…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?

Just in case you encounter anyone who still thinks the Democratic health care proposals would lead to euthanizing your elders, show them this brief interview with Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia. He's a solid Republican with impeccable Conservative credentials…and even he describes Sarah Palin's tales of Death Panels as "nuts."

But more and more, I'm coming to like the whole idea of Death Panels. I think we oughta have 'em and I think I oughta be on one. I did fourteen panels at the Comic-Con. Why couldn't one or two of them have been Death Panels? Deciding who lives and dies…I could do that. I could start with all those people I was going to murder if Phil Spector was acquitted and go from there…

Fans of Laurel and Hardy (I am one) have long lamented their fate on home video. It's been a frustrating litany of sporadic releases, most of which didn't do a very good job of packaging, presentation or promotion. Sometimes, the issuers have managed to get one of those three things right but never quite all three. You can buy the complete works of Cheech and Chong on DVD. But Stan and Ollie? Well, not in the United States, you can't.

Just to rub it in, a superb set was issued a few years ago in the United Kingdom. It contains darn near everything The Boys did as a team, lovingly restored and presented on 21 (!) DVDs, totalling about a thousand minutes of my favorite comedians. That's the good news. The bad news for most of us is that it's a PAL/Region 2 release. The DVDs will play in Albania, Andorra, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Vatican City, Yemen and Yugoslavia…

…but not, grumble grumble, the United States. Osama bin Laden can watch this set. We can't.

So American lovers of Laurel and Hardy had a few options, one being to move to one of those countries. Another has been to purchase a region-free DVD player. They aren't expensive. WalMart sells the Durabrand-1002, which claims it'll play anything from anywhere, for $24.88 and other brands are available for not all that much more.

Third option? You could always do without. If you've done without this far, the following might interest you…

Laurel & Hardy – The Collection has now been seriously discounted. It originally sold for £199.99 (about $333 USD) and it's now down to £32.98 (around $55 USD). Here's a link to order it from Amazon UK.

There's a fellow skulking around comic book conventions offering a bootleg version of this set, converted to NTSC/Region 1 but you don't want that. First of all, it's a bootleg. Second of all, I saw the picture quality of one disc and it looked like Stan and Ollie were trapped in one of those multi-layer Jell-O parfait desserts with different color streaks throughout. You're much better off buying the genuine article plus a region-free player…especially since there's no reason to believe we'll soon have a playable-in-the-U.S.-of-A. version on this thing soon. If and when we do, it'll cost a lot more than $55 plus the cost of a region-free player.

Thanks to David Kirkpatrick for letting me know about this.

The White House has set up a website called The Health Insurance Reform Reality Check to debunk the main attacks against their proposals. I'm glad they're doing this but just as some people will never be convinced the world is round, some will never believe that the new plan won't involve putting old folks to death when their medicine starts costing too much.

A question for those who read this website: Have you seen — and if so, can you direct me to — an article that lays out a real case against the current reform proposals? I can't believe there aren't genuine, valid arguments against them but all the talking points we seem to get fall into one of three categories…

1. You take something rotten that health insurance companies do all the time like denying coverage. You make like that never happens but would constantly if the government got into the health care business, even though the government would have little or no incentive to do that thing, whereas for-profit companies have plenty.
2. You pretend that the government isn't already in the health care business…and quite successfully, at that. Has anyone ever seriously proposed turning the V.A. over to Aetna to run? I mean, besides maybe Aetna and those they pay to say such things. And has anyone checked to see how many Senators who oppose government-run health care are turning it down and buying Blue Shield policies for themselves and their loved ones?
3. You just plain lie about what's in the proposal. It's so long that no one's going to read it. So if you say, "Under this plan, if you get sick the government has the right to kill your housepets," no one's going to utterly disprove it. At best, some in the media will pit a talking head who says it's in there against one who says it's not and then act like it's all an open question.

Seriously: Can anyone point to an article against the current proposals that doesn't play those games? I'd certainly be open to the argument that this particular Health Care Reform package is flawed in its design and details but no one seems to be making it. Instead, it's all about "death panels" and arranging for Granny to take the permanent dirt nap before she's ready for it.