I used to have a friend who would jokingly quote the maxim, "A lie is as good as the truth if you can get anyone to believe it." Funny how I keep thinking of that as I read about this whole "Death Panels" nonsense.

End-of-life Counselling is a very good idea, not only for the government but for the person whose life may be ending soon. If someone wants to make the case against things like Living Wills and Advanced Directives, I wish they'd speak up and make it honestly…but I don't think anyone does.

Newt Gingrich certainly doesn't. As noted here, just a few months ago, he was saying that it "empowers patients and families to control and direct their care." He also noted how much money it would wind up saving our health care system while simultaneously doing better by the folks receiving that care.

Sarah Palin certainly doesn't. In April of '08 as governor or Alaska, she signed a proclamation for a "Healthcare Decisions Day" to note "the need to plan ahead for health care decisions, related to end of life care" and went on to "encourage hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, continuing care retirement communities and hospices to participate in a statewide effort to provide clear and consistent information to the public about advance directives."

As far as I can tell, no Republican leader does. The 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill which the G.O.P. wrote and passed overwhelmingly contained funding for such counselling.

But we're now in that wonderful realm where you campaign by deliberately misrepresenting the opposition's position. Democrats have sometimes done this by claiming that some G.O.P. proposal would destroy Medicare or Social Security, thereby panicking older voters into shunning it. Some Republican or Insurance Company stooge (not that there's much separation there lately) looked at the Health Care Reform proposals, noticed the same end-of-life counselling provisions and thought, "Hey, we can pass this off as giving the government power to kill your grandparents!"

The Republican leaders spreading this manure don't believe that. In fact, once this country passes whatever kind of Health Care Reforms it winds up passing, there will probably be a bill to reinstate whatever part of the provision gets dropped, and the reinstatement will probably be co-sponsored by Republicans. But right now, folks like Chuck Grassley obviously think it's a dandy way to stall the bill and weaken the parts of it that they really think should be weakened…so they're willing to go along with this lie. And it's a sad fact for everyone that lying seems to be working. That just means there'll be more of it — from everyone.

According to a new report, income inequality — the gap between the richest Americans and the poorest — is greater than it has ever been.

In other news, more stupid people are planning a demonstration because they're afraid this country is turning Socialist on them.

…I keep reading about all these nutcases who are carrying guns (or at least signs threatening violence) because they think Barack Obama is about to do something that will make this country into the Soviet Union…

…and the thought that keeps coursing through my mind is Max Bialystock stuffing money into the hands of the bestraught Franz Liebkind, and Max is saying, "Here…buy bullets! Go! Kill the actors!"

And of course, in this analogy, Max is played by Rush, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, et al.

Esquire surveyed a group of what they call the nation's top chefs and asked them to pick their favorite fast food joints and meals. The winner, by a large margin, was In-N-Out Burger. Which figures.

After every Writers Guild strike, there's the unfortunate business of investigating claims of scabbing and charges that members (and non-members) crossed picket lines to perform writing services. As I wrote in this article for New Republic during the last strike, there is surprisingly little scab work done during one of our strikes. There are often a lot of accusations but then they rarely prove to be valid. When the WGA takes a hike, very little writing gets done.

The Guild has just closed the books on that strike with only minor disciplinary actions. One member was fined for writing a pilot script during the strike. Another is being disciplined in unspecified ways.

One non-member has been permanently barred from membership…and that's about it. Especially notable is that Jay Leno, who was accused of violating Guild rules when he went back to work during the strike and generated his own monologues, appears to be unmentioned in the final report. What I am hearing is that the Guild concluded that what Leno did fell into a "gray area" and that given Jay's otherwise strong support for the strike, and the fact that he did confer with the Guild before making his decision and there was some ambiguity in those discussions, they've elected to not make an issue of it. There are, I know, folks in the Guild who'd love to "string up" someone famous for violating strike rules but even most of them didn't think Jay's case was clear-cut enough for that.

I suspect we'll see some of the language in those rules revised and made clearer before the next Writers Guild strike. And don't think there won't be one in the next decade or so.

If you live in or around Sacramento, there's a production of Man of La Mancha there this week at the Music Circus at the Wells Fargo Pavilion. I don't know anything more about it than that my friend Valerie Perri is playing Dulcinea. But that's all I need to know to recommend it. I've seen Valerie in the role and…well, let's put it this way. If I were singing the lead, it would still be worth going to see.

There are a lot of topics in the news that reporters and pundits often get wrong but I can't think of one where they seem to be so consistently full of manure than this one: Tensions in the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

I have no idea what their marriage is like behind closed doors…and insofar as I can tell, neither does a single one of the many writers who've penned articles and books about their private lives. The pieces all remind me of those essays we all did in school — I did them, you did them, we all did them — about subjects we knew nothing about. You fake. You cite imaginary references and sources. You generalize. You speculate. But you report absolutely nothing factual because you don't have anything factual.

Since Bill returned from his Korean mission, there are all these articles on the 'net about what this means for the marriage; how he's upstaged his spouse and this led to angry words or must have led to angry words. Well, maybe it did. If I wrote that you had roast beef for dinner last night, I might be right, too…but that wouldn't mean I had any basis for my reporting. That's kinda how I feel about every piece I've seen about friction in the Clinton marriage. How many times have we now heard that divorce papers were being drawn up? How many times have those reports been accurate? At times, I almost suspect they're staying together just to prove the Enquirer wrong.

Interesting event, this morning. As you may have heard, the U.S. Postal Service has issued a set of stamps saluting twenty great shows from early television. The shows are The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, The Dinah Shore Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show, The Red Skelton Show, Hopalong Cassidy, You Bet Your Life, The Honeymooners, Howdy Doody, The Phil Silvers Show, The Tonight Show, Lassie, The Lone Ranger, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Perry Mason, Dragnet, Texaco Star Theater, I Love Lucy, Twilight Zone and Kukla, Fran & Ollie.

Obviously, we could all quibble with the list but it ain't a bad selection. The reason some programs aren't there is that you can't put a live person on a U.S. postage stamp. Your Show of Shows would be there but Sid Caesar is still, happily, with us.

This morn, out at the TV Academy, there was an unveiling ceremony. They invited relatives of folks involved in the honored shows so I got to rub elbows with Clayton Moore's son-in-law, Jack Webb's widow and even a collie from the Lassie bloodline. The two gents in the photo above are Arthur Marx (son of Groucho) and Frank Ferrante, the oft-plugged-on-this-site impersonator of Arthur's father. Oh, and here's a photo I took of Jayne Meadows Allen who, despite a busted hip, wasn't about to miss the debut of a stamp with Steve's picture…

Among the other celebs present were June Lockhart, Barbara Hale (who played Perry Mason's secretary, Della Street), David Nelson (son of Ozzie 'n' Harriet), Gary Owens, Leonard Maltin and the host for the ceremony, Carl Reiner. The attendees were a curious mix of folks who love old TV, and folks who love first day issues of stamps.

Carl Reiner was wonderful. He's getting a bit slower in old age and he kept getting confused as to what he was supposed to introduce next…but he made wonderful, funny recoveries from every error and if he'd kept on talking, that whole audience would still be there listening to him and laughing. After the event, I overheard someone compliment him on his performance at the Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers which aired this past weekend. Mr. Reiner winced and told the man — and enough surrounding people that I feel it's okay to report it here — that it was maybe the most humiliating show of his life. He hadn't realized what he was agreeing to appear on and felt totally out of place. Given that, it's amazing he was as charming and funny on it as he was. (If you haven't seen it, don't…or at least, don't watch any part of it except for Carl Reiner.)

Not much else to report. I had a nice chat with Leonard Stern who assured me that the early sixties' sitcom I'm Dickens, He's Fenster (which he produced) is very close to appearing in the whole DVD treatment. I got to sit with Frank Ferrante and Arthur Marx and heard Arthur joke that he should have gotten a discount on the stamps he purchased. (I pointed out to him that I couldn't go out and buy U.S. postage stamps with my father's picture on them.) On the way out, I came about a half-inch from crashing into the daughter of Phil Silvers. All in all, a nice way to spend a morning…and the stamps looked so good, I may start putting them on my e-mail.

The L.A. Times has a brief photo feature on Sergio Aragonés in conjunction with that exhibit of his work in Ojai. How come the drawings of Sergio look more like Sergio than the photos of Sergio?