I'm preempting Stooge Sunday to bring you something that's time-sensitive and almost as classy. It's Live From Lincoln Center with its presentation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel starring Kelli O'Hara and Nathan Gunn. This ran the other night and apparently is not going to run again…but it's on the PBS website for the next week or so. Until then, the window below will show you all two and a half hours of it. This is not my favorite show but it is an American classic and this is a stunning production of it. So if you want to see it, don't delay. Once this link goes dead on May 3rd, it'll be very hard to come by…

Here are 50 Great Jon Stewart quotes. Actually, I think a couple of them were uttered by correspondents on The Daily Show and a lot of them were probably invented by writers on that program…but you get the idea.

Dick Cavett remembers Jonathan Winters. (And Mark forgets to go to bed at a decent hour…)

Here's a weird story. Last night, there was a taping of America's Got Talent at the Pantages Theater here in Los Angeles. A comedian comes out and does a bit that goes over quite well. When it's time for Howie Mandel (one of the judges) to give his critique, he says that he recognizes the routine as very similar to one performed by another comedian, Frank Nicotero. And here's the really weird part: Frank Nicotero is in the theater. He's the warm-up comedian for America's Got Talent.

I always wonder about this kind of thing. It's one thing to steal another comic's material and do it in some comedy club that he'll never visit. It's another thing to do it on national TV where either he'll see it or someone who knows the material will call and tell him. You'd think no one would do this simply because they'll never get away with it…and yet every so often, someone attempts it. Back when he was in the cast of Saturday Night Live, Jay Mohr "wrote" and performed an entire sketch that even he had to later admit was plagiarized from a comedian named Rick Shapiro. This is like robbing a bank and leaving your driver's license with the teller.

Here's a report on what happened at the America's Got Talent taping last night.

In 1971 when Woody Allen made Bananas, he went to England and sat for a very long interview. In it, he lied his ass off and didn't give one truthful answer — and it turns out, the man's pretty good at that. Amazing that he didn't run for public office…

The convention center in which Comic-Con International convenes in San Diego is getting a much-needed expansion but not fast enough. I'm a bit fuzzy on when it was to be completed but it ain't gonna be done by then, whenever then was.

Comic-Con is committed to San Diego through 2016. I have long predicted that it will remain there long after that and I hold to that prediction. Yes, we've had two splendid WonderCons run by the same crew in Anaheim and to some, the notion that Comic-Con might someday relocate there doesn't sound quite as impossible (or undesirable) as it once did. On the other hand, can you imagine the price of a hotel room and the density of traffic on the freeway if they held Comic-Con adjacent to Disneyland in the middle of July? Forget my running joke about how if you want a parking space for Comic-Con, leave six months early. If Comic-Con 2017 is in Anaheim in July, leave now.

I try not to use this blog for self-promotion so I think it's been one full year to the day since I mentioned here that I write the Garfield comic book published by the fine folks at Boom! Studios. That is to say I write most of it. Last year when I was in the midst of losing my mother, I got behind and a clever gent named Scott Nickel graciously filled in on a few stories. He did such a fine job that I hurried back to my post lest anyone wonder why they needed me. The comic is drawn expertly by Gary Barker, Andy Hirsch and an array of fine guest artists.

In other comic book news involving me: Sergio Aragonés is over his medical problems and drawing pages again for the long-delayed Groo Vs. Conan mini-series from Dark Horse. I expect to be able to announce a release date here shortly. I've also just agreed to write a new, unrelated-to-Groo-or-Garfield comic for another publisher and I think they plan on announcing this at San Diego. I'll try to update you on all this stuff more often than once a year.

I always find the annual White House Correspondents Dinner to be a fascinating event, especially in terms of how each year's guest comedian will work what is surely a very tough room. But that doesn't mean I don't agree with Tom Brokaw that there are many things wrong with politicians and journalists setting both callings aside for an evening and shmoozing over celebrities and each other.

John Cassidy has an interesting thought about Terrorism and Gun Control. And he's right: The way people reacted to the Boston Marathon tragedy would have been entirely different if the brothers' weapons of choice had been AR-15s instead of homemade bombs.

Here's a list called 50 Reasons You Despised George W. Bush's Presidency. I'm never comfy with words like "hate" and "despise" being used in politics but I agree that the man was a terrible Chief Executive. What's especially appalling is that some of the "accomplishments" on this list are probably things that he would call great achievements.

Here's the amazing a cappella musical group Pentatonix with a four-minute history of American music. Like all YouTube musical videos, it adheres to the current requirement of a minimum of ten seconds of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and there's a lot of other good stuff in there as well…

They opened a George W. Bush Library this week, prompting many to employ a joke I remember out of David Frye's act. When he did it, he was George Wallace saying of his own library, "They're putting both of my books in there, including the one I haven't even gotten around to coloring!" I sure hope one of the books in the Bush Library is The Pet Goat. It would be nice if they all were.

Bush's approval rating seems to be on a bit of an upswing and all sorts of reasons are being offered. The public likes that in retirement, he hasn't done anything bad, which he's largely accomplished by not doing anything. He seems moderate compared to the current G.O.P. And we just don't like staying mad at people, which is why all former presidents gain points with us after they're just human beings again. I would imagine there's some truth in all of those reasons. I would imagine further that if you asked people if they wished he and his policies were still in office, you'd see a different reaction. (Actually, more of his policies are still in office than some of us had hoped…)

But then we have this whole discussion going on today on the 'net about whether Bush was (and presumably still is) stupid. Keith Hennessey, a former Bush aide, says the man he worked for was a lot smarter than people think. Jonathan Chait says he wasn't. To me, both articles miss the point. My question is not how smart the guy was but what did he do with whatever smarts he had?

Smart people in power can do disastrous things, either because they weren't as smart as they thought or because they had a bad (for most of us) goal. Bush presided over a massive transfer of wealth in this country from the poor to the already-rich. That may have been stupidity or it may have been exactly what he intended…and it doesn't really matter which. The money follows the same pathway. He also presided over the Iraq War which took way more lives and money than anyone intended, all in search of stated goals that were never realized. Bush still says it all went almost according to plan. Is that stupidity or did he really get what he wanted out of it? Again, it doesn't matter which it is. The Americans who died in that war are still dead, either way.

We judge our elected officials not by whether they could pass an I.Q. test but on the results they get, given the reality of the world in which they govern. Obviously, I think Bush failed that test big time. My suspicion is that he was and is a smarter man than many critics and comedians give him credit for…but the test of his presidency is what he did, not whether he was sharp enough to figure out how to do it.

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has apparently used chemical weapons — "against his own people," as we used to say to prove what a monster Saddam Hussein was. I never quite understood why "against his own people" was included. Would he have been any less of a monster if he'd used them against someone else's people?

Barack Obama has said that if the president of Syria did that, the U.S. would take action…so what's he going to do about it? Here's Fred Kaplan with the latest…

Dean Obeidallah is a political comedian and a former attorney — and isn't that a nice combination of careers? He's also a Muslim-American who condemns terrorism. The overwhelming majority of Muslims do but we have people in this country who won't accept that until all 2.2 billion Muslims in the world write this article.

One of the lucrative aspects of animation is that it travels well. Cartoons produced in America are easily dubbed into other languages and sold around the world.

Here's the beginning of a 1967 episode of Braccobaldo, which is Italian for "Huckleberry Hound." What's unusual about it is that this particular bit of animation was done in Italy and never aired in the United States. I gather the rest of each program was translated American product but they seem to have generated some local footage, probably to make the show seem less foreign. The female dog is Kitty, Huck's girl friend in the Italian comic books of the character…