Nothing I've seen or read lately has made me more pessimistic about the Iraq War than this article in The Washington Post. It's by William Kristol and Rich Lowry, two of the most outspoken "neo-con" voices in favor of that invasion. They have quietly, however, shifted their argument. The old version was that our cause was so right and our power so grand that we could achieve everything we wanted to in Iraq with Donald Rumsfeld's "leaner, meaner" U.S. fighting force. Now, they're saying we can triumph if only George W. Bush and his boys will send in more troops.

Nowhere in the piece do Kristol and Lowry address the fact that many generals have stated we simply don't have more troops, or that to send more into Iraq will cripple our efforts elsewhere. That is not a small detail, easy to skip over. In fact, my cynical side wonders if maybe the authors know full well that no significant reinforcement of troops can or will be sent in; that they're just laying the groundwork for the Official Excuse as to why their precious Iraq War didn't end the way they told us it would.

Not so long ago, Lowry was one of the leading non-administration voices telling us America was undeniably succeeding in its every goal there. He doesn't seem to be saying that now. He seems to be getting ready to write a lot of sentences that begin with, "Well, we could have won if…"

It's amazing that "new" footage of the World Trade Center disaster should emerge five years later but some has. A couple who lived 500 yards from Ground Zero shot home video that day and has now released their footage on the Internet. It runs about fifteen minutes and is very chilling because…well, because you hear a family watching the tragedy, wondering what's happening and commenting as they see it unfold before their eyes, practically in their back yard. Here is a link to it and I'll warn you that some of it is pretty graphic and that the connection may be overloaded at times. Thanks to Alan Light for being the first of many to let me know about it.

Also: Keith Olbermann did a long (almost nine minutes) and angry commentary on his show last night. He excoriated the Bush administration for many things related to 9/11 but mostly for the fact that Ground Zero is still, five years later, devoid of either a memorial or any new building. The piece was well-written, well-delivered and presented with a passion and clarity of purpose that I think we all, regardless of our political orientation, wish we heard occasionally from our leaders. I'm not sure I agree with his central thesis, however. A physical memorial to those who died on 9/11 seems almost trivial and unequal to our loss on that day…and to rebuild on that site strikes me as a lot more complicated than the White House just deciding someone should. I wonder how many companies would lease space in a new World Trade Center — even if it wasn't called that — and how many people would be willing to go to work every day in one. Here's a link to Olbermann's "special comment" on YouTube and in case you'd like to view it with his lips in sync, here's a link to it on the MSNBC site.

This is real quick but you'll want to watch it. How often do you get to hear Harpo Marx talk?

If you need more Marx in your day, here are links to two video clips that I cannot embed on this page. This link will take you to a performance Groucho did of the song, "Show Me a Rose." This link will take you to a duet Groucho did with Jackie Gleason. They perform a variation of the famous routine done by the legendary comedy team of Gallagher and Shean, initially in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1922. Al Shean from that duo was an uncle of the Marx Brothers, which I thought was worthy of mention even though I don't know if it connects in any way to the clip.

Watch or TiVo tonight's Tonight Show With Jay Leno…most notably the segments with James Woods. The first part is a moving discussion of his brother's recent death. The second is about 9/11. Then Charlie Rose comes out and further discusses that awful day and the heroism he witnessed.

Okay, I give up. I've watched about thirty more video clips relating to 9/11 — many of them suggested by folks who'd read the previous message here — and I couldn't find one that seemed appropriate to have up on this site today. Worse, some of them were depressing to no good purpose and I have things I have to do this afternoon. So no video clip today. I'll make it up to you with the ones I have lined up the rest of this week. Hope you folks like the Marx Brothers.

I may not be watching much news today, either. At some point years ago, I became acutely conscious that on the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, most of the televised remembrances were not about the tragedy but of the press discussing its performance in covering that tragedy. Looking back at the news footage of 11/22/63 is important, of course, but there's one way of presenting and configuring it that says "Here's what happened that day" and another that says, "Look how we — i.e., folks in our profession — rose to the challenge of that day." Makes you want to yell at the screen, "It's not about you!"

Some of the 9/11/01 remembrances today strike me as skewing in that direction. The rest seems to be about the upcoming elections and how Republicans and Democrats can influence how 9/11 is viewed, the better to garner votes. Last night, I saw a few minutes — I think on Fox News, what a surprise — about the heroism of George W. Bush on that day. Yeah, right. I watched longer than I should have but I was kinda waiting to see if it would include the part where he runs out and single-handedly captures Osama.

Roughly 3,000 people died on September 11 for no good, human reason. Countless others were injured and/or had their lives forever harmed in a myriad of ways…physically, emotionally, financially, etc. (I think there's an unfortunate tendency to talk about the number of dead as if that's the sole measure of damage that occurred.) I don't think we should look back at it all in a way that just makes us afraid it'll happen again. We usually do the wrong thing when we operate out of fear. But there's got to be a more constructive thing we can do with that memory than exploit it for short-term benefits.

I probably won't be posting much, if anything, the rest of the day. I don't feel I have anything positive to offer and it feels creepy to be posting here about anything else. And besides, like I said, I have things to do. I hope you do, as well.

As you know if you hang around this page, I try to pick out interesting video clips to link to, usually one per day. This takes less time than you'd think but last night, as I went searching for something to post tomorrow, it took an unusually long time. I felt that on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I ought to put up something that said something important about that day.

There are thousands of video clips on the Internet about the September 11 tragedies. Many of them are long, intense lectures by people who believe they've proven (but haven't) that the "official" version of what occurred that day is a sham. The twin towers could not possibly have collapsed the way we were told they'd collapsed…and of course, no plane hit the Pentagon. Of all that, they are sure. I am a big believer in the expectation that the government will shamelessly lie to us — any regime of the government and especially the current one — but in this case, I have seen no evidence that makes me suspicious that what most people think happened that day is not pretty much what happened that day.

So I won't be linking to any of those videos and besides, they're all real long and extremely boring.

There are also thousands of "tribute" videos people have made…some clumsily titled as "tributes to 9/11" by folks who don't mean to celebrate what occurred on that day. Most consist of stills and video clips edited against a properly somber record…often "Only Time" by Enya. (The first one I recall seeing online a little less than five years ago was this one. It's still quite moving and whoever assembled it did a helluva job.)

I watched a few of them last night and found myself getting alternately sad and angry. The sad part needs no explanation but perhaps the angry part does. The more I am reminded of the pain of that day, the more I resent the folks who've tried to manipulate its memory. No event in my lifetime (I'm 54) brought Americans together the way our shared suffering brought us together that day. It is appalling not only that this unity has been lost but that the emotions of 9/11 have been reconfigured to demonize one another. The worst kind of partisans have claimed 9/11 as a club to use against the other side. The same thing has happened with the Iraq War: If you don't see things my way and vote for my side, you must be objectively pro-terrorist, plus you hate America and pray for our troops to be killed.

That dung has always bothered me, but it never quite bothered me as much as it did last night when I was watching footage of the burning towers, still shots of innocent human beings plunging to their deaths and the pained agony of onlookers and family members. I kept thinking, "How did we get from this to where we are now?" I finally had to stop watching 9/11 videos and cleanse my video palate with stuff like this.

So I haven't picked out a video for tomorrow. If you have any nominations, let me have them…though I can't guarantee I'll be able to watch them all. It really depresses me that, as I read about this Path to 9/11 movie on ABC, some people seem to be trying to note the five year anniversary of that awful disaster by seeing how much blame they can pin on their political opponents.

Yesterday, we brought you the opening to the 1963 Casper cartoon show. Here's the ending, which is a bit sad until the last few bars of music. It's nowhere near as sad as the closing credits of the Linus the Lionhearted Show but it's still a bit depressing. Then again, the whole Casper franchise is about a dead child so maybe depressing is appropriate.

Something dawned on me as I watched this. The premise of the Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons was always that poor little Casper just wanted to have a friend…but he didn't fit in with the ghosts and witches of his world, and he scared away almost everyone he encountered in "our" world. Usually, at the end of each cartoon, he'd find someone who liked being around him…and then the next cartoon, he'd be right back to moping about, trying to find someone who wouldn't spot him, do a bad Tex Avery "take" and run screaming into the background painting.

Okay, that was the premise when they made a couple of theatrical cartoons per year. When he got into the comic books, he started making friends left and right: Wendy, Spooky, Nightmare, etc. Someone at Harvey Comics — and I have to presume this was a conscious thought — decided that the idea of Casper scaring away all potential friends would get monotonous. It would also make for a pretty depressing comic book…so they pulled that idea way back. Casper in the comics sometimes scared people but mostly, the stories were about a kid who was different from all the rest. Since we all feel different from everyone else when we're kids, there was a nice bit of reader identification going on there. My friends who had older siblings (I was an only child) all identified madly with the way Casper was picked on by The Ghostly Trio…and of course, adding in all those friends as a supporting cast created plot possibilities, to say nothing of spin-off comics.

All in all, it was a nice bit of retooling an animated property for the comic book page. And it sure was successful for a couple of decades there.

Before we roll the clip, I should mention: I said when I posted the opening that Norma McMillan was the voice of Davey on the kids' show, Davey and Goliath. Anthony Tollin reminds me that she was a voice of Davey and that Dick Beals — who's mentioned more often on this site than Donald Rumsfeld — was the original voice. Dick Beals would also make a much better Secretary of Defense than Donald Rumsfeld but that's beside the point.

According to a CNN poll taken a week or so ago, 43% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

According to a Senate report released Friday, Hussein was not involved at all. This report seems to have settled the question once and for all, at least insofar as our leaders and prominent pundits are concerned. Partisans on both sides are arguing as to whether the Iraq invasion was predicated or sold on that misperception, and who should have known better…but I don't see anyone important out there insisting that the report is wrong and that Hussein was involved.

So here's what I'm wondering about. Two things, really.

I'm wondering what the number will be like, next time some pollster asks people if they think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. I'm assuming the number will drop but is it going to drop to 5% or 10%? Or is it going to drop to 39% or 40%? I'm guessing a small decrease, not much greater than the margin of error.

And I'm wondering about the people who thought or still think Hussein was involved. I'm wondering on what they based that conclusion. These are just people off the street with no access to Hussein or Al Qaeda documents or anything of the sort. They get their information from watching TV, listening to the radio, reading newspapers and magazines and websites, and chatting with friends who get their info from the same sources.

Are these people working backwards from the fact that we proclaimed Saddam was the devil and we invaded Iraq? Is it that he suddenly became the worst villain in the world to the U.S. so it stood to reason that he must have been involved in the worst crime? Is it that Cheney and Company insinuated — and to an extent they now deny, spoke outright of a Hussein-9/11 connection? Is it that some folks are getting so paranoid that they just assume that all the various parties in all the nations that hate the U.S. must automatically be in cahoots with one another? (I've only run into one person who believes Saddam was involved in 9/11 and he fervently insists that the Russians, the Nazis, both Koreas, the Mafia, Fidel Castro and eight shooters on the grassy knoll were also in on the deal…which, by the way, was a series of well-planned controlled demolitions from within.)

I mean this question with more seriousness than my phrasing here probably suggests. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting John F. Kennedy and if you asked me, I could cite several books and arguments of logic that convinced me. I may be wrong but I didn't arrive at this view because God whispered it to me or because I consulted a Magic Eightball or I read it off a Ouija board. It came from somewhere.

So where did the belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 come from? And if it came from the public statements of Bush and Cheney, how do those people feel now that those men are running around insisting, "We never said there was a connection"?

Mark is still having some e-mail problems. I don't think anything you send is getting lost but there may now be a delay before it gets to me. The crack tech crew here at news from me — which consists solely of me — is laboring diligently to solve the problem so that I can get your mail quickly and not answer it, instead of getting it hours later and not answering it.

Also: This website may be offline for some time — maybe an hour or so — on Monday night as my hosting company does major equipment upgrades and such. Don't panic. Don't go into convulsions. Just find something else to read on the Internet until we become available again. I hear there are other sites.

Here, boys and girls, is the opening of The New Casper Cartoon Show, which appeared on ABC Saturday mornings (and sometimes on Sunday) from 1963 to 1969. Most of the history books say that this was a newly-produced show but I recall it as an amalgam of newly-produced cartoons and recycled Paramount theatrical cartoons of the forties and fifties. The new cartoons were interesting because they reflected the Casper that had evolved in the pages of the Harvey comic books.

Quick History Lesson: Casper the Friendly Ghost started out in Paramount cartoons in 1945 and after a slow start, he became their second most-popular star, bested only — of course — by Popeye the Sailor. In 1952, after another company had briefly published a Casper comic book, Harvey Publishing secured the license and their Casper comic became very profitable for them, spinning off many allied titles. Eventually, Harvey wound up owning Casper and his film library, and when this new Casper show was done in '63, Harvey was in control and Paramount was the lesser partner. The series featured supporting characters who had popped up in the comics such as Wendy the Good Little Witch and Nightmare the ghost horse.

We have here the 1963 opening titles, which I always thought were quite peppy and fun, which is more than I was able to say for the show. I believe the voice of Casper here is done by Norma McMillan, who was also the voice of Davey on Davey and Goliath and Sweet Polly Purebread on The Underdog Show. But Casper went through several voices over the years so I could be wrong about this.

John Bengston is a scholar of silent movies, particularly of Buster Keaton and of where movies were filmed. Here's an Adobe PDF file he compiled that details a tour you could take in Los Angeles and see where Keaton worked his magic.

The one that floored me when I first learned of it years ago was the one on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. You know that big newsstand at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood? Of course you do. Well, to the right of it there's an alley that I used to drive down to get to a great parking space no one knew about. Then years later, I found out that in one of Keaton's best shorts, Cops, you can see Buster run down that same alley.

The Library of Congress, in partnership with a bunch of other entities, has created an online web archive of online web reporting on 9/11. There's an awful lot of material there spanning a range of nations and languages. You might find it interesting to do some random browsing.

They also have some other online archives in the section they call Minerva…with more to come.

There's been a robbery in the Gasoline Alley newspaper strip! A truck has been stolen!

Here's a link to the strip in which the theft is discovered. The truck's owner phones the police…

…and then click over to the following day's strip to see who answers the call.

Our video funfest today brings us a commercial for Chocks, a vitamin for kids that was introduced into the market in 1960. Insofar as I can tell, these are no longer made. Vitamins shaped like Flintstones (introduced in '68) and other recognizable characters took away enough of the market share to bring an end to Chocks. All we have left are ads like this one.

The voice of the cuckoo bird sounds like Dick Beals, who we've discussed here many times before. The panda's voice was supplied by the world's greatest ventriloquist, Dr. Paul Winchell. The rocking horse is…well, I'm not sure. It sounds like Tom D'Andrea, a character actor best remembered from The Life of Riley. Then again, it might be someone doing a real good Tom D'Andrea impression. And I have no idea who the woman is who's doing the singing. Okay, let's roll it…

Another good article on my current favorite comedian/commentator, Lewis Black. Thanks to Lee Wochner for letting me know about it so I could let you know about it…and also read it myself.