Over at The Thread, Tobin Harshaw has an excellent round-up of responses to Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, being held tomorrow. Stewart has been riding a wave of positive coverage recently, scoring Barack Obama as a guest this week on The Daily Show and attracting a presumed turnout of hundreds of thousands to the Rally. But he’s also attracted no small amount of criticism, both for the politics of the rally (“It doesn’t go far enough!” or “It goes way too far for a comedian!”) and for his quasi-softball interview with Obama.

Harshaw links to a piece that Ryan Kearney wrote that I think sums up the situation nicely:

As the criticism of Stewart’s rally proves, we are delusional: Writers often aren’t very thoughtful at all. We’re just bitter. We loved Stewart because he voiced that bitterness we felt — about politics, about television, and even about our own careers. Now that his narrative has diverged from our own, we fear he’ll become just another media figure — or worse, a politician — about whom we’re forced to write articles. Some of us, consequently, reject Stewart in the way we might reject a boyfriend or girlfriend who has left us for something bigger: He or she is already gone, but somehow we convince ourselves that the decision to leave the relationship was ours to make.

For some reason, I’m reminded of the words of Homer Simpson, who once intoned, “I can’t live the button-down life like you. I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. Sure, I might offend a few of the bluenoses with my cocky stride and musky odors – oh, I’ll never be the darling of the so-called ‘City Fathers’ who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards, and talk about ‘What’s to be done with this Homer Simpson?'”

In short: Get over yourselves, people. Stewart may be struggling to straddle his various roles as political commentator, comedian, show host, etc. But the man has achieved wild success and most importantly, he’s proven he can make us laugh the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time in spite of horrifying developments in our political landscape. Any shortcomings in our public/political discourse are surely more the result of an ossified, complacent punditry and a journalistic establishment beholden to corporate interests and sensationalism, rather than a talented funnyman who’s trying to take his comedy to new places (literally). Don’t shoot the court jester, even if he tries to get serious every now and then.

The Independent has an essay from Patrick Cockburn who was stricken with polio during the summer of 1956. In addition to being a sobering first-person account of what it was like to carry the debilitating disease, the essay also contains some insights into the nature of the polio outbreak, and why some areas were more prone to outbreak than others:

I have no memory of realising that I could no longer walk, still less that this might be permanent. The poliomyelitis virus, to give the disease its full name, attacks the nerves of the brain and spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Some shrivel and die. In other cases the nerves are only stunned and can be brought back to life by courses of physical exercise over a two-year period. After three weeks at St Finbarr’s I was sent to an orthopaedic hospital at Gurranebraher, on a hill overlooking Cork. It was a horrible place. Its single-storey isolation blocks had been built for TB patients and rapidly converted for use in the polio epidemic. I was lonely because Andrew had recovered and gone home, only his big toe affected by the disease. The nurses maintained a gruff, barrack- room discipline. One night I woke up and heard a nurse telling a small boy who had messed his bed that if he did it again he would have to eat his own excreta. Afterwards I had difficulty sleeping because I was frightened the same thing would happen to me.

Just three weeks after its release, a high-quality copy of “The Social Network” is already being torrented like it’s going out of style. According to Torrentfreak, the rip comes from a studio source (as with all rips of this quality) and is being downloaded so quickly, it may become one of the most pirated films of the year.

Earlier today, Gawker published a piece, deceptively-titled “I Had a One-Night Stand with Christine O’Donnell,” which was theoretically notable because of O’Donnell’s notorious stances on abstinence education and masturbation. The piece, which was paid for by Gawker and published anonymously, details an anticlimactic evening in which O’Donnell attempted to seduce the author, but ended up getting turned down due to the author’s antipathy towards female pubic hair:

Christine was a decent kisser, but as soon as soon as her clothes came off and she was naked in my bed, Christine informed me that she was a virgin. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. She didn’t explain at the time that she was a “born-again virgin.” She made it seem like she’d never had sex in her life, which seemed pretty improbable for a woman her age. And she made it clear that she was planning on staying a virgin that night. But there were signs that she wasn’t very experienced sexually. When her underwear came off, I immediately noticed that the waxing trend had completely passed her by. Obviously, that was a big turnoff, and I quickly lost interest. I said goodnight, rolled over, and went to sleep.

Sounds like a classy guy.

Shortly after this piece was published and started racking up what would become half a million page views, the internet exploded. What follows are a couple of pieces I thought to be good responses to this story.

Tracy Clark-Flory captures the general flavor of the internet’s reaction:

Not only is this piece piggish, but it reveals nothing relevant about her politics or character. In fact, if anything it makes her an immensely more relatable and sympathetic character. As a Gawker commenter put it, “To me the only point of this mildly tacky, rather boring story is that Christine O’Donnell comes off as a human being, and even a likable one.” Congrats, Gawker, you’ve accomplished quite a feat.

Alex Pareene has a pretty good explanation of why this piece is reprehensible from a journalistic standpoint over at his Tumblog:

The sad thing (in addition to the existence of people who think and act like Anonymous, which is itself a sad thing) is that a smart editor — or an editor who gave a shit about the integrity of the site in addition to the site’s mission to run stories that will get a lot of attention — could’ve handled this in a way that didn’t end up being both an endorsement of slut-shaming and a promise of salaciousness that the story doesn’t actually contain…But what kills me is you could’ve gotten the uniques cake without eating the justified near-universal condemnation too if you’d just been like “One Douchebag’s Sleepover With Christine O’Donnell” instead of presenting it in the earnest first-person like a “Modern Love” essay from The LateNightShots.com Magazine.

The Smoking Gun has outed the once-anonymous young man as Dustin Dominiak. Apparently the firestorm of media attention has made it difficult to be Mr. Dominiak, or any of his friends. Undoubtedly he will experience consequences in the dating department from here on out, and potentially in other areas of his life as well.

But by far the best response goes to Foster Kamer over at the Village Voice, for his brilliant parody of the Gawker piece:

What I will say, though, is that her pussy was mangled and that whore ended up blueballing me. Not that I was really “bout it bout it,” because it looked like it was shipped to me straight from the Meekong Delta circa 1968, and hadn’t aged well. But I was willing to take one for the bros and stick it. But then she was like, nah, son, you’re dick’s too good for this business, and also, it’s about nine inches too big.

Last year, the battle between Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno for NBC Late Night supremacy captivated America. Bill Carter has written a forthcoming book about it, The War for Late Night, and has published a fascinating excerpt at Vanity Fair. My favorite bits are the ones with Jeff Zucker, who apparently retained his sense of dickishness and entitlement, despite having run NBC into the ground:

“Hello, Richard,” a voice said. Jeff Zucker often used the formal first name affectionately when he greeted someone. After inquiring how everyone was doing, he asked, “Well, have you seen tomorrow’s New York Times yet? Let me read you something.” He proceeded to share an update on the Conan situation, already available online, which included a reference to overt interest in Conan from the Fox network, expressed by an unnamed executive, as well as an assertion from a representative of Conan’s that the star had not accepted NBC’s plan and was not likely to anytime in the near future. “Let me explain something to you,” Zucker said. “I want a fucking answer from you. If you think you are going to play me in the press, you’ve got the wrong guy.”

Alessandra Stanley, on Jon Stewart’s interview with President Obama last night:

Mr. Stewart seemed to feel that he needed to voice the concerns of liberals who are disappointed in Mr. Obama’s legislative record, one he described as “timid” instead of coming up with more offbeat questions of his own. And the president, who had earlier in the day answered questions from radio talk show hosts and liberal bloggers, easily parried Mr. Stewart’s complaints about the lack of real change in Washington. As is his wont, he gave long, reasoned answers about the economy, unemployment and populist frustration that Mr. Stewart couldn’t or wouldn’t interrupt. Sometimes, Mr. Stewart showed his own frustration by making fun of his inability to get a word in, interjecting in a high, squeaky whine, “It’s just been hard not to talk.”

As someone who’s interviewed relatively famous people before, my sympathies lie with Stewart. His interview prep for last night was probably one of the most difficult he’s ever done. Still, Stanley’s points about the end result are probably on the mark.

Check out the interview here.

The NYTimes reports on the plight of the Parents Television Council, whose finances are a complete disaster and who can’t seem to get anyone to get outraged about breasts and bad language anymore:

Escalating costs collided with declining donations, resulting in a 2008 loss of almost $1 million. In 2009, as the recession battered fund-raising efforts anew, council revenue totaled $2.9 million, a 26 percent drop from the previous year. To cut costs, the organization has reduced its staff by 38 percent over the last two years. The council’s elaborate reports — given provocative titles like “MTV Smut Peddlers” — have grown infrequent, severely hampering the organization’s lobbying and fund-raising efforts. In 2008, the council published four major reports; it published one in 2009 and has published none so far this year. (Mr. Winter said he planned to publish three reports in the next two months, including one centered on online video.)

Don’t get me wrong: When I have kids, I’m going to protect them from all the adult content I can for as long as humanly possible. But I don’t need some organization doing that for me, and I certainly don’t need them exacerbating the already-stifling U.S. creative climate in the realm of TV or films. Enjoy your trip to oblivion, PTC!