Alec Baldwin took to the highbrow nursing home that is 60 Minutes last night to discuss, among other things, that notorious voice message in which he called his adolescent daughter a "rude little pig." With narrowed eyes, Baldwin told an old, old Morley Safer that though he is sorry he left the message, he is "pretty overwhelmed by the sanctimoniousness of people." It was a quiet exhibition of the unflinching honesty and unwillingness to bend to public outrage that will ensure this guy never, ever wins the public office he seeks.

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EASY TRANSITION "Alec Baldwin says he's … mulling a run for public office. The Massapequa, L.I., entertainer, eldest of the four Baldwin brothers turned actors, says in an interview airing Sunday that politics looks appealing now that he's turned the corner on 50. 'There's other things I want to do,' besides acting, the left-leaning performer tells CBS' '60 Minutes.' 'There's no age limit on running for office, to a degree.' It is 'something I might do one day,' he said."

SHUT IT DOWN " … I propose that it is time for CBS News to be put down, in the Old Yeller sense of the phrase. It's time to turn out the lights and just start airing Hollywood gossip at 6:30 p.m. The network could follow Schieffer's lead and simply dissolve the thing after the inauguration, maybe keeping 60 Minutes around, either as a commercial-free public service program (because what exec doesn't love a prestige-hogging loss leader?) or under the auspices of CBS' entertainment division (because why keep pretending?). The farewell would be handled with dignified pomp—tributes to Murrow and Severeid and so forth. And if Walter Cronkite is in good health, he could do the honors with a final sign off. I'm serious. That's how bad things are, and that's the way it is."

America's bringing out the complimenting, gorgeous-eyed guns in an attempt to dissuade its favorite white immigrants, the family Beckham, from prematurely fleeing the states. In this Sunday's 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper fawns over the Beckham patriarch David, his tattoos and his famous "bend." Quite the handsome, ingratiatory interview, now let's hope Davey will stay. We couldn't watch another LA Galaxy game without knowing he's sitting on the bench, contemplating what suit to buy next.

FIEFDOM OF THE PRESS "An Alabama TV station's technical troubles during a '60 Minutes' piece about the state's former governor caused ripples of controversy by some who wondered whether the outage was politically motivated. A Scott Pelley-reported piece about former Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman that led '60 Minutes' wasn't seen by viewers in northern Alabama served by WHNT-TV, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Ala. The station, which initially blamed CBS, said Monday that instead there was a problem with its satellite receiver that was supposed to take the network feed. Pelley's piece focused on Seigelman's conviction for corruption, which many question, and included an interview with a Republican operative who said that former Bush adviser Karl Rove asked her to take compromising pictures of Siegelman."

Sunday's 60 Minutes profile of FaceSpace wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg drew a season-low number of viewers, about five million less than average. Jossip's take on the downturn: "Young people don’t watch old people TV."

And that may be, but don't the numbers also indicate that old people don't like to watch young people on TV? Regardless of whether or not said young people are partially responsible for the phenomenon of cutely-named, oddly-hyped social-networking sites? And doesn't this in some way augur an eventual inverse relationship between the year and the membership of current social-networking sites; with aging twentysomethings finding them too juvenile and the young and technologically savvy finding them too passé?

Perhaps the billionaire investors staking claims on these sites should take their noses out of the Journal and spend some time with the idiot box.