in the most positive way possible -- attention being paid to them as first priority. I could crow all day about the brilliance of this move. Above all, it's honest. We've got problems: watch us fix them. Take notice, Pfizer. How about a little candor, double-tall.

Dr. Phil to the rescue. Of Dr. Phil.

Dr. Phil visited Britney Spears’s hospital room, then made a statement. The Spears family called him out on it. He said, if he had it to do over, he wouldn’t have made that statement. Non-apology of the month. On a Christian TV network.

Let me be clear. I’ve been a Dr. Phil fan from the start. Still am. Oprah was right. He’s a phe-nom.

This morning Phil made the rounds of the network morning shows, a phenomenon in itself -- not every superhero gets to do that. I saw his interviews with Diane Sawyer on ABC and Matt Lauer on NBC. I have to assume he made it to CBS’s cellar-dweller, too, since CBS owns his show. He repeated and embellished his non-apology. Nobody out-explains Phil.

Fact is, he flew all the way across the continent to say that this is no big deal. Mainly he wanted to slap down those tabloid lies about Oprah firing him, his wife leaving him, etc. Fine. Done.

But the part that others have been saying for him, that since he retired his psychologist’s license (in good standing, we hasten to add) means he had no legal or ethical responsibility to maintain patient confidentiality -- that fine lawyerly point, that’s a crock, folks.

Having heard Phil thunder countless times at wrong-doers on his show about his professional responsibility to turn them over to the legal authorities unless they clean up their acts, I’m not buying it. Hype wraps itself in all kinds of righteous raiments.

Dr. Phil, you moved to Hollywood. You wear the silk suit well. But your makeup’s looking a little shiny these days. It shows up in hi-def.

My new Vista Experience.

About six months ago I bought a new Sony VAIO notebook -- latest Intel double-whatever chip inside. Came with Vista. Fresh and snazzy look, I said. Of course I was skeptical--or as they say in the UK, sceptical. I have come to believe I was right to be. My long-held belief has been confirmed by my user experience with Vista--that Microsoft has a whole division whose sole task is to slow down the latest Intel chip. I can't prove it, but this division must be Microsoft's most productive and efficient.

These double-something chips are supposed to be screamers. And yes, this machine and Vista are faster than XP was on my old merely-single-doodad HP. But is my Sony running as rapidly as it can with the weight of Vista to carry? I had a nagging doubt. Now I see that many true-blue MS customers are resisting buying new Vista PCs, and Microsoft, ever customer-responsive, has obliged by giving manufacturers six more months of selling XP equipped computers. I wonder how my VAIO would run XP? But what kind of havoc would I cause if I tried retrofitting it? I don't think I can do that. I'm alone here, a reasonably skilled user with no IT geek down the hall.

Well, I finally bit the bullet this morning. I'm a morning person--at my peak when I first get up. (I know, the rest of the day is downhill, but that's life.) I got an idea and went hunting in the Control Panel for those little option lists that let you turn features on or off. I found it. In System, under Advanced something or other, there was a Performance button, and another button under that, called Visual something. (Sorry, didn't write it down. Go explore.) There it all was, a dozen or more little boxes labeled Animate this or that, Slide this or that, Translucent and Transparent the other. And big buttons at the top, including Best Appearance and Best Performance. I chose Best Performance, hit Apply. The screen said Wait a moment, shuddered and zap! What was I looking at, but Windows 3.0. It was amazing. And was it fast! Wow!

So that was it all the time. I had turned the clock back. Microsoft's been improving the plumbing of Windows, of course, over the years. But mainly, as our President might say, Windows is what it is. And, as I've always known, the Division of Chip Speed Mitigation has grown into the biggest and most powerful arm of the corporation, wielding vast power at Microsoft, albeit not very quickly. They worked on Vista for what, seven years?

I have since gone back and found the System-Advanced-Performance menu again and restored some of the settings. I will play around with this newfound toy until I'm sure I have the Vista look and feel that I want and most of the speed I can get from my double-widget Intel computer. And I'll call Sony again about that funny whine in the hard drive on battery mode.

And, next time, I'm buying a Macbook.

TOM FRIEDMAN: WHAT HE SAID, TODAY.

"9/11 IS OVER." This column says it all for me. And thanks, NYTimes.com, for making your opinion columns free again.

THE GREENING OF BLOGGERS CONTINUES.

Here's a nifty AP dispatch (via the Buffalo News): "Bloggers Consider Forming Labor Union." Now, was that inevitable, or what? Pretty soon, if not already, blogging will be considered a mainstream activity. There are already blogger conventions. Last week there was the KOMO-TV-LockerGnome meetup in Seattle, one of the tech hotbeds, hailed by many flattered folks as a true breakthrough in the acceptance of bloggers by the current Mainstream Media.

No doubt there'll soon be a guild, or a union--there'll be a wide range of entities to join, large and small. Some will seek, like the reported effort under way, to just get group health insurance.

And then there's the talk of raising standards. This makes me smile. All human pursuits spawn efforts to create elites. The anarchic among us -- I must be one of them, because I almost didn't use the word "us" for fear of appearing to join something -- are already bristling against organization of any kind. And no, I'm not joining the anarchists association, either.

Remember me? I'm the dude who said he wouldn't go to the KOMO event because I wanted to remain unaffiliated and unschmoozed, to preserve my fragile claim to impartiality. I hear I missed a fun time, and, I'm sure, some yummy hors d'oeuvres. And the thing was well-attended. I'm fine with that. Only a little wistful at missing connecting with a lot of nice people.

I'm happy to trade links with you to broaden the audience for blogs--I suspect bloggers mostly are ending up writing to the blogger audience, thinking wrongly that they're speaking to all the world of civilians.

I don't want to join trade organizations or unions, brotherhoods, or PACs, or whatever you end up calling them. My experience is that such orgs standardize practices in fields where being different is the right path.

Bergman yesterday. Today, Antonioni.

Do you doubt the Twentieth Century is over?

Bergman. Antonioni.

TRIBAL HYPE.

Here's a thought. Want a clue why the Congress can't seem to get an immigration reform bill out when everybody seems to want one? We've all forgotten how to compromise. See, as Bob Schieffer pointed out eloquently last Sunday morning, everybody wants his way. Therefore, this legislative body has forgotten that they're supposed to compromise. Thus, "Congress demonstrated yet again that it could not muster the political will to confront a major problem head-on and resolve it."

Blame isn't productive, but I'll blame the Shark wing of the Republican Party for honing the art of demonizing opponents to a razor's edge. And the Snark wing of the Democratic Party for playing at their game, poorly. The result: for some time we've had only posturing faux ideologues to choose from for Senate and House. The only thing that's "saved" us this season is our general cross-party agreement to sack the most extreme jerks and get some, any, new blood in there.

We have to do something about this gap in our current education, this slide in our political culture. If you want a searing, eye-burning look at the end result of extreme name-calling and cultural labeling in politics, just look east, at Iraq, Gaza, Rwanda, and back in time to Serbia-Bosnia-et al, Lebanon, Northern Ireland.

The longer we demonize Conservative Tribes, Liberal Tribes, Christian Tribes, and all the rest of the sub-tribes, the more we're apt to tilt our increasingly gory terrain. We're going to have to agree on something; and to do that, we must rediscover that more than one person deserves to be right.

ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT HYPE FIRES.

What do you expect to be when you grow up when your parents named you Paris Hilton, so you're like a walking billboard for the family business? I guess it could be worse: they could have called her Cleveland. Anyway, let's have a little dose of reality therapy here. Is the big story whatever Paris is doing at the moment, or is it "What is it with the media, that Paris is such a big story?"

Let's be honest with ourselves. We love gossip. We love it when the rich and beautiful fall upon their shapely glutes. We watch NASCAR for the thrill of streamlined cars smoothly negotiating scary curves? Hell no! We gape at car crashes. We want to see 'em flying through the air, end over end, smashing into a zillion pieces in a cloud of smoke and liquified rubber. It's all riveting TV, radio, magazines and newspaper stories.

We want our Congressmen and Senators to erupt over violence and nasty language on radio and TV. But if they ever actually took it all away, we'd storm Capitol Hill. The Hiltons have been playpeople for generations. Paris is just carrying on a family tradition, living up to her genes. And you, you're watching Entertainment Tonight tonight, skipping Bill Moyers. So, get over yourself.

HYPE REVIEW, II. WHAT IF THE PRODUCT ITSELF IS HYPE?

You've surely noticed, that much of television programming is about...television programming. Much of entertainment is about...other entertainment. Beginning with Entertainment Tonight, the whole celebrity fanmag market boomed. Now it's a culture. "Reality" shows are not about reality. They're about being about reality. Creating their own reality. "News," especially broadcast news, is often about covering events, not the events themselves. "Entertainment news" used to be published for the participants of the entertainment business. Now news about the news and entertainment people easily ranks above world events. So, it's inevitable that the Internet Entertainment and Communications hurricane would become bigger than events or issues of real life, assuming there still is such a thing as "real life." Examples: this conversation about blogging, and disappointment in blogging...essentially, that we can't all be famous, after all.