From TV Guide:

The surprise Emmy win for The Amazing Race Sunday night couldn't have come at a better time for the show's executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

While Bruckheimer had begun preparations for a fifth installment of the globe-hopping competition, there had been no official renewal notification from CBS. Going into the weekend, the show's fate was very much up in the air.

But after the awards Sunday night, with the Emmy in hand for Outstanding Reality/Competition Program, Bruckheimer was telling associates that CBS had finally given him the greenlight for another season of The Amazing Race in 2004.

Yeaaaa! Can't wait. Could it ever top Chip & Reichen? Probably not, but I've enjoyed all four races a great deal. Applications are now being taken. You have until October 8. Don't say you missed your chance.

The weekly CBS email previewing Survivor has this to say about this week:

• When one tribe wins the first Reward Challenge, they learn of a new twist: one member may visit the losing tribe's island to pillage and loot one item from their supplies!
• A tribe is stunned when one Survivor confesses a desire to quit the game.
• Rupert, Morgan tribe's "Blackbeard," goes into a rage after learning that a tribemate has lost something crucial to Morgan's survival, but is determined to recover it at all costs.
• It's a desperate battle of mind and body for Immunity, where every last second will decide the winner in a photo finish you must see to believe.

Chip & Reichen fans: Don't forget, Reichen appears on the Frasier Premiere, and that's coming up in about 7 hours or less (depending on your coast).

He has just one line, and I believe it's the first (definitely in the opening scene), and hopefully you know by now that nearly all the nets and local stations now start their shows a minute or two early (some local newscasts are starting as early as five minutes early). So make sure you instruct your VCR or Tivo (tell me you're not still using a VCR--are you also loading tape reels onto your PC for memory?) to start two minutes early or you'll miss him.

And I believe his character will be listed in the credits as "The impossibly handsome man."

(Another note: the show is being adverstised by NBC as a one-hour special, but Tivo has it as two half hours, so be sure to grab both if you don't have a season pass.)

(And thanks to Ben for the reminder to me.)

Update:

I hope you didn't plan your evening around it. Pretty anticlimactic to me. (Same for the rest of you?) Don't know what I was expecting out of one line. Can't say it was delivered all that well even. But I'm sure he was nervous. (It was not so much the line itself as the sultriness or some kind of animal magnetism he was supposed to exude. He wasn't bad, just not great.) Or maybe it was just the standard expectations thing. I always expect too much.

I've been telling you for weeks to keep your eye on Washington D.C. They outmanuevered New Hampshire to get the first primary spot this year, and the press is increasingly beginning to recognize it.

I have little doubt that NH will still be widely heralded as the first "true" primary--a ridiculous assertion, but our old beltway boys are incredible creatures of habit--but D.C. will make its mark.

From Tuesday's Metro Column by Marc Fisher in the Washington Post:

One day, the Associated Press reports that next year's first presidential primary will be in New Hampshire, and then suddenly, the wire service corrects itself and puts the District at the top of the calendar.

Similar corrections appear in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Globe and other newspapers. . . .

But in the political hotlines and columns that count, the District's primary is increasingly listed as No. 1, maybe not with a bullet but at least with an asterisk.

And the campaigns now treat the District, for the first time in its brief history of semi-independence, as a factor. Campaigns are staffing up, organizing events, even bringing in the candidate. Howard Dean came to town, sidling through the Bohemian Caverns nightclub on U Street, talking about the injustice of denying half a million Americans the right to representation in Congress. The District primary is proving to be an early test of Dean's ability to reach beyond his base in NPR America -- those white, college-educated, socially liberal voters who yearn for a latter-day Adlai Stevenson.

John Edwards promised a Washington audience that "we're going to be campaigning hard here." Joe Lieberman reminded voters that he introduced the No Taxation Without Representation bill that would grant the city votes in Congress. Long shots Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton plan efforts here, hoping to rejigger the election calculus.

E.J. Dione opens his op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Post by saying:

You can't understand an election without understanding the dynamic that underlies it. The dynamic for the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries is, at best, only half understood, and many on the right don't understand it at all.

Thank you! The beltway boys have really been dense in understanding this one, but there are a few good glimmers in this piece:

If the rebellion in the Democratic Party were primarily ideological, closet centrist Dean would be going nowhere. What Dean understood earlier than his rivals is that Democrats wanted someone who did not seem intimidated by Bush. Iraq became both a substantive issue and a symbol. If Dean was willing to fight Bush on Iraq, many Democrats reasoned that he'd be tough enough to take him on across the board.

. . . The critical fact is that the roots of the anti-Bush feeling among Democrats were planted before the war. Democrats are still incensed that even though they strongly backed the president after 9/11, Bush turned around and used issues of national and homeland security (1) to club them in the 2002 elections, and (2) to push through his ideological program, especially more big tax cuts.

I don't think Dione completely nails the dynamic here, but for a beltway boy, he's starting to get warmer.

Where to start with the report released Monday afternoon on the Air Force Academy rape scandal? This one comes from the panel ordered by angry Congressmen this spring, tired of the BS they were getting from the Air Force. (The prime movers were Colorado Senator Wayne Allard, and Senator John McCain. You can read the entire 141-page report in PDF, or the NYT story, or the better Denver Post story (yes, the Denver Post did a much better job than the NYT on this one.)) 

The first thing to say is that it really is a breakthrough. It is the first independent review from outside the military, and it shows. (It was hand-picked by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, but composed of outsiders who obviously felt no obligation to cover his butt. It was led by former Florida congresswoman Tillie Fowler.)

It gives credit where credit is due--praising much of the pentagon's spring solution, the Agenda For Change--but slamming the hell out of not just Academy leadership, but Pentagon leadership, who were repeatedly made aware of a severe problem for at least a decade and ignored it. And then it accuses the Pentagon of a coverup.

It also delivers a thorough assessment of the Agenda being implemented to improve the culture, identifying key holes in the plan. Rape advocates will be overjoyed that they have finally been heard. I spoke to both local and national rape advocates this spring in my Salon story analyzing the Agenda, and they were thrilled with some provisions of the Agenda, but dismayed that seemed doomed to failure because it did nothing to get women to come forward to report their rapes. In fact, it made reporting less likely, by eliminating the only confidential options. Today's report discloses that a 1997 Inspector General report acknowledged that as few as one in ten rapes were being reported, a figure validated again late last month, by another IG report. If much of your solution addresses fails to address 90 percent of the problem, that's a gaping hole. This report finally addresses the insanity of that approach (using much milder language, of course, but highlighting it in the exec summary).

Now about that coverup:

Late this spring, the Air Force dispatched its own "Working Group," to investigate the problem, and in June, the Air Force general counsel released its report clearing itself of "systematic acceptance of the problem." This group flatly rejected that finding and stated, "This Panel believes that the Air Force General Counsel attempted to shield Air Force Headquarters from public criticism by focusing exclusively on events at the Academy."

The new report dedicates more than a quarter of its executive summary to details of the coverup. It then concludes that the Pentagon is responsible and "Those responsible should be held accountable." It laments that many of the culprits are retired and out of reach, and again states "there must be further accounting."

It's hard to know exactly how to read that, but they could be calling for the head of Air Force Secretary Jame Roche, who President Bush has attempted to promote to Secretary of the Army, pending Senate approval.

The Denver Post say, "The report makes 21 specific recommendations for change at the school," though I have not read all of them yet. It praises the Agenda For Change several times, while noting some key flaws, which is exactly what my analysis showed last spring. Which has to make me wonder--couldn't the initial Air Force team involved more outsiders and avoided some of its inherent myopia in the first place?

All I did was talk to an assortment of nationally-recognized military scholars, rape advocates, faculty and cadets. They spoke to a lot of the same people, but it was exclusively Air Force officers conducting the interviews and making the decisions (along with AF Secretary Roche). If they could have accepted the existence of their own blinders and included some outsiders in the decision-making, they could have arrived at the current, more enlightened report months earlier.

There's a nice summary of the Agenda in the new report, which goes to the heart of what still needs to change:

The Agenda for Change is evidence that the Air Force, under Secretary Roche's leadership, is serious about taking long-overdue steps to correct the problems at the Academy, but in certain respects it does not go far enough to institutionalize permanent change. The most important of these shortcomings are:

• Culture and Climate of the Academy. The Agenda for Change recognizes that the sexual assault problems at the Academyare related to the culture of the institution, yet it does not go far enough to institute enduring changes in the culture and gender climate at the Academy.
• Command Supervision. The Agenda for Change does not address the need for permanent, consistent oversight by Air Force Headquarters leadership. [Because Academy leaders roll over every two years, so there is no consistency for a long-term solution.]
• External Oversight. The Agenda for Change does not address the need to improve the external oversight provided by the Academy's Board of Visitors.
• Confidentiality Policy. The Agenda for Change effectively eliminates the Academy's confidential reporting policy for sexual misconduct. In doin go, however, it reomves critical options for sexual assault victims to receive confidential counseling and treatment, and may result in the unitended consequences of reducing sexual assault reporting.

They're dead-on with all of those, particularly the last one.

Here are the other passages I found most illuminating:

The Panel examined and reviewed the culture and environment at the Academy. It found an atmosphere that helped foster a breakdown in values which led to the pervasiveness of sexual assaults and is perhaps the most difficult element of the problem to solve. . . .

The Panel has found deficiencies in the Honor Code System and in the Academy's character development programs that helped contribute to this intolerable environment. . . .

The situation demands institutional changes, including cultural changes. these changes are incremental and cannot be made overnight.

Lot of wisdom coming from this panel. I'm really impressed. They demand aggressive change now, while facing the reality that true cultural change takes a long time--and that actually effecting it is a delicate art form.

Nice work independent panel. Very nice work.