A week or two ago in a monologue, Jay Leno mentioned some new bit of bad news for the White House and he said, "My God, that's the worst thing that's happened to the Bush administration all day."

That's kind of how it's been going lately: Every day or so, there's a new poll or a new revelation or a new document or a new general or former supporter calling for big changes. I'm starting to feel sorry, not so much for Bush and his crew, but for all the people who supported them in good faith. I've backed politicians who turned out to not be as competent or honest as I once thought. It's not a pleasant realization.

The latest blow is tonight's 60 Minutes interview with Tyler Drumheller, who was once the highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe. He says there was plenty of accurate intelligence on Iraq and its alleged weapons and its supposed attempts to acquire yellowcake uranium. The White House, he claims, simply ignored the good intelligence because the flawed reports fit their agenda. This will not come as a surprise to anyone but it adds to the pile-on.

And the week is just starting…

Okay, we've had Monty Python TV shows, movies, DVDs, records, books, concerts and a Broadway show. What's next?

How about Monty Python ice cream?

(By the way: They don't seem to sell this flavor in their parlors but Tuesday is Free Cone Day at all Ben and Jerry's Scoop Shops.)

Comic book creators are getting better deals these days. This article explains.

I don't drink beer or have much to do with horses. Still, for some reason, I'm a sucker for the Budweiser Clydesdales and the commercials they appear in. Don't ask why. I don't know.

Here's kind of a nice one. (This is an ifilm embed and they don't seem to work with as many browsers as the others. So if it doesn't play for you, go to this page. You may have to sit through a commercial to see a commercial, though.)

As you may recall, NBC abruptly pulled the final two episodes of Celebrity Cooking Showdown from their Thursday night and Friday night schedules, substituting reruns of other shows.

Looking at it just in terms of immediate ratings, that may or may not have been a good idea. The Deal or No Deal rerun that ran Friday in place of the last episode of the cooking series won its time slot by a hair. Its first half hour got a 5.0 and the second got a 5.9. Would Celebrity Cooking Showdown have done better there? We'll never know but it doesn't seem likely. Clearly, not much of America got hooked on the bake-off to the point of following it every night. Then again, the finale of a reality show usually does better than an average episode, and the competition on other networks that night wasn't strong.

Saturday night, NBC had a stealth airing of the last two installments of Celebrity Cooking Showdown. Nobody knew they were on and each hour got around a 1.8 rating, which is about as poorly as one can do on a major network. In the TV departments of all the Walmarts across the country, there are usually enough sets tuned to NBC to get a 1.8. Had they aired the shows on Thursday and Friday, they might not have done as well as the reruns put in their place but they'd sure have done better than a 1.8. I'm curious if the folks at NBC think it was a good trade-off.

Congress is about to vote to give several top communications companies, including Time-Warner, Verizon and Comcast, a certain amount of control of the Internet. I dunno how this will work but I'll bet we won't like it.

There's nothing I like better than a good Laurel and Hardy film, and our link today is to three glorious minutes from one of their best. I'm sorry it's colorized but it's not offensively so…

Glenn Greenwald on how the Bush administration loves to leak information to reporters.

Here's today's installment of Get Fuzzy. It looks to me like the storyline will be continuing next week.

Comic book/strip artist Richard Waring Rockwell passed away last Tuesday at the age of 85. Dick was a charming gentleman who lived too much of his life in the shadows of others. His name was rarely mentioned without noting that he was (a) the nephew of the great illustrator, Norman Rockwell, and (b) Milton Caniff's uncredited ghost artist on the Steve Canyon newspaper strip for some 35 years.

Dick began his comic book career in 1948 working for Stan Lee at what was then called Timely Comics. He also worked for Lev Gleason, Dell and several other publishers before (and occasionally, after) connecting in 1952 with Caniff. The way the story is told, Rockwell applied for membership in the National Cartoonists Society, which involved submitting a sample of his work. Caniff, who was then in charge of looking over applications, saw Rockwell's and immediately called him to say he qualified for membership and to ask if he was available for work. Rockwell was…and he was soon drawing a lot more of Caniff's strip than Caniff was. For much of the next 3.5 decades, Milton would write the strip, Rockwell would pencil it and ink in everything but the main characters, and then the art would go to Caniff who would finish things off and retouch wherever he deemed necessary.

After Caniff passed away in 1988, Rockwell brought the strip to a proper close and then turned his attention to his other projects. All the time he'd been working on Steve Canyon, he'd also been drawing editorial cartoons, illustrating books and working intermittently as a courtroom sketch artist. This article from 2003 discusses his work in this field. Dick also taught art for over thirty years at New York University and the Parsons School of Design, and had recently been teaching at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

I was privileged to work with Dick on a few projects, including a Blackhawk story of mine that he illustrated. He was a dedicated professional who deserved more time in the spotlight than he received.

Here's an interview with Scott Ritter, the guy who was right about Saddam's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Some of you may be wondering about Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy. These are two newspaper strips which may or may not be in your local newspaper, both from the same syndicate. Monday's Get Fuzzy (which you can see here) featured a phone conversation. Someone named Alex called a gent who I guess is supposed to be Darby Conley, who draws Get Fuzzy. And I guess Alex is supposed to be someone who works at the syndicate. Alex tells Darby, "I think the FedEx you got last week accidentally had some unpublished Pearls Before Swine in it. Go ahead and destroy those." Darby, who's been busy playing a videogame, is late with his strips for the week…so he gets a fiendish idea.

The rest of this week, every Get Fuzzy strip has been the same day's Pearls Before Swine strip but with the Get Fuzzy characters badly pasted-in over the Pearls Before Swine characters. As an example, here's Tuesday's Pearls Before Swine and here's Tuesday's Get Fuzzy. Furthermore, in Wednesday's Get Fuzzy, we have Stephen Pastis, who draws Pearls Before Swine, making a guest appearance to call Conley and inquire about the duplications.

This is a very funny idea, especially with the bad, obvious pasteovers. Or at least, it's funny if you're reading a newspaper that carries both strips. As Len Wein and I were just discussing on the phone, if your local paper carries only Get Fuzzy — and there are at least a couple that do — you've got to be going, "Whaaa–?" I think I admire the guts that Conley is exhibiting not only to risk alienating a chunk of his readership for the sake of a good joke, but the courage to keep it going all week. Wonder if there's a further pay-off ahead.

NBC is running the last two episodes of Celebrity Cooking Showdown back to back on Saturday evening. If you care.

You're bored…you're frustrated…your approval rating is down to 33% even in the Fox poll…what do you do? Why not bomb Iran? Here's a video about it. (If you can't understand all the lyrics, they're posted here.)

Christina Larson has some encouraging words for those concerned about what's happening with our environment.