Two Jerry Springers

The severe storms that hit Bloomington yesterday have knocked out half of my cable channels. So I have CNN, FOX, Comedy Channel and MTV (Shot of Love II, anyone?), but not the others.

Having the local FOX means that I can skip writing mid-afternoon for The Jerry Springer Show. Not something you should do regularly - the number of ads telling you to get off the couch and enrol in a course somewhere tell you something about its core demographic - but Jerry's show is now pretty baroque with a lot of on-stage props, including a guy with no legs who walks the stag on his hands, two muppets ('Tell it to the muppet!!'), and a guy who translates Appalachian drawl into mangled Spanish. My personal favourite is a large gorilla who sits in a corner off stage. This is presumably "the gorilla in the room that no-one talks about".

But a less known fact about Jerry Springer is that he is a lifelong Democrat who was Mayor of Cincinatti for two years in the 1970s. Being a Democrat and a Chicagoan, he found himself tonight being grilled by Sean Hannity on FOX NEWS about Barack Obama, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko and Bill Ayres. Observing that the rest of the world doesn't care about Wright, Rezko and Ayres, Hannity replied:

"I don't care about the rest of the world. This is America."

To which Jerry replied:

"Its that sort of attitude that has got us in the troubles we are now in."

As they say on the afternoon show, "Jerry, Jerry, Jerry".