Stories on the Takeaway have all kinds of origins. There are host pitches, obvious news stories, monster bookings, weird obscure stuff (my personal favorites) and the millions of great ideas that our staff comes up with. Then there is the occasional asteroid, a story that is whirling out there that seems possibly misguided, a rogue: destructive, preposterous, awkward, or worse, embarrassing. “Where did this story come from?” was my question about the idea that we were going to talk about the religious significance of the movie 'Groundhog Day' on the holiday Groundhog Day, February 2^nd. What religious significance? I was imagining the crackpots who would come into the show with Bill Murray masks or with their hair all done up like Andie MacDowell, or worst of all Groundhog Day costar Chris Elliot would show up in a trench coat with a Bible in hand talking about his past lives.

John Hockenberry walks through some moments from past State of the Union addresses, looking at the themes that always recur: the economy, health care, jobs, the deficit and changes big and small to our constitution and government.

From its constitutional origins, the State of the Union speech – State of the Union message, gesture, whatever you want to call it – has evolved into a big media event worthy of the Kremlin. Although Article 2 merely directed the president “from time to time” to report on the state of the union, it’s now an annual speech, followed by a response from the party out of power and media evaluations of the president’s own evaluation of the state of the union. What would the framers think about this sober, elaborate ritual, picked apart by the jabbering class commenting on who smiled, who applauded and who walked out?

John Hockenberry sat down with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen at the Pentagon on Wednesday for a wide-ranging conversation. In this excerpt, we ask him about the use of Guantanamo Bay in the Haiti relief effort and working with a Haitian government in disarray.

The United States military is getting more involved in the Haiti relief effort by the day. On Wednesday, 4,000 more troops were added, bringing the total U.S. presence in the country to about 16,000. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the nation's highest ranking military officer, tells The Takeaway that he recognizes the scale of the U.S. footprint and insists the focus is to support other organizations. He also says the use of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is an option in the treatment of the many wounded Haitians.

John Hockenberry sat down with Adm. Mullen in the Pentagon on Wednesday. Here is a partial transcript of the interview.

I have a new baby. He can’t talk. He can’t walk. He loves to eat and he wants to be a part of his much bigger family. It’s a little like The Takeaway.

He was going to be my space buddy. He had always been. Walter Cronkite was my companion as a boy to understanding the world. His voice was the narration for the Kennedy assassination and his tearful gesture in announcing JFK’s death was, for my parents, the almost tribal gesture giving permission for us to grieve. Because Cronkite shed tears we could all move away from shock and step forward together.

Walter Cronkite was the story. He was the news. He was the news business. He was trained as a wire service reporter and embodied those values and virtues long after technology upstaged them. Nothing could ever trump the authority of Cronkite and today, newspapers and networks alike yearn to recreate and bottle it as though what Cronkite had was a part of his performance. The networks assumed that the authority in the news business belonged to them --like the phone company owns the telephone wires. But in their choices after Cronkite, each network made clear that other values such as youth and celebrity mattered as much to them as authority, and audiences got the point. Authority doesn’t share the stage well with the superfluous or the supercilious. Walter stood alone.

Comparisons come almost too easily. One can rank the hype and pure star power of Michael Jackson up there with the most famous people who have ever lived. His reach was planetary in scale. His loss delivers the shock and tragic complexity of the death of Elvis Presley, John Lennon or Marilyn Monroe. But focus on Michael himself and the comparisons evaporate. This is an irreplaceable talent that sadly the world lost some time ago. By the time of his death at age 50 this week, Jackson had receded from a world that could only witness him in bizarre glimpses. Those glimpses continued all evening on television news reports showing blurry crowds and telephoto shots of ambulances. As in life, in death the best mere humans can do is get a ticket for the global stadium event.

Michael was outsized from the moment he took the stage as part of his family's irresistibly appealing Motown act. But he immediately outgrew his family; over time he became, as the King of Pop, bigger than his genre. Then, at the top of his game, he exceeded the scale of celebrity itself. In the late 80s and 90s Michael hung out with actress Elizabeth Taylor because almost no one could match his towering profile of talent and weirdness. ... Continue reading

Let's say you're a musician and a news junkie, and you want to combine the two. If you were really talented, you might end up with something like the work of musical brothers Evan and Michael Gregory. They use the sound tool "Autotune," often used by rappers like T-Pain and Kanye West, to make music with the news. Evan and Michael, two of the four members of The Gregory Brothers, join us with more on how they Autotune the News.