Oh, my goodness! I haven't checked lately to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive!

The government is considering bailouts of the NBC prime-time schedule, the San Diego Padres, Madonna's acting career and my stomach after a bad tuna sandwich that I had from a Subway shop yesterday.

So now the U.S. government owns 79.9% of American International Group, one of the largest international insurance and financial services organizations in the world. Hey, what's that term we use when other countries do this kind of thing?

Oh, right. Communism. Well, that always works so well.

But don't despair. At least the C.E.O. of A.I.G. got a $47 million dollar severance package back in July. I mean, you have to reward a guy who does such a fine job steering his company. And I was glad to see that so many investors did well the last few days by selling the stock short. They made about $40 billion which doubled the price we (you and me, folks) paid for this failing insurance firm we now own.

Several years ago, I wrote a joke that Bush was doing such a bad job with the economy, his only hope was to burn the country down and try to collect on the insurance. Now we can't even do that because we're the insurance company…

The Broadway show Xanadu will play its final performance October 12, which will mean it will have been there for 49 previews and 528 regular performances…a respectable but not spectacular number. I hope its backers made a profit as I enjoyed it a lot. A tour will follow and if it comes near you, go. Better still, if you're in New York before 10/12, go there.

You can watch their Tony Awards offering over at the Xanadu on Broadway website. But I'll warn you: It starts playing instantly once you go there. It's not the number I'd have chosen but it still demonstrates the charm and good humor of the enterprise.

Just saw John McCain on the news blaming our current financial disasters on Wall Street and those who run its institutions. I think he used the word "reckless" about six times and "irresponsible" at least three.

Isn't McCain's vision for Social Security that we should privatize it all, and then everyone turns their financial future over to these guys for safekeeping?

(Sorry about all the McCain posts. I'll get back to comics 'n' fun stuff later today…)

I neglected to write anything last week when longtime newsman-commentator George Putnam passed away at the age of 94. Mr. Putnam was a fixture of Los Angeles television for most of my youth and there were periods when the ratings suggested he held the attention of the city. He probably deserves to be remembered for more than his blustery, arrogant on-camera style which served as co-inspiration for Ted Baxter, the pompous newsman played by Ted Knight on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Baxter was an amalgam of Putnam and the other L.A. newsman who seemed to think his delivery was more important than any story he reported, Jerry Dunphy.

I never met Putnam for any longer than a brief handshake and some minor pleasantries but I was around him on two occasions. It's probably not fair to judge an entire man on two encounters so maybe these were not typical…but I have this theory about newspeople and pundits, which is that it's all an act. They may or may not believe what they say but if saying it seems to yield success in fame or finance, they keep on saying it louder and louder so the act becomes the message instead of the other way around. It simply becomes too lucrative not to believe one's own bull. Once you become a darling of the left or the right, your base expects you to deliver and you can't afford to let them down for even a second. It's bad for business.

I was around Putnam once in the newsroom of KTLA, the L.A. TV station that employed him for a very long time. I wanted to see the building because Warner Brothers cartoons had once been made in it and I had this notion that I'd glean some understanding or connect with Bugs and Daffy by touring their former home. It turned out there was nothing of the sort to see, nothing of the sort to learn. But I did see George Putnam scurrying around, urging his copywriters to redo the script for that evening's broadcast to give him more theatrics to "sell." (I think he even used that word.) It was a lot like Ted Baxter telling Murray that all those unpronounceable names of foreign leaders were playing havoc with his performance.

And then I spent an evening on the stage where Putnam and the KTLA news team did their 10 PM broadcast live. At the time, it was an odd format — a half-hour or so of news, then the rest of the hour was a segment called Talk Back with a live audience invited in to debate the headlines with the team. It mostly consisted of Putnam not letting anyone talk back. Those who approached the audience mike were usually rather foolish-looking (and sounding) hippie-types — this is 1971 or thereabouts — trying to offer lame talking points about Vietnam or Richard Nixon. Putnam never let them finish, interrupting to ridicule their appearance and — always — suggest their political views could only be the result of too much smoking of "funny cigarettes." At home, it looked like cheap theatrics and in the studio, seeing Putnam drop the act during commercial breaks, it looked even cheaper.

I was on that stage because it was being shared by a gent named Larry Vincent, who under the name "Seymour" was our local horror movie host. Mr. Vincent's show, for which I was writing gags, was using the same tech crew, before and after the newsguys needed it for their program. It was amusing to me that the cameras were capturing Putnam in the news set describing what was going on in Washington and then they were going to swing around, face the other way and videotape Seymour in the horror movie set introducing The Brain From The Planet Arous starring John Agar. There wasn't all that much difference.

Anyway, that was when and where I formulated my view…that we give media personalities who deal in news and opinion too much credit for being thoughtful and candid, and that most of them are just saying (and often believing) what advances a career. I have seen little since then from Liberals or Conservatives to dissuade me from that belief…and it started with George Putnam.

Putnam was truly becoming a figure of self-parody by '73 when KTLA dropped him. He flirted with other local stations and briefly co-hosted an amazing show with Mort Sahl on KTTV called Both Sides Now. It was kind of like the Crossfire of its time — an ostensible Liberal and a righteous Conservative debating through each day's guest(s) — but it didn't work. Sahl didn't think or talk in sharp, simple bullet points. He rambled around topics, discussing nuance more than supposed hard truths and he wasn't predictably Liberal, sometimes arguing Putnam's side of an issue better than Putnam did. It was like two men attempting to have a dialogue but lacking a common language.

After a few weeks of that, Putnam was gone — quit or fired, depending on who you believed. Sahl ran the show alone for a while and though a single host seemed to belie the basic premise, he actually did a better job of presenting Both Sides Now than when George had been aboard. But ratings plunged without Putnam and then Sahl decided to turn the program into an ongoing infomercial for Jim Garrison's revelations about the Kennedy Assassination. That was when every single human being in Southern California stopped watching.

By then, George Putnam was beginning a very successful post-TV career on radio, doing a show again called Talk Back where, at least whenever I tuned it in, he was still not letting anyone talk back. That was probably a great place for him. I don't think his routine would have played well on television any longer, especially after Ted Baxter made that kind of newsman seem like a joke. On radio, I think all those guys are jokes but it seems to work there…or at least it draws an audience. It is to Putnam's credit that he had one up until the end. How many people who make it to 94 can you say that about?

John McCain says it's a sign of Obama's recklessness and inexperience that he wants to engage in any sort of dialogue with Iran. But a bi-partisan group of former holders of the office of Secretary of State say it's a good idea.

To the previous post, I would like to append the thought that maybe it is time to get rid of employer-paid health plans. They burden business and they also make it difficult for people to change jobs. I just think we shouldn't get rid of them by making them more expensive to the insured…and of course, there has to be a way that people can get health insurance and still be able to eat.

Last night, I went to see a production of the musical Seesaw. It was out in Glendale, staged by the Musical Theater Guild, a fine organization of talented folks. They put on these shows, reviving old musicals for only a couple of nights, and they did a great job with this one. My buddy Eydie Alison was electric in the starring role of Gittel, originated on Broadway by Michele Lee.

In introductory remarks, the head of the MTG said that the book for Seesaw (based on the play by William Gibson and credited to choreographer-director Michael Bennett) was largely ghost-rewritten by Neil Simon. This is apparently widely-known, and much of it certainly sounds like Mr. Simon…or someone who's very, very funny in the same way. However, in his autobiography, while Simon does acknowledge a ghost "punch-up" job for Bennett's A Chorus Line, he says not one word about Seesaw. Which makes me wonder how much, if any, he wrote or why he doesn't claim credit now. Steven Suskin's book Second Act Trouble, which is all about plays that underwent drastic rewrites before Broadway, quotes composer Cy Coleman as saying that Simon made lots of suggestions but didn't rewrite one line of dialogue. This is hard to believe. Does anyone know for sure what he did? And why he's silent on the topic when he seems a little bitter that his contributions to Chorus Line are so unknown?

I just looked at the time in the system tray and I have to get to bed. Good night, Internet. See you right back here on my computer in the morning.

Health care is a big issue with me. I think a staggering number of people are literally (not figuratively, literally) dying in this country, more than we imagine, because of the high cost of health care.

When John McCain first started talking about tackling health care, I thought he sounded like he had a simple goal: To promise something that would sound like reform but would, in fact, change nothing. After all, we can't let anything prevent pharmaceutical and insurance companies from making as much as possible. Now, I feel like his goal has shifted. It actually seems to be to make health care more expensive for the lower and middle class.

His proposal would reclassify employer-paid health benefits as income on which workers would have to pay taxes. This is the kind of thing that if a Democrat suggested it, we'd be hearing about how those damned Liberals just live to raise taxes on everyone. McCain counters that everyone would receive a refundable tax credit to help pay for this increased cost. Sometimes, he tries to make it sound like you'd come out even on the deal with the tax credit paying the entire increase…but of course, that wouldn't make any sense. Why even change the tax structure if it's going to be revenue-neutral?

Obviously, it's not. Obviously, it's going to cost people even more at a time when 50 million Americans already can't afford it. Bob Herbert says the idea here is to get rid of employer-paid health plans so that everyone will have to buy from private companies. I don't know if that's a conscious motive but it sure sounds to me like the result of this will be that laborers will be paying more and getting less in the area of health insurance. Just what we don't need.

Suddenly, we're hearing a lot about Congressional "earmarks." I don't see this as an issue that has ever concerned a lot of voters. We all detest wasteful government spending but there's so much more that doesn't fall into that category and is going undiscussed. (Is anyone the least bit interested in the billions of bucks that were supposed to go to fight the Iraq War and which have simply vanished, presumably into someone's pocket?) On some level, I think voters see earmarks as all part of the game. Your state pays a lot of money in federal taxes and if it doesn't get a few earmarks, it forfeits the chance to make sure some of that is put to work in your state.

But now everyone's talking about earmarks, if not as a matter of policy than as of personal integrity. It's a little difficult to sort out the facts but this article in The Wall Street Journal seems to have a grasp on them.