The other night, Sean Hannity had on three couples to tell how their health insurance situation had been devastated by Obamacare. Reporter Eric Stern contacted those three couples to fact-check their assertions and discovered they didn't know what they were talking about. Most of the campaign against the Affordable Care Act has been built on this kind of thing.

I should probably save this for closer to Christmas but it's too good to wait. One of my favorite performers as a kid — and someone I had the pleasure of working with when I grew up — is Eddie Lawrence. Eddie is an all-around talent. He acts, he writes, he paints…but he is best known for a comedy routine he's been doing for more than fifty years called "The Old Philsopher." He introduced it in the fifties in a series of best-selling comedy records and it was imitated and plagiarized everywhere.

Eddie is 94 years old and I hear he's still in good shape. At least he was when our pal Kliph Nesteroff interviewed him a few years ago. This video is from Conan O'Brien's old show on NBC on December 23, 1993, almost twenty years ago. Obviously, it's a Christmas show and they closed it by having Eddie come out and do a yuletide version of his signature bit…

• Obama said this morning, "There are no winners." That's what gracious people say when they win and ungracious ones say when they lose.

A brief interview conducted via e-mail with Bill Watterson.

To put yesterday's Republican loss/fail/surrender (whatever you want to call it) in perspective, let's go back for a moment to 3/21/10. This is a column David Frum — once a speechwriter for George W. Bush — wrote when the Affordable Care Act, AKA "Obamacare," passed. Give it a read and keep in mind that Frum was called a traitor to his party and a "RINO" for writing it.

Fred Kaplan says a historic deal may be in the works with Iran. I'll believe it when I see it…but Fred's pretty good at predicting what we're going to see.

Hey, remember that Zack Snyder/Bruce Timm film of Superman through the years? This one? Here's a handy-dandy guide to what's in it.

Way back in this message in July, I mentioned I was working on a "secret project" that gave me much joy. Fifty years ago next month, a movie changed my life a lot and in a good way. I was delighted to participate in what will easily be the best version of it ever made available to the public for home viewing.

January 21 of next year, the Criterion Collection — the class act of home video — will bring out a five-disc set of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Here's their announcement…

Stanley Kramer followed his Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg with this sobering investigation of American greed. Ah, who are we kidding? It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure, is the most grandly harebrained movie ever made, a pileup of slapstick and borscht-belt-y one-liners performed by a nonpareil cast, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a boatload of other playing-to-the-rafters comedy legends. For sheer scale of silliness, Kramer's wildly uncharacteristic film is unlike any other, an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery.

• Restored 4K digital film transfer of the general release version of the film, with 5.1 surround Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New high-definition digital transfer of a 197-minute extended version of the film, reconstructed and restored by Robert A. Harris using visual and audio material from the longer original road-show version—including some scenes that have been returned to the film here for the first time—with 5.1 surround Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New audio commentary featuring It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World aficionados Mark Evanier, Michael Schlesinger, and Paul Scrabo
• New documentary on the film's visual and sound effects, featuring rare behind-the-scenes footage of the crew at work and interviews with visual-effects specialist Craig Barron and sound designer Ben Burtt
• Talk show from 1974 hosted by director Stanley Kramer and featuring Mad World actors Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, and Jonathan Winters
• Press interview from 1963 featuring Kramer and members of the film's cast
• Interviews recorded for the 2000 AFI program 100 Years…100 Laughs, featuring comedians and actors discussing the influence of the film
• Two-part 1963 episode of the CBC television program Telescope that follows the film's press junket and premiere
• The Last 70mm Film Festival, a program from 2012 featuring cast and crew members from Mad World at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, hosted by Billy Crystal
• Selection of humorist and voice-over artist Stan Freberg's original TV and radio advertisements for the film, with a new introduction by Freberg
• Original and rerelease trailers, and rerelease radio spots
• Two Blu-rays and three DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Lou Lumenick

It's been an open secret for some time that they were doing this and I apologize to many of you who wrote to ask what I knew of it and couldn't be answered. Some of you even guessed it was my "secret project" — and by the way, I don't want to give the impression that I did more than appear on the commentary track and offer some advice and info to the fine folks who really put this together.

I am amazed though that some lovers of this film have posted messages of genuine fury across the Internet, livid that the film was not coming out when they wanted it to come out; upset that Criterion was withholding a formal announcement of a release date and what would be on it; demanding that certain things be included, etc. Let me state something that oughta be obvious to all but apparently isn't…

Putting something like this together is a helluva lot of work. Footage must be located. It must be processed and restored and color-corrected and such. Rights to some extras must be obtained. If you're the releasing company, you don't want to announce what's going to be in the set until you're reasonably certain you can deliver it. They're announcing it now because they're reasonably certain. They couldn't announce it months ago because they weren't. (And things are still turning up. We recorded the commentary track in July and we're going back into the studio next week to record additional narration for "lost footage" that has been located and added in since then.)

I'm delighted with what I've seen so far, my one regret being that it won't be out next month for the 50th anniversary. But it wouldn't have been as good or as complete if they had hit that deadline so I'm glad they didn't. I'll tell you more about it and post a link to order when we get closer to January.

Don Rickles with a story about Anthony Quinn and Marcel Marceau…

• Good day to watch C-Span. Occasional spurts of sanity and I think I even heard someone talk about what's best for the country.

• Getting worried. Boehner's new proposal involves Howie Mandel, 26 models with cases and one case that says "Repeal Obamacare."

Stephen Colbert is a master at not breaking character but every so often, even he is overcome by the absurdity of some of his own material. I don't embed Comedy Central videos on this site because their coding is a thing of evil. But if you go here, you can see five times when Dr. Colbert couldn't keep a straight face…and I defy you to keep a straight face watching them.

• House Repubs began a caucus this AM singing "Amazing Grace." Isn't that song about admitting your past wrongs and vowing to change?

Zack Snyder and Bruce Timm spearheaded this brief but powerful animated history of The Man of Steel, interlaced with nice winks to various artists' interpretations of the character. I'm sure every Superman fan who watches it can point to the one moment in that history where the hero was "done right"…

I used to refer to Barney Frank as the smartest man in our government. Now, alas, he's the smartest man who was recently in our government but is no longer. Here's an interview with the guy.