…..the families of Harvey Korman, who I will always think of first as The Great Gazoo, and second as that hysterically funny man on “The Carol Burnett Show”

 and to Tim Russert.

When Russert first took over “Meet The Press,” I wasn’t very excited. He seemed to turn a serious, sober news program that used to feature panels of journalists (check the title) interviewing Very Important People about Very Important Things into an entertainment program, with him hogging the spotlight. But his show became required viewing during Shrub’s administration, and I quickly became a big fan of his hard questioning and extraordinary research. (If you said it somewhere in the last 25 years, Russert would find it and put it on screen, and make you talk about it.) Before I knew it, I was centering my Sundays around “Meet The Press,” actually telling people that the show was my equivalent of church.

Yes, he was another mainstream white boy insider who respected authority too much. (Why didn’t he beat up on Bush as bad as he did Cheney?) But I learned a lot from his work (like, how to do it RIGHT 🙂 ), and actually went through the five stages of grief when he passed.

And my vote for the successor is David Gregory if the search is kept inside NBC, and Ifill if it expands outside.

JUNE 19th UPDATE: re: death and funeral coverage: Was Russert elected Vice-President of the United States and nobody told me? LOL!  🙂 Wow, talk about REAL power in America……