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.

Here's an article in The Los Angeles Times about who got what wrong last night.

Dennis Donohoe writes…

What really struck me was Kerry continually talking about his "plan" for everything. I think any rational person would wonder why he hasn't done anything in the last 20 years toward items in his plan and now he will. But then I'm a conservative (and not a reflexive Bush backer by any means). Did this strike you as overkill or just run-of-the-mill political speak?

It struck me as indicative of how little a person can say in 90-120 seconds. I can't imagine anyone having a worthwhile program for turning around the economy or fixing what's wrong in Iraq that could be summarized in under two minutes. Under that silly limitation of time, about all anyone could do was to announce that they have a solution, even if the restrictions don't allow them to discuss it in any depth.

That said, yeah, I was annoyed at that repetition. I think I even said during the Veep Debate how tired I was about hearing "John Kerry and I have a plan…" I didn't like Bush saying a lot of the same things over and over and over, either.

As I read over Kerry's record in the Senate, I don't find it as lacking as you seem to. I think "any rational person" would understand that there's a big difference between what you can accomplish as President of the United States and what you might have been able to do as Junior Senator from one state. A member of the Senate can only function on a few committees, and Kerry was confined to things like "affordable housing" and a lot of veterans' issues. A number of Kerry-Edwards "plans" are for things like the war in Iraq which have only recently become problems that needed fixing.

By the same token, one might ask why Bush is now talking about so many things he wants to do in the next four years that he could have done, in some cases with very little effort, in the last four years. How long would it have taken to tell a cabinet meeting, "Let's go ahead and let people buy prescription drugs from Canada"? I've always thought that all the excuses on that one were flat-out lies. You can buy wine from other countries, cheese from other countries, even fish from other countries and the health safeguards are deemed adequate. But if you need Celebrex in order to survive, you have to pay $360 for a hundred tablets in this country, instead of ordering from a Canadian retailer and paying $130 for the exact same medicine made in the exact same lab. There's no reason for this other than that Pfizer, which makes Celebrex and hundreds of other drugs, is the fourth-biggest donor to the Republican party.

I am not, as you may have noticed here, a huge fan of Mr. Kerry. For the umpteenth consecutive election, I find myself voting for someone primarily because he's the guy who can defeat the one I really don't want to see win. Worse, I don't even expect him to accomplish very much. If he wins, he'll probably spend a couple months fighting Republican challenges to the vote, then the G.O.P. leadership will convene and begin planning how to subvert every single thing he wants to accomplish and to launch investigations that could lead to impeachment. But even if Kerry has done nothing and can do nothing, I still think that's preferable to letting Bush do anything else. Too many Americans have already wound up in poverty in this country or dead in Iraq.

Here's a link to a better copy (a Quick Time file) of that brief speech I mentioned earlier by Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan.

A fact-check on the debate from the Washington Post. And here's one from The New York Times and another from the Associated Press.

Dick Cheney seems to have made factcheck.org the place to be. Flipping channels, all the pundits are citing them as an authoritative source of truth. I guess they figure no one can fault them for using that since Cheney sort of endorsed the site and Democrats have often used it to prove their points.

Did Charles Gibson really need a TelePrompter to do that closing?

Bush did better than he did in the first debate. Kerry missed a lot of good opportunities. I don't believe in saying one guy won or lost but my sense is that the polls for Kerry will be somewhat higher by the time these two men meet again.

Bad, evasive answer on the last question to Bush — the one that challenged him to name three mistakes he made. This is the one people are going to talk about.