The Newseum will display Russert's office "reassembled to look as it did June 13, 2008, the day Russert died of a heart attack at age 58," beginning in November. The only other journalist to merit an office recreation at the Newseum is Edward R. Murrow.

It's been more than a year since Russert's death, so by now it's OK to say about his memory what we were saying about him when he was still alive: He was a handmaiden masquerading as a watchdog, and the reason people went on his show wasn't because he was an "institution" or "tough but fair"—it was because he was safe and predictable but had the unearned reputation of being aggressive and relentless. But whatever: Let's stipulate that he was a towering genius. We're still recreating his office in a museum?

Here's what Lewis Lapham had to say on Russert's funeral, attended by all the grandees he claimed to torment:

Long ago in the days before journalists became celebrities, their enterprise was reviled and poorly paid, and it was understood by working newspapermen that the presence of more than two people at their funeral could be taken as a sign that they had disgraced the profession.

Anyway, what's in the office? A WHOLE BUNCH OF JUNK ABOUT THE FUCKING BUFFALO BILLS.

McCain was a guest on Meet the Press today and was quizzed on the whole Palin resignation fiasco by David Gregory. He smiled and oh-goshed Grandfatherly and acted like all of this was just dandy and that he has no regrets about plucking little ole simple Sarah from the wilds of the Klondyke to run the country in the event that he, a 72 year-old man with a history of cancer, had to step down for, like, dying or whatever. No, McCain can find no fault with any of what she did and he doesn't regret picking her and she's still a hope for the future of the party blah, blah, blah.

Poor John McCain—The old "maverick" doesn't have the sack to say what you just know he really feels and believes deep down—That he toiled away for years as a prisoner of war, refusing to bend to the demands of his captors all the while, and for decades as an able public servant, only to see his shot at the presidency, not to mention a historical legacy looked upon with almost universal esteem by future generations, destroyed by one horrendously God-awful decision. Congratulations John McCain—Sarah Palin, the complete antithesis of you, is your legacy.

And speaking of Palin, a report in Monday's Times suggests that stress was causing her to lose her hair.

Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser and close friend, Jessica Steele.

"Honestly, I think all of it just broke her heart," Ms. Steele said in an interview at her beauty parlor in Wasilla, the Beehive.

Perhaps now we're getting to the real motivation behind Palin's decision to step down—Pageant girl vanity?

Scarborough, appearing with GOP strategist Mike Murphy in a roundtable discussion with host David Gregory, said, "I suspect that Cairo speech really scared the Grand Ayatollahs...If they were going to fix an election, this was the time to fix it."

Now, even the most hardcore Obama supporter would be hard-pressed to credit a single speech by the President with triggering a revolution in a Middle Eastern country, but Scarborough's theory that his words at Cairo University may have freaked out Iran's string-pullers to the point where they became too aggressive in their election-fixing, thus sparking a revolution by outraged citizens, does have a ring of plausibility to it.

And this sort of intellectual honesty is one of the reasons to like Joe Scarborough.

Video via Media Matters

"I'd have to see," he said when asked about the Alaska governor, and suggested he might support Louisiana Governor Bobby "Kenneth the Page" Jindal or Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Anyone hear the sound of a bus running over someone?

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon producer Gavin Purcell hopelessly shopped for shoes.

CNET News reporter Caroline McCarthy stayed focused on the big, important story of the day.

Slate writer John Dickerson exhibited profound laziness.

Meet the Press host David Gregory fell victim to Twidiocy.

Techmeme editrix Megan McCarthy made a joke about Google's nondiscovery of Atlantis.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

No, they are still buried in crosstalk on Meet the Press, of course, because they're filthy liberals. Here is Barney Frank, yesterday, explaining that all the "spending" in the stimulus bill that the Senate centrists stripped out was the "stimulus" bit of the stimulus bill, and that back in the day the Republicans never let the "centrists" do shit, and then Mike Pence is all "whatevs Barney" and Barney is all "you aren't even listening to me asshole" and David Gregory is all "ok let's talk about something else, and also let's have the argument on terms decided on by these self-appointed centrists who have no ideology besides a pathological need to temper whatever their party does with a dash of what the opposing party wants, even if it makes no economic sense."

Do we sound like we've been reading too much Krugman? We have! The Nobel-winning economist has long been the most outraged liberal of the Times opinion section, and he really found his shrill, Bush-hating voice over the eight years of that presidency. And now there's a great big economic crisis and he's a super-smart economist so surely Obama will be consulting with him every day until we're past this! But no, the Times editorial board convinced Tom Daschle to withdraw his cabinet nomination, but no one listens to Krugman, still. He just blogs about how much he hates bipartisanship and how everyone but him is so stupid.

At a certain point you have to acknowledge that liberals are just big losers who can't get anything done. You have to acknowledge this because it is the conventional wisdom, that right-wingers get things done and the liberals just all shout at each other all day.

He tells useless WP media regurgitator Howie Kurtz:

"I'd be crazy if I wasn't nervous about it," Gregory said. "Succeeding Tim Russert is humbling, and I think I'm appropriately nervous."

And on the same day, told the NYT:

In a telephone interview, Mr. Gregory, who is 38, acknowledged that the task before him was challenging. “I’m honored,” he said. “I feel humbled and very excited. I’m not nervous or apprehensive about it, but it is daunting.”

WELL ARE YOU OR AREN'T YOU? He hasn't even started and already, scandal.

The seat was left vacant when longtime host Tim Russert died early this summer, with Tom Brokaw acting as interim host until now. Gregory is the Chief White House Correspondent for NBC News, and is married to Beth Wilkinson, a former Fannie Mae executive and the lawyer who got Timothy McVeigh executed. So, um, good work everybody! Watch a clip of Gregory hard at work, below.

Sunday NBC executives made calls to people who had been considered as potential hosts or panelists on “Meet the Press,” letting them know a decision had been made. The list of contenders had at one time been long, including two other NBC correspondents, Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell; the MSNBC host Chris Matthews; the PBS host Gwen Ifill; the CNN correspondent John King; and even the “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric, who had been a longtime host of “Today.”

Well, there are your leakers right there. NBC News notifies a bunch of media bigwigs about the job they didn't get, for which Gregory was the longtime frontrunner, and the network is surprised there was a leak why?

NBC makes a nice mint on Meet The Press, but the real cash cow is Today, and Gregory is reportedly being put into a holding pattern at the former so he can eventually be called on to host the latter. Which means the wine-loving clown will soon be doing one of his infamous happy dances, as remembered in the clip above (culled from Monday's comments!).

He's full of himself—you have to be to pull those Sam Donaldson stunts with Ari Fleischer—but has never really demonstrated a great intellect. He's never proved himself as an interviewer, which leads us to believe he'll just pull the "the research team dug up a quote from you that slightly contradicts some other thing you said" card way too often. But he's tall!

His show was boring, but Gregory is still more famous and network tv-ready than Chuck Todd, the actually astute political analyst who became a minor MSNBC star during the election. It's broadcast chops, not journalistic ability or smarts, that actually qualify one for Meet the Press.

Also he does impressions. He's famous for his shitty impressions. Everyone in Washington with a reputation for being "funny," with the exception of Barney Frank, is a complete tool.

Here is a clip of David Gregory drunk on Imus (another sign of tooldom: doing Imus).

NBC has to want Couric for Meet The Press. Her interview with Sarah Palin was the most memorable television of the election and arguably changed its course. Even before that, Couric's sit-downs for Today were fondly remembered. But she's expensive, with $40 million left on her $15-million-a-year CBS contract.

And should Couric even take the job, assuming NBC offered, complete with an attractive salary? The situation at Meet The Press parallels the CBS Evening News a bit too closely, perhaps.

The show is heavy on old-school, old-media respectability but short on ratings upside. Yes, Russert grew viewership and kept the show in the lead even among younger viewers. But the long-running — longest-running, actually, after 60 years — show has a reserved approach that would strain to compete with the likes of the Daily Show should the show try and tack in that more opinionated direction amid continued weak ratings (numbers have, naturally, fallen since Russert's death). It wasn't long ago that Kurt Andersen wondered in New York if Meet The Press "will simply cease to exist."

Maybe Couric should just bank the $40 million and devote herself to her quirky YouTube channel once her contract is up. She could no doubt use a break from sweating the ratings every night. (Thank God there's none of that sort of pressure online!)

To an im-

portant personage Russert asked one

or two faintly impertinent questions,

usually about a subject of little or

no concern to anybody outside the

rope lines around official Washing-

ton; sometimes he discovered a con-

tradiction between a recently issued

press release and one that was dis-

tributed by the same politician

some months or years previously.

No matter with which spoon Rus-

sert stirred the butter, the reply was

of no interest to him, not worth his

notice or further comment. He had

sprinkled his trademark salt, his

work was done. The important per-

sonage was free to choose from a

menu offering three forms of re-

sponse—silence, spin, rancid lie. If

silence, Russert moved on to anoth-

er topic; if spin, he nodded wisely; if

rancid lie, he swallowed it.

Worse, even, than Lapham's words is the overenthusiastic praise he presents from Russert's establishment friends.

Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State: "As a public official, it was really, first of all, a treat to get on the show."

Cheney aide Mary Matalin: "He never treated [politicians] with the cynicism that attends some of these interviews. So they had a place to be loved."

Sam Donaldson, ABC: "He [Russert] understood as well as anyone, maybe better than

almost anyone, that the reason political reporters are there is not to speak truth to power... but to make those who say we have the truth — politicians — explain it."

It's easy to fall in love with Lapham's alternate view:

Long ago in the days before

journalists became celebrities, their

enterprise was reviled and poorly

paid, and it was understood by work-

ing newspapermen that the presence

of more than two people at their fu-

neral could be taken as a sign that

they had disgraced the profession.

Halfway through his stint at the 6 p.m. hour on MSNBC, Mr. Gregory’s numbers are solid but not remarkable. For the second quarter of 2008 (from late March to late June), Race for the White House averaged roughly 526,000 total viewers and 161,000 in the 25-54 demographic—roughly twice the audience that Tucker Carlson averaged during the second quarter of 2007.

Twice Tucker is a form of damnation by faint praise.

...over the past several months, the show has rarely made news.

The Observer said it doesn't help that Gregory's show relies on the network's own political contributors as talking heads instead of on actual newsmakers.

This results in a pogram so unmemorable that even NBC's Tom Brokaw screwed up its name, calling it Road To The White House, when ending an episode of Meet The Press. Brokaw also indicated the other NBCer on Meet The Press that morning, political director Chuck Todd, would be making frequent appearances "in the weeks to come" — a sign that Todd, also rumored to be in the running for Russert's job, was well ahead of Gregory.

Another of Gregory's competitors for Meet The Press, former far-right congressman Joe Scarborough, has received laudatory coverage in the Times and New York magazine lately for his MSNBC show Morning Joe, a far cry from the way the Observer is treating Gregory.

This all goes to show that sometimes being a hard-working, aggressive reporter is not always enough to advance in TV news. But don't count Gregory out yet — if this 2006 Tonight Show clip of Gregory imitating George W. Bush is any indication, the correspondent has a wide range of untapped skills.

[Observer]

In any case, we managed to stumble upon a curious casting call on Craigslist which tipped us off to the Russert biopic. The headline reads: "Casting Older Caucasian Woman for Major TV Network Movie." The ad goes on to explain that a "small independent New York based film company is searching for the role of Maureen Orth, the wife of the late Tim Russert. The film will explore the last 24 hours of Russert's life and Golden Globe winner Randy Quaid is set to play the role of Tim Russert."

Well, we certainly can't argue with the choice of Randy Quaid. The two men look as though they were raised in the same womb. But what aspiring actress will tackle the role of Russert's wife? Here's what the producers want: "We're looking to cast an emotionally versatile actress for the role. Should be thin, 40-55, and able to cry on cue." That narrows it down, but don't forward them your resume just yet, Debra Winger. "The network is only interested in working with an unknown, so we will consider any and all women who look the part." Finally an un-famous middle-aged actress is gonna get a break in this town. And all it took was the death of a great newsman.

• Casting Older Caucasian Woman for Major TV Network Movie [Craigslist]

"'Some of my best memories from covering the last several presidential elections have included working closely with Tom,' MTP Executive Producer Betsy Fischer said, 'so I know just how lucky we are to have him step in as moderator for Meet the Press. His intellect, focus and calming presence is exactly what we need to move forward smartly and remain the No. 1 public affairs show on television as we head into one of the most pivotal elections in our nation's history.'

"Brokaw is quoted in the release as well: 'I've been appearing on Meet the Press since the days of Watergate when it was moderated by Lawrence E. Spivak right through the distinguished tenure of my great friend, Tim Russert, so I feel right at home. Tim made Meet the Press the center of the universe for informative and lively discussions of public affairs, particularly the exciting 2008 campaign for president, and I intend to continue that commitment to our viewers.'

"The program will continue to be produced and taped at the NBC News Bureau in Washington, D.C." [MediaBistro]