A retired Major General, John Batiste, writes about the ineptness of Donald Rumsfeld.

We all have the public issues that rankle us. One of mine is the ongoing (and increasingly successful) attempt to do away with the Inheritance Tax. I not only think it's wrong and unfair but I believe the argument for eliminating it is built on a structure of deliberate and calculated lies…starting with calling it "The Death Tax." In this article, Ellen Goodman explains why that's a dishonest way to put it and why the whole thing is a rotten idea.

And I'll link to an old article which ran in Slate and which did not prompt one rebuttal that I saw. Michael Kinsley wrote about how it's a lie to say that money taxed by the Inheritance Tax is money that's been "taxed twice."

I understand why very, very rich people are in favor of its repeal. If I stood to inherit billions, I'd sure prefer that no tax be paid on that money. Heck, I'd prefer that no tax be paid on the check I'm expecting from DC Comics and I'm sure the guy who cuts my lawn would prefer not to pay taxes on the money I pay him each month. But us non-billionaires don't have the clout and connections to ram through our exemption from taxes. So not only don't we get it but we'll probably end up paying in many ways for the tax cut for the super-rich.

Not long ago over lunch, back when I ate lunches, I got into this discussion with one of my more Conservative (and not rich) friends. I said that if the U.S. government was going to forgo a trillion dollars (or whatever eliminating the Inheritance Tax will cost us), I'd prefer that the cuts be spread out over the entire population and not all given to the family that owns Walmart. It seems to me that people who actually work are at least as deserving of tax relief as people who inherit it. My friend came back with the usual accusations that "my side" (I was talking about just me) loves taxes, would raise them as high as we could, wants to soak the rich, blah blah blah. I don't get why he feels this way. Isn't cutting taxes for everyone still cutting taxes? Apparently not. It's only a tax cut if it goes to people who don't need the money.

Last April, we had a brief discussion here and also here about the origin of the oft-bootlegged office poster with the laughing guys asking, "You want it WHEN?" A consensus emerged that it was the work of cartoonist Henry Syverson and that it probably derived from the laughing characters he drew for years, chuckling atop the cartoon page in each issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Well, Russ Maheras has just sent me the above scan from the March 29, 1958 issue. The heading is credited to Mr. Syverson so for me, that pretty much proves it. Thanks, Russ.

The next few days, I think I'm going to be linking to old commercials here. Today's is a spot produced by and starring the great Stan Freberg. Stan didn't exactly invent the funny commercial but he perfected the form to the point where other ad agencies used to (and may still) talk about doing "Freberg style" spots for their clients. No one else could ever quite pull it off because along with the more obvious shortcomings, they lacked Stan's courage and confidence. Who else could talk a sponsor into making a huge investment in commercials that didn't even mention the product's name out loud? But he did, as you'll see…

Most of the Sav-on drug stores which dot Southern California (and elsewhere) are all turning into CVS Pharmacies. The parent company of the latter purchased the former and I don't think they've gotten as far as changing the signs outside but legally, the change was official a few days ago.

Yesterday afternoon, I went into a store that said Sav-on on the outside and Sav-on all over the insides. I'm guessing that if you went around the store and counted, you'd find the name "Sav-on" at least a thousand times. Over the pharmacy, for instance, there was a huge, six-foot sign that said "Sav-On 24-Hour Pharmacy." Absolutely nothing else had changed except that taped to all the cash registers were little paper signs that said, "This is now a CVS Pharmacy," and then under that in smaller type, the signs explained that if you pay by check, you have to make the check payable to the new name, not the old.

Ahead of me in the one checkout line was a woman, perhaps seventy, who was utterly confused by all this. She had purchased a tube of Vagisil (I think it was) which her doctor told her to get at Sav-on. She'd found it on the shelf and carried it to the register…where she'd discovered, much to her horror, that she was not in a Sav-on. I had to stand and wait through about ten minutes of conversation, the last part of which went roughly like this…

LADY: Why does it say Sav-on if this is a CBS Pharmacy?

CLERK: CVS Pharmacy, ma'am. And it used to be a Sav-on but now it's a CVS Pharmacy.

LADY: Well then, I can't buy this here. My doctor told me to buy it at a Sav-on.

CLERK: This is the exact same store it always was.

LADY: If it's the exact same store, why isn't it a Sav-on?

CLERK: Because Sav-on was sold. And anyway, you can't buy it at a Sav-on. There are no more Sav-ons. They're all CVS now.

LADY: (getting panicked) But my doctor said I needed this and I had to buy it at a Sav-on…

At this point, I decide that if I'm ever going to make it out of this store, I'm going to need to step in and clear things up.

ME: Excuse me. Your doctor doesn't care where you purchase this item. It's the medicine that's important, not where you buy it. This is the exact same product they sold here when this was officially a Sav-on.

LADY: Then you think it would be safe to buy it here?

ME: Absolutely. For all intents and purposes, this is still a Sav-on.

LADY: Well, in that case, I'll buy it here. Thank you. [to Clerk:] I'm going to need to write a check.

CLERK: Certainly. Please make it out to "CVS Pharmacy."

LADY: But this man said this was still a Sav-on!

At this point, I gave up and went to another register. In a Walgreens.

Hey, for today's video link, how about a cartoon? How about a Tex Avery cartoon? This is Jerky Turkey, which was released to theaters on April 7, 1945…like you couldn't guess the approximate date from all the World War II references. It's another in the endless (for a time) stream of attempts to create a new Bugs Bunny by having a hapless character chase a crazy, carefree animal character who has the ability to defy all laws of physics and to pull explosives out of nowhere. Tex did a few of them, none of which evoked the magic he'd achieved with the wabbit in A Wild Hare.

Preston Blair, who we wrote about here, did a lot of the animation of the doughy pilgrim. And this particular print seems to have a few frames clipped out in and around some of the more "violent" jokes but I can't help that.

I've always found it interesting that these cartoons "work" for people too young to get a lot of the phrases and gags. The lineup to purchase cigarettes, of course, had to do with wartime shortages. The billboard that asks, "Was this trip really necessary?" is derived from the advertising campaigns at the time encouraging Americans to save gas and to ask, every time they traveled, "Is this trip really necessary?" I wonder if very small kids even know what the "1-A" notice means. I hope they never have to experience it first hand.

Okay, enough intro. Here's Jerky Turkey…

Ira Matetsky points out in an e-mail that Congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia has a photo on his official website of himself with Stephen Colbert.

So what do we think? Did he not get that the interview he did with Colbert (this one) made him look like a clueless politico who can't get anything done? Or did someone in his office perhaps not watch it and put the pic on his website? Maybe they just think, "Heck, a celebrity's a celebrity." Beats me. All I know is if I were Congressguy Westmoreland, I'd want everyone to forget a.s.a.p. about that Colbert interview.

116 years ago today in Ulverston, England, a couple named Arthur and Madge Jefferson celebrated the birth of their son, Arthur Stanley Jefferson. When he turned to performing, he became Stan Jefferson and later, Stan Laurel. When he teamed up with a man named Oliver Norvell Hardy, he became immortal.

As I've written many times on this site (here, for instance), there's really nothing I enjoy watching more than Laurel and Hardy in their natural state, which is on film. And I don't even like slapstick all that much. I just like watching them: The way they move, the way they gesture, the way they react, the way they talk (if they talk), everything about them. Their gag men, with Laurel as lead gag man, crafted brilliant jokes and situations for them…but Stan and Ollie are even fascinating to watch when they're standing still.

Nothing I'm writing in this item is new or unique or unusual. Audiences have loved Laurel and Hardy since they first teamed and people yet to be born will love their films well into the future. But I noticed today was Stan's birthday and I thought I'd note it here. Because even writing about these guys is fun.

Jim Henson graduated from the University of Maryland. Not long ago, that institution decided to erect a statue of Henson and his froggy alter-ego on campus, and they produced a little fourteen minute documentary about it and him. Parts of this film are more about the statue than about Henson but it features a lot of people at the school and some of the Muppeteers talking about Jim and what his work meant to them. And the statue looks pretty neat.

Michael Kinsley on the Central Intelligence Agency…the group that no one seems to like much anymore.

Lunch in elementary school could be traumatic. In junior high and high school, it was no problem: I brown-bagged it, bringing in a paper sack into which my mother had inserted either a meat loaf sandwich or a tuna sandwich or a peanut-butter-and-strawberry-jelly sandwich (something of the sort) and a little baggie containing three Nabisco Chocolate Chip Cookies. Today, they call them Chips Ahoy but back then, they were just Nabisco Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'd eat, toss the bag and that would be it.

Not so easy back at Westwood Elementary. Back there, if you didn't have a cool lunch box…well, forget it. You might as well paint a big sign on your butt that read "Mock me unmercifully." I don't recall if a bagged lunch suggested you were poor or low-class or boring or just why it was such a social faux pas. All I remember is that whenever my old lunch box had to be retired, I had to get the new one before the next school day. I didn't dare go to class with my eats in a sack.

Lunch boxes had to be replaced with alarming frequency. (So did our Student Teachers.) On our schoolgrounds, both got battered about a lot — enough that I'm amazed any lunch pails from that period still exist, let alone in "collectible" condition. But what was really vulnerable about them was the thermos bottles. Today, I'm told, they're like the black box on an airplane. Back then…drop one and it was history. Heck, just nudge one and it was goner. You'd shake it, hear the inner lining rattle about like broken glass and then pitch it into a trash can. So what did you do if the thermos in your Porky's Lunch Wagon lunch box (I had one) busted? Well, you didn't replace it with a generic thermos; not unless you wanted snide remarks from your fellow pupils. Instead, you had to get your parents to buy you a new lunch box with matching milk container.

This was how it was in first through third grades while I was at Westwood. In fourth grade, they began having someone sell milk at lunchtime — a little carton for a nickel, sold from a cart behind the cafeteria building that they'd been building since I was in Kindergarten. This simplified the process since you no longer needed a thermos at all. This not only spared you replacing the whole lunch box every few weeks, it enabled all our mothers to pack more into our lunch kits. Mine took to adding in fruit and small packets of Laura Scudder's Potato Chips. I think each packet held about four chips.

Then in fifth grade, they finally got the cafeteria building up and running. I'll write about that wrenching experience in the second part of this post, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow.

If you didn't see last night's episode of The Colbert Report, you missed seeing Mr. Colbert make a Georgia Congressman look like…well, let's just say that if you were running against this man, an interview like this would be your fondest fantasy. The video's a bit fuzzy and it starts a bit slow but stay with this one until the end.

Nathan Newman, in a weblog post, raises an interesting question. Thanks to this morn's Supreme Court decision, it's now Kosher for police to enter your home without knocking or announcing their presence. But there are also laws in some states that say that if an unknown person comes crashing through your door, you have the right to shoot first and ask questions later. So of course, one of these days, someone's going to shoot a cop and offer the latter law as a defense. This strikes me as a set of laws that can't help but clash…and often.

And the Supreme Court decision strikes me as one of the many times Justices who say we should look to the "original intent" of the Constitution and interpret it as per the mindset of the Founding Fathers, have ignored that because it wouldn't have led them to where their present-day guts wanted to go.

I feel almost dirty writing something here about Ann Coulter. It strikes me that all her invective and "controversial remarks" have but one purpose: The financial enrichment of Ann Coulter. There are people out there who hate Liberals and will shell out good money (or tune in talk radio) to enjoy them bashed and attacked…and I don't think most of them even care if the attacks are fair or the facts are accurate. They just want to see "the enemy" slapped around. A similar marketplace is growing with regard to beating up on George W. Bush but it hasn't yet proven to be as lucrative. Judging by the polls, it may still get there.

The section of Coulter's new book that's making headlines and getting her on highly-rated TV shows is her attack on a small group of 9/11 widows whose main sin seems to be that they made commercials for John Kerry. (Has anyone asked her if she'd object to 9/11 widows making commercials for Bush-Cheney?) The premise here is that Democrats — or maybe it's Liberals she's singling out — trot out "victims" to make their cases and then argue that victims are sacred and that the opposition isn't somehow allowed to respond to them.

Seems to me that, first of all, Ann Coulter has no problem responding to victims. So if there's a problem there, her gripe is with folks on her side who allow that to intimdate them. Or maybe they don't respond because some of them think that you lose more than you gain when you attack someone like a 9/11 widow or a mother whose son died in Iraq. Certainly, we see a lot of right-wingers this week who think Coulter's doing more harm than good to their cause. It also seems to me that the unseemly action for a woman whose husband died in the 9/11 tragedies would be to just take the settlement money and go shopping, rather than to try and change the system or demand investigations.

It especially seems to me that George W. Bush and those who support him have done a darn good job of wrapping themselves in victims and other sacred heroes. Bush does it every time he invokes 9/11 in response to some criticism or gets himself photographed with grieving families or surrounded by uniformed firefighters. His supporters do that every time someone faults Bush or Rumsfeld and the rejoinder is, "You're attacking our troops." Same trick: Instead of debating issues, you hide between someone who's considered inviolable. If I thought Ann Coulter was out to get everyone on both sides to knock that off, she'd be my new hero…but I don't. I think she just wants to stir hatreds to sell books.

Last night, Jay Leno had Coulter on, paired with George Carlin for what NBC press releases promised would be mano a mano combat. But that was a false promise because Carlin, even if he thinks Coulter is utterly wrongheaded, is not about to fault someone too much for saying things that some find offensive. He kind of makes his living doing that, after all. Leno offered a feeble challenge to her views but since she's good at this kind of thing and since her supporters packed The Tonight Show audience to cheer her, she came off as a superstar, at least to the kind of viewer likely to ever buy her book. I suppose Jay and his producers thought it was worth it because of the ratings they'd get with the great Carlin-Coulter Slap-Off…but they didn't even get that. The numbers for last night were about average for a Wednesday, maybe even a few tenths of a point off. I'd like to think it's because America, like me, is already bored with this bogus controversy.

There are a lot of "impersonator" plays around these days. I guess it started before Hal Holbrook did his Mark Twain show and before James Whitmore was out there bringing back Will Rogers…but those two spawned a lot of imitations done by imitators of other famous folks.

I guess the format is irresistible. First off, you can usually do these shows with a cast of one, or perhaps a cast of one plus a few musicians. You don't need sets or a lot of costumes. And you start with a lot of great material because you pick one of the famous dead people who left behind writing and monologues and songs, plus there's also the subject's biography which will probably yield some good anecdotes. Plus, you have that Big Star Name. People won't go to An Evening With Ira Lipsitz but they might turn out for An Evening With Someone Famous (as portrayed by Ira Lipsitz).

Some of the ones I've seen have been very, very good (Frank Ferrante as Groucho, for instance). And even the worst of them (I won't name names) had a fair amount of entertainment value, even if it derived from the person being imitated, not from the imitator.

I won't pass judgment on the show being promoted in today's clip, which runs around four minutes, since I haven't seen the whole thing. But I will say it's rather an odd choice of Famous Person to replicate…