This checklist by the Knight-Ridder news agency lists 178 campaign promises made four years ago by George W. Bush. Despite his party's control of Congress for most of that period, they estimate he has kept 46% of these promises. By contrast, Bill Clinton — though saddled with an opposition Congress — achieved about 66% of his campaign pledges. Obviously, these cannot be exact comparisons since some goals are harder to realize than others and since 9/11 did alter a lot of priorities in Washington. Still, I was surprised at how many of Bush's own proposals never made it through the House and Senate.

Frank Rich discusses the fuss over Kerry mentioning that Dick Cheney's daughter is a Lesbian…and Rich somehow manages to tie it in to the current embarrassments being visited upon Bill O'Reilly.

ABC has dropped their option to air the Miss America contest, dealing a severe blow to the pageant's pocketbook and prestige. Barring some major renovation that brings in Johnny Carson to host and has the contestants compete nude, I can't imagine any of the other networks picking up this brontosaurus. The pageant operators will probably put together a syndication arrangement whereby companies that participate in Miss America promotions sponsor the event, and that could allow the hoary institution to continue for quite some time without going topless.

Still, I think it says something nice about our national sensibility that the public has rejected this silly event with its shallow values and blatant commercialization. True, the Tony Awards get low ratings but they have a prestige that the beauty contest lacks. Does any little girl these days dream of growing up to be Miss America? A few boys, maybe…but no girls.

Here's a QuickTime excerpt from Monday's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in which Mr. Stewart summarizes his view of what occurred the previous Friday on Crossfire.

Lately, fewer of my e-mail correspondents are interested in selling me drugs and more want to loan me money. Here's an e-mail that just now arrived, somehow making it past my intricate series of Spam filters…

Here is Buford Craft. I write to you because we are accepting your mortgage application. Our office confirms you can get a $220.000 loán for a $252.00 per month payment. Approval process will take 1 minute, so please fill out the form on our website.

Now, there is zero chance I will ever order drugs from a stranger on the Internet. I don't really need any drugs but if and when I do, I'll get them from a slightly more reputable source…say, buying them from that guy who came up to me the other night in a parking lot and asked if I wanted to score some "dynamite crack."

And I don't need to borrow any money, thank you, but if and when I ever do, it won't be over the Internet…and it especially won't be from someone who calls himself "Buford Craft." Where, I wondered, did the presumably-overseas person who composed this message pick up that name? I mean, the guy was clever enough to insert an accented letter "a" into the word "loan" so no Spam filter would flag it. Couldn't he figure out that Buford Craft was not a name that would suggest a stable, reliable business associate? I wouldn't buy live bait from someone named Buford Craft.

So I googled Buford Craft…and don't waste your time. All you'll find is that someone by that name was a pallbearer at a funeral in 1970, and the obit is posted on the web. I'm guessing the loan shark just scours the Internet at random for proper names and plugs them into these inviting e-mails. Perhaps an automated bot does it, the same way it scans for domain names and e-mail addresses.

But the nice part is that whoever transmitted this e-mail wasted his time — and not just because almost none of us will fall for this racket. Most of these things, I'm told, are sent out by people and programmers who work on commission. If they somehow manage to snag a sucker and deliver them into the main scammers' clutches, the e-mailer (Buford, in this case) gets a fee or a cut. Just to see what would happen, I clicked on the link that was included to take me to the website where I was to fill out the form…and got a dead end. No website there. They probably either fled or were closed down. You can't trust anyone these days.

Today on the news, I saw George W. Bush saying over and over that he will never allow a new military draft. I usually think Bush believes what he says even when I think he's dead wrong. In this case, he didn't convince me he wasn't thinking, in the back of his mind, "If and when we need more soldiers, we'll find some way to draft them without calling it a 'draft.'"

Actually, I would have believed him if he'd said, "No one running for president can swear to you that a draft will never be necessary because no one can anticipate what battles America may have to fight." I think that would have been an honest statement. I also would have believed Bush if he'd come out with some explanation of how, apart from a draft, this country can increase the size of its army. The most likely answer, however, is something Bush probably wouldn't want to say because it's what Conservatives always accuse Liberals of doing: Throwing money at a problem.

I don't think it would be a bad idea to make military service more financially attractive. We say we love our soldiers but we don't seem to pay them very well. Earlier this year, I wrote this post all about this.

I also heard Bush say that Kerry will say anything to be elected. This was just before he said, "If you vote for me, I'll buy you a pony."

As you may have heard, there was a sudden change in the London company of The Producers, which is about to open. Richard Dreyfuss was going make his musical comedy debut in the lead role of Max Bialystock. Just the other day, citing medical problems, Dreyfuss pulled out and he's been replaced, only days before opening, by Nathan Lane…who at least knows the part. So a show that's about a show where the leading man is injured at the last minute and replaced has just replaced its leading man at the last minute because he's injured.

A lot of people immediately began presuming that the medical problems are a cover story; that something more serious prompted the switch. This article in a British newspaper says that Dreyfuss was just not ready.

So now the speculation can shift over to wondering how much it cost to get his replacement. I'm guessing that after twelve weeks at Drury Lane, they'll be replacing the "Drury" part of the signs with "Nathan."

My wrist is improving. Thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions about what to do about it. (Most of you suggested a trackball and I may — you'll excuse the expression — give one a whirl.)

People keep forwarding me links to articles about the bulge on the back of George W. Bush during the debates…and so far, I haven't seen one with any hard info; just so-called "experts" saying things that are mostly inconclusive. Unless someone comes forth with an intercepted audio recording of Karl Rove dictating talking points during one of the discussions, I'm inclined to think it will remain an Urban Legend.

People also keep forwarding polls to me. Can we just agree that Bush and Kerry are neck and neck and that if you shop around, you can find polls that have either ahead in the national popular vote or in certain key swing states for electoral supremacy? You can also find plenty of reasons to not believe the polls that don't have your guy ahead. This election has more unknown quantities in the voting patterns than any we've ever had in this country, and I suspect the pollsters will begin narrowing the spread as we near Election Day. Not that they cheat but the supreme humiliation for a public opinion survey group is to solidly predict for Candidate A when Candidate B wins, and it's not unprecedented for a pollster to make a last-minute "too close to call" prediction just to cover his derriere. Regardless, I don't sense that even the polls that have someone substantially ahead are all that confident of their findings.

Here's a link to an article out of the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau that's headlined, "Post-war planning non-existent." Pretty damning stuff.

On a comic book message board, someone recently posted a message saying that someone else had told him that a certain then-beginning comic artist had ghosted Jack Kirby's last few stories for Marvel in 1969-1970. Several of you have written to me and asked, in essence, "This is nonsense, right?" Right. Utter nonsense.

Okay, that's it for tonight. Back to nursing the wrist and meeting the deadline.

A Disney stockholders suit against Michael Eisner is coming to trial. Here's an article about it.

The most interesting item to me is where it says, "[Michael Ovitz] charged the company as much as $125 a person for food served at executive meetings at his house, an amount later reduced to $15 as he neared the end of his tenure." What did he serve that cost $125 a plate, what did he serve that was $15, what did people say who'd eaten there under both budgets…and what do you want to bet that most of us would have preferred the cheaper meal?

Posting may be kind of light here the next few days. I have an important deadline and a bad wrist. After years of ache-free computering, I finally developed a pain in my Carpals (or thereabout) from moving the mouse around. Rest, warm compresses and an Ace wrist band have lessened the hurt…but I've fallen behind on things that need to be done, plus I'm working at about half-speed. So while I'll still be putting stuff up here, it'll mostly be links and they may be fewer and farther-between than usual.

Do not delete me from your bookmarks. I'll be myself again before the week is out.

The Tampa Tribune is a right-wing newspaper that, with one exception, has endorsed every Republican presidential nominee since Eisenhower. The one exception was Barry Goldwater and that year, they decided both candidates were unacceptable and endorsed no one. This year, they've come to the same decision.

I just changed the link to the Ron Suskind article in the previous posting. Same article, different link, no New York Times subscription necessary. In fact, here's the link again.

Ron Suskind discusses the faith and management style of George W. Bush. Not a flattering portrait.

A few more thoughts on the Jon Stewart evisceration of Crossfire…

I've been watching that show — sometimes steadily, sometimes not — since the days when it was Michael Kinsley on the left and Pat Buchanan on the right. (Not exactly a balanced match-up since Kinsley was only a bit left of center and Buchanan was so far right, he was off the charts.) It's always been a frustrating bit of Theater since no pundit with a brain in his or her head is so relentlessly partisan as to always be able to defend the left or the right, as the case may be. Lately, there have often been times when I didn't believe that one or more of the show's hosts actually held the view he was advocating; that he just had to say it because that's what the format requires. Robert Novak will write a newspaper column about how Bush is in trouble, then go on Crossfire and denounce anyone stupid enough to believe Bush is in trouble.

So to the extent that some of that is Mr. Stewart's point, I agree with all that. I believe that the news media does routinely fail to give us content over Mud Wrestling, that interviewers do not demand straight (or straight enough) answers from public figures, that reporters are way too willing to broadcast — and sometimes even repeat "spin," as opposed to cutting through the Party Line for us. I believe all that.

I'm just not sure the guy picked the right target. He should have said that to Wolf Blitzer. Or Ted Koppel. Or Brokaw or Rather or Jennings or Brian Williams or the folks who put those men on the air.

He accused Crossfire of "partisan hackery" and was miffed that anyone would suggest that his show, being on Comedy Central and all, should be held to any sort of news standard. Fine, but Crossfire is a show that has rarely pretended to be about anything other than spin. Just because it's on CNN doesn't make it a hard-hitting news show. My God, the centerpiece of CNN's prime-time line-up is Larry King, who can't get off the Laci Peterson case and who hasn't posed a tough question since he asked Sinatra about his fight with Dino. When Tucker Carlson was berating Stewart for not challenging his guests, Stewart should have said, "Do you have basic cable, Tucker? Have you even watched what gets passed off as news on this network?"

More often than not, the guests they bring on Crossfire are party leaders whose job description just about requires that they never admit their side is wrong or that the opposition has any valid point. And accusing Paul Begala, James Carville, Tucker Carlson and Bob Novak — the last of whom Stewart routinely refers to as a "Douchebag of Liberty" — of partisan hackery is like that lame joke Kerry had about Tony Soprano. Those men are unabashed partisan hacks, and one should no more look to them for anything more than one should expect the show following Crank Yankers to ask incisive political questions.

The success of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is just embarrassing the hell out of a lot of the news media…or it would if newsmen were more capable of being embarrassed. The surveys that suggest a substantial number of Americans get their news from The Daily Show or Leno or Letterman are not so much a compliment of those programs as they are indictments of the ones that are supposed to be filling that need. This has put Stewart in the amazing position of being able to criticize the media while assuming no responsibility for showing them how it should be done. I would hate to think that people will believe the problem lies with shows like Crossfire. Very few people watch Crossfire and almost none of us expect it to be anything more than it is. Isn't there some sort of old saying about how if you aim for a small target, you can easily miss the big ones?

What's wrong with George W. Bush?

This is not a political post, so my few friends who are uncomfy with my views on this election can read it. Maybe one of them can even tell me what might be wrong with their boy and the way he talks. I keep seeing clips of him addressing audiences a few years ago and he didn't have the awkward pauses in his speech. He didn't start sentences and then, halfway through, look like he wanted to stop and ask for directions. He didn't have all those odd facial expressions, including the recent one where the left corner of his mouth seems to always do the exact opposite of the rest of his face. You cannot look at old footage of the man and not wonder wha' happened?

Presidents do undergo physical changes while in office. Their extreme features and gestures all seem to become exaggerated and by the time they leave the White House, they all look like the Drew Friedman caricature and sound like Dana Carvey's dubbing them. They also seem to age three years for every one they actually served…then once they're out of office, they get about half those years back. Did you ever see photos of Lyndon Johnson in '64, '68 and '70? They look like pictures of a man, his grandfather and his father…in that order.

Is that all that's happened to Bush? That the stress of the job is scrambling his speech patterns?

Around the Internet, even pro-Bush sites are starting to hesitantly float irresponsibly reckless theories about strokes or various medical conditions or even drug use. Before Election Day, some sort of baseless, long distance diagnosis may make it into the mainstream press for a brief, unfortunate controversy.

Like I said, this is not a political post. If you think Bush has the right answers on Iraq and the economy, you're not going to switch your vote even if it turns out he's a robot and in dire need of Rustoleum. But something has impacted his oratorical skills and it may even explain why he didn't do better in the debates than he did. It would be nice to know what it is.