Our next "golden moment" from sitcom history originally aired October 30, 1978. It's from the underrated (and under-rerun) series, WKRP in Cincinnati, which detailed the bizarre goings-on at a radio station.

In the storyline, it's just before Thanksiving and the station's general manager, Arthur "Big Guy" Carlson, has come up with a promotional idea that will really put WKRP on the map. Let's cut to our reporter in the field, Les Nessman, for live coverage of this history-making event…

A friend of mine who must remain unidentified but who's in the thick of the Washington press scene wrote the following in response to my earlier musing and said it was okay if I shared it with you. And yes, I think there's irony somewhere in the fact that he's anonymous here as he writes about anonymous sources…

You're overthinking the question of whether Woodward changed his views or not. Woodward prides himself in not having any views of the subjects he covers. The only exception is that he cares about whether or not they're talking to Bob Woodward and telling Bob Woodward the truth. The thing that separates him from all other reporters is access. His sources are extraordinary. Everyone talks to him. People who swear on a stack of Bibles they don't talk to Bob Woodward talk to Bob Woodward. He takes it all down, sorts out the lies and self-serving b.s. according to the Bob Woodward b.s. meter, prints the rest and sells a million copies.

The key thing you're missing is that people talk to him. Is it true? Is it not true? Who knows? But it always came from a source that should know what he or she is talking about. If the portrait of Bush is that he's a cowardly jerk, it's because some insider whose opinion Woodward can't dismiss or ignore or disprove thinks Bush is a cowardly jerk. It's someone close to the man, someone who if he were quoted by name we'd all say "That means something if that guy says it." Only Woodward can't say who it is. The whole Deep Throat thing made his reputation as the guy who will always protect a source and honor background.

That sounds right to me. The image of Bush in Woodward's books has changed because he's now getting different stories and accounts from the people around Bush. It makes you wonder how many of them are the same people.

On a slight change of subject: One thing I've always wondered about in books and reporting of the Woodward variety is the "blind source" whose identity seems obvious. There are a lot of them in his work…in The Final Days, especially. For example, it seems obvious that Alexander Haig was a major source for the book. There are many scenes that could never had been reported if Haig had declined to speak with Bernstein and Woodward. Now, if you were to ask Woodstein about it, they'd say, "Sorry…can't divulge sources." But in this case, if Haig didn't talk to them for the book and provide the accounts that were the basis of those pages, the authors are guilty of deliberately conveying a false impression that he had.

I'm sure they would argue, "Well, we didn't say he did." But they sure led people to believe he did.

Then there's the scene in which Nixon and Henry Kissinger get down on their knees and pray together. Much dialogue is quoted, a lot of details are included. You figure it could only have come from someone who was there…but only Nixon and Kissinger were present, and they say in the introduction that Nixon refused to be interviewed for the book. Ergo, while Woodward and Bernstein are pointedly refusing to say that Kissinger was the source, they're also quite consciously leading everyone to believe that he was.

I have to go run an errand but I'll write more about this tomorrow if I have time. I'm not sure how I'd reconcile your view of Woodward, even though I suspect it is on-target, with what he did in his book about John Belushi. There, I think he interviewed all the right people and probably quoted them accurately…but ended up with a shallow, incomplete portrait of the world in which Belushi operated, if not of the man himself. It's almost like he assembled the right pieces into the wrong puzzle or something. And that was with sources who weren't anonymous.

Okay, so Bob Woodward wrote a book a few years ago that made George W. Bush out to be a decisive leader. The White House even recommended that people read the book in order to know the "real" Bush.

Now, Woodward's written a book that makes Bush out to be a pretty bad leader…one who ignored or isolated himself from good advice and who now presides over a military situation that's in chaos. (The book is entitled State of Denial: Bush at War, Part Three and that's an Amazon link to buy it, hint hint.)

So what happened here? Was Woodward accurate in the previous book and he's got it all wrong now? Was he wrong then and now he's wised up? Is there any way both portraits could be correct? I imagine both could be wrong but that's quite a contortion. Does Woodward suggest that George W. has undergone a massive change of personality and integrity in the last few years? Somebody help me here.

The book is just now getting out, just now being read. The last few days, we've seen people debating it on the basis of a few excerpts that have hit the Internet. Last night on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno and Bill O'Reilly discussed it and I don't think either had even read the excerpts, let alone the whole book.

So far, without benefit of actually knowing what Woodward wrote, the pro-Bush camp has tried suggesting that Woodward's earlier book was a work of integrity and that now that Bush-bashing is in vogue, he's gone that route because there's money in it. The anti-Bush crowd is throwing out the idea that Woodward was conned by Bush and hypnotized by Karl Rove before, but that he's finally snapped out of it and wised up. I don't know about you but I don't buy any of these explanations.

Mr. Woodward is making a promotional tour for the book. In the next week or so, he'll be on more shows than Brad Garrett…which makes sense because Woodward is funnier. Presumably, someone will ask him to reconcile his two versions of the current White House occupant. I'm curious to hear what he has to say.

I've decided to extend our "Festival of Great Moments in Sitcom Humor" a few more days so this is not the end of it. Today's clip is from one of the funniest half-hours ever done for TV, and you really need to see the whole half-hour. It's available on this DVD which I highly recommend.

It's an episode of a show known at various times as You'll Never Get Rich, The Phil Silvers Show and Sgt. Bilko. By any name, it was Phil Silvers giving a glorious performance as M/Sgt. Ernest T. Bilko, flim-flamming all who could be flim-flammed. This installment was called either (depending on what you read) "The Court-Martial" or "The Trial of Harry Speakup" or "The Case of Harry Speakup" or "The Court-Martial of Harry Speakup." I've seen it every which way. It first aired on March 6, 1956 and the writing was credited to Nat Hiken (creator of the series and its main director and head writer), Arnie Rosen and Coleman Jacoby. I actually worked with Arnie Rosen on one of my first TV writing jobs and was somehow then unaware that he'd worked on Sgt. Bilko. Wish I'd known because I'd have asked him about it. Then again, he was more interested in pressing matters like writing the show we were doing and having me fired.

The premise of the episode is that Bilko's Army Base is trying out some new techniques to speed up the process by which new inductees receive their physicals, take their written tests and get sworn in as soldiers. Via a plot twist you'll learn about when you see the whole show, a chimpanzee gets into the assembly line and before anyone notices, he is inducted. He also somehow gets a name. When someone tells him to "Hurry! Speak up!", another person thinks the recruit has said his name is Harry Speakup.

This will be humiliating to the officers if it isn't hushed up fast. The trouble is that due to red tape, the only way to get rid of the Harry Speakup problem is to court-martial the chimp and throw him out of the Army. Bilko is appointed to serve as Private Speakup's counsel in the trial that you're about to see.

One of the many interesting things about the Bilko program was that even though it was done on film, they tried to treat it as much as possible like a live performance. They barely stopped filming between scenes and often, if someone bobbled a line or things went wrong, they left it in. There are a number of instances when actors — most notably Paul Ford, who was otherwise so good as Colonel Hall — forgot important lines and someone else — usually Silvers, who had a fast mind and a great memory — would ad-lib around the problem. Silvers often improvised during the show and he had to ad-lib a lot in this scene because the trained chimp didn't always do what he was supposed to. At one point, Mr. Speakup ran over to grab a prop telephone and Phil came up with a terrific explanation right on the spot. (His quick wit caused a few of the actors to almost break up. At several points in the scene, you can see some of them trying to stifle or hide laughter. Especially watch the kid at left playing a guard.)

If you're interested in understanding how much the actors ad-libbed and paraphrased, we have a link for you. Many of the scripts, including this one, were published in paperback form in 1957. One website has scanned the relevant pages of that paperback and posted them here. You'll need something that can read an Adobe PDF file but you probably have just such a program on your computer already.

Okay…so the Army inducted a monkey and now they're trying to have a trial so they can kick the monkey out of the Army, and Bilko is the monkey's lawyer. Perfectly logical. Here's the scene…

At this very moment, over on The Drudge Report, the headline is "Gloves Come Off" and the premise is that Democrats and Republicans have stopped being nice and started bloodying one another with charges and invective and comments about how each other's mother is a whore. The big picture is of George W. Bush and there's a link to the AP coverage of his latest speech. And to represent the other side, Drudge has up three headlines which I've captured and reproduced above.

The first, the one labelled "Carter," links to a story about a speech given by Jimmy Carter, who's out campaigning for his son. The second, "Clinton," turns out to be about Hillary Clinton, not Bill. Almost the first thing I learned in my Journalism class in junior high school was that headlines should never be confusing or ambiguous about any aspect of the story. Obviously, Drudge never took that class. And then the third example of the gloves coming off is that Stone is ashamed of his or her country.

"Stone?" Who's "Stone?" Is there some former Democratic president or current Democratic senator I'm forgetting named Stone? We're not talking Sharon Stone here, are we?

Turns out it's director Oliver Stone. Which raises the question: How did he get in that list? No one ever elected him. His name's never been on any ballot aside from the one for the Oscars. There's no reason to believe he represents anyone but himself. I'm not even sure what political party, if any, he's signed up with at the moment.

Mr. Stone is entitled to his opinion and if the press wants to cover it like news, fine. But it seems to me like at any given time in the last decade or three, you could go to Oliver Stone and get a sound bite that he's ashamed for his country. You could also get a few juicy but ill-defined conspiracy theories at the same time. I'm not sure why it's news that Oliver Stone is against what any current administration is doing or why that now shows that "the gloves are off." There's always been someone, at least as prominent, saying that the president — whoever it was at the moment — was leading the nation into disaster and shame. There were guys on the radio who made their living doing that from Day One of the Clinton administration.

What I get from looking at the news is that the gloves are barely off…or maybe only off in the White House corner. Polls suggest that most voters embrace the idea that Bush needs a lot more Checks and a whole lot more Balances and maybe needs to be stopped altogether. Still, most prominent Democrats let Bush's latest "I can do whatever I want" laws pass with barely an ahem. Some opposed that bill just enough so they can say they were against it, not enough to perhaps do anything to stop it. And on this one, I sure get the feeling that a lot of House and Senate Republicans don't like that they were forced to vote for it, so as to not tick off a vital part of the G.O.P. base. During the debate stage, Arlen Specter (doing his usual Good Arlen/Bad Arlen act) said that the bill sets us back "900 years" in human rights, allows the president to imprison people indefinitely without trial and that it violates core Constitutional principles. But he voted for it anyway.

If he was a better reporter, Drudge could have finished out his "list of three" without going to Oliver Stone. You need three in a situation like that because two doesn't seem like a trend or a movement. For some reason, three does.

There certainly are other important Democrats who speak for a large part of the country who are saying that Bush is screwing up big-time: Kerry, Gore, Ted Kennedy, John Edwards, etc. There just don't seem to be very many who are in serious re-election campaigns at the moment saying it, which strikes me as odd. You'd think, with more than half the country saying Bush is doing a bad job, you'd have more than half the Democrats proclaiming that above a whisper.

This page has more video of the baby pandas.

Today, we bring you one of the great moments in the history of television. It's Monday evening, May 29, 1990 and it's the last episode of Bob Newhart's sitcom, Newhart, in which he plays an innkeeper married to Mary Frann. The show's going off and one of the writers — Dan O'Shannon, I'm told — comes up with a terrific idea on how to end the series in a way no one will ever forget.

We now bring you the last three minutes of that episode. Tomorrow in this space, another sitcom moment that many will never forget.

The DVD of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show is now set for December 5. This page has all the details. I'll post a link here to order copies as soon as the Amazon people add it to their wares.

Michael Kinsley asks a couple of good questions about how some people (like, say, George W. Bush) who say they care about protecting the rights of the unborn don't have a big problem with human beings being killed after they're born.

I know some people reading this don't like Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. I do, most of the time. Judging from the latest ratings, an increasing number in the 18-49 demographic category do, too.

Anyway, this is not about politics. Every day, he does a segment called "Oddball" that includes weird or interesting news footage. In today's, he had tape of newly-born baby pandas. There is nothing cuter on this planet than newly-born baby pandas. Nothing! You know how cute baby kittens are? Especially baby kittens swatting at a fly or a string? Well, newly-born baby pandas make baby kittens swatting at flies look like a cluster of unsightly pimples oozing pus. That's how cute newly-born baby pandas are. They're cuter than you are, certainly. They're even cuter than me and I'm pretty darn cute.

Here's a link which will probably only work for a day or three…but right now, it takes you to the MSNBC website and loads the video of today's "Oddball" segment. You can stop watching after the newly-born baby pandas. Nothing can top them, anyway.

And let me know if you find any other online footage of the newly-born baby pandas. You can never see enough of newly-born baby pandas.

Stephen Colbert is currently accepting "atonement phone calls" from Jews who wish to apologize to him for…well, anything at all. If you're really Jewish, you can think of something.

I'm actually only half-Jewish so I called up and didn't leave a message. Still, I enjoyed hearing his announcement and you might, as well. The number is (888) OOPS-JEW. If you have no Jewish blood in you at all, you can give it a try and see if it works. I don't see how they would know.

If you do call, stay tuned past the annoying announcement where the lady informs you that they have the right to use your call on the air. Colbert gets the punch line just before the beep.

Here's a brief interview with Peter Cullen, a fine voiceover performer. Peter played Venger on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show (which'll be out on DVD in December, they're now saying) but his big animation role was Optimus Prime on The Transformers. Wise people now doing the live-action movie of that property have seen fit to engage him again…because it just won't be Optimus Prime if it doesn't sound like Cullen.

There's an unfortunate tendency in the movie business to think of voice actors as not real stars. If Mel Blanc were still around and they were making a big Bugs Bunny feature — especially if it was live-action and therefore a bit removed from the old context — there'd be some studio exec who'd say, "Hey, can we get Mel Gibson to do the rabbit's voice? Or one of those Wayans Brothers?" What they don't realize is that the character is the star and the voice actor is an integral part of the character. They also don't realize that voice actors are stars, too. In fact, they're big stars…huge stars.

Stars in Hollywood are judged by how their movies gross. If you're in a movie that takes in $600 million, you're a bigger star than someone who was in a movie that took in a measly $300 million. If you're in a number of movies that take in a lot of money, you're a bigger star that someone who's in a lesser number of movies with lesser receipts. Stars are hired and they command top salaries because of their past grosses.

Now…suppose you fed into a computer the cast lists of all the movies and cross-indexed that with the grosses. Wouldn't it be interesting to see who was in the cast list of movies that had collectively grossed the most money? Can you guess where I'm going with this?

Here are the box office grosses going back a couple of decades for my pal — and maybe the best voiceover actor ever — Frank Welker. If you go by this, he was the number one grossing actor of the nineties, ahead of Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Williams or Bruce Willis…and I'll bet the total for Frank is, if anything, low. He was in a lot of movies for which he did not receive credit. (Okay, so some of his standing is due to sheer volume. When you only work one or two days on a movie, you can be in a lot of them. But it's still an interesting way of looking at the situation.)

And it's also kind of neat to note that Stan Lee is, at the moment, #20 on the Box Office List for this decade, ahead of Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy.