The leadership of the Writers Guild has just agreed to a new 3-year contract with the AMPTP after months of working without a contract. A rough summary can be read in this press release.

I haven't seen all the terms but after years of reading WGA press releases that try to put a victorious spin on a mediocre deal, I think I'm seeing that again. Among other shortcomings, there's no improvement at all in DVD revenues and there seem to be rollbacks in a few areas.

Many of the terms seem to come right from the recent settlement that the Producers made with the Directors Guild. We have this thing in town called "pattern bargaining," which means that once one of the three above-the-line guilds has agreed to something, it becomes a line of demarcation for the others. If the directors accept a bad contract provision, it's difficult for the writers and actors to resist it…and I think a certain amount of that happened here. The DGA folded on DVD revenues so we had to, also. (The WGA leaders may also have figured that this is an area best left to the Screen Actors Guild, which claims to be quite militant about it. Actors have a much greater capacity to shut down production if they strike, so the feeling may be, "Let them fight for this.")

The deal won't be official until it is ratified by the membership. I'm guessing there will be a loud, angry movement within the Guild that will try to defeat it and send the negotiators back to the bargaining table to get more. I'm also guessing that this movement will not succeed.

I think it's kind of slimy that the Sinclair Broadcasting Group is ordering its stations to air an anti-Kerry documentary just before the election. And though I never like to judge something I haven't seen, it appears that the film in question is of dubious accuracy. Every time I hear something from those "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" and their allied organizations, my already-low appraisal of their credibility sinks lower. I think that, like certain talk radio hosts, they're just feeding bogus reasons to a segment of the population that's so desperate to hate the War Hero that they'll accept just about anything.

That said, I am also uncomfortable with the current efforts to pressure Sinclair's advertisers to withhold their dollars in ways that might then pressure Sinclair into changing its plans. I wish Sinclair would change its plans but I also do not like the idea of holding advertisers too responsible for the content of programming. They don't make the shows, they don't generally pre-screen the shows and they often buy ad time in bulk and don't even select the shows in which their commercials appear. I sure wouldn't like it if sponsors felt that since they're going to be blamed for what occurs on programs that air their ads, they have to get more involved in supervising scripts, casting, etc. The number one reason that TV execs play it safe or excise material that might offend someone from a show is that they're afraid the advertisers will flee…so I don't like the whole idea of encouraging them to flee, whether it's from this Kerry smear or that Reagans movie or anything.

In this case, heat is being applied to advertisers who have nothing to do with the attack on John Kerry. They're merely buying commercial time elsewhere on the station, presumably because they think it's good for their businesses…and most of them bought it before this whole matter came up. If I were the head of such a company, I'd answer the protests with a simple form letter that said, "We're only responsible for the content of our own commercials. We neither endorse nor condemn all that other stuff on the network that we have nothing to do with."

John Kerry said that we ought to reduce the terror threat so it's just a "nuisance." The Bush campaign is currently flogging the idea that the use of this word tells us something — I'm not clear on what — about Kerry and his wrong attitude towards terrorists. This strikes me, and probably even a lot of Bush voters, as a naked ploy to deliberately misinterpret what Kerry said.

I am honestly unsure if Bush's position is that we can win the war on terror…and if so, precisely what that means. I would like to think that we can win it to the extent that it becomes so rare that the word "war" no longer applies. Either that or we accept that forever and ever, there will always be the very real possibility of a chemical attack, a suicide bomber on a bus, another 9/11…or worse. There was a time when we didn't worry about such things and I would think that if and when that time comes again, it would not be improper to say we've won the "war." We could then say we'd reduced the terrorist threat to…well, if "nuisance" is the wrong word, let's find another one that denotes something that is a slight worry, the way it's a slight worry just to get on an airplane or just to drive on the freeway in bad weather.

I think the use of "nuisance" is just fine in that context…but if it isn't, so what? George W. Bush, of all people, should be tolerant of folks who use awkward phrasing.

Bush is the first person I can think of who has managed to convince a substantial part of America that he's not to blame for what comes out of his mouth. If Kerry uses the wrong word, people jump all over him. When Bush uses the wrong word, which is often, those same people say, "Oh, that's just the way he talks. You know what he really meant."

In the last debate, Bush made reference to "The Internets," plural. How fair would it be for the Kerry campaign to whip up an ad saying, "George Bush is so out of touch with the world today, he thinks there's more than one Internet"? Every time Bush opens his yap, he provides fodder for that kind of commercial. I'm not wild about a lot of the pro-Kerry ads but at least he hasn't resorted to that kind of gotcha.

The infamous Nixon tapes are being edited for public release. I don't think this bothers me but I'm not sure.

Garry Trudeau, its maker, is a guest on The Charlie Rose Show this evening. If it's already run in your area, you might check for a rerun tomorrow on your local PBS station.

All this week, Doonesbury is pointing its readers towards webpages on which prominent Conservatives endorse John Kerry. Today's link (to this article by John Eisenhower, son of Guess Who) created so much interest that it crashed the site of the Manchester Union Leader newspaper…though it seems to be accessible at the moment. Here's an article about the surge in their web traffic.

Just caught two episodes of Win Ben Stein's Money, a series that was done a few years ago for Comedy Central but which is now rerunning on Game Show Network. I forgot how much I enjoyed the show, especially the first three years when Jimmy Kimmel was the co-host. Mr. Stein was put on this planet to disprove the belief that Conservatives are never funny. His game show worked, in part because it was cleverly formulated and written but also because it was so real. Ben really liked the contestants but really wanted to beat them. Ben was really amused by about 80% of what Kimmel said and really mortified by the rest. The part about winning "Ben Stein's money" was a little fake inasmuch as it implied that he put up $5000 of his own money each day and kept whatever the contestants didn't get. (You had to read the fine print to understand that it didn't work quite like that.) But the show managed to be funny and a legitimate game show at the same time, and I can't think of many programs that have achieved both at the same time. It's back in reruns and I've taken a Season Pass on Ye Olde TiVo. You might want to give it a peek.

As you may have heard, The Lone Star Iconoclast, which is George Bush's "hometown newspaper" in Crawford, Texas has endorsed John Kerry. Here is a link to that endorsement…and here's a link to a follow-up article on the anger that the endorsement has generated. (Thanks to Al Feldstein, comic book legend and longtime editor of MAD Magazine, for calling this one to my attention.)

One of my favorite political bloggers, Kevin Drum, lists every known lie or distortion from the Bush-Kerry dust-up and scores them on falsity, importance, etc. Forget the scoring and just read down the columns.

When you think about it, it's like a really bad, contrived soap opera storyline twist: A guy who was so physically fit he could play Superman suffering an injury that left him almost paralyzed for life. If a writer came up with that, you'd say, "That kind of thing never happens in real life." But it happened to Christopher Reeve when he tried to jump a horse over a fence…and after it did, he looked more like a hero than he had when he was flying around in the blue tights. Even unable to move — when he presented at the Tony Awards, he couldn't even open the envelope — he just radiated courage and strength and a determination to fight his near-total disability.

I met him a grand total of Once, and that was before the accident. He struck me as very nice, very serious and somewhat deficient in the Sense of Humor Department. People were saying funny things and he laughed the kind of laugh you emit when others think something's funny, you don't know why, and you don't want to seem out of the loop. But like I said, he was nice…and gentle. Very gentle, very polite…and very handsome. Oh — and strong. He was 6'4" but it wasn't the absolute height that made him tall. It was how he moved. Easy to see why they cast him as Superman. Above and beyond the physical stuff, he had the necessary purity and purpose. I was never a fan of those movies. In fact, the only thing I really liked about them was just how perfect Christopher Reeve was for the role.

It was an odd caprice of fate that an actor who would have preferred doing classical texts made his fame and fortune in something based on a comic book. It was another strange turn of events that later put him in the wheelchair. And yet another bizarre, melodramatic plot point took him from us at a time when he was fighting for Stem Cell Research and it was an issue in a presidential election. (Kerry mentioned him in the debate Friday night.) It's really sad that he's gone; that we won't get the part of the story where he overcomes it all…because despite the hopelessness in his neurological state, I still believe it could have happened. A few years ago, he was on with Leno and they made some sort of deal: I think it was that Jay would buy Reeve's motorized wheelchair and put it in a museum, just as soon as Christopher could walk out onto the stage and give it to him. I know some folks from The Tonight Show read this site and I'd like to ask them to please dig out that clip and show it Monday night. The way Reeve promised that would someday happen was one of the most "real" examples of guts I've ever seen on television.

True, they're never going to be able to make that exchange. But that's not because he gave up.

Friday night, CNN asked folks to vote in their online poll as to who they believe won the contest and said they'd report the results later. They then proceeded to ignore those results and never report them because, as you can see, Kerry won by an incredible margin. Obviously, someone decided that it represented well-organized voting and probably some software-fiddling from folks who know how to vote multiple times and/or configure a "bot" (robot) to vote repeatedly. And that someone was probably right.

So what I want to ask is: When are we going to get rid of these stupid, easy-to-rig online polls? Okay, pro-Kerry folks managed to stuff this ballot box until it was obvious…but doesn't this kind of stuffing go on to some degree in any online poll that deals with any topic anyone cares about? If the people who ran Kerry up to 94% in this poll had stopped at 62%, CNN would have reported this poll as if it meant something. More to the point, aren't they well aware that most polls are "stuffed" this way by advocates of all sorts of views? Isn't what happened here that the phony poll came out a little too phony to report? The disclaimer on all votes reads…

This QuickVote is not scientific and reflects the opinions of only those Internet users who have chosen to participate. The results cannot be assumed to represent the opinions of Internet users in general, nor the public as a whole. The QuickVote sponsor is not responsible for content, functionality or the opinions expressed therein.

Okay, it doesn't represent the opinion of the public. It doesn't even represent the opinions of Internet users. What are we pretending this does represent? If the results of this one weren't worth reporting because they were obviously phony, why report the results of the ones that are only a bit less phony?

I know why they run these. They like the idea of drawing people, even vote-stuffers, to their site and tallying all those clicks. But a news organization (and almost all of them do this) shouldn't be presenting a poll that looks like news when they know it really isn't. They already have enough of that kind of reporting when they do the headlines.

Fred Kaplan reveals how an awful lot of the fictional movie, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, wasn't fictional.

I found this article via the website of my friend, radio master Paul Harris. If you don't live in or around St. Louis, you can't listen to him but you can at least check out his site.

Within days of the 9/11 attack, the Broadway community rallied and taped a TV commercial starring everyone who was then appearing in a show, urging people to come back to the theaters. It had Nathan Lane up front and everyone was singing, "New York, New York." At one point, one of the cable channels (Bravo or Trio) was running a little five-minute filler showing not only the final commercial but shots from the set-up and pre-record and planning. I had it on a videotape but it seems to be lost. Does anyone out there have a copy of it? I'll settle for an online video. Drop me a note if you do. Thanks.

I need to clear my head of political and logical thought before I go back to writing Groo today so…

I'm not surprised that polls say Kerry did well with "undecided" voters last night. I'm surprised there are any undecided voters but not that they would have preferred Kerry. Bush went a long way to reassuring his supporters that he is not that frantic, testy little man that he was in the first debate. (There was some of that but not so much that if you're already on his side, you couldn't ignore it.) But if you weren't already for Bush, who is a known quantity, I can't see that he gave you much reason to suddenly decide for him. I think Kerry is winning by seeming presidential and quite unlike the caricature that his opponents have been trying to pass off as The Real John Kerry. I can imagine a lot of Americans looking at the mess in Iraq, looking at the staggering deficit and all the Bush predictions of job growth that have not come to pass…and thinking, "Bush doesn't even think those things are problems. At least the other guy will try to fix things."

I loved Bill Maher's opening joke on Real Time last night…

The last question, a lady said "Name three mistakes you've made," and Bush said, "This debate, the last debate and the next debate."

(He and his staff came up with that less than a half-hour after the debate. This is a good example of what I was talking about when I said that talk shows can and should have more immediacy, and why Leno and Letterman are wrong to tape ahead on nights like this. Maher had a very good show, by the way. It reruns many times throughout the week.)

Bush has set himself up for the talking point, "He thinks he's infallible and won't even consider changing course when the evidence changes or his plans just plain don't work." He couldn't name one thing and could only allude to having hired some of the wrong people, which is another way of saying, "I trusted a few people and they made mistakes." I think the question was a bit unfair but the answer probably lost some folks who might like to vote Republican but don't think everything's gone as well as it should have.

Okay, back to work.

Turner Classic Movies doesn't run nearly enough classic movies to suit me but every month's schedule includes a few treasures. Obscure but wonderful footage can often be found on their Festival of Shorts, which hauls out rarely-seen short subjects. This month, they have a 1930 film called The Hard Guy starring Spencer Tracy in a talky melodrama and a 1935 Bob Hope short called The Old Grey Mayor. It's hokey stuff but Hope rises above his material and reminds us how good he could be when he wasn't reading off cue cards. You or your TiVo can catch these when they rerun at 5:30 AM (Eastern) tomorrow morning or again on October 28.