David Letterman has been losing to Jay Leno for a long time, and losing by a wider margin than ever lately. But last night, a guest appearance by Hillary Clinton helped Dave pull slightly ahead, at least in one night's overnights. It wasn't as big as the last time Hillary appeared with Letterman but last night, it brought in a 4.6/11 rating. Leno only had a 4.4/11, while Ted Koppel had a 3.1/7.

I just changed the link address in the referral to the Charles Vess website. I accidentally linked to a fan site for Charles instead of his official site,which is what I thought I was linking to. Now it goes to the real place. Thanks to "Stephen" for the catch.

Robert Meeropol is the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for spying. He has long been on a personal journey to determine their guilt or innocence and has come to some interesting conclusions.

I've said this about others but it's as true of Charles Vess as it is of anyone: He showed up in comics one day and did a few of them in the classic tradition. Then he blossomed into a unique and glorious illustrator. There are several nice examples over on his website.

Hey, you hockey puck! Why don't you sit in a hot tub and watch a duck sink? Go suck sap out of a rubber tree while the wife just lies in bed and goes, "Help me with the jewelry." No, but I kid websurfers…especially those that go over to the Don Rickles website.

My pal Dave Mackey reminds us that yesterday marked the 59th anniversary of announcer Don Pardo going to work for what was then (1944) the NBC Radio Network. Fifty-nine years in any job is impressive. To last that long in the highly-competitive (and high-pressure) world of radio/TV announcing is astounding. How many commercials must that add up to? How many game show prize shpiels and pauses for station identification? It's a skill that is generally unappreciated. To do it well, you have to make it sound easy…and year after year, Pardo has made it sound easy, squeezing awkward copy into tight time slots and sounding enthusiastic about intros and sponsor plugs that must have bored the hell out of him.

Being a network announcer has often been a very political position. Networks are often unbelievably fussy about their images, and it has generally been believed that an off-camera announcer somehow becomes "the voice of the network," especially when delivering promos or station identifications. They've gotten a little less anal about this in recent years but still sometimes insist that a given voice job be filled by someone from their "approved" list. Names come and go from those lists but Pardo has managed to remain on them longer than most people currently active in the voiceover field have been alive. For years, he was known primarily as a game show announcer, most notably on the Bill Cullen The Price is Right and the Art Fleming Jeopardy! Later, Saturday Night Live made him even more famous. He was the announcer on the very first broadcast (where he accidentally billboarded "The Not For Ready Prime Time Players" — a gaffe fixed for some reruns and not others). He quickly became the most "permanent" member of the cast — though there was a brief period where, trying to "freshen" the show, they replaced him with Mel Brand. Somehow, it wasn't Saturday Night Live without Pardo, and they brought him back. Those who decided to get rid of him should have known better. (This was during a period when Michael O'Donoghue had returned to the show and was trying to force a lot of odd ideas into the mix. Reportedly, he not only wanted to dump Pardo but to fire him on the air during a broadcast. Yeah, that would have been real funny…)

I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm not sure if he's still announcing the show. I gave up watching it some time ago…and the last time I tuned in, I believe the opening announce was cast member Darrell Hammond imitating the sound of Pardo. If he's semi-retired and doesn't want to stay up that late, I could certainly understand. The man is 85, after all. I hope he's around for a while longer but even after he's gone, his voice will be heard, and not just in reruns. A couple of generations of radio personalities, disc jockeys, announcers and voice actors have learned how to do it from Don Pardo. If he got royalties for imitations, he could buy the network.

A lot of Republicans fear that their greatest electoral danger is within; that the extreme right-wing, having tasted more power with this president than they've known before, will try to drag the rest of the party into positions that will lose moderates and swing voters. Here's Senator Alan Simpson doing what little he can to head that off.

A brief interview with Jules Feiffer.

You find the darnedest things up for sale on "The World's Online Marketplace." An auction house is currently selling the 1929 Caerulia, which was the yearbook for Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California. This is of interest because one of the graduates therein was Lindley Armstrong Jones, who would later be world-famous as either the funniest bandleader in the business or the most musical comedian, Spike Jones. That's his class picture there, back from the days he marched in the school band (he was the drum major) without firing a single pistol shot.

I love old Spike Jones records, radio shows and TV programs and have avidly collected them for many years. He was a very funny man and when it came to music, he really knew what he was doing. But I'm not bidding on his yearbook. Some artifacts are too trivial, even for me.

Mort Walker has been producing Beetle Bailey since it took place in the Civil War, and also dabbling in other strips including Hi & Lois, Boner's Ark and Sam & Silo. I liked Sam & Silo even better in its original as Sam's Strip. He has lots of fun stuff over at his website. Fall in.

An odd twist in the war between Disney and Stephen Slesinger Inc., the company suing The Mouse for royalties on Winnie the Pooh. I don't know what, if anything, this means.

I haven't read Hillary Clinton's newly-released autobiography and as far as I can tell, neither have about 90% of the folks who are now reviewing it. Fox commentator Tony Blankley even nakedly admits he hasn't read it and then proceeds to trash the book, and he may be on to something. (At least, give the man some points for beings honest about it.) Even those who have actually turned some pages seem to have only done so to pull a few quotes they can use as evidence to shore up the opinions — pro or con — they were already going to write. If you want to see some real clumsy lying, go over to the page on Amazon where folks who've read the book (or claim so) can post reviews.

You'll see long-time Hillary-haters pretending to be unbiased observers who just happened to have gotten hold of a copy, read it and found it so boring and/or incredible that they just have to advise you to save your money.And you'll find the opposite faction: Pro-Clinton people pretending they came to the book with no opinion of Senator Clinton and her hubby and were overwhemingly convinced of their virtue. At the moment — it could change if one or two people become determined to change it — the vote is pretty much split. The average reviewer gives it two-and-a-half stars out of five, which is roughly the split that polls tell us Hillary inspires in Americans. It intrigues me that Amazon has become this barometer of political spirit in much the same way activists feel they've won something if they can bombard an online poll with thousands of faux votes and see their side win a victory. It's becoming painfully obvious to me that a lot of online polls are deliberately configured to inspire such manipulation. If I ever need to get my "hit" count up here, I'll install one and ask some hot button questions.

I don't know that having a best-selling book everywhere, let alone just on Amazon, means that the author is growing more powerful or is winning over America — a country where few read books, and most who do read books favor those that confirm what they already believe. But since there seems to be no other way to vote for or against Hillary at the moment, it's getting turned into a kind of referendum. Her book — briefly — fell from #2 to #3 on Amazon and when I visited a few of the conservative chatboards I surf, I saw cheering and the proud proclamation that the U.S. was catching on to her and that the book would be on the remainder table by next week. (Uh, couldn't it also have meant a brief surge in Harry Potter sales?) When Hillary quickly returned to #2, we got the conspiracy theories: Amazon is lying, Barbra is buying up tons, etc. The folks trying to spin this as Hillary's comeback are no better.

Sometimes, a hot dog is just a hot dog. Sometimes, book sales are just book sales. I don't think the tons of volumes that Michael Moore and Michael Savage were simultaneously selling prove that the country was moving in any direction, much less both at the same time. I don't even think it proves that any significant number of people have a favorable opinion of either Michael. If anything, it proves that those men were good at exploiting political sentiments in order to sell some books. Hillary and her publishers have obviously learned the trick.

Here's the transcript of a recent public appearance by the outspoken writer. It rehashes a lot of things he's said in other interviews and I'm really only posting this because I finally figured out how to link to articles on the Writers Guild website.

Alex Ben Block over at Television Week explains that "The Fix Was In."

Dirk Deppey over at The Comics Journal's ¡Journalista! site has been serializing a very pointed, on-target (I think) assessment of what's wrong with Marvel in their current approach to publishing. It's mostly about distribution and comic shops and if that kind of thing interests you, I recommend it. He's just collected it all in one place. Of course, it doesn't begin to tackle the most burning question of the comic book industry, which is what the hell I'm doing up at this hour.