If Oprah likes Obama, does that mean voters will like him, too? Maybe yes, maybe no, according to the results of a telephone survey of more than 1,000 people by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Reports trade publication Broadcasting & Cable:

According to the survey, 15% said Oprah's endorsement would make them more likely to vote for Obama, while the same 15% said it would make them less likely and 69% said it would make no difference. That is down from a 2000 poll that found that 14% said her endorsement would make them more likely to vote for a candidate and 11% less likely.

But 60% still said they thought Oprah's support would help his overall candidacy, while only 3% said it would hurt, although how that squares with the vote results is not clear.

There was a clear split along party with an Oprah endorsement, however, with 23% of Democrats saying her endorsement of a candidate (not necessarily Obama) would make them more likely to vote for that candidate, while only 13% said it would make them less likely. It was reversed for Republicans, with 10% saying it would help and 22% hurt.

Other celebrities have even less pull with voters, according to the poll:

† Jay Leno: 6 percent more likely to vote for a candidate he endorsed; 16 percent, less likely; and 78 percent would just laugh off his political judgment.

† Bill O'Reilly: 11 percent more likely to support his presidential pick; 21 percent, less likely; and 68 percent, say he has no impact on their preference.

† Jon Stewart: 10 percent more likely to put their trust in his choice for president; 15 percent less likely; and 75 percent would fake him out by voting the way they planned to all along.

† Donald Trump: 5 percent are more likely to pick the candidate The Donald says just can’t be beat; 20 percent less likely; and 75 percent don’t think his opinion should be the boss of them.

† Tiger Woods: 6 percent more likely to swing toward Tiger’s choice; 13 percent less likely; 79 percent think political punditry from Woods is stepping in a voter’s line.

The Stiletto wonders whether Anna Nicole Smith’s endorsement would help or hurt a candidate in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and other places where dead people tend to vote.

Dan Rather told The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz in a telephone interview that by filing his $70-million wrongful dismissal suit against CBS, he is fighting for "the red, beating heart of our democracy," journalism.

Here’s how Kurtz describes Rather’s beef in a nutshell:

[H]e was made a "scapegoat" for a discredited 2004 story about President Bush's National Guard record because CBS wanted to "pacify the White House."

CBS management "coerced" the veteran news anchor "into publicly apologizing and taking personal blame for alleged journalistic errors in the broadcast," says the $70 million suit, which also names Sumner Redstone, chief executive of the network's then-parent company, Viacom; CBS Chairman Les Moonves; and former CBS News president Andrew Heyward.

Jeff Bercovici, a columnist at Conde Nast’s struggling business magazine, Portfolio, contends “the 32-page complaint reflects worse on the former anchor than the Memogate saga itself ever did.” Bercovici says the suit is “riddled with logical inconsistencies” and “is evidence of a man desperate to have it both ways”:

As anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News for 24 years, he claims credit for the broadcast's many awards and triumphs. Yet when it comes to the disputed Air National Guard documents, he reverts to the defense that he was too busy covering Bill Clinton's heart surgery and Hurricane Frances to pay them much attention.

I wonder: Had the National Guard story won a Peabody, would Rather have insisted it belonged to everybody else but him?

Kurtz reports that his former colleagues are “baffled” by Rather’s claim of being an uninvolved bystander, just reading words other people wrote off the teleprompter:

"I think he's gone off the deep end," said Josh Howard, who was forced to resign as executive producer of "60 Minutes II" after CBS retracted the story. "He seems to be saying he was just the narrator.

"He did every interview. He worked the sources over the phone. He was there in the room with the so-called document experts. He argued over every line in the script. It's laughable."

Rome Hartman, a former executive producer of "CBS Evening News" who now works for the BBC, said: "It's got to be about this lasting sense of hurt and pride. I was flabbergasted. I just don't get it."

While Rather’s ex-colleagues think he’s lost his mind, Los Angeles Times reporter Mary McNamara, for one, thinks he’s lost his edge. Writing about Rather’s appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” she pointedly advises Rather to “get better writers” if he is “going to set himself up as our last defense against corporate corruption of news organizations.” She notes that the interview consisted largely of “boilerplate,” and that Rather was “verbose, seemed at a loss for real talking points, lapsing instead into self-indulgent and maddening asides rather than sticking to the story.” With a final twist of the knife, McNamara concludes, “you'd think a man with as many years in front of the camera could do a little better than that.”

The smartest analysis of Rather’s suit, in The Stiletto’s opinion, is offered by MediaPost editor-at-large Diane Mermigas, who makes the case that both he and CBS are in a “time warp”:

It's sadly evident the lawsuit is a byproduct of both Rather and CBS clinging to old-line value systems and economics that are being dismantled by new always-on, interactive media.

The marquee news anchor, like the network's self-absorbed half-hour nightly network newscast, is an anachronism in an era when the connected consumer wants the news on-demand and, increasingly, online. …

You can hardly blame Rather for pursuing the same line of passé thinking in his lawsuit, as if the old broadcast TV network value system that gave him star power was still in place.

Given that the “voice of G-d” news anchor is yesterday’s news, one wonders what Mark Cuban was thinking when he hired Rather to front for his fledgling hi-def cable channel.

BTW, Rather has gone on record saying he would donate most of any court award to journalistic causes. Wanna bet the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University won’t get even one thin dime?

“The Brave One” And The Second Amendment

“The Brave One” traces one woman’s journey from victim to vigilante when her fiancé was beaten to death and she was left for dead, after being set upon by a three thugs in Central Park one evening. Leaving aside the fact that no sane or savvy New Yorker would walk in Central Park at night, Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is the archetypical “enlightened” (read: liberal) New Yorker: She hosts a talk show on NPR called “Street Walk,” which takes listeners on a sentimental journey around New York City to recapture days gone by and preserve fading memories for posterity; is engaged to David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews) a younger man, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from India; and lives in a funky, not-quite-safe neighborhood in upper Manhattan.

[SPOILER ALERT: Stop reading the rest of this post if you have not read any reviews, and do not want any details whatsoever about the plot.]

Bain awakens from a three-week coma a different person, a stranger to herself. Paralyzed by fear, she is unable to leave her apartment building at first. Understandably, once she is able to get past the lobby door, she makes a beeline for John Jovino Gun Shop in Little Italy. She is informed that she needs to apply for a permit before she can purchase a weapon – the granting of which can take months and requires numerous trips to One Police Plaza during what would be your working hours, BTW.

A shady character takes her to nearby Chinatown, where she is able to get a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun for $1000, with a box of bullets thrown in for free. Notes The Washington Post:

The movie doesn't fetishize the gun (a smallish, uninteresting 9mm automatic) and push the tired line that the gun seduced her into violence. She wanted the gun, so much so that she paid three times its value to a street hustler. So much for gun control: It takes about two minutes. [Note: The WaPo film critic obviously doesn’t doesn’t know from handguns; the gun is a semi.]

The stranger, now armed, deliberately becomes a lightning rod for crimes of opportunity and blows the bad guys away. The New York Times calls Bain “a haunted survivor,” like Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” but notes that “her spirit is in many ways closer to that of Charles Bronson’s workaday vigilante in the ‘Death Wish’ movies” because she “clearly feels some anguish, but little in the way of remorse.” 

Bain also evokes electronics engineer Bernard Goetz, who refused to be a “designated victim” by shooting (though none fatally) four muggers on the subway armed with sharpened ice picks – the 1984 incident divides New Yorkers into two camps to this day (hero v. vigilante). For this reason, The Times acknowledges:

“The Brave One” … is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.

And that, the movie insists, is how, in your heart of hearts, you really do want it to be. Its none-too-subtle governing idea is that even the most effete, brownstone - dwelling public radio listener (or New York Times reader) might feel the occasional urge to blow someone’s head off. …

Or as the WaPo put it:  “In the real world, liberals do get mugged, just like everyone else.”

As Bain is hunting down the bad guys, the police - in particular, homicide detective named Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard) - are hunting down the unknown vigilante. The movie has a surprise twist at the end, which The Stiletto won’t reveal. Suffice it to say that the entire movie theater in Times Square was whooping and hollering. So The Times is not entirely off base in its assessment that “The Brave One” is “a pro-lynching movie that even liberals can love.” But not nearly as much as conservatives.

Editorial Note: During a stint as a private investigator in another state, The Stiletto obtained a concealed carry permit. In many jurisdictions, a PI is also a peace officer, so The Stiletto was required to demonstrate to the state’s satisfaction that she was proficient in the use of several types of firearms. (And because The Stiletto has a mischievous sense of humor, she hung the target showing the clusters of lethal head and heart shots in the hallway just outside her bedroom door.) Alas, The Stiletto had to give up her gun and her Second Amendment rights (third item) when she moved to New York City in the pursuit of career happiness. Her gun guaranteed all her other Constitutional rights – most important, the right to life. Any minute of any day, a depraved criminal can take that away and there’s nothing The Stiletto can do about it anymore, because of New York’s Sullivan Law and a myriad of other gun control measures clearly meant to render the Second Amendment moot. It’s un-American.