She was, famously, the driven and ambitious stage mother of a sexually brutalized and murdered 6-year-old beauty queen. She was also the star of the long-running cable TV series Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?

Patsy Ramsey holds a poster the Ramseys had printed offering a $100,000 reward for information in the slaying of JonBenet. Patsey also sent a letter to members of her childhood church congregation: “We miss her very much. I cry myself to sleep every night.”

And now, according to her family lawyer, she will live in sainted memory:

“Over the last two, three years they have come to understand there’s been a shift in public opinion about the death of JonBenet and people realize now that this family was very much victims of that murder and have suffered because of it in terms of the false accusations made against them,” Wood said.

(via lepaparazzi)

Jon Fine reviews Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright on bloggingheadstv and says:

It’s smarter than the networks’ Sunday morning talking-points recitations and more engaging than PBS’ high-minded fare.

He won’t get any argument from me—I am a longtime Kaus fan, and I think no one does it better. I recently read somewhere (can’t find it) that he’s the first thing the White House guys read in the morning!
Fine also calls weird-ass home operations like bloggingheadstv the “future of political talk.” Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But self-powered and, most important, self-edited new-media platforms are certainly a trend: Hot Air, Hugh Hewitt’s show, and Fareed Zacharia’s Foreign Exchange TV ( a hybrid: funded by PBS, aired on 100 stations, and available to anyone on the Web) are other examples of political talk that is a hundred times more interesting and informative than almost anything found on television.

Fine calls bloggingheadstv “weirdly compellling.”

There is a phrase that describes what makes a hit on the Web, and that phrase is “weirdly compelling.” No one could have imagined that looking at digital self-portraits online and posting comments under them was weirdly compelling until Friendster and then MySpace (NWS ) became two of the greatest venues for procrastination in the world since the Web itself. No one knew how weirdly compelling footage of people lip-synching could be until home videos of Gary Brolsma (the uninitiated can Google “numa numa”) and two young Chinese men grimacing to the Backstreet Boys became huge Web hits. The same is true watching Wright get cranky whenever Kaus, in his well-honed contrarian shtick, contorts himself to find common ground with Ann Coulter.

He concludes:

It turns out that the nontheatrical is theatrical, and a serious political conversation between two poorly dressed bloggers is, yes, weirdly compelling.

There’s nothing weird about it. It’s unfiltered, uncensored, unpackaged, unedited, and not hobbled by self-awareness or attempts at image control. It’s the un-news. And, for the matter, un-infotainment.

Hmmm. I have to come up with a new category…

Michael Chertoff, the director of Homeland Security, wants you to know that the TV show 24 is nothing like reality:

[H]e doesn’t have a way-cool, state-of-the-art Counter Terrorism Unit like the one on the Fox TV show. Bad guys aren’t foiled on an hourly basis. And not everybody is romantically involved with co-workers.

Chertoff also wants you to know, however, that some things about it are real:

[c]haracters on “24″ constantly face situations “where there is no clear magic bullet to solve the problem, and you have to weigh the cost benefits of a series of unpalatable alternatives,” he said….

Chertoff spoke of the challenges in “trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options.”

Participating at an event (sponsored by the Heritage Foundation [!] and featuring Rush Limbaugh, among others) was a bit much for the actress

Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays techno-chick Chloe O’Brian….

“I got into acting to avoid politics and so I can remain in a fantasy world,” said Rajskub, who seemed bewildered at questions about how closely “24″ cleaves to reality. “And you guys are kind of bringing me out of it.”

It seems to me that was rather the point of the exercise, Ms. Rajskub.