Brent Baker

Ahead of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony, USA Today commentary editor Jill Lawrence likely reflected the dreams of much of the Washington press corps when she wrote a column imagining what he would say “if he were to let loose and say whatever he wants.” She laughably conjured a scenario in which Mueller will use rhyme to convince Democrats, telling them..."Don’t just teach; you must impeach. Don’t give a speech; you must impeach...”

The public isn’t alarmed enough about climate change to satisfy NPR talk show host Joshua Johnson, so he suggested on Tuesday morning that, in order to induce fear that will lead to public demands for action, scientists say the human race is in danger of becoming extinct. Johnson noted studies about other calamities, but hasn’t yet heard a scientific report “that says if we don’t do something about this, you and your children...and everyone you love will die!”

The last time Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House, in January of 2007, ABC anchor Charles Gibson showed video of her on the House floor holding her infant grandchild “while giving directions on how events were to proceed.” Gibson hailed: “It seemed the ultimate in multitasking: Taking care of the children, and the country.”

One key reason it’s so difficult, if not impossible, to ever reverse, or even slightly reduce, an entitlement program is how the news media become advocates for the program. So, as expected, in the wake of the federal district court ruling Friday night declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional, ABC, CBS and NBC all found an example of someone who would be hurt by losing ObamaCare.

Sunday night I stumbled across CNN’s United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell and I actually learned something as host Bell devoted the hour to the joys of living in Canada. Bell featured a man who was so disgusted by Donald Trump’s election that he left Oregon for Canada. That man: Mark Nykanen, an NBC News Washington correspondent from 1980 to 1988.

Last week’s episode of FX’s The Americans, set in 1987, imagined a U.S. arms control official telling an undercover Soviet KGB operative that he’d heard from a White House insider that President Ronald Reagan has “been forgetful, not focused, almost a different person lately. The man I talked to said he thinks that the President might be going senile.” In the next scene, the agent’s KGB handler worried: “Weinberger and his cronies are even more hard-line than Reagan.”

The sixth and final season of The Americans, a drama about Soviet agents working undercover in suburban Washington, DC in the 1980s, begins tonight (Wednesday) on the FX cable channel. While the FX series humanizes undercover KGB operatives working in the U.S. on behalf of the Soviet Union, the show also illustrates the ruthlessness of Soviet communism and how the American Left in the 1980s helped advance Soviet interests. Five video highlighhts follow.

Where does acting end and reality begin? In a movie now in rotation on HBO, actress Allison Williams, the daughter of MSNBC anchor Brian Williams, declares: “My dad would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have. Like, the love is so real.” Sounds perfectly plausible that such sentiment would apply to her real life father, the disgraced ousted anchor of the NBC Nightly News. I stumbled upon the line in Get Out, a horror movie from Universal released in February. 

As summer winds down, a quick look at a scene I caught on Netflix’s Ozark in which the wife of a money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel declared her admiration for former President Barack Obama. Recalling how she worked for “Obama’s second legislative campaign,” criminal “Wendy Byrde,” played by actress Laura Linney, touted how “I just loved everything he stood for, what we were all trying to do together.”