My favorite current stand-up comedian, Lewis Black, was the featured entertainer at the 61st Annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner where he drew the kind of spot that is every comic's dream: Following Dick Cheney paying tribute to a dead Pope. Talk about your great warm-ups. He was also required to wear a tux and to avoid the use of naughty words or inflammatory rhetoric. In his regular act, Black has been known to describe Cheney as "pure evil" but I guess you don't want to use that material when the guy's seated on the dais about five feet from you.

You may or may not be able to view video of the event over at the C-Span website, where things don't seem to be working too well. What you'll want to do is go there and do a search for "61st annual." Then if the site's functional and you have Real Player installed, the whole 80 minute event just might load. Mr. Black goes on around 36 minutes into it and you'll probably want to Fast Forward to him.

It's an odd performance and Black spends much of it discussing how it's a bad place for a comedian to work. The audience is not well-miked so I think he got more laughs than the video would seem to indicate, but it's still far from him at his best. I just mention it because if you think Lewis Black looks uncomfortable on The Daily Show, you oughta see him trying to amuse the Washington elite. I try to watch these every year and I don't recall any comic doing all that well with this crowd.

This is for those of you watching GSN's late night/early A.M. broadcasts of old Goodson-Todman game shows. They've gone through all the episodes of The Name's the Same. Tomorrow morning, they air the first of four episodes of What's Going On?, a short-lived program that Mark Goodson used to cite as the worst show his company ever did. It's nowhere near that. As a matter of fact, it was probably a better show than The Name's the Same and it was certainly better than Choose Up Sides, which will take its place on the GSN schedule after the four episodes air.

Goodson's negative view of the show may stem from all the production problems involved. The show used live remote cameras, which were a big (but not bug-free) feature of television in 1954. The producer of What's Going On? was Allan Sherman, who was later known for brilliant song parodies but who was then a producer for Goodson-Todman. It is said that when things weren't going well, as was apparently the case with this show, Mr. Sherman was difficult to deal with. (What's Going On? was cancelled after five shows aired. Only four episodes still exist.)

While I've got you here: Thursday morning, GSN should be running the 3/11/56 episode of What's My Line?, which as originally broadcast featured two Mystery Guests — Dinah Shore and famed clown Emmett Kelly. The segment with Ms. Shore is apparently lost so the episode has awkward continuity and GSN will probably have to pad out the half-hour with ten or eleven commercials for the Rascal Scooter. More significantly, that episode represented Fred Allen's final appearance. He died six days later, on Saturday, March 17. The following night, a rather glum episode of What's My Line? was broadcast, and GSN will presumably run that on Friday morning.

Front Row, which is a radio show on BBC4 in the UK, recently did a nice half-hour interview with Stephen Sondheim. Go to this page and select the broadcast from last Thursday…and do so before it's displaced by next Thursday's show. You'll need to have Real Player installed to listen in.

Speaking of Mr. Sondheim: If you're a fan of his and you're in Southern California, you might want to get tickets to be at the Hollywood Bowl the evening of July 8. Here's why.

If you live in Los Angeles or think you know it, try to find your way around on this.

This morning on Meet the Press, Tim Russert welcomed congressguys Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Barney Frank (D-MA) for a "blunt and frank" (ha ha) discussion of certain controversies involving Tom DeLay's ethics, or the lack thereof. The quick summary would go something like this: Frank asserted that Republicans keep changing the rules so as to make it impossible for a complaint in this area to be seriously pursued. Blunt insisted that the changes are necessary because without them, your political opponents could keep a meritless investigation alive in an effort to smear you. Neither said this but it seemed to me they were jointly making a strong argument that Congress cannot set and enforce its own codes of conduct. But of course, this will never change.

George W. Bush's approval ratings are way down, but America's opinion of Congress is even lower. Does anyone wonder why that is?

As we've all come to expect, Russert did not ask any questions which really challenged his guests on their interpretations of reality. One I'd have put to Blunt involved his insistence that DeLay has done nothing wrong. Is it that he has really done nothing wrong? Or is it that he has artfully navigated (and Congress has amended) the rules so that conduct which should be against the rules is not, by some technicality, illegal? And I'd have asked Frank if he was prepared to say that no Democrats have engaged in similar transgressions. But those questions might have made his guests a wee bit uncomfortable and we can't have that on television's oldest news/interview program, can we?

Frank Rich on what's up with Tom DeLay and some of the slimy folks around him.

Peter Sanderson attended the recent memorial service in New York for Will Eisner. Here, he supplies the first part of a detailed play-by-play account.

Every so often, I get the feeling that some cosmic force is watching Leno, Letterman, Conan, Craig Ferguson, The Daily Show, Bill Maher and everyone else who does topical humor and saying, "Hmm…I'd better give them a great news item to write jokes about." The whole Michael Jackson trial is, of course, a direct result of this cosmic force, as was the Monica Lewinsky scandal of yore. This one won't last as long but it's going to be good for a couple of monologues.

My pal Paul Harris does a fine talk/interview radio show on KMOX radio in St. Louis. I've mentioned it here before and lamented that his station didn't stream to the 'net. Ergo, I couldn't listen to his program. Well, things change and now I can listen to KMOX via a link on its website, and so can you. Paul is on weekdays from 2 PM to 6 PM, Missouri time. If you can't listen live, Paul puts audio clips of some of his best interviews over on his website. Good stuff.

I enjoy watching Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, in part because Maher asks tougher questions than most interviewers. But he's also funny, especially in a segment they do at the end called "New Rules." It's not quite as good as seeing them performed, but there are transcripts of all the "New Rules" spots over on this webpage. Go see.

85 years ago today, Sheldon Moldoff was born. Talk about a guy who was present for a lot of comic book history: Sheldon had artwork in the very first issue of Action Comics. He drew the cover for the first issue of Flash Comics, introducing The Flash and Hawkman, and was the artist for many early stories of Hawkman and The Black Pirate. He also drew the cover for the issue of All-American Comics that introduced Green Lantern. He was Bob Kane's first assistant on the Batman strip, and drew many stories for All Star Comics. In the late forties, he was one of the first creators of horror comics, and even approached EC publisher William Gaines with the idea of doing them, years before Gaines launched his own Tales From the Crypt.

He is probably best known to a generation of comic fans as "Bob Kane." Throughout the forties, Kane turned more and more of his Batman art chores over to assistants, to the point where he was doing virtually none of it. In 1953, he hired Moldoff as his ghost, and for fifteen years, the artwork that DC (and many fans) thought was being done by Kane was actually done by Moldoff. Sheldon also worked directly for DC Comics, often as an inker of Curt Swan's art for Superman, and worked for Kane as a designer of his 1960 cartoon series, Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse.

For the last decade or so, Sheldon has been a frequent and welcome guest at comic book conventions, usually selling wonderful sketches of the many classic characters he's drawn. I've enjoyed interviewing him on panels and chatting with him away from panels. He's a wonderful source of historical info about comics and a fine gentleman. I hope he has a happy 85th birthday day with many more to follow.

Comcast, the company that routes me into the Internet, has been cutting in and out for the last few days. If you can read this, it's back up…but probably not for long.

So I may not be posting much and I'm also having trouble receiving and answering e-mails. This will pass.

Back here, I predicted that Michael Jackson would probably moonwalk (i.e., be acquitted) in his current child molestation case. I would like to reverse my prediction. It was made at a time when it looked like the judge would not allow evidence and testimony relating to other cases wherein the King of Pop allegedly put his hands where they didn't belong…and hey, how's that for a euphemism? And if the judge had indeed ruled that way, my prediction would stand. There's enough to tar the parents of the supposed victim as money-grubbers who are not above ginning up a phony charge, that I figured the jury would give Jackson the benefit of the doubt.

But the judge is allowing a parade of other victims or witnesses to victimization, and that changes things. I figure if I'm on the jury, I'm thinking, "Well, he may not have been wholly guilty in this case but he's gotten away with too much for too long." In that case, I don't think I could live with myself if I let Jackson go and then, six months or a year from now, read about him paying off more molested kids to keep quiet. Conversely, if we all vote to convict, the worst that can happen is that a pedophile has been stopped, albeit for the wrong instance.

On the other hand, I can't imagine M.J. actually going to prison. Hmm…you know what I think? I think I oughta go to bed. Good night, all.

Here's an easy review: If you have any interest in EC Comics, you need a copy of Foul Play, a fine new book by my pal, Grant Geissman. It's an overview of the artists who worked for the company (like Al Williamson, the fellow in the photo above). There's a bio, art samples and one complete story for each of them, plus you get a lot of little extras, like drawings done for company stationery and office parties. There's also one story that was never published 'til now. I just received my copy, sat down to read a little and got hooked, working my way through the entire thing before I put it down. Grant knows the topic well and quotes liberally from interviews with the men (and one woman) who did such lasting work. Click here to buy it from Amazon.

E.J. Dionne discusses the looming repeal of the Estate Tax. I'm actually a big fan of tax cuts but this one, I think, has been sold to the American people with a lot of fraudulent information, including calling it the "Death Tax" to load the emotional argument. It's really a loophole for the super-rich to pass on wealth to their heirs without anyone ever paying taxes on it.

Here's a link to a 2000 article by Michael Kinsley about why this is, and here's an excerpt for the benefit of folks who are too lazy to click on that link…

The truth is that most of the accumulated wealth that is subject to the estate tax was never taxed at all as income. Repeat: never taxed at all. If the estate tax is abolished, the average billionaire's billion-and-first dollar will be subject to a cumulative tax rate of zero. By comparison, the very first dollar earned by someone frying burgers at McDonald's is subject to the FICA tax of about 15 percent. (Investment income is exempt from FICA.)

[snip…]

The reason most inherited wealth was never taxed as income is that it consists of so-called "appreciated property." The simplest example is shares of stock. If you buy at $100 and die at $120, your $20 profit is never taxed as income. When your heirs sell the stock, their profit is calculated as if they bought at $120.

Like I said, I like tax cuts. I'm just skeptical that tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy won't eventually translate into tax increases in some form for the average working guy. Has anyone ever seen any of these crusaders for lower taxes ever expend much energy on lowering payroll taxes?