So who's briefing him on the P.D.B.'s? A. The briefer himself.
Peter MacKay, a conservative leader in the House of Commons, said of Mr. Martin, "To think that he hadn't briefed himself is just unbelievable".
Morgan, however, had briefed himself on Batista, who had seized power in a coup, in 1952: how the dictator liked sitting in his palace, eating sumptuous meals and watching horror films, and how he tortured and killed dissidents, whose bodies were sometimes dumped in fields, with their eyes gouged out or their crushed testicles stuffed in their mouths.
"He wrote the briefs himself; he paid the court costs; it became his mission for future filmmakers, was how he saw it," said Jacqueline Stewart, a professor of radio, television and film and African-American studies at Northwestern University, who interviewed Mr. Fanaka for the L.A. Rebellion retrospective.
"People just love to say that figure: one hundred million dollars," he said (employing a brief caesura himself).
The coach enjoyed a brief career himself in the league, spending time with the San Diego Chargers, Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos and Green Bay Packers.
In January, a prosecutor linked to the case excused himself during a media briefing and shot himself in the head.
Forty-five minutes later, he found himself briefing reporters on that and other effects of the court's decision.
"We've got a unique opportunity to do something big, to tackle our deficit in a way that forces our government to live within its means," he said in an appearance in the White House briefing room, casting himself as much an honest broker as a partisan participant in the talks.
Follow Lawrence Neil on Twitter.
