After Rod Roddy's death in October 2003, The Price Is Right has used five different announcers at various tapings, but on today's show, Bob Barker revealed who gets to say "Come on down!" from now on: Rich Fields. He was the rotating announcer all last week, but the show says his first "permanent" show aired last Friday, April 23. (That would have been show 2885K, taped April 5, so he apparently got the job at the beginning of the month. It's hard to tell game shows apart sometimes, but TPIR regularly airs shows less than two weeks after they were taped.)

Fields, who was most recently the weatherman at KPSP, CBS-2 in Palm Springs, California, is the show's third announcer in its 32-year history on the CBS Television Network. Johnny Olson was with the show from 1972 until his death in 1985, at which time Rod Roddy replaced him. Fields replaces Roddy, who passed away in October of 2003.

[...] Fields has been associated with the Network for 13 of his 25 years on the air, most notably a 10-year stint with KCBS-FM in Los Angeles. Fields also worked for the CBS/Infinity Radio group in Tampa, Florida. He has won four Addy awards for his work in radio production and commercial voiceover.

That's a real difference between living in Oklahoma and in the rest of the country: people here will not accept a "weatherman" who is not a meteorologist. Weather, and particularly severe weather, are way too important to leave to entertainers. The concept of a weatherman becoming a game show announcer (Fields), or host (Pat Sajak), or talk show host (David Letterman) just makes us wonder what the hell is wrong with you people that you'd let comedians interpret the weather good grief don't you have any common sense at all????

Ahem. Anyway, congrats to Fields.

I won't repeat the long sections that Josh Marshall quotes from this Salon piece on the President's befuddling National Guard records, but here's one key part:

When Bush left the Guard about a half year early to attend Harvard Business School, his hard-copy record was retained in a military personnel records jacket at the Austin offices of the Texas Guard. Eventually, those documents were committed to microfiche. A copy of the microfiche was then sent to the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Those records are considered private, and they cannot be released to anyone without the signature of the serviceman or woman. The White House has never indicated that Bush has signed the authorization form. And this is what prompts unending suspicion.

In season 4 of The West Wing, faced with a Republican challenger who set expectations for himself so low that forming a complete sentence was seen as a win, the Bartlett campaign risked everything by agreeing to hold only a single debate, provided that the candidates got to ask each other questions and the moderator could compel them to answer. I've long thought that John Kerry must do something like that, because he absolutely has to find a way to ask questions directly to George W. Bush and make him answer them.

Can't you just see it in this case? "Mr. President, I have here in my pocket National Guard form X/Y-Z, filled in with your name, Social Security number, and service number. All you have to do to release all of your military records, as you've promised for four years, is sign this form that you've never signed. Here's the form and here's a pen. Will you sign it right now and put an end to this ridiculous speculation?"

Now that's an opposition party.