let's start with the good news.

today is billie joe armstrong's 33rd birthday. best wishes to a cool guy, a sexy guy and one third of one of the rockingest bands (green day). green day took on the bully boy and ended up with a best selling cd and a grammy for best rock album.

now let's do the bad. i'm finishing up with the evening news as i write. and i'm a longtime nbc nightly news viewer. tom brokaw was some 1 i grew up with and trusted. brian williams is just not cutting it.

those eyebrows are too fucking weird. and the look on his face is like he's been fragging his butt hole with his index finger and then sniffing it. (he actually reminds me of a guy named pete that i saw for three weeks. pete did that and would have the same annoying look on his face.)

i gave up on nightly news continuing in the brokaw tradition tonight. i had to suffer through a report by andrea mitchell dressed as though she's stepped off a fashion runway -- for a fashion show for elderly women. then there was the issue of her hair. what is the woman? 80?

is it a wig? is it a weave? i'm finding it hard to believe it's hair. and watching her shake it and toss it i was left with the impression that i was watching not nightly news but a wella balsam commercial from the 70s. (if farrah fawcett-majors had been a really, really ugly woman.)

and it really wasn't the evening for andrea mitchell to be playing bleached blonde floozy on network tv. i've got 1 story that's been e-mailed to me 16 times today. it's from the washington post and if you haven't read it, you should. terence o'hara has written 'records show liberal use of riggs jet: ex-ceo's guests took trips on company tab.'

there's a whole host of people who should be embarrassed. that includes former president jimmy carter. (who i think was a better president then anything we've elected since 1960 but that doesn't change the fact that he should be embarrassed.) but there is embarrassment and there is shame.

feeling shame should be barbara walters (though i doubt she has any -- if she did, star jones probably snacked on it). feeling shame should be the clone or fembot that's replaced diane sawyer. (truly, plastic surgery alone cannot really account for the difference between 90s sawyer and the airbrushed version that sits in front of cameras today, can it?) and then there's maude:

NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell was invited to join Allbritton and his wife on a flight from New York to Washington in December 2002.
Mitchell said Barbara B. Allbritton approached her "at the last minute" in the airport in New York while Mitchell was waiting for the Delta shuttle to Washington.
"Barbara said, 'We're flying back to D.C., would you like to go with us?' " recalled Mitchell, whose husband, Alan Greenspan, is chairman of the Federal Reserve, which regulates Riggs's holding company. She said she knows the Allbrittons socially. "I thought it was their personal airplane. Only later when this whole thing came up did I learn that it was a corporate aircraft. I'm usually very careful about those things."
She described the Allbrittons' offer as "sociable and neighborly."

you're usually very careful about those things? those things? conflicts of interest? it's bad enough that you're the wife of the fed chairman. that alone should have gotten under your wig or fall or whatever that bleached thing on your head is. but you are also a reporter. so you've sinned twice over andrea.

you're usually very careful about those things? those things? conflicts of interest? like when you attacked john kerry in a post-debate chat-fest on msnbc because you felt your husband grandpa munster had been slimed?

and never once did you explain that you were married to grandpa. you just acted as though you were an objective reporter.

andrea's hall of shame time.

and i flip channels on her sixth or seventh hair toss and check out world news tonight. the story she was reporting on? about john negroponte being named as the intelligence chief? much better reported on abc's world news tonight. martha somebody did a wonderful job. let me look up her name. okay it was martha raddatz. and i'm sorry for not knowing it but i never watch world news tonight. i've spent the last 10 years with nightly news. (yes, i thought tom brokaw was sexy.) martha did a great job including details in her report that andrea must have missed while perfecting hair toss.

but the other thing that i enjoyed was that peter jennings actually seemed to know something about the story. his comments before the story and after indicated that he did. whereas brian williams, again, acts as though as soon as the camera goes elsewhere he's got his finger rubbing his prostate.

at 1 point, in jenning's introduction to the story, they lost visual, then they lost audio. when they had it back, jennings cooly dismissed it with 1 sentence. that was a pro at work.

now i don't mistake peter jennings for amy goodman. amy goodman's the real deal. she's the last newsman standing as far as i'm concerned. but of the big three, i'm willing to trust peter jennings. i won't watch bob face the nation with the red eye lids that look like a sick bunny face.
i don't trust him. he always seems too highly amused with himself.

as for williams, if i were to learn that he actually was getting off on prostate massages during the broadcast, i'd applaud his sexual recklessness. but i still wouldn't trust him. he is beyond bland.

so i guess i'll be watching world news tonight from now on. i'll miss the old faces. and other than williams, they're all really old, really, really old. no more wondering if pete williams will crack a hip. no more noting lisa myers' stress eating. and no more majorette moves from andrea mitchell. (i wouldn't be surprised to find out she was a majorette. i'd be shocked to learn she'd been a cheerleader, however.)

so john negroponte will be leaving iraq and moving onto d.c. i hope there aren't any convents in the area. sisters, watch out for the death squads.