F.C.C. Commissioner Michael Powell says, "I am outraged at what I saw during the halftime show of the Super Bowl. Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt. Our nation's children, parents and citizens deserve better."

I gather he's talking about the fleeting shot of one of Janet Jackson's breasts but he could have been talking about the endless procession of ads for pills that induce erections.

However, the chances of Michael Powell taking umbrage or action against a pharmaceutical company are about the same as the chances of me playing in next year's Super Bowl. And winning.

Here's Eric Alterman making the case that George W. Bush was AWOL from the National Guard.

I must admit that I am uneasy about this kind of thing. It kind of creeps me out that so much of presidential politics is about digging into a candidate's past and finding things to charge him with, long after the charge can be proven or disproven, and sometimes long after it should matter. On the the other hand, politics is a game and that's the way the game is played. I never thought "draft dodging" quite fit what Bill Clinton did to avoid military service but his opponents hammered away on that theme. It must be irresistible for Democratic leaders to now throw this "AWOL" business in the face of the same opponents, especially since they know we're going to see all sorts of things dredged up from their nominee's past.

It all raises the old question of whether it's ignoble to throw mud back at the person who's throwing mud at you. You'd like to think your candidate would be above that kind of thing. But then again, you'd also like to see your candidate win.

You know who Sid Couchey is? Not surprising. He was one of the anonymous artists who drew comics for Harvey like Richie Rich and Little Dot. He did thousands of pages of some of the most beloved funnybooks of all time and I don't think he ever got his name on any of them. You can hear an interview with him over at the NPR website on this page. Also note there are several other comic-related interviews there. And if you don't feel like listening to Sid, here's a newspaper article on the man. We love it when guys like that get a little recognition.

I didn't see Saturday Night Live last night but a friend who did and who lives in Los Angeles told me that for no visible reason, the last half-hour of the show didn't air and in its place was a half-hour "town meeting" with Joe Lieberman. This is the real Joe Lieberman, not Darrell Hammond in make-up, and a real town meeting, not a sketch. This struck me as so odd that I scanned the Internet and found this article. Here's an excerpt talking about Cassandra Lentchner, a lawyer who works for Lieberman…

In December, Lentchner found out that Al Sharpton would appear on Saturday Night Live. She dove into the federal equal-time rules and found that in states in which both candidates were on the ballot, Lieberman was entitled to exactly what Sharpton got — 28 minutes of free air time on certain NBC affiliates. She cut a deal for reruns of a Lieberman town meeting to air in media markets in California and Missouri.

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else online but that's bizarre…to just dump out of an episode of a network show (even a rerun) and run a half-hour of something like that in a major market like Los Angeles. My friend who saw it reported also that it was poorly shot and didn't make Lieberman look especially good, either.

This of course raises the question of why no other candidate has received the same "equal time." Perhaps some of them still will. Kerry, Clark, Edwards and Dean might feel it would do them more harm than good with public sentiment, but they might not. More to the point, Lyndon LaRouche is on the ballot in California and he always seems to love TV airtime, and it's not like Dennis Kucinich has much to lose. Gephardt and Braun have shut down their campaigns but they're still on the ballot and might be able to claim the airtime. It wouldn't surprise me, by the way, if Gephardt (out of the race) still got more votes in California than Lieberman (still in).

One might also wonder if this will make Saturday Night Live less inclined to let real politicians host the show during an election year. Maybe if it doesn't, that's not a bad thing. Based on the last time I saw the show, the town meeting with Lieberman might have been funnier than the real last half hour of SNL.

Brent Seguine suggests I emphasize that the Marx Brothers Collection I mentioned earlier (the DVD set of seven Marx movies) will not be out until May. It should not be confused with a currently available Marx Brothers Collection which offers five DVDs crammed full of public domain material. This one contains old TV pilots, trailers and oddments but no movies. Some of it is interesting…like the time Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person interview program visited Harpo. Some of the video quality is poor. So I'm not recommending it but if you're interested in it anyway, here's an Amazon link. Just don't confuse it with the one that will be out in May. Thanks, Brent.

I am not watching the Super Bowl. I have the Internet all to myself.

My apologies. I prepared a reminder the other day about this but I just plain forgot to post it. As you doubtlessly know, Fantagraphics Books will soon be issuing Volume 1 of The Complete Peanuts, a year-by-year reprinting of Mr. Schulz's classic newspaper strip. It will take many years and cost mucho money to get them all but I can't imagine it not being more than worth it. Many Peanuts strips have never been republished anywhere, especially from the first few years when Schulz was still doping out his characters and finding his style. We'll all get to watch that style mature and the characters develop, and that alone should be worth the price.

The reason I wish I'd posted this yesterday is that Fantagraphics was offering free shipping on the first book if you ordered (as I did) before February 1. But it's still a bargain. Order here. It ships in one month.

Since I set up a special e-mail address for folks to send Get Well messages to Julius Schwartz, I've been swamped. And a pretty impressive number of what I've received has not been about Get Rich schemes and genitalia enhancement. Most of the messages have been lovely expressions of good wishes for the man who was a founding father of fandom (say that fast five times) and one of the all-time great editors of comic books.

The address is schwartz@newsfromme.com and I'm announcing a deadline. Tuesday morning at 10 AM Pacific Time, I'm sending off everything I've received and shutting down the address. So send your message before then. And please, no attachments and no expectations of a reply.

One of the joys of the Internet is getting to read The New York Times every day not only for free but without leaving my chair. There are a lot of articles I think are myopic or pointlessly sensationalized, but less so than most papers. Their coverage of Wen Ho Lee was so embarrassingly wrong that they conducted an internal investigation and ran a partial apology. Their coverage of Whitewater was worse. It made one suspect that, trying to prove they were not the liberal-slanted newspaper so many make them out to be, they decided to stick it to a Democratic President. A rather staggering number of charges that were later proven bogus gained great credibility by being plastered across the first page of the Times, often above the fold.

Still, there are always a few articles in each issue that I find interesting. Today, I'd like to link to…

• A front page article that discusses, one year after the fact, Colin Powell's major report that there was absolutely no doubt Saddam Hussein was sitting there with Weapons of Mass Destruction by the truckload. So wha' happened?
• An article on lip-synching at live musical events and how it ticks some people off.
• Frank Rich on what's harming marriage in this country. It ain't gays, says Rich…and I think he's right.
• A report by top scientists that says that even if existing air pollution laws are enforced, they won't be enough to keep our atmosphere breatheable.

Some of you may not visit the Times site because it requires you to register. I do not think this leads to Spam. At least, I've never received an e-mail ad that appeared to come because I registered at a site like this. But if you're uneasy about leaving your address laying around the Internet, there's an easy solution: Get a separate e-mail address for that purpose. Go to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail or any of thousands of sites that will give you a free e-mail address and mailbox. Sign up for an address that you only use when you have to sign up for something. Very handy.

Apart from the fact that it mentions the silly issue of whether John Kerry has had cosmetic surgery, this column by David Brooks is pretty good.

Every year, the Museum of Television and Radio in Los Angeles has its annual William S. Paley Television Festival. These used to be wonderful: They'd salute great old shows and bring in everyone they could find who'd been a part of them for a big panel discussion. If you ever go to the Museum (and they have these tapes at the one in New York too, I understand) watch the videos of the seminars devoted to classic moments in television.

Alas, the festivals are no longer as wonderful. The last few years, they've had fewer events and they've increasingly been about current shows. I don't think it's posted anywhere on the 'net so here's this year's line-up of seminars…

• March 3 — Creating Characters with J.J. Abrams
• March 4 — Trading Spaces
• March 5 — An Evening With Angela Lansbury
• March 6 — Joan of Arcadia
• March 9 — The O.C.
• March 10 — An Evening With William Shatner
• March 11 — Arrested Development
• March 12 — A Salute to Sherwood Schwartz
• March 13 — The Wire
• March 15 — Smallville
• March 16 — Carnivale

And that's it. Some of the shows being saluted are fine shows and may in the future be viewed as important, classic television programming. But have they yet? Here's an excerpt from the museum's press release for a Paley Fest of a few years back…

The Paley Festival, named for William S. Paley, founder of both the Museum and CBS, offers the public an appreciation of the medium's commitment to quality. During these evenings, the audience views episodes or highlights of the featured work and has the opportunity to ask questions of the cast and creative teams or the individual involved in its production. Since the first festival in 1984, the Museum has honored more than 200 programs, including Cheers, Friends, Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners, Marty, M*A*S*H, Roots, Route 66, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, All in the Family, Will & Grace, Friends, The Untouchables, thirtysomething, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, South Park, The Untouchables, The West Wing and The X-Files, along with such personalities as Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Alfred Hitchcock, Sid Caesar, Cher, Jim Henson, Bob Hope, Jane Fonda, John Frankenheimer, Jack Lemmon, Mary Martin, Carl Reiner, Gene Roddenberry, Garry Shandling, Flip Wilson, Milton Berle, Barbara Walters, Jonathan Winters, and many more.

I suppose one could argue that Angela Lansbury and William Shatner are in the same class as the folks named above. The salute to Sherwood Schwartz will mainly be a salute to Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch. Sherwood is a nice man and I love hearing him tell stories about writing for Red Skelton and other such experiences…but the Museum didn't do a salute to Gilligan's Island twenty years ago when more of the cast was alive. What's changed? And have they really run out of shows more than a year or two old…i.e., old enough for there to actually be an overview? This is a very disappointing schedule.

First off, I just edited the previous post to remove the "f" word. I had a couple of complaints, one of which made a lot of sense to me. It's too long to post here but essentially, the guy said, "I encourage my kids to read your site because I like the way you express yourself. I don't want them to read sites which employ foul language and I don't like taking your site away from them because you curse once every four years. So either curse more often or not at all." I think it's wrong to pretend you can shield kids from such words and also wrong to make a big deal out of them. But I also think it's a parent's right to make that decision and the guy is right. I did kind of spring it as a surprise, so I took it out.

Secondly: My e-mail goes through a complex routing of various Internet Service Providers, some of which have been filtering to try and cut down on the percentage of messages that contain the "MyDoom" virus. At the same time, I deleted a few hundred infected messages on my end and I seem to have also nuked a few real ones in the process. So if I don't respond to an e-mail you sent recently, it may be because I didn't receive it. If it's important, please send it again. Thenk yew.

Political websites are currently erupting with the charge that John Kerry has had Botox injections in his face, especially his forehead. May I be among the first to ask, "Who cares?"

I've decided. I'm going to cast my presidential vote for whichever candidate runs on what they're actually going to do for the next four years, as opposed to trying to convince us that "there's something wrong" with the other guy. There actually may be something wrong with the other guy, at least in the sense that there's probably something wrong with anyone who wants to be President. But if Kerry's the nominee, I don't want to listen to months of hearing about his hair and his long face and how he almost looks French. Just as I don't want to hear that Bush's ability to scramble sentence structures proves that he's stupid. No, it doesn't prove that. Nor does it tell us a lot about a man that he was born into privilege or that he keeps marrying into it. To me, when they're bringing that kind of stuff up, it's because they don't have anything intellectually honest to say about the stuff that matters. (This also applies to trying to make the election about trivial issues like school uniforms, burning the American flag, steroid use by athletes and maybe even going to Mars. The space effort itself is not trivial but it is when it's not going to receive sufficient funding to actually do something.)

This personal crap is not new to politics. In the first presidential race I was old enough to follow, some were trying to make an issue of Kennedy's religion while others were telling us Nixon was too shifty-eyed to trust. Then Johnson was a wimp, whereas Goldwater was so pathological about Communism that he was going to get us into a nuclear war…and so on. It's a sad commentary on the American electorate that right this minute, there are strategists sitting around, trying to figure out how to market the notion that an opponent has serious psychological problems and/or that how he dresses, what he eats or other details of his life prove "he's not one of us." I don't think anyone who has ever gotten seriously near the presidency is "one of us." If you think they are, you're probably one of those people who thought John Wayne was a war hero, O.J. Simpson was a great role model, or that when Rock Hudson wasn't making movies, he was out banging hot chicks.