Andrew Sullivan is an openly gay conservative pundit who I find to be spectacularly off-target on most topics unrelated to being an openly gay conservative. But he does know that beat and here, in perhaps the most influential conservative forum in this country, he makes a strong case that conservatives are on the wrong side of the issue of gay marriage.

Here's an interesting glitch in online banking that happened to me and that might happen to you. I use Microsoft Money, which downloads the details of my checking account and credit cards. On the first Monday of each month, my bank charges me a $12.00 service charge for my checking account and then because my balance is over their minimum, they immediately reverse it. So each month, I download from them a transaction that says, "Monthly service fee, $12.00" and then one that says, "Monthly service fee reversal, $12.00." Or at least, I did.

In June, I purchased something off eBay for $12.00 and sent a check to the seller, whom we shall call Myron. As it turns out, that check was dated the first Monday of that month. For some reason, Microsoft Money merged that transaction with that month's monthly service fee. It saw two $12.00 debits the same day and treated them as one.

Ever since then, it's been treating each monthly service fee as if it's a debit to Myron. Each month, I download "Payment to Myron, $12.00" followed immediately by "Monthly service fee reversal, $12.00." Since the balance is correct, I didn't catch it until this week. Suddenly, I noticed that this Myron guy, from whom I bought one silly item in June, had been charging my checking account $12.00 every month since then! I dug up his phone number and called him to accuse him of thievery or worse. I got his voice mail and decided not to leave a message…which was fortunate because a few minutes later, I resorted Microsoft Money to isolate just my $12.00 transactions and that's when I realized my Monthly Service Fees were missing for the same dates as the charges to Myron. After (literally) forty minutes on the phone to the bank, we figured out it wasn't Myron and it wasn't even them. It was Microsoft Money…or maybe it was me not checking its math closely enough.

Anyway, I almost accused an innocent eBay vendor, and there's a lesson to be learned here. Never attribute to larceny that which can be explained by computer error. Or something.

Several articles today (like this one) are discussing the propriety of Jay Leno introducing Arnold Schwarzenegger at his victory party and otherwise boosting the man's candidacy. For what it's worth, I don't think Jay has gone easy on Arnold in the monologues but he has certainly left himself wide open to the charge. I think Leno's wrong if he thinks that he can avoid being considered a supporter of a candidate in such a situation just by not making a formal endorsement and by saying, "He's a friend."

Here's a piece about the recent Friars Roast of Tom and Dick Smothers. [WARNING: Contains Jack Carter jokes. Approach with caution.]

My pal Paul Harris does a fine talk radio/interview show Monday through Friday on station KTRS, which is 550 on your dial if you're in or around St. Louis. You can find online audio excerpts of his best celebrity interviews at this site, along with his weblog and lots of other fun stuff. Not long ago, I chatted with him about my book on MAD Magazine, Mad Art, and he's replaying that conversation on Monday as he takes a rare day off. (My segment is scheduled to air at 12:35 PM Central Time, but I think you can also find it on Paul's site and listen to it any time you want.)

Also, on the Thursday edition of All Things Considered on N.P.R., another pal is interviewed. Joe Bevilacqua is a radio producer and performer who studied with the late, great Daws Butler and has recently co-edited this book of sketches that Daws wrote for his legendary voice acting classes. Some time during the All Things Considered hour, there'll be eight minutes with Joe discussing Daws and the book.

Which brings us to the question of how you're going to listen to these shows. Lately, I've been playing around with and generally enjoying Replay Radio, which is a piece of computer software that functions like TiVo for the recording of Internet radio feeds. If you have a good, swift 'net connection, you can set Replay Radio to record any channel that you can access at the time you want it to record. It will make an MP3 or WAV file or even burn the recording right to a CD if you like. A list of shows is built into it, as is a list of Internet addresses for channels, but you can set it for any radio station for which you can find a web address. A demo version of the software can be downloaded from their site. It will only record five minute hunks but it'll give you the idea and let you see if it's compatible with your system. Once you register, which costs thirty bucks, you can record broadcasts and webcasts of up to four hours. There's also an add-on piece of software that will you let you listen to these recordings easily on a Pocket PC. So far, it's working fine for me.

An unannounced walk-on at the end of Mr. Leno's monologue tonight on The Tonight Show. Maybe Jimmy Kimmel can get Gray Davis.

By coincidence, my friend Nat Gertler was at the same performance last night of The Producers. His reaction is over here on his weblog. While you're there, browse around the entire 'blog because Nat's a bright guy and a good writer.

One way in which the recall seems to have been good for George W. Bush is that it distracted attention from David Kay's report on the hunt for those elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. For months now, one of my conservative friends has been e-mailing me that when that report was in, it would prove that Saddam had weapons and was about to use them on the U.S., no doubt about it. Well, if anything, it proves the opposite. Here's Fred Kaplan's reading of it, which among other things extracts the claim that the policy of sanctions and inspections was working just fine. If it wasn't more fun to talk about Arnold grabbing ladies' breasts, the press might have pointed this out.

Michael Kinsley on "Why Bush Angers Liberals."

Interesting, of course, to see everyone spinning the recall verdict in the most positive light for their faction. Depending on which weblog you visit today, it either represents a victory for the conservative movement in California because of how much of the vote Schwarzenegger and McClintock got between them…or a loss because of how many liberal positions Arnold had to have to get that. It could be good for Bush because it means that Arnold will presumably be governor in 2004 and may be able to help the state and raise money, or it could be bad for Bush because it could start the trend of throwing out elected officials who run up deficits. It could be good for the Democratic and Republican establishment because Independents did so poorly or it could be bad because it represents an electoral urge to toss out career politicians and bring in outsiders.

It could lead to cleaner elections because all the reports of Arnold grabbing women didn't hurt him and maybe helped, or it could lead to dirtier elections because the hatchet job on Gray Davis worked and because Arnold proved you don't have to define your positions to win. It could lead to lower taxes in California because Arnold will be a better manager or it could lead to higher because he'll feel the need to quickly wipe out deficits and the sooner he raises taxes, the easier it will be to blame them on Davis. It could lead to elected officials not only in California but across the nation becoming more responsive to the people because they fear they'll be recalled or it could lead to them catering more to the special interests that could defuse any recall attempt.

I don't know which way a lot of these things will play out and neither do you. My guess is that people who supported Arnold will like him a lot less once we get down to the specifics of what state programs will be cut and what sources of revenue will be increased. Some have suggested that former governor Pete Wilson and his crew will really be running the state with Arnold as figurehead. I sure hope that's not true. I can't think of a single rotten thing you could say about Gray Davis that wasn't equally true of Wilson. If that becomes the power structure in Sacramento, the Schwarzenegger era will probably be a lot more like the Davis era than anyone in either camp is now prepared to admit.

While many of you were watching an Austrian bodybuilder become governor, I was watching a German dictator become the toast of Broadway. An acquaintance asked why I got seats to see the Los Angeles company of The Producers on the evening of Election Day. I had to remind him that when I bought these tickets, there was no election scheduled this month. Besides, even if I'd known, it was a lot more fun to watch Jason Alexander and Martin Short prance about than to view any conceivable kind of election coverage. Then again, you could say that about almost any show.

Since I was fortunate enough to see Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick do The Producers in New York (report here), it raises the obvious question: How do Jason and Martin compare? Friends of mine who've seen the L.A. company have mostly reported that they liked one but not the other and have been pretty evenly split on which one they liked. I guess we got a good night: I liked both of them. A lot. This production seemed broader than the Broadway version, which may be because the Pantages Theater is larger than the St. James in New York, or it may be because the cast has been doing the show longer and actors often find little schtick with which to get laughs that weren't there before.

It may even be because though Alexander chews no less scenery as Max Bialystock than Lane, Short is a lot more physical and cartoony than Broderick. His version of Leo Bloom writhes on the floor and does "takes" they probably saw in the last row of the balcony…in the theater across the street and down a block. At times, he misses the humanity in the character but he's so funny, you almost don't mind. I wish he'd lose or at least not overdo that strained "inhale" voice he does…but boy, talk about taking a part you didn't originate and making it work for you. Which is also what Alexander does. I'm not sure I liked him more than Nathan Lane but I'm pretty sure I didn't like him any less.

The rest of the cast was pretty good. Lee Roy Reams is playing Roger DeBris and I always thought he was terrific, ever since I saw him in the first Broadway show I actually saw on Broadway — 42nd Street. Bill Nolte is playing Franz Liebkind. (If you're tracking the players in the various companies of The Producers: Gary Beach, who originated the role of DeBris, was out here but he has now returned to the New York company. Fred Applegate was playing Liebkind out here but he went back to New York to take over as Bialystock since Lewis J. Stadlen had to leave due to a hip injury. In fact, Applegate debuted and Beach returned to Broadway last night.) Our Ulla is Angie Schworer who, in keeping with the tone of this production, made her character even more of a caricature than what I saw back east.

It's interesting how the Pantages up in Hollywood has turned into a first-rate (albeit, too large) legit theater. I first knew it as a movie palace. I remember my parents taking me there to see The Great Race in 1965. I'm not sure when it switched to housing plays but I'm pretty sure that's where I saw — not in this order — La Cage Aux Folles with Gene Barry, The Music Man with Dick Van Dyke, Barnum with Jim Dale, My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison, Camelot with Richard Harris, Fiddler on the Roof with Herschel Bernardi, and Peter Pan with Sandy Duncan and again with Cathy Rigby. I'm sure there were others. Owing to a bad case of food poisoning, I saw half of I Do, I Do there (i.e., I saw one I Do) but I don't remember who was in it; all I remember is the men's room. For several of those shows, the acoustics in the place were not wonderful but they are now. It's really become a pleasant place to see a musical. Especially if you can secure seats in the same zip code as the stage.

Well, the exit polls tell me that I just wasted my time walking close to two miles to and from my polling place. Then again, I did get some exercise.

The polling place wasn't crowded, and everyone was joking about chads on the punchcard ballots. One elderly woman was asking for assistance, not because she didn't know how to use the voting machine but because she said, "I want to be sure I vote how I want to vote." You wonder how difficult it would be in this computer age for someone to design a voting machine that gives you a little paper printout of your vote to check and take home with you. With so much suspicion about the accuracy of these devices, it might help keep the system honest.

I can't help but feel that no matter how the vote comes out, everyone loses a little. None of them — Davis, Arnold, Cruz or McClintock — strikes me as someone who will ultimately please voters. I voted as I did (against the recall) because I believe it's a very bad system, and if a recall is mounted against Governor Schwarzenegger, we'll hear all the people who now defend it do a fast backflip and decide that. It might make sense if it had been used to remove a bad executive and insert a good one, but it looks like it's going to install a man of no experience. You wouldn't let an inexperienced doctor operate on you, you wouldn't let an inexperienced lawyer defend you in court…but somehow, some people have decided that the state is in deep, deep trouble and what it needs is a guy who has never spent one day in a real government position. I don't understand how casually people can brush that aside or even see it as a positive. I could have voted for Dick Riordan, or even for Peter Ueberroth, who has at least done this kind of work. But I couldn't get behind Arnold for the same reason I could never cast a presidential vote for Jesse Jackson, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, Al Sharpton, Ross Perot or anyone else trying to make an important job into an entry-level position. Experience isn't everything but it also isn't nothing.

Here's a pretty interesting article about the comments that got Rush Limbaugh fired from ESPN. (Yeah, I know. He resigned. In TV, when someone quits a good-paying job and doesn't fill the void immediately with a more lucrative one, they were fired or about to be fired.)

I don't know from football but it seems to me that Rush got a bit of a raw deal here. He may have been wrong in his thesis but it sounds to me like ESPN was more worried about future comments and the reaction to them. My guess is that when they hired Limbaugh, they figured he would draw in a certain additional audience without alienating their base, and this controversy made them decide they were wrong; that if he said something more controversial, even if he said it over on his radio show, it would upset the core ESPN audience. In other words, it wasn't that they were shocked that he acted like Rush Limbaugh but that they found out that had a downside.

A number of articles have compared the controversy to what happened with Al Campanis, and I don't think that's fair, either. In case you don't remember, Al Campanis was an executive within the Dodgers organization who went on Nightline back in '87 and suggested there was perhaps some genetic reason why blacks weren't fit for leadership positions in sports. It was an odd interview because Ted Koppel tried to help the man out of the hole he was digging for himself but Mr. Campanis, exhibiting a certain cluelessness, took it deeper. There was an outcry there too but the situation was quite different from the one with Limbaugh. Campanis was in the Dodgers front office. He had apparently had a say in selecting which of the team's two coaches had succeeded Walt Alston as manager, and they'd picked Tommy Lasorda (Caucasian) over Jim Gilliam (Afro-American). The choice was ostensibly on the grounds that Lasorda was a tad more qualified…and Campanis's remarks suggested the difference may have been skin color. That's a big difference from the matter with Limbaugh, who was and is completely outside any team's decision-making process. Even if the statement was racist — and I'm not saying it was — it's one thing just to be racist, quite another to hire with race as a criterion.

That said, every time I've heard Rush, I thought he was misquoting and distorting the positions of others, so I'm not too worked up over this. Besides, I have to go vote.

Here's an amazing (to me) article over on the Newsweek site. A reporter who has covered the California recall election writes about how bad the coverage has been.

Over on Salon, Eric Boehlert makes a very good point about the current downtrend in the popularity of George W. Bush. It's that it started on September 7 when he unveiled the price tag for rebuilding Iraq: $87 billion…

Within days of Bush's prime-time address, his approval ratings, and the support for his reconstruction plans in Iraq, began a steep decline. In retrospect, it's clear the speech became an unlikely presidential turning point — and possible tipping point — and one the White House has yet to recover from. Pollster Stan Greenberg told the Wall Street Journal he couldn't "find a parallel moment" in history when a president's approval rating dropped so dramatically following a nationally televised debate.

Here's the full article which I think is correct. Iraq sounded like a great American triumph to many until they started to realize what it will end up costing us to have deposed Saddam Hussein. I'm sure we're in for a roller coaster ride of viewpoints on this, as well as a lot of up and down on Bush's favorability rating. But it's interesting to note that, like so many things in this world, people change their minds about a war when they find out there's no money in it.