The Ben Stiller Show. Get a Life. The Critic. The Tick (cartoon). Profit. Futurama. The Tick (live-action). Andy Richter Controls the Universe. And now, Arrested Development. And that's just off the top of my head.

It's like Fox has one set of executives who develop smart, well-written, offbeat, subversive comedies, and a completely different set of execs who give those same shows the worst time slot on the network, don't promote it, and then complain about low ratings.

Cheers was dead last in the ratings the week it premiered. A modern-day network probably would have cancelled it immediately and missed out on the biggest hit of the decade. But NBC is the one network that will occasionally give a show a chance to thrive. Seinfeld got a bunch of chances, and had awful ratings until it picked up steam in year 3.

The best current comparison to Arrested is The Office, which was also low-rated but critically acclaimed. While Fox put their critical darling in a worse time slot and never ran any commercials for it, NBC put theirs in the best time slot on the network, and plugged the hell out of it. If Fox ran 1/4 the promos for Arrested (or any of the shows listed above) they run for swill like The War At Home, or Skating With Unemployed Actors, who knows what kind of success the show would have had.

I think it's pretty unlikely that Cheney would ever step down voluntarily - given all the immoral and illegal stuff he did to get into power, why would he simply walk away now that he's there? But if for some reason he did, Condi's their perfect candidate. She has no governing experience; she's beholden to the oil companies; she's easily influenced by Cheney or other figures around her; she somehow managed to fuck up royally and come out with a promotion at the end of it. In other words, she's Bush in a dress. Plus, the right wing media will be able to smear anyone who says a word against her as racist, just like they did at the Gonzalez hearings. They can pat themselves on the back for putting a black woman in the White House, while continuing policies that hurt blacks and women (and pretty much everyone else).

Did anyone ever doubt, even at the time, that Bush thought Saddam was a legitimate threat to America? Did anyone actually believe at this stage that Bush ever thought his own trumped-up rationales for war were true? It's pretty blindingly obvious that Bush's second thought after the 9/11 attacks (the first being "I wonder how The Pet Goat ends?"), was "how can we pin this on Iraq instead of actually fighting terrorism?"

Replace "doubt" with "belive" in that first sentence, and the whole thing makes a lot more sense. I miss TableTalk's edit feature in these letters...

Charlie Bird, I like your comic relief metaphor. But if you're stranded on an uncharted desert isle, what kind of an idiot puts Gilligan in charge of fixing the radio and not the Professor? Can't entertaining us be the job of the Vice President? Or Dave Chappelle? Someone who doesn't have their finger on the button?

The Clinton impeachment hurt the Republicans' standing because it was clear to the public that Clinton hadn't committed any serious crime, and the Republicans were on a witchhunt. Can anyone saner than Ann Coulter say the same about a Bush impeachment? The big question on my mind isn't whether we should impeach Bush, but which of a dozen or so legitimate charges should we press first?

The chief obstacle is one of the major flaws in our Constitution - the framers didn't anticipate party politics, or that the party that controls Congress can impeach for no reason, or prevent an impeachment no matter how well-justified. But that all goes out the window if the Democrats can take back Congress this year. I'm sure Diebold and Karl Rove will make sure that doesn't happen, but it's nice to dream.

> Let's hear just how many Americans the pro-lifers want to criminalize.

Another letter writer asked this question, and I may have an answer. Read the article in this week's New Yorker about the Bush administration's war on science - particularly their efforts to stop the startlingly effective HPV vaccine from hitting the market, and to discourage condom use as a method of HIV prevention. Both efforts are because the Religious Right believes that these overwhelmingly effective methods encourage promiscuity. And while they're okay with hundreds of thousands of women dying of cervical cancer or AIDS every year, unmarried adults having consentual sex is beyond the pale.

That's what this all boils down to. The mentality we're dealing with is this: if you have sex, then you deserve what you get, whether it's disesase, unplanned pregnancy, or murder at the hands of "pro-life" activists. It's almost impossible for me to believe that people actually think this way, but they do, and in large enough numbers to gain control of our government.

Today they're blocking the HPV vaccine and challenging Roe v. Wade. How long will it be before they're stoning women for having sex like the Taliban did?

Ari Fleischer's spending time with his family too. This doesn't mean they won't just find someone equally odious as a replacement.

Instead of Americans conducting torture at Abu Ghraib, now Iraqis will be torturing at Abu Ghraib, while Americans have a shiny new prison to torture people in. Problem solved!

The backbone of the GOP's anti-Kerry campaign was, basically, "Fuck Massachusetts." Anyone from Massachusetts, up to and including Paul Revere, is a tax-loving left-wing moonbat who loves terrorism and hates apple pie. The GOP faithful has been eating up that bullshit for years. So, how exactly are they going to run someone from the state they love to hate?