Ezra Klein explains about things like the filibuster and reconciliation. His main point is that the rules are being twisted in ways that go against both the original intended applications and also the precedents. He's absolutely right. And is there a man, woman or child alive who doubts that next time the Republicans have the majority and the Democrats are in the minority, both sides will be twisting them back in the other directions?

I'm getting e-mails with an unsourced rumor that much of the Amazon graphic novel sale was a computer error; that some of those books were never supposed to be priced so low. Possible, I suppose. Before prices reverted, I ordered about a dozen books. I'll let you know if I get them for the prices upon which I clicked. Fortunately, I have the e-mailed order confirmation.

Matt Taibbi on the current "Tea Party" movement, how it differs from Ron Paul's "Tea Party" movement and how it's being manipulated by powerful forces to direct its ire where they [the powerful forces] want it.

And in the last hour, Amazon has repriced some items. For example, The Fantastic Four Omnibus, discounted to $8.24, is now back up to $63. But there are still many great books at closeout prices so shop around…and maybe check back later on some of those items that have gone back to their original prices.

I wonder what's behind this whole sale. Most of the books involved say they'll ship in 1-2 weeks, which is not the norm for Amazon. Sounds like they bought out or acquired some going-out-of-biz chain or distributorship so they suddenly had this extra supply of merchandise to unload…and the sale is only good 'til that inventory is depleted.

Someone at Amazon has apparently decided they're overstocked with graphic novels and reprint collections of old comic books, mainly from Marvel and Dark Horse. Sales on selected titles have just been slashed…for how long, I do not know. But here are some examples…

• The Fantastic Four Omnibus — The first 848 pages of that classic comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby…in hardcover for $8.24. This thing used to be $64 and it was worth it then.
• The Incredible Hulk Omnibus — 752 pages of early Hulk adventures by Lee, Kirby, Steve Ditko and others…in hardcover for $8.24.
• The X-Men Omnibus — 768 pages of…well, you get the idea. Also $8.24.
• Iron Man Omnibus — A measly 720 pages for $8.24.
• Amazing Fantasy Omnibus — This one costs a bit more and you get a bit less but it's still a bargain. This is a hardcover collection of those weird monster and mystery stories that Stan Lee did with Kirby and Ditko (and a few other artists) before the Marvel super-hero era. 416 pages for $14.99.

There's also a lot of Dark Horse material with low prices. This is a fine time to pick up the Herbie Archives, for instance. Or to get into their Tarzan reprints or Turok, Son of Stone. There are also a ton of books with recent material that have been drastically discounted…way too many for me to research and set up links.

I'm going to suggest then that if you're interested in this kind of material you go over to the Amazon website and look around. You might try clicking on one of the above links and then browsing through the links they have there which say, "People who bought this book also bought these…" Or if you just go over to Amazon without that, please go via this link which will enable this site to claim its commission on your purchases.

Happy shopping. Some of you are gonna spend, spend, spend.

This site has ceaselessly plugged and recommended Zero Hour, a play by and starring my longtime friend Jim Brochu. I do this not to drum up business for Jim but to make myself look good. You see, I promote the show and then Jim and his friends like me. Then, people go see the show and they write me and say, "Boy, you were right about that one," and that makes me look better. You see? Only selfish motives on my part.

Of course, this only works if the folks who go see the show love it but I wasn't taking any gamble in that regard. I've seen this show, in which Jim portrays the outraged and outrageous Zero Mostel, capturing as much of that great actor as is humanly possible. I know everyone who sees it will thank me. Jim's play has been all over the country to rave reviews and recently, it completed a smash run at an off-Broadway theater that wasn't too far off-Broadway. The notices were so good, Jim himself could have written them. Knowing him, he probably did.

In fact, it did so well in that off-Broadway run that a new one starts tonight. The theater Jim was in had a commitment to another play so this evening, he reopens at the DR2 Theater over on East 15th Street in Manhattan for what they call an "open-ended run." That means he'll be there Zeroing as long as people are buying tickets, which they can do via TeleCharge. More info can be had at this site.

I dunno how long he'll be there…hopefully until I can get away from this end of the country and go back and see it again. If you're already on that end of the country or will be there, I suggest you buy seats and go fill them. Then you can send me a message and tell me how right I was about this one.

I've mentioned this before but one job I'm glad I don't have is assembling the "In Memoriam" segment for a show like tonight's Academy Awards. As noted in this article, you have to decide whose life will get noted and celebrated and whose won't…and then deal with the hurt the exclusions do to friends and family. I've heard there are those in the Academy who've suggested dispensing with the montage precisely because it slights those who can't be included.

The article says they have to whittle the list of "more than 100" down to "30 or so" so that's a lot of families who will be disappointed not to see a loved one mentioned. Someone also has to decide who's the "biggie" for the closing. I'm guessing Patrick Swayze, though I wouldn't be surprised by Natasha Richardson or Karl Malden. The biggest name who's passed away in the last twelve months would have to be Michael Jackson but I don't think he had enough of a movie career to close. There will reportedly be a special separate segment on John Hughes.

Having not been to the movies much lately, I don't have a huge interest in who goes home with Mr. Oscar. For what it's worth, the "buzz" I'm hearing is that a lot of people think The Hurt Locker deserves some big wins but probably won't get them. And usually when you hear that about a movie, it wins. I would also suspect there are voters who think the following: That a blockbuster like Avatar is not going to be significantly helped by winning Best Picture. It already has its "award" in its grosses, whereas The Hurt Locker has underperformed and is more deserving of that boost. Also, of course, James Cameron got his props for Titanic.

But it's also silly to try and predict what's on the voters' minds because for one thing, we don't really know who's voting and which films they've seen. There's also no data on how they vote…just what they vote for. I've made this analogy before but that never stops me. After a presidential election, we have a demographic breakdown of voters and we have exit polls and county-by-county vote totals so it's possible to infer a few things that were on voters' minds. After an Academy Award is handed out, we just know who won. We don't even know by how much they won. So theories like the one I just offered about The Hurt Locker are utterly speculative. For all we know, Sean Penn won Best Actor last year because half the voters flipped a coin and the other half thought they were voting for the guy who works in Vegas with Teller.

Enjoy the show. My TiVo thinks it'll be three hours but I've padded the recording time with an extra thirty minutes, just in case. Ten nominees for Best Picture will take a while.

Superstar Psychic Sylvia Browne claims an accuracy rate in her "readings" of around 85%-90%. While some of her predictions are too vague to be verifiable, a lot of them are. Researchers Ryan Shaffer and Agatha Jadwiszczok itemized 115 predictions (all they could find) that Ms. Browne had made about missing persons and murder cases and then they checked to see how many of them had been accurate.

90 of the 115 are either open or unconfirmable cases. That is, there has been no disposition or evidence that would show whether Browne was right or wrong. Of the remaining 25, her predictions have proven to be wrong in…well, wait a second. Let me go back to the article and see how many of those readings turned out to be correct. Even though I don't believe in this kind of thing, you figure that just making wild guesses, a person would be right once in a while.

Okay, I just checked what these researchers wrote and according to them, the number of times Browne was right in those 25 cases is zero. Wrong every time. If you want to look for yourself, here's the link. They quote the prediction and then they cite a news source for the actual outcome.

The sad part is that this won't matter to most of the people who seek out Sylvia Browne's aid and pay her what are often large sums of money for this kind of "advice." It won't even stop Larry King from having her on his show and drumming up more customers for her.

Hey, remember Julia Sweeney, who was so wonderful on Saturday Night Live for several seasons? I saw her in a one-woman show a few years after that and she was quite amazing (in a good way) in that, too. So whatever happened to her? My pal Bruce Reznick sent me this link that'll clue you in. (The article is, by the way, by Mary Schmich, who writes the Brenda Starr newspaper strip. Not that that's relevant but I like to notice that kind of thing.)

Last night, I read this piece in Vanity Fair about the scandal/crime involving David Letterman and an alleged extortionist. I don't know the facts of the case…and I also don't know that I (or you) have any particular right to know the facts of this case. But the article itself certainly felt to me about as sleazy as anything that Letterman or his supposed blackmailer were involved in. So I decided not to post the link even to tell you that I would not recommend taking at face value what you may find at the other end of the link.

I'm in a different mood this afternoon and maybe I'll regret it…but there it is. The whole tone of the piece makes me not believe it's giving us the true picture, just the juiciest one. Perhaps your reaction will differ.

One of my long-standing pet peeves is what I call Plans Without Action. I could cite many examples but I'm thinking now of a producer I worked for years ago who liked to chair big staff meetings with everyone crowded around the conference table. We'd have a problem — say, too much money being spent on donuts. And we'd argue about the problem, discuss various ways of tackling the problem, propose and debate various solutions, etc. These meetings would always go on for much, much longer than the dilemma deserved…to the point where I'd always suggest we needed a staff meeting to discuss how to cut down on staff meetings. But at some point, having figured out a number of constructive ways to solve The Great Donut Spending Crisis, we'd adjourn…

…and then no one would do anything.

No one would get around to doing anything we'd discussed. None of the solutions would be implemented. The show would continue to spend just as much on donuts as it ever had. But somehow, everyone would feel good that they'd put in some hours and energy on the problem. And if I or someone said, "Hey, this problem still exists," the response would be, "Hey, we had a three-hour meeting and came up with a number of good solutions."

Somehow, that felt better…made folks feel like they weren't so helpless in the face of the problem, I guess. But I used to argue that having the meeting and not acting on its recommendations was basically the same thing as never doing anything. In some ways, it was worse. It's a lot quicker and easier to just do nothing than to have a three-hour meeting and then do nothing. I also think that having the meeting created the illusion that something was being done…and sometimes, such illusions get in the way of actual problem-solving.

I'm starting to feel that way when someone says, "The government needs to spend less" and then doesn't specify what should be cut. Fine. The government needs to spend less. We all agree. And the air should be cleaner and unemployment should be lower and all the good-tasting foods shouldn't be high in calories. But to me, saying the government needs to spend less is a Plan Without Action. It feels like doing something but isn't.

I keep reading articles and op-eds where folks say the beast has gotten too large. It's immense and it's growing larger and any day now, it's going to step on us all and grind us into oblivion. And then they either offer no way to make the beast smaller or, at most, suggest trimming its toenails.

Sometimes, when you offer a minuscule solution to a huge dilemma, you're off to a good start and, hey, you gotta start somewhere. But sometimes, the minuscule solution is another one of those "Let's pretend we're solving the problem" things.

I have no solution to any of these challenges like cutting government spending. Hey, I'm doing well if I can cut what I spend on computer equipment by a few bucks a week. That's okay because, you know, I write cartoons and comic books and TV shows. Dealing with the national deficit is not up to me, which is great because I'm never going to do anything that will solve that crisis or anything of the sort. The one thing I'll say in my defense is that at least I'm honest enough to admit it.

More and more as I get older, I believe that pretending (or even intending) to do something and not doing anything is usually the same thing as not doing anything…or maybe even less. And about all we onlookers can do is to be able to tell the difference and not get them confused. And if we can do that, maybe we can spark someone into actually doing something.

Four weeks from today, the wonderful WonderCon opens in San Francisco. Those of you who feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego would do well to check out WonderCon, which is kind of like Comic-Con Lite. The same skilled crew operates it but it's about a fourth as packed. (Last year, WonderCon drew 34,000 attendees whereas Comic-Con had somewhere between 125,000 and 140,000.)

I will be among its guests and in a stunning reversal of past precedent, I will be hosting panels. The schedule will be up soon but Colleen Doran has already announced that she and I and a couple other folks will be doing one on Creator Rights. And you can assume I'll be interviewing WonderCon guests like Murphy Anderson, Joe Kubert and Adam Kubert, and that I'll be sharing a stage with the famously infamous Sergio Aragonés. I'm also pleased to remind you that Stan and Hunter Freberg will be there. An awful lot of folks told me that meeting Stan at last year's Comic-Con was among the great thrills of their lives.

And it's not that long until Comic-Con International happens again. The new issue of the Comic-Con magazine is reaching mailboxes even as we speak. If it doesn't reach yours, you can read it online. And remember that the mad dash for hotel reservations commences Thursday, March 18. I am told it will be a lot better this year than it has been in years past. So you may not wind up sleeping in a Public Storage locker in El Cajon.

Our pal Peter Sanderson takes a look at that most effectual Top Cat. A lot of cartoon shows I enjoyed as a youth don't hold up well when viewed today. For instance, I loved all the Woody Woodpecker cartoons when I was nine and today, there are about eight of them I can watch without pounding my head against a tree. But every so often when I catch a Top Cat, I'm delighted with how well they work.

The show only lasted one season in prime time, a fact Joe Barbera used to attribute to a theory that adults don't want to watch talking animals. I suspect there were just too many of them that season. In addition to Top Cat, the schedule also had The Bullwinkle Show, The Alvin Show, The Bugs Bunny Show and Calvin and the Colonel. (The Flintstones was also on that year but it was about funny cave people, not funny animals.) Also, Top Cat had an odd time slot. It was on at 8:30 following an hour of The Steve Allen Show and preceding the cop show, Hawaiian Eye. That wasn't a great place for kids to find it and if kids didn't, adults wouldn't, either.

When Top Cat left prime time, the same thirty episodes (that was how long a season was in '61) reran ad infinitum on Saturday morning and did quite well. In fact, when they finally started to peter out several years later, Hanna-Barbera almost engineered a deal to make some new ones to refresh the package. "Refresh" is programming exec talk for adding new episodes into a bunch of reruns. It never materialized but Joe Barbera spent a lot of time afterwards trying to find a way to bring T.C. and the gang back. They finally did a syndicated TV movie in 1987.

Anyway, Peter has some good thoughts on the show. Go take a peek.