Lower ratings seem to agree with Larry King. Like most of his one-time fans, I've watched his interviews deteriorate over the last decade…watched him lob more softballs than all the ladies' baseball teams combined. For a long time, he seemed to think that it was less important for his guests to address important issues than for them to enjoy being on Larry King Live and want to come back. Maybe the guests did but audiences haven't been flocking back to him. But lately, he seems to be trying harder. Maybe it's better preparation by his staff. Maybe it's that he hasn't been divorced lately. Whatever it is, he seems to be trying harder.

The bad side of that is more shows about the Laci Peterson case, the Michael Jackson case, etc., and more bogus authorities. When Jermaine Jackson complained about the media giving air time to people who falsely claim to know his family, he probably had Larry in mind. I really wish King (and others on the cable news channels) would raise the standard of what constitutes an expert, an intimate friend or a spokesperson. Larry King Live keeps featuring these "panels" of six people, only one of whom has anything of substance to say.

But one thing Larry has to offer is a long friendship with most of his celebrity guests. He's lately out of his element on newsy topics but pretty good with show biz veterans…and he is kind of a legend. Saturday, CNN is rerunning a special show that ran on the 19th to celebrate Larry's 70th birthday. It started out as an hour with Regis Philbin but about five minutes in, Regis announces that the rest of the hour is actually a surprise birthday party for Larry. Dr. Phil takes over the host chair while Larry moves over to be guest on his own show, claiming to be utterly surprised. I suspect he was not, but you can judge for yourself if you catch it on Saturday. Most of the hour is a cavalcade of stars showing up live, via remote or pre-tape, to wish King a happy seventieth. The list includes Mike Wallace, Jay Leno, Nancy Reagan, George and Barbara Bush, Wayne Newton, Liza Minnelli, Dick Cheney, Tony Bennett, Sharon Stone, Madonna, Ross Perot, Bill Maher, Cher, Don Rickles, Jimmy Carter, and on and on. Weirdest of all is a live remote to Jerry Lewis in some hospital somewhere with an oxygen line taped into his nose. It's the oddest moment in a very odd hour.

As this article in The New York Times notes, the Disney organization is struggling to make Mickey Mouse as popular as…well, as popular as Mickey Mouse oughta be. There are a couple of obvious reasons why he isn't, one being that his best work is being hidden. The Disney Channel and Toon Disney rarely feature the classic Mickey cartoons, and the home video releases have been more slanted to the collector market. The comic strips are gone and the comic books are sparse in their availability and tend to treat Donald and Scrooge as the superstars. Yes, Mickey presides over Disneyland and Disney World and is well-represented therein…but only because he has the job. He's increasingly becoming like one of those faux celebrities who is famous only for being famous. You wake up one morning and folks are insisting on his greatness but you never get to see it; ergo, you never fully accept it. So how is a kid to fall in love with The Mouse? And when Mickey's classic adventures are accessible, do they not seem a bit grounded in an earlier, unfamiliar era?

Those are good questions and the solution obviously has to do with generating great new Mickey adventures in several venues. But this brings us to a major stumbling block that inevitably diminishes every great character that is controlled by a corporation: Too Many Bosses. If you were to roam through the Disney organization, you'd find hundreds, maybe thousands of folks who have some sort of "executive" position and what they think is a clear take on what to do with Mickey. They're not all wrong but they're not all right in the same way. Which creates massive gridlock and unhappy compromises since they won't concede to having no say in Disney's signature asset. Not long ago at another big corporation which shall remain nameless (it was Time-Warner), I had a meeting with a mid-level exec who at that moment had nothing to do with Bugs Bunny…and boy, was she pissed. The lady had every intention of rising up in the Time-Warner hierarchy to better jobs with bigger salaries, and that meant she had to get some control over The Wabbit and his immediate cohorts. It was demeaning that she was excluded from Bugs projects, just as I gather it's demeaning in a non-entertainment company situation if you don't get to eat in the Executive Dining Room or tinkle in the Executive Washroom. Don't think that kind of thing doesn't happen in any corporate situation, and Disney is no exception.

Ideally, what Disney needs to do is to find one cartoonist or one small group and appoint them to be Mickey Dictators. Give them the power to define Mickey anew and to say no to anything that involves Mickey the way Walt once could…and did. But no one high up in Disney is about to exclude themselves from such decisions. This has always been true but it's truer now than ever. Once upon a time, people who went to work for a company like that envisioned long careers, staying there forever, if possible. The business has changed. Now, the mindset is that everyone's a temp, and you want to get as much as you can for as long as it lasts. That means rising up quickly in the company and not caring a lot about the long-term health of its properties, which leads to something as symbolic as Mickey Mouse being caught in umpteen tugs-of-war. Every office, every division wants a piece of Mickey, which means that key decisions are made, if they're made at all, by committee. With a committee, it may go in as a Mouse or a Duck or a Wabbit, but when it comes out, it's always The Camel. One of the main things that made Walt Disney as successful as he was was that he didn't have to fight anyone to prove he was in charge. And of course, he expected to be with the company for the rest of his life.

Here's a brief news story on the lawsuit 'twixt Todd and Twist. Nothing you don't already know, but it does indicate that some pressure is growing for the Supreme Court to get involved.

And now, it seems Harvey Fierstein will not be playing Mrs. Claus in the Macy's parade. Here are the details.

Here's an article by Eric J. Greenberg on the impact of Jews in comic books, with special focus on Joe Kubert. The piece has a few errors in it (Captain Marvel was created by C.C. Beck and Bill Parker, not Beck and Otto Binder; Bob Kane's real name was Bob Kahn), but it's otherwise pretty good.

There's lots of good stuff to read over at Jim Hill Media, like this profile of Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, this piece about Mickey Mouse's relationship with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and this rundown of musicals that Disney may or may not bring to Broadway. Alas, they no longer have columns by my pal Jim Korkis, but he's been replaced by another expert on animation history, Jackson "Pop Culture" King. Here's King's latest. Good stuff.

Here's a tip that will make some animation buff very happy…and don't thank me. Leonard Maltin just told me about it. Disney Home Video has been releasing a series called "Walt Disney Treasures," which feature rare Disney films and cartoons on DVD. These are the ones that come packed in those little tin boxes, and they are starting to go out of print. As they do, they begin selling on eBay for…well, for a lot more than Carl Gottlieb's pants. If you missed them, you missed some terrific, must-have video gems. Obtaining the first seven now could run you $350 and up.

There is, however, an alternative. Disney has put together a slipcased set of the first seven called "The Walt Disney Treasure Chest." You don't get the tin boxes but you do get the first seven DVDs in a cardboard sleeve for $124.99. What's the catch? Just this: You have to belong to Costco. This set seems to have been produced only for them as a Christmas item. It may not be available anywhere else and it may not be available once Costco finishes selling whatever quantity they've purchased. It should be in the Costco stores any day now if it isn't already there, or you can pay postage and get one from the Costco website (Do a search for "Disney Treasure"). If you aren't a member, you can either pay 5% extra or join Costco, which costs $45.

By the way: Costco is also selling that new Pioneer DVD-TiVo I mentioned recently for $779.99. If you've been thinking of getting one, that's a pretty good price. I'm still quite happy with mine.

Guess who's playing Mrs. Santa Claus in the Macy's parade on Thursday! If you're registered to read articles at the New York Times website, you can read this article by the future Mrs. Claus and some comments on what it all means.

Carl Gottlieb is a writer, producer, director and actor with a list of credits to die from. I just called and left a message on his voice mail informing him that someone on eBay is selling his pants!

Here we find William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg discussing the Republicans' new TV commercial that suggests the Democrats are against fighting terrorists. The discussion makes a good point that Bush's policy of shooting first and looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction later is getting tougher to defend.

The other day on Crossfire, Paul Begala challenged Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri on this ad. He quoted the line that says "Some are now attacking the President for attacking the terrorists," then asked Bond twice to name someone who's actually doing that. No names were forthcoming.

Maybe there should be a TV show during elections called "Defend Your Commercial." In it, the producer or candidate would come on and their commercials would be shown. They would be asked to substantiate each claim, and there would be a jury of statisticians to fact-check whatever they said. At the end of the show, a panel would vote on the truthfulness of the ad and would itemize the assertions they felt were false or misleading. The show would also fact-check the commercials of those who refused to come on and defend them. I wonder if a network could refuse to air any spot that declined to submit to this process.

Richard Cohen has some pretty strong words for the Bush administration and what they got us into with Iraq. I wish I could link to one of Cohen's columns from the lead-up to the war because it sure seems he's changed his tune.

As I mentioned, I'm probably not going to tune in to the infomercial formerly known as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. But I might to see the announced return of some of their older balloons, including one (four? three?) of the Marx Brothers. And I did enjoy browsing around a website the Macy's folks set up to give out info and some of the history on their annual Turkey Day ritual. Actually, one of these days, I'd like to go to N.Y. and see the parade in person. It marches down Broadway past the windows of several companies I do work for, and at least one of them will usually open the office on Thanksgiving for the employees who want to come in and watch the festivities below and sometimes above. One year, a friend of mine called me from his desk to say, "I took a secretary into my office, closed the door and we started making out…until we saw a sixty-foot Bullwinkle peeking in on us. That kind of killed the mood." I imagine it would.

I doubt there's anyone anywhere who thinks that Newsmax is a legitimate news source. It's not that they're a rabidly right-wing website and news service but that they're rather fiercely committed to printing whatever will get right-wingers fired up enough to send money. For a long time, they were flogging the idea that it was an absolute certainty that Hillary Clinton has a firm plan to run for president in 2004 and were soliciting donations to stop her. Lately, they've been edging towards the idea that she now realizes she's so unpopular that she can't win. So if she doesn't run, that will be the reason. (Uh, it couldn't be that she never planned to run?)

Anyway, they recently posted this "news" story that flows from an interview on Larry King Live the other night…

For all the coverage generated by the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination this past weekend, the media managed to miss the only genuine news to emerge from the commemoration. Nellie Connally, wife of former Texas Gov. John Connally and the only person still alive who rode in the presidential death limousine, publicly disputed for the first time the Warren Commission's "magic bullet" theory, a scenario absolutely essential to its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy's lone assassin.

They're wrong about this being the first time she's said this. She's said it hundreds of times. The Newsmax piece says it's the first time she said it publicly but also quotes her as saying she said it to the Warren Commission. Her statements there and elsewhere are quoted in around 95% of all the books that seek to refute the official findings, and that's a lot of books. Here's a link to the text of a 1998 interview in Texas Monthly where she not only says it but says that she's never wavered from her view. I think she's incorrect about the second shot but it certainly is not news that she believes that.

It is also kinda dishonest for them to pull that one item out of the interview (here's the whole transcript) and not cite that she also said that she was positive there were exactly three shots and that all three came from behind. Of the thousands of conspiracy theories that have been tossed out since 11/22/63, I'm not sure there are any that believe there were three from behind, that the second hit Connally and that the third hit Kennedy only. That description does not match the physical evidence. In any case, Nellie Connally may firmly believe the "single bullet theory" isn't right but she also firmly believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. She's wrong about some part of it, and Newsmax is wrong to quote only the part that supports their agenda. They do a lot of this.

One of my earliest heroes was the world's greatest ventriloquist, Paul Winchell. If Paul was on TV with his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, I was in front of the TV. Always. I read and re-read his autobiography, which was also a kind of "how-to" book on his craft, and practiced many hours with my toy Jerry Mahoney. I loved my little Jerry and kept it long after most of my other toys of that era had gone into the dumpster or off to Goodwill. About seven years ago, the water heater in my basement burst and the only thing destroyed was my old Jerry Mahoney doll. I cried a bit, then ran to the computer, logged onto a new thing called eBay and won my first auction: $300 for a new old Jerry Mahoney doll. I have since purchased exact, working replicas of Jerry and Knuck, which sit around my house and do a great job of scaring my maid every single time she walks into the room.

Shortly before the water heater incident, I'd written this column about Paul and the current "best ventriloquist" I've seen, a talented gent named Ronn Lucas. I'll have to write another, better one since that column doesn't begin to do justice to Paul. In the meantime, you can find out a lot about him at his website. They're still erecting the new version but there's already some good biographical information posted there.

Here's an Interview with Don Novello…writer and performer for Saturday Night Live, creator of Father Guido Sarducci and "Lazlo Toth, American," and candidate for Governor of California. Don't thank me for noticing it. Thank Kevin Walsh.