The 1/2 Hour News Hour Recap - July 22nd, 2007
We’ll start off this recap by examining some of the “produced” segments. The first such segment, entitled _Feature Story_ featured an interview with John Edwards. It was a pretty predictable affair as he’s getting his hair cut, has a facial mask on, cucumbers on his eyes, etc…all while talking about the concept of his “two Americas”. The other “in-studio” segment was dealt with the issue of immigration. It was a parody on the typical “immigration debate” staged on cable news shows, where they put a true expert on the topic up versus someone who just spouts populist rhetoric. The rhetoric, of course, is a big winner with the crowd and the expert hardly gets a word in. The final produced segment was a “man on the street” type segment, where the question was asked, “would you vote for a black man?” This was then taken to extreme by asking things like “would you vote for a leper?”, “would you vote for a dwarf?”…resulting in nearly everyone answering “yes” to all questions, except “would you vote for a woman?” which would got some mixed results.
The interlude segments this week were fairly strong. The _Hollywood Helping Humanity_ featured Ryan Ziering asking for people to “donate their unused Carbs” while the ACLU commercial explained how they sued to back up the University of North Carolina in the university’s effort to make all their students study the Koran. The “Guy White, Closet Conservative” cartoon wasn’t the best one I’ve seen, dealing with Guy deciding to announce to the company he was a conservative, but ultimately backing down.
Dennis Miller’s _The Buck Stops Here_ lacked a cohesive theme this week, instead going for a bunch of quick hitters. He discussed Hillary’s War Vote and her confusing spin of it, how liberals say “but” while moderates say “however”, and how the killing of the terrorists before they kill us can be though of as “pre-emptive universal health care”. Overall, it wasn’t close to his stinging cristism of Harry Reid and was more in line with his earlier efforts that were on the weaker side.
The news segments on the Half Hour News Hour have been strong through my last few viewings and this week was no exception. It seems like both of the co-hosts are really getting their timing down and Jennifer Robertson (who goes by “Jennifer Lang” on the show) has really taken her performance up a notch from when the show started. Some joke highlights include: Rosie moving up the terrorist priority list due to the al-Qaeda in Iraq’s leader being captured, Gore’s Daughter’s wedding having more people at it than his _Live Earth_, Rudy writing his “Prenup with America”, a Democratic debate focusing on Gay issues will be done as a musical, and the coup de grace: Democrats plan to show how serious they are about the war on terror, by promising to have more sleepovers.