For this baby boomer pop culture fan, the most important thing happening today is the 50^th anniversary of the first episode of animator Jay Ward’s Rocky & Bullwinkle. For a show with so-so ratings at the time, produced on a shoestring by a small group of smartasses, Rocky & Bullwinkle had an enormous impact, if only for its influence on Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. An irreverent, mocking tone in a cartoon? Taking on current issues and pop culture fads? Talking directly to the viewers? Arguing with the narrator? Spoofing other shows? All stuff we take for granted today, all those things started — and that’s no exaggeration — with R&B.

Cartoons on television were a bland wasteland in the medium’s early years, when, out of the blue, here came a flying squirrel and a dimwitted talking moose who wisecracked, were silly for silly’s sake, and treated kids as if they were smart enough to get all the jokes. (Although, at times, the jokes were for grown-ups’ enjoyment, such as the intro for an episode of Fractured Fairy Tales that started, ''Once upon a time there was a little village on a hill, called Daniels on the Rocks.'')

Rocky and Bullwinkle’s adventures, largely spent fighting two Cold-War-spoof Russian spies, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, were matched by other segments that became as popular as the title duo. Peabody’s Improbable History, in which Peabody, a bespectacled, talking dog, and his young adopted human son, Sherman, traveled in the “Way-Back Machine” to famous historical events, is still hilarious; the pair even showed up in a 1994 episode of The Simpsons. Many boomers, though, claim that the stories and exquisitely awful puns in Fractured Fairy Tales were a highlight of their childhood. In any case, here’s the show’s opening sequence.

Yesterday’s disclosure by the Associated Press regarding Charlotte law firm Moore & Van Allen and its behind-the-scenes work against health care reform was a stunner. There’s nothing illegal going on, but the law firm’s activities have a bad smell nonetheless. The story revealed that MVA is engaged in advocacy against a public option, and in favor of requiring Americans to buy health insurance. Although MVA wouldn’t identify the clients, it’s pretty obvious that a group of health insurance companies are paying the law firm to conduct anonymous campaigning for them. Note that MVA isn’t doing legal work here, but rather things such as enlisting trade groups to oppose government-run health coverage, or helping anti-reform advocates get on the radio or post opinions on conservative blogs.

One big problem with MVA’s activities is that the clients they’re working for are anonymous and are paying others to conduct their political action for them. As MVA spokesperson Matthew French told the AP, "They want to stay in the background and off the front page. They want the message to be the important thing." In other words, they’re trying to evade responsibility. Not to mention that in a democracy, issues should be openly discussed in debate that makes it clear who, or what corporate entity, is standing for what.

Many conservatives like to see themselves as rugged, no-nonsense defenders of freedom, clear-thinking patriots, ready to slap down America's enemies at the drop of a hat. Too bad, then, that they're actually cowards.

The right's current collective nervous breakdown over plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York for his role in planning the 9-11 attacks confirms once again something we wrote about last year: the American right wing is scared stupid. When Attorney General Holder announced the forthcoming KSM trial, conservative members of Congress, columnists, TV newscasters, and bloggers just, there's no better way to put it, completely freaked the hell out. "Dangerous!" "Irresponsible!" "What if he's acquitted?!" "It invites more attacks!" Yesterday on Fox & Friends, Gretchen Carlson seemed genuinely terrified, practically on the verge of a stroke over the prospect of KSM's trial.

Here's what the stalwart patriots of the right can't seem to understand: the whole point of terrorism is to make a country's population walk around in fear every day. Conservatives, as far as I can see, threw in that towel a long time ago. Salon's Glenn Greenwald describes the conservative position as, "We're too scared to have real trials in our country," which, as he points out, "is the textbook definition of 'surrendering to terrorists.'"

Spain held open trials for the terrorists who bombed trains in Madrid in 2004. The Brits tried the London subway terrorists in, you guessed it, London. The terrorists who bombed a nightclub in Bali? A regular trial in a regular courtroom. The 2008 massacres in Mumbai? Same thing. More to the point, we've already tried terrorists in America: remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber? Zacarias Moussaoui? Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy who launched the World Trade Center bombings in 1993? Will you Fox-Rush folks please get a damned grip?

It's actually the right and their fear-mongering leaders who are being irresponsible by their public displays of terror. Again, as Greenwald put it, "It's hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right." Frankly, these sunny day patriots' ongoing surrender to terrorism would be kind of pitiful if they weren't so damned cocky about being scared to death.

• Gretchen Carlson: Help - the terrorists will kill us all!