Looks like Timmy can dish it out, but he can't take it:
Official respect for the First Amendment is apparently in steep decline. The other day, an intrepid journalist and truth-seeker was grilling a powerful public figure. But before the interview was over, the powerful public figure's press aide abruptly broke in as tape rolled and stopped the interrogation.
Tim Russert interviewing Colin Powell?
Nope. Try Brian Lehrer interviewing Tim Russert.
"We were given precisely 10 minutes with Russert to tape an interview about his new book from 8 a.m. to 8:10 a.m. for broadcast at 10 a.m. last Friday," the WNYC radio host told me yesterday.
"My impression was that he was very tightly scheduled, and had to do five or six interviews one after the other and his people were trying to keep him on schedule ... Eight minutes into the interview, a woman's voice cut in and barked, 'WNYC, you have eight seconds left!' And the interview came to a quick end."
Lehrer added that the glitch was deleted from what sounded, when it was broadcast, like a seamless conversation.
"It was no big deal," Lehrer said, noting that the interrupter was not an NBC News employee. "These things happen. It was just the usual bureaucratic stuff and getting an interview. So we edited it out."
But two days later, Secretary of State Powell's press aide, Emily Miller, was so desperate to keep her boss on schedule that she tried to end Russert's taped interview when it ran into overtime. The "Meet the Press" moderator went ballistic.
Not only did Russert castigate Powell's aide on his own NBC show, he gave righteously indignant interviews about "attempted news management gone berserk" to CNN and The Washington Post.
On Monday, Lehrer poked fun at Russert's tantrum by airing the rude interruption that he had earlier excised.
"If Colin Powell's people were guilty of attempted news management gone berserk," Lehrer told me yesterday, "then I can say only that Tim Russert's people succeeded at it."
Russert could not be interrupted for comment yesterday.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/195080p-168547c.html
From the same source: Twenty-two-years old and soon to graduate from college, presidential twins Jenna and Barbara Bush - previously best known for rampant nightclubbing and underage drinking - are blossoming into admirable young ladies, claims People magazine.
Jenna, who'll collect her bachelor's degree from the University of Texas, will be moving to Manhattan to do volunteer work with schoolchildren.
"She's looking for something where she can give back," says an Austin friend.
Yale almost-grad Barbara, meanwhile, will intern with a pediatric AIDS program at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
People reports that the Bush sisters - who heretofore shunned the glare of publicity and politics - also will be featured in a joint interview in Vogue, and then pitch in on their dad's reelection campaign.
I thought Timmy was being a bit too carried away over Powell's aide error. Shame on you Timmy!
I swear we're living in Bizzaro World, what with Dowd's ranting and now this information, of which I was completely unaware, Gene Sperling was once dubbed Washington's most eligible bachelor!
• Former Clinton White House economic adviser Gene Sperling, once dubbed Washington's most eligible bachelor by W magazine, is finally engaged at 45. The bicoastal relationship started three years ago when Sperling met Allison Abner, 38, at a Hollywood lunch for staffers of the NBC series "The West Wing," where she was a writer and he a consultant. He proposed last month beneath the same oak in Big Sur, Calif., where Abner's parents had wed. (How romantic!) WP
Holey smokes!!! Slim pickins in DC that year!
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Hill staffers possessed of naughty imaginations -- and perhaps too much time on their hands -- were madly swapping theories yesterday about the identity of a young Senate aide who kept what appeared to be a detailed online diary boasting of her many sexual partners. The woman's explicit accounts of her alleged frolics -- including an affair "with a married man who pays me for sex" -- were given wide notice this week by Ana Marie Cox, the Washington cyber-gossip at www.wonkette.com, who posted the diary. Continued