…tried to appeaal to the sleaze-talk radio audience with a promotional tie-in to Sean Hannity, it’s now trying to appease progressives. A new TV commercial tries to extend Chevy’s “all-American” brand image by featuring images of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Nixon’s resignation, 9/11, and Katrina; all done to an original jingle performed by John Mellencamp (who, when he was more popular, publicly scoffed at oldies-rock stars selling their songs for commercials).

…(can you even imagine he used to be on SportsCenter?) expounds again, this time on why it is indeed possible to criticize Bush without being a terrorist sympathizer.

…from a company that’s been brimming with dumb ideas of late: “GM Hires Fox News Mouthpiece Sean Hannity As Spokesman.”

…lives. The Boondocks comic strip, alas, might not be back for a good while, if ever.

…of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was everything I’d expected–really predictable Hollywood-insider soapiness. But there was one funny rant about filming in Vancouver.

…about this being five years since you know what. Except this:

• I’ve only found a couple of reviews of the apparently silly, allegedly far-right-biased ABC 9/11 TV movie. As cheap publicity stunts go, the hype over the movie’s writer-embellished Clinton bashing seems to have brought more attention than the piece-O-tripe deserved.
• The right-wing sleaze machine still doesn’t want you to realize several things about the attack. Foremost among them: Al-Qeida has no interest whatsoever in overthrowing the United States government or imposing a strict Islamic regime on the U.S. citizenry. They’d like to install such regimes in Iraq, Somalia, the “Stans,” and Turkey; and they’d like Israel to disappear.
• The hijackers came not from Iraq but from “friendly” Saudi Arabia. You know, that country where the official religious poilce harass insufficiently-covered women, where a corrupt monarchy rules everything, and whose said monarchy’s big pals with Bush’s oil-piz pals.
• The real threats to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. democracy, and the U.S. way of life are internal, and they can all be traced to the right-wing sleaze machine. This is acknowledged by just about everybody who’s not directly or indirectly employed by the sleaze machine.
• As Nov. 2006 nears, and with it the potential end to total one-party control of the federal government, the sleaze machine will only get sleazier. Because fear-‘n-smear is all they know how to do anymore.
• But what if more of us stood up to the fear-mongering, not just in politics but in our daily lives and in the economy (too many of us, including many of us in the media biz, live in fear of being left behind by an increasingly inequitable economy, and thus become willing slaves to anything that will allow us a toehold into the “haves”).That’s the premise of Arianna Huffington’s newest book/web site, Becoming Fearless. Unfortunately, the site’s shackled by adherence to self-help publishing industry rules, including the rule that such material must be by/for/about women only.

  And what drives these media-biz rules? Strict commercialism, which at its bottom line is just another form of fear.

…than watching myNetworkTV:

• Buffing toenails.
• Cleaning tile grout.
• Emergency oral surgery.
• Removing the cellophane wrapping from compact discs.
• Reconfiguring a small-office LAN installation.
• Tongue piercing sans local anesthetic.
• Proofreading volumes of small towns’ municipal codes.
• Scraping old gum off the bottoms of restaurant tables.
• Hand-grading standardized tests.
• Separating recyclables from non-recyclables.
• Being interviewed for a job you don’t even want, pretending you want it.
• Listening to jackhammers.
• Listening to coworkers or customers complaining.
• A ten-mile freeway backup.
• A middle-school piano recital in which you are not related to any of the performers.

I’m home waiting for the installers to show up for my Internet phone service. I’m watching MTV on its 25th anniversary day. Surprisingly, for an institution that usually can’t stop cvelebrating its own self-proclaimed fabulousness, the channel and its Web site are nearly ignoring the birthday.

(MTV’s Web site does offer a selection of ’80s oldies videos, but in an annoyingly Mac-incompatible format. Rival site Fuse has no such discrimination.)

I happened to tune in during a show called The Big Ten, in which the channel reverts, for at least one hour, to its former shtick of playing music videos. (Remember those?) Madonna’s still on the roster there. So are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Justin Timberlake, Mary J. BLige, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, Nelly Furtado, Green Day, Beck, the Goo Goo Dolls, Snoop Dogg, and even Mariah Carey. As for the up-n’-comer acts on the show, they fall into definite generic categories. There are corporate-friendly Cobain impersonators, gold-chain-twirlin’ white and black gangstas, bootay-shakin’ soul divas, boys wearing eyeliner, metal-rap-punk fusion confusions. You’ll be comforted, I’m sure, to learn the primary video-imagery cliches still revolve around big cars and small garments.

But, as I’ve sure you’ve heard, MTV’s main fare these days is young-adult “reality” shows. These still include such workhorse concepts as The Real World, Cribs, and Pimp My Ride. There’s also My Super Sweet 16, in which a different rich girl in each episode spends more on her birthday party than you’ll make this year.

MTV’s “remit,” or corporate mission, has always been to own the advertiser-beloved teen and young-adult audience, without spending a lot of money to do so. As this prized audience gravitates further away from TV viewing toward other leisure pursuits, and as better-funded TV ventures take aim at the same target, this task keeps getting harder.

So, like an aging pop star desperate to stay on the charts, its every attempt to prove its continued youth and vitality only shows off how old it’s gotten.

From a decade ago, here’s one guy’s prediction of “why DVD would fail” in the home-entertainment marketplace.

I’ve been loyal to the Ivar’s waterfront fireworks show for years, only to learn that the competing Lake Union fireworks show’s a lot more spectacular.

Fourth of July revelation #2: My annual enjoyment of the SciFi Channel’s Twilight Zone marathon was rudely and abruptly discontinued when the channel switched to Extreme Championship Wrestling. This is even worse than moldy Saved by the Bell reruns on the Cartoon Network, or right-wingnut commentator shows on Headline News.

Seattle Weekly editor Knute Berger’s announced his resignation, six months after the paper was bought by the Arizona-based New Times chain. Berger (nephew of former Guiding Light soap star Barbara Berjer) spent his current editorship functioning as an old-guard defender of the faith, maintaining a sense of the paper’s (and the city’s) heritage in spite of parent-company pressure to cheapen and “modernize” the product. In spite of the Stranger’s constant ribbing about Berger’s official residence in the ‘burbs (a relic of his previous helming of the Weekly‘s former EastsideWeek edition), he remained loyal to the end to a particularly “Seattle” way of looking at the world—sincere and serious, but with a healthy sprig of wryness.

Our splendider-than-splendid 20th MISCiversary hullabaloo commences at 8 p.m. in the downstairs “Grotto” room of the Rendezvous, on Second Avenue between Battery and Bell in formerly-quiet Belltown.

INSTEAD OF REVIEWING Jay Leno’s non-starter of a segment with wingnut crashing-bore Ann Coulter, I’ll comment on Coulter’s Ally McBeal-esque rail-thinness. I’ve seldom if ever commented on a female celebrity’s physical appearance, but in this case Coulter’s countenance might be a key to her mindset.

Last week at a First Thursday art opening, my fellow Belltown Messenger scribe Gillian Gaar told me she thought Coulter looked anorexic. I don’t remember everything Gaar told me, but she essentially suggested Coulter was treating herself with the same judgmental cruelty she uses on non-Bushbots. I responded that I’d known right-wingers who were vegetarians, not for moral reasons but for the sake of personal perfection.

The shrinks and the self-help authors claim many anorexics are propelled by an obsession with attaining perfect beauty, and/or an obsession with an ethereal transcendence that both denies and overcomes the limitations of bodily existence.

I’ve known only one ex-anorexic personally. This woman, who’s doing much better these days, said that at the time she felt disgusted at the idea of putting anything into her body. You could call it the ultimate chastity, and it’s another kind of perfection-obsession.

Coulter, overtly, markets herself as a proud provocateur, a daring rebel, a valiant warrior. I happen to view her as none of these, but rather as a pompous bully, an insult comic who forgot to be funny. She’s like the screechingly pathetic MSNBC incarnation of Dennis Miller, without Miller’s wordplay or comic timing.

But back to her self-image. She clearly thrives on hate, both giving and receiving. She publicly treats criticism as proof of her greatness, just before she spouts another “joke” advocating her opponents’ violent murder. It’d be easy for an armchair psychologist to interpret Coulter’s emaciated physique as a sign that she gets off on punishing herself as much as she gets off on bashing anybody who doesn’t worship Bush. In BDSM lingo, that’s mean she was a dominatrix who’s also her own submissive.

But other intrepretations could also be in play. One can imagine Coulter rigorously maintaining the visual appearance of a brittle li’l waif, to make her verbal brutality seem somehow more “against type” and therefore more “truthful.”

But it still doesn’t work. Coulter just comes off as a spoiled princess, an upscale snot crassly harping about anyone poorer or less refined than herself. She’s no crusader; she’s just a schmuck.

Note: Neither Leno nor his other guest, George Carlin, made any serious attempt to call Coulter on her BS. But at the show’s end, musical guest KT Tunstall appeared with an acoustic guitar festooned with Woody Guthrie’s old slogan, “This Machine Kills Fascists.”

…today to Vernon L. Fonk, 75. The former ambulance driver and cigarette-company wholesale rep started the Vern Fonk Insurance agency in 1964; it now has 14 offices in two states, specializing in “special risk” auto policies.

Please note: The guy who plays Vern Fonk in the agency’s delightfully wacky TV commercials is still, thankfully, with us.

…has jumped all over a mini hype-bandwagon started a week and a half ago by KOMO-TV, which apparently just discovered that you can find escort ads on the Internet. So now we get P-I scribe Robert Jamieson pleading for a populist uprising against Craigslist.com for allowing said advertisers to use its URLs, without compensation.

Of course, this is pure anti-Internet FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

(Not to mention it’s attacking a victimless act performed by consenting adults in the privacy of their own blah-blah-blah.)

And, of course, these advertisers would simply find other online fora for their messages should Craigslist ever lock ’em out. Indeed, many of these advertisers are already using several other online “spaces,” including weekly papers’ sites, their own sites, and “review” message-board sites.

So why pick on Craigslist?

Could it be because Craigslist’s other ad categories are taking a big bite outta the daily papers’ want-ad revenue?

Naah. It couldn’t be that….

…but I love old toy commercials better.