Who's responsible for the screw-up on intelligence relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction? Why, it's Secret Squirrel!

Matthew Wall lists times when America has gone to war based (perhaps) on faulty intelligence. I don't know that all his examples are what they appear to be…but I do think a large segment of the population never wants to admit it when it happens.

Paul Krugman notes that two years ago, the Bush administration projected the 2004 deficit would be $14 billion and now they're projecting $521 billion. Which probably means it'll be even higher than that.

Here, written by Timothy Noah, is a clever piece about the holiday we're celebrating today.

Yeah, I'm starting this up again. Ed Hannigan's name may not be familiar to you but if you read DC or Marvel comics for a few decades there, you saw some pretty snappy covers that were designed by him. He usually didn't do the finished art but he did a rough sketch. And there were times when they should have thrown out the finished cover and printed Ed's rough. It's not fully stocked yet but he has a website where you can see some of what he does and did.

In 1967, the musical Sherry! opened at the Alvin Theater in New York to withering reviews. The show limped along for 65 performances then closed and has not been seen since. Like many fabled flops, it prompted much Broadway talk: Was it as bad as they said? Could the source material have possibly yielded a great show? The source material was The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, one of the most successful non-musical plays ever. There were those who said that what Kaufman and Hart wrote was so perfectly self-contained that any alteration, even the addition of songs, could not help but diminish it. Others said that the play had a sound structure so songs could have enhanced it, had they been the right songs. It's not the kind of debate that could possibly have a right or wrong answer. Adding songs turned Pygmalion into My Fair Lady but there have also been plenty of great plays that were turned into rotten musicals. In any case, once Sherry had faded from memory and was unavailable for viewing, the debates about its merits died down.

They may start anew since Sherry! is about to have its first-ever cast recording…and what a cast it is! Nathan Lane, who was so wonderful playing Sheridan Whiteside in the recent Broadway revival of the play (available on DVD) again plays Sheridan Whiteside. Other roles are filled by Bernadette Peters, Carol Burnett, Tommy Tune, Tom Wopat, Phyllis Newman, Mike Myers and others equally talented. This of course is a studio recording, never performed on any stage, only in a recording studio. But if the songs of Sherry! have any merit at all, it ought to be evident with that crew.

Why is this show being recorded now? And with so many top stars? It probably has to do with the fact that the author of the book and lyrics for Sherry! was James Lipton. That's right: The same James Lipton who hosts Inside the Actors Studio and who gets burlesqued from time to time on Saturday Night Live. His newfound stardom seems to have gotten this project off the ground, and I believe most of the principles have been interviewed on his Bravo series. (Lipton also takes a role in the recording, that of the Doctor.) Anyway, I'm eager to hear it. If you are, you can advance order a copy of the CD from Amazon by clicking right about…here.

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.