From this morning's news reports…

Clark, the retired Army general, held a slight lead over Edwards in Oklahoma with all precincts reporting after Tuesday's vote. But the race was so close that no winner could be declared until the vote is certified by state elections board next week.

Hey, maybe the Supreme Court could step in again and declare Bush the winner.

There's a letter in the "Letters to the Editor" section of today's Washington Times from someone named Bill Stosine of Iowa City, Iowa. Here it is in its entirety:

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Powell says: "I am outraged at what I saw during the halftime show. … Our nation's children, parents and citizens deserve better."

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 Mr. Powell or anyone else in the Bush administration 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.

Mr. Powell wants communications conglomerates bigger and bigger and bigger — so CBS asking corporate brother MTV (they're both owned by giant media conglomerate Viacom) to produce the halftime show is what he gets.

Don't parts of this letter sound a little familiar?

Getting back to the matter of the F.C.C. investigating the Janet Jackson breast flash on the Super Bowl…

Some folks seem to be troubled that it takes weeks, sometimes months, to get the Bush administration to agree that an inquiry is warranted into a matter that involved security leaks, people being sent to die in a war founded on faulty intelligence, whether 9/11 was preventable, etc. But show a bare breast on TV and ten seconds later, a thorough investigation is underway. The comparison is stretching a bit to underscore how reticent the current administration to do anything that might point up its errors or shortcomings but the mindset is the same: We only want to do investigations which will help us politically. I suspect that's a lot more common in all corners of government than we like to admit.

The troubling thing to me about the Super Bowl investigation is this: What's to investigate? Either it was or wasn't planned. If it was (as seems likely), then a couple of MTV producers, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake made the decision to flash nipple and the F.C.C. is not going to prosecute them and may not even have the authority to do so. What the F.C.C. can do is stick it to CBS. The idea here is to see if they can find some way to argue that the network was culpable and to use that to pressure them in other ways. At the same time, it puts all companies that hold broadcast licenses on notice that they'd better not tick off the folks in power.

There are people out there who think television has gotten too raw and too sensationalized. And you know what? Those people cannot win. They can pressure the networks to tone it down for a little while and even dole out a few punishments…but the liberation of public language and standards only goes in one direction, which is to get looser. Trying to roll that back is like trying to stuff toothpaste back into the tube. Can't be done.

What F.C.C. Commissioner Powell may be able to do is remind networks that he can make things very unpleasant for them. That's what the "investigation" is all about. They're going to investigate ways to use this against CBS.

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.