Frank Rich–the only liberal Times columnist worth reading–points us toward this Jeff Jarvis post about the FCC’s complaint against the show Married by America.

A quick summary: The FCC sued the network which broadcast Married by America for $1.2 million. They cited 159 complaints. Jarvis filed a Freedom of Information Act request and found that there were only 90 complaints, not 159. These 90 complaints were filed, collectively, by just 23 individual people.

And of these 23 individuals, 21 of them sent in a nearly identical form letter. So the FCC was cooking the books.

This is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect in George W. Bush’s America: Censorship! And don’t let John Ashcroft’s “resignation” fool you–he’s behind this, too.

This is the perfect liberal morality tale, except for one teensy-weensy problem. The network that aired Married by America is . . . Fox!

So in order for one liberal shibboleth to live, another must die. Oh well. But the next time someone lectures you about how Rupert Murdoch is in the pocket of the Bush administration (or vice versa), point them thisaway.

Reuben Johnson has another power-packed dispatch from Kiev. Worth reading.

How serious are the Yushchenko supporters? They’ve banned all alcohol from their tent city, even though it’s the dead of winter. That’s pretty committed.

And very, very smart.

Glenn Reynolds thinks Havel should replace Kofi Annan at the United Nations–and that the Ukraine election is the perfect moment to do it.

Reuben Johnson has a report from Kiev about the attempt from Viktor Yanukovich to steal the election.

I would be worried, but know that we don’t have to worry about Vladimir Putin, because President Bush “looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” And he likes him!

Moyers is dropping Now. Village Voice

With an eye for detail and mordant wit, as they call it, this guy’s been keeping a semi-regular diary of his struggle and how bad it feels to be alive. Rather moving. subtext

I don’t know anything else about him and have come upon his blog entirely by chance.

Even as more colleges take a dim view of AP scores, the experience of taking AP tests, even if a student fails, is a good predictor of whether he’ll graduate college in 5 years. Students who took but failed an AP exam were more than twice as likely to graduate in 5 years than students who didn’t take any AP exams. The indispensable Jay Matthews

Caught The Barbarian Invasions the other night, celebrated by critics for its intelligence and fine acting when it came out in theaters last year. Now on DVD, the movie proves curious, interesting, and with few equals in the one or two areas where it truly excels. Those two areas might be roughly described as politics and the depiction of intellectuals.

The opening shots of a hospital will make you think you’re visiting wartorn Bosnia, instead of Canada the land of socialized medicine. A dying father in Montreal has to be taken to Vermont for a decent X-ray, before the results are transmitted to experts in Europe, so pointless, according to the movie, is it to raise questions with Canada’s health authorities. But don’t get comfortable, because one soon realizes this movie’s title comes from a bit of TV punditry in which a condescending Euro-style intellectual discusses the meaning of 9/11. And still, the movie’s soul is elsewhere, possibly with this dying man and his circle of aging radical intellectuals.

These sweet old farts get a wonderful chance to sit around like old times, lamenting their mistakes—one hilarious scene has them naming every –ism they ever fell for—and celebrating the life of the mind. Even as the movie appears to be rooted in a typically Canadian not-Americanism, America’s founding receives the most respectful treatment in a long, lavish conversation celebrating history’s greatest moments of intellectual alignment. That is, when all the geniuses of an age seemed to know each other and left behind a lasting monument of their combined effort. It’s a bittersweet moment for a circle of brainy people who are leaving behind only a legacy of friendship.

Once I realized the movie was heading toward the dying man’s suicide, I turned away, because I did not want to be subjected to any lectures on physician-assisted suicide (which I oppose). But then, faced with the prospect of returning a half-watched DVD to the store, I gave it another try. And for a movie that does some serious lifting in the ideas department, The Barbarian Invasion proves to have a surprisingly light touch, even in this heaviest of scenes.