As mentioned earlier, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) has introduced a bill that would make it illegal (!) for the National Weather Service to make its forecasts available for free on the Internet. The National Weather Service is supported by those of us who pay taxes, and its data is the foundation of all weather forecasting across the continent. There are private weather services that take the NWS info and supplement it with additional data, as well as processing the NWS data through different computer models. There are others that do a fair amount of their own forecasting but even those firms have derived their computer models by studying NWS data, and their forecasts are always done with one eye on what the NWS says. So basically, what the private weather services sell is information derived from the work of the NWS. Santorum's bill is based on the premise that it is "unfair competition" for the NWS to give away this information because it might make it harder for private companies to charge money for their versions of it.

The most prominent of the private companies is AccuWeather, which is based in Santorum's alleged home state of Pennsylvania. (He actually lives in Virginia, a fact you'll probably hear mentioned often as re-election time draws near.) Is anyone surprised that the top execs of AccuWeather have donated a couple thousand bucks to the "Santorum in 2006" campaign?

This is out-and-out, unabashed bribery. Sometimes, when a representative takes money from the cheese industry and then pushes for a law that benefits the cheese industry, there's a rationale: The legislation was long overdue. Others have noted the problems it's intended to fix. The beneficiaries are just supporting that benevolent cause. Something like that. But in this case, no one was pushing for this change. In 50+ years, no one thought it was bad for the National Weather Service to be making its findings available to the public. It's just Santorum taking money for screwing the public…and his price is darned cheap, at that.

Yeah, this kind of thing happens all the time, and about bigger issues than the weather forecast. But it still ticks me off.

The other day here, I noted that Garry Trudeau has a tough job in Doonesbury, writing topical material that has to go to press way in advance. As noted, he's had a pretty amazing track record of not having his "projections" go awry. What happens between the time he sends a batch of daily strips off to his syndicate and the time they see print rarely renders them untimely.

As Ray Arthur noted to me in an e-mail just now, the Trudeau Luck is holding: Today's Doonesbury strip is about George W. Bush pledging his friendship and support to the embattered Tom DeLay. And today's developments in the DeLay situation are being summarized in news stories with headlines like Bush Gives DeLay Show of Support. A nice bit of prognostication there, in a strip that was probably drawn two weeks ago.

Here are two very funny writers, Lee Kalcheim and Marshall Efron, on Social Security privatization. Thanks to Lennie "Scream like a chicken" Weinrib for the link.

Here's a nice picture of the creator of Dick Tracy, Chester Gould. It's my way of alerting you to an upcoming What's My Line? treasure on GSN. Mr. Gould was a guest on the 4/22/56 episode of that venerable game show, and I think it's the one GSN is airing early Wednesday morning.

Also, if you're a fan of great ventriloquists, you might want to watch or TiVo the following night's (day's?) show, which should be the one from 4/29/56. Paul Winchell is on the panel, with Jerry Mahoney popping up every now and then from under the desk, and the mystery guest is Edgar Bergen with Mortimer Snerd. Winchell was always in awe of Bergen and was genuinely thrilled when he figured out who it was.

A lot of fascinating people popped up on What's My Line?, which is one of the reasons I enjoy watching these hoary reruns. If you watch over the week or two, you'll see appearances by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Liberace, Bob Hope, Margaret Truman, and the bodybuilder whose torso adorned many a comic book advertisement…Charles Atlas.

For those of you following the Peter Paul/Stan Lee Media story, here's yet another chapter.

My pal Ken Plume is looking for something and I'll bet someone reading this can help out. It's a cartoon by the famous pre-war British editorial cartoonist Paul Crum (real name: Roger Pettiward). It depicts two hippopotamuses, their noses above water, and one is saying something like, "I keep thinking it's a Tuesday." A collection of his work was printed in '85 entitled The Last Cream Bun and we assume it's in there. Ken needs a scan and he's a good guy…so if you have access to this and would like to get thanked profusely in an article, drop a note to me and I'll forward it on to Ken.

Early tomorrow morn — 8:30 AM on my satellite dish — TV Land is running the episode of I Dream of Jeannie that guest stars Dave Barry. This alert is for those of you who want to see the late comedian and cartoon voice actor in action. See this earlier posting for background details.

Just came across a box that UPS delivered Friday and which my cleaning lady apparently brought in. How nice to find the third volume of The Complete Peanuts, which takes us into the 1955-1956 period. This was when Mr. Schulz really started figuring out what he wanted to do with his characters. Charlie Brown starts to act like Charlie Brown, Lucy starts to act like Lucy, etc. He's still fiddling with their relative ages but as soon as Linus gets a few years older and Sally Brown miraculously develops, we'll be through that era of indecision.

Another nice thing about the strips in this volume is a personal one. As a kid, I avidly collected the Holt, Rinehart and Winston paperbacks of Peanuts strips. They were a dollar each at a little shop called Bookhaven that used to be on Westwood Boulevard, about halfway between Wilshire and Santa Monica. It was a folksy little bookstore run by two older women and it looked like someone's living room. On all but the hottest days, they'd have a fire going in a fireplace, and their dog would be sound asleep next to it. Bookhaven dealt mainly in rentals of current best sellers — books too new to be obtainable at the public library — and my parents went there almost every Saturday to take something back and get something new to read. I'd usually go and if there was a new Peanuts paperback out, or a B.C. collection or anything of the sort, it would be purchased for me, and it would be read over and over and over. I can recall enjoying many of the strips in this new third volume of The Complete Peanuts while sitting in one of those easy chairs in Bookhaven, waiting for my folks to make their selections.

Also nice to see ol' Pig-Pen on the cover. Pig-Pen didn't appear often in the strip, even back then, and it seemed like Schulz would later forget about him for decades at a time. I always liked the character…though I must admit that as a youth, I guess I was laboring under a misperception. Around '68, Schulz introduced Franklin into the strip and the press noted that Peanuts was now integrated; that there was finally a black kid in the neighborhood. I recall reading that and realizing that when I was younger, I'd kind of vaguely assumed that Pig-Pen was a black kid. I'm not sure where I got that impression. Maybe it was the way Schulz drew his hair. Maybe he appeared somewhere in color and they put a lot of brown on him to represent mud. Non-Caucasians have endured some enormously clumsy representations of their skin colors in comic books and strips, including being colored the same as Caucasians, so you never know about some of them. Anyway, I had my great moment of racial awakening when I realized I was mistaken about Pig-Pen, and whenever I see one of those movies where in the last reel, it's revealed that someone has been "passing for white," I think of him. I believe there were one or two early Peanuts strips where I wasn't sure Pig-Pen wasn't a girl, too.

Is there anything I can quibble with about this book? Well, I still think the art direction is a little too much the style of the books' designer, Seth, as opposed to Charles M. Schulz, but I suppose that ship has sailed. Also, the promotion on the Fantagraphics website says that this edition is supposed to contain "an epilogue by series editor Gary Groth," but I can't find one in my copy. Still, the book's a must-have, so I'll just throw in an Amazon link and suggest you click on it.

And how much will it cost a resident of Los Angeles to drive to the new Zankou Chicken? Find out here.

My friends who live around the west side of Los Angeles will be thrilled to know that as of this morning, Zankou Chicken has opened their latest outlet. It's on Sepulveda, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, in an area that had no decent restaurants when I worked over there in the early eighties. Zankou serves exquisite rotisserie chicken which most diners slather with the garlicky Zankou sauce.

Right around the corner is a shopping center with a Koo Koo Roo Chicken…so in one block, you have my two favorite places in the world to devour poultry. I may just camp out on the block from now on.

This article over on Slate says that Jeff Foxworthy is the best-selling comedian of all time, at least in terms of selling record albums and CDs. A couple of folks have written to ask me if this is so.

Well, maybe. Foxworthy has sold a lot more records than you'd imagine. The problem is that no one can say for sure how many were sold by the only other real contender. Redd Foxx made and sold a ridiculous number of comedy albums, many of them for obscure companies whose sales were never charted via mainstream measures. In many cases, Mr. Foxx didn't know how many he sold. He did them either for flat fees or for dishonest companies that never paid him his royalties. Some of those records were revived, repackaged and reissued over and over with different jackets, especially after he became popular on Sanford and Son. There's no way to ever prove it but it wouldn't surprise me if all those Foxx "party records" collectively sold well over the fifteen million total that Slate reports for Foxworthy.

And actually, there's another contender, depending on your definition of a comedy record. Some of the albums by Ray Stevens would probably qualify. Some, obviously, would not. Still, if you counted singles and compilation albums, there have probably been fifteen million records sold that contained Stevens' recording of "The Streak"…and that's just one of many. The guy's been making records for 48 years and he still sells millions of his "comedy classics" videos.

I can't think of anyone else who might be near the 15 million mark…so I'll just mention that if you want to read an article I wrote about Redd Foxx, click here.

A hovering grey cloud of a deadline will probably keep me posting very much here the next few days but I wanted to link to two items, both of which I came across on Talking Points Memo, a fine political weblog maintained by Joshua Micah Marshall.

One is this item where he's quoting Andrew Sullivan and…oh, here. I'll save you all that mouse-clicking effort and quote it myself…

QUOTE FOR THE DAY I: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials." — President John F. Kennedy.

At the time, the speech was regarded as an attempt to refute anti-Catholic prejudice. Today, wouldn't the theocons regard it as an expression of anti-Catholic prejudice? Wouldn't Bill Frist see President Kennedy as an enemy of "people of faith"? Just asking.

Good point. Someplace — I wish I could find it — I once read a fine article by Kurt Vonnegut which said, of various religious-based political movements, something like, "They don't understand that in America, we allow different religions to co-exist not by denying their worth but by agreeing to set them aside in matters of public policy." I even find a certain amount of arrogance in the very term, "People of faith," because it presumes that people who are not of your faith — or even of the way you spin a political matter as an expression of your faith — are people of no faith at all. Anyway, on to the other item…

I feel like everyone who lives in the state of Pennsylvania owes the rest of the country an apology for making Rick Santorum a Senator. And don't write and tell me you didn't vote for him. You should have tried harder to keep this guy from getting into office. This is the man who compared consensual homosexual sex to someone having sex with a dog. This is the man who is taking outright bribes from Walmart to push legislation favorable to a company that already thinks it's above the law. This is the man who tried to gut medical malpractice awards even though his wife recently won a large one. His latest gambit is that he wants to block the U.S. Weather Service from making its weather data available for free on the Internet. This is the weather data that is paid for by our tax money. Santorum has introduced a bill — and apparently, a vague and sloppily worded one, at that — that would stop that because it cuts into the profits of private services like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel. Do I even have to explain what a rotten, unfair-to-us idea this is? Hope he got paid well for this one.

I'm going back to that assignment. I'll check in from time to time over the weekend.

Rogers Cadenhead is a clever writer. We've crossed paths a few times — I don't recall if I interviewed him or he interviewed me but it was one of those — so I was surprised to see him on Countdown With Keith Olbermann yesterday on MSNBC. (And by the way, that there's just about the best news-type show on TV these days, as far as I'm concerned.)

With a bit of foresight, Rogers managed to grab up the domain name, www.benedictXVI.com before some porn huckster or online casino could get to it. Very swift. And he doesn't intend to keep it; not unless they don't want it over at The Vatican. On his weblog, he explains what he intends to get out of this, and I'm cheering him on. I'm hoping they go for the World Peace but I'll settle to see him get the hat. Can't believe that some people apparently think he's doing something wrong here.

My spy at GSN says that the new (old) show going on in the late night black-and-white slot is another run of the old To Tell the Truth episodes hosted by Bud Collyer. Not a bad choice. And in case you haven't noticed, the GSN morning schedule now includes the 1990-1991 daytime version of To Tell the Truth, which was hosted by Gordon Elliott, Lynn Swann and then Alex Trebek. No matter who hosted, this one never caught on.

Given how much I've mentioned it on this weblog, I feel like Paramount Home Video owes me a commission on their new DVD of the 1959 movie of Li'l Abner. (Actually, I'm receiving a small one. You folks out there have ordered enough of 'em through the Amazon link on this site to pay for the copy I purchased.) I received mine today and it looks like a good (not great) transfer and of course, there are no extras. I'm guessing it'll be at least 2-3 years before they bring out a more expensive version with bonus features.

It would have been nice if they'd lassoed a couple of cast members for interviews, especially Peter Palmer, who was so perfect in the title role. I interviewed Mr. Palmer a few years ago for this article and this one, and recently a reporter in Tampa, Florida interviewed him for this article about what he's up to, these days. Not mentioned in that article for some reason is the fact that he's been working with a little theater group in his neck of the woods, directing (among other plays) a production of Li'l Abner last year. You will note that he's annoyed about the mislabelled DVD of the other Abner movie, which we told you all about here.

For those of you who buy the new Abner DVD, here are the answers to the questions you'll otherwise send me: Yes, that's Valerie Harper (of Rhoda) and Beth Howland (of Alice) among the chorus ladies. Yes, that's Donna Douglas (of The Beverly Hillbillies) with one line as a Dogpatch resident. Yes, that's Paul Frees doing the voiceover of the newsman. Yes, Leslie Parrish's singing voice was dubbed…by Imogene Lyn, whose voice you know from many Tex Avery cartoons. (See here for details.) Yes, it's true that Ms. Parrish married Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, then pretty much disappeared from Hollywood. Yes, that's Jerry Lewis in a brief cameo. No, that is not Jamie Farr playing Evil-Eye Fleagle. Yes, the movie is very similar to the Broadway show but with some songs cut or altered. No, although there have been rumors in the past that a Broadway revival was planned, one does not seem imminent.

The oddest plan I heard of to bring the show back to the Great White Way was a few years back. It was optioned by some group with which Tony Curtis was affiliated and as I understood it, the idea was that Mr. Curtis would serve as a producer and play several small non-singing roles in it. The late Elliott Caplin, who was Al Capp's brother and a manager of the property, told me about the deal. I asked him what he thought the odds were of it actually reaching New York. He said, "Oh, about one in a thousand." Then he paused and added, "If they get rid of Tony Curtis, maybe one in five hundred."

So don't hold your breath. Just enjoy the film version.