Stephen Colbert has a “super PAC.” The Federal Election Commission on Thursday approved his application to form such a political fundraising entity. He celebrated with a balloon drop to patriotic music on “The Colbert Report” Thursday night.

“I am a super PAC, and so can you!” the comedian crowed to his studio audience.

But what is a “super PAC” anyway? Is it like a regular political action committee, only with a nicer office? Are its donors richer? Must its employees wear capes.

No, no, and no. But the Stephen Colbert news got us to wondering how many people understand campaign finance basics. The law in this area is pretty complicated, after all. We’ll do our best to try to disentangle it.

Political action committees have been around since the 1940s, pointed out journalist Elizabeth Drew in her 1983 classic, “Politics and Money.” They began as associations organized by labor unions to bundle together their members’ campaign donations. Some old-line trade groups such as the American Medical Association had PACs as well.

But they didn’t really take off until Congress passed the 1974 law that established the Federal Election Commission, provided for public financing of presidential campaigns, and generally set the boundaries for the modern US political cash system. With big donations from wealthy individuals banned, PACs suddenly looked like a great way to channel money. By the end of 1974, 600 PACS had registered with the new FEC. By 1982, there were 3,400. Today there are about 4,600.

Nowadays there are two kinds of regular, plain vanilla, nonsuper PACs: connected and unconnected. Connected PACs are associated with unions, corporations, or other groups. They take money only from individuals who belong to the group in question. Unconnected PACs are – you guessed it – not associated with another organization. They’re organized around issues, or ideologies, or even members of Congress.

Individuals can give only $5,000 a year to a regular PAC. In turn, regular PACs are limited to hard-money donations to candidates ($5,000 annually), parties ($15,000 annually), or other PACs.

Super PACs are a new breed created after several 2010 Supreme Court decisions that struck down some restrictions. They’re “super” because there is no limit to how much money they can receive from an individual, corporation, or union.

They’re limited in that they can’t give money directly to candidates to help in elections. However, they can spend unlimited amounts advocating for or against political candidates on their own.

Capes are optional.

Campaign finance experts worry that super PACs will allow rich individuals or corporations to have an undue influence on US politics. (Yes, we know, that’s happened before.) Colbert, for his part, said he doesn’t know what he’ll do with any funds he collects.

“Give it to me, and let’s find out,” he said Thursday.

The new Colbert super PAC already has a website, and it’s open for donations, Colbert noted.

“Please donate, nation, because you can’t spell ‘donation’ without ‘nation’ and ‘dough’, he said

Comedian Steve Harvey's ex-wife has posted a series of videos on YouTube about the breakup of their marriage and the bitter fight that followed.

"It's hard to put something behind that keeps popping up in your life," Mary Harvey said, pointing to an Essence magazine article this month referring to her and a lawsuit filed by her former husband.

"As I sit and talk and speak right now, there's a lawsuit that's been filed against me in Texas, because in Steve's opinion, I was responsible when Oprah didn't give him a TV show," she said. "I'm being sued for that as I sit here on this sofa today."

The three videos, which run 26 minutes, include excerpts of letters and e-mails she said she intercepted between Harvey and his current wife, Marjorie, near the end of her 16-year relationship with him.

A statement given to CNN Monday by Harvey's lawyer said: "We are appalled and aware of the videos and the other fabricated documents, which were placed on the internet over the weekend by the ex-wife of Mr. Steve Harvey, which contained false, misleading, derogatory, disparaging, malicious, explicit and slanderous information about Mr. Harvey, his current wife and others."

Steve and Mary Harvey divorced in 2005, but a bitter fight followed in which Harvey "turned my son against me, had me evicted from our house, thrown out, all the businesses, all the money, the cars," she said.

"He manipulated the courts, everything against me," she said.

Steve Harvey would not personally respond to the charges because of "existing court gag orders," lawyer Bobbie Edmonds said.

He is "taking necessary legal steps" against the ex-wife because of the videos, which he said violate court orders "which prohibit either party, their lawyers or representatives from discussing and releasing information on the internet and to the media," Edmonds said.

"We are saddened that the ex-wife has resorted to such devious and selfish behavior, with a reckless disregard for their minor son, her adult son and Mr. Harvey's other children," he said.

Steve and Mary Harvey met in 1989 and married in 1996, she said. Their son, Wynton, was born a year after their marriage.

In the videos, Mary Harvey describes the early years of their relationship as a financial struggle in which she supported his comedy career by sleeping in their car as they traveled from job to job.

The couple would sometimes survive on a jar of coins kept in their trunk, sometimes by stealing gas to make it to the next city, she said.

It was when Harvey's career was prospering that she realized "I was not alone in my relationship with my husband," she said.

"It hit me really hard" when she intercepted a love letter from a mistress on their second wedding anniversary, she said.

The letter was from the woman Harvey would later move in with and marry, Mary Harvey said.

She never got an apology, she said.

"Steve never said that he was sorry," she said. "He had our housekeeper pack his belongings up and forward those belongings to New York and after that, that was it."

The last of the three videos includes an apology letter she said Harvey's lawyer wanted her to sign.

"He wanted me to take the blame for it, in writing," she said.

here's the videos:

Organizers say 250,000 crowded the National Mall for the event by comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Satire and laughs ruled the rally, with a rare serious message from Stewart at the end: These are 'hard times, not end times.'

Stephen Colbert (L) engages in a debate with fellow comedian Jon Stewart (R) at the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" on the National Mall in Washington, October 30, 2010.

On the eve of Halloween, just days before a potentially seismic U.S. election, Sarah Wanenchak marched on Washington to deliver a message of fear to the American people.

Walking purposefully along the length of the National Mall, Wanenchak held a sign over her head that revealed a terrible truth: “Obama is a Secret Zombie - Show Us Your Death Certificate.”

And, yes, it was a joke.

The 26-year-old grad student from Philadelphia was among a throng of Americans who gathered Saturday for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, an event that spoofed political mega-rallies even as it turned into one itself.

Hosted by comedian-satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the two-hour rally provided an outlet for Americans who have grown frustrated with a hyper-partisan political and media culture that often drowns out respectful debate in the country.

At times serious and silly, the rally served as an emphatic counterpoint to conservative talk show host Glenn Beck's Aug. 28 “Restoring Honor” rally, which cast America as a nation in moral decline and in need of a spiritual re-awakening.

“I can't control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions,” Stewart, the host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, said in a 13-minute speech that closed the event.

“This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or to look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are, and we do,” he said. “But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.”

Rally Signs

Although there was no official estimate, the rally rivalled Beck's event in size - the crowd stretched from the foot of the U.S. Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial.

Stewart, in an apparent reference to Beck's claim to have drawn 500,000 people, opened the rally by jokingly trying to “count off” the audience one by one.

For the better part of its 120 minutes, the rally was pure satire. Stewart played the straight man seeking sanity in public discourse while Colbert - in character as a bombastic conservative host - promoted fear.

At one point, Stewart introduced the folksinger Yusuf, formerly Cat Stevens, to perform a rendition of his famous song, Peace Train. But he was interrupted by Colbert, who brought former Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne on stage.

Later, Colbert walked on a stage followed by a giant “Fear Puppet” and played video clips of hyperbolic cable TV broadcasts warning viewers about the dangers of everything from bed bugs to terrorism to fecal matter on hotel remote controls.

When Colbert said Americans should fear Muslims, because they “attacked us” on 9/11, Stewart responded that there are “plenty of Muslim people that are not bad, and that you would like, and who are fine.”

Enter Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the former Los Angeles Lakers basketball star, who grabbed a microphone and said: “A real friend understands that no matter what religious position someone plays, we are all on the same team.”

The crowd was almost as eager to get in on the act. Some came hoping to hear and convey serious political messages, while others simply wanted to laugh. Still others came to do both.

“I love the idea of a rally that says, ‘Everybody chill out,' ” said Wanenchak, who carried the ‘Obama is a Zombie' sign.

Her placard was a dig at the expense of the “birther” movement, which contends President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and questions the validity of his birth certificate.

“Primarily I think this is entertainment,” Wanenchak said. “But I also think it is important to show up in support of the fact there really is a silent and increasingly dismayed majority of people in this country who don't think the way to debate in this country is to compare your opponent to Hitler.”

Gary Cole, 64, came all the way from Indiana because he worries that cable networks such as Fox News are turning Americans against each other.

“I think a lot of misinformation is being spread by the likes of Glenn Beck and Fox News,” Cole said.

“I think it is a serious message that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are trying to send. Stephen Colbert's comments are tongue in cheek. Keeping fear alive is what Fox News is trying to do, trying to scare people.”

Though Colbert steered clear of taking any political sides, many in the audience carried signs with overt - or subtle - liberal messages.

“8 Years of Silence and Now You're Mad?” said one sign, an apparent reference to conservative anger that emerged after president George W. Bush left office.

“I understand the Tea Party is upset about taxes and deficits, but why didn't want to take their country back when George Bush was running up the deficit?” said Brenda Taylor, 50, of Rockville, Maryland.

“Why now do they want to take their country back?”

Some signs took aim at former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, a driving force behind the Tea Party movement.

“I Can See Virginia From Here,” said one, a reference to Palin's claim she could see Russia from her home in Wasilla, Alaska.

Jose Rodriguez, who was selling political-themed merchandise, said his biggest sellers were buttons saying Jon Stewart for President and Vote Zombie Palin.

Although he came to the rally to be entertained, Rodriguez credited Stewart for seeking to convey a more earnest message about the loss of civility in public debate.

“Humour is one of the most important political tools we have,” Rodriguez said. “And humour is much better than negativity.”

In his closing speech, Stewart expressed some hesitation about bringing a sober message to a comedy show.

“I know there are boundaries for a comedian, pundit talker guy and I am sure I will find out tomorrow how I have violated them.”

But he forged ahead anyway, taking broadsides at what he called the “24-hour politico pundit perpetual panic conflictinator” of cable television news.

“If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” Stewart said. “The image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us (seen) through a funhouse mirror.”

The U.S. media is the country's “immune system” and “if it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker,” Stewart said.

“Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.”

On Oct. 30, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will host dueling rallies on the National Mall. Called "The Rally to Restore Sanity" and the "March to Keep Fear Alive," respectively, the two rallies closely mimic Glenn Beck's recent "Restoring Honor Rally," also held in Washington, D.C.

Stewart sat down with Terry Gross on Sept. 29 in front of a live audience at New York City's 92nd Street Y to discuss his time on The Daily Show, his role in the media, and the upcoming rally — which is being billed as "Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement."

"Like everything that we do, the march is merely a construct," he says. "It's merely a format, in the way the book is a format, a show is a format ... to be filled with the type of material that Stephen and I do and the point of view [that we have]. People have said, 'It's a rally to counter Glenn Beck.' It's not. What it is was, we saw that and thought, 'What a beautiful outline. What a beautiful structure to fill with what we want to express in live form, festival form."

For the past 11 years, Stewart has been expressing his opinions nightly on The Daily Show, which consistently ranks among the top programs viewed by the 18-34 age demographic. His quick wit and biting satire have taken the once-obscure fake-news show and made it an influential voice in American humor and politics.

To make the bits that go into the nightly show, Stewart says, the writers and producers follow a daily schedule that includes a lot of research, writing and rewriting.

Terry Gross interviewed Jon Stewart on Sept. 29 at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

"You'd be incredibly surprised at how regimented our day is and how the infrastructure of the show is mechanized," he says. "People say, The Daily Show, you guys just sit around and make jokes,' but to weed through all of this material ... and decide what to do, we have a very strict day that we have to adhere to. And by doing that, it gives us the freedom to improvise."

Each day at 9 a.m., Stewart sits with his writers and producers. They go over all of the previous day's top news stories and how they've been covered by the 24-hour news channels and other news programs.

"The 9 o'clock is to kind of rehash the analysis we were going over the night before, to see if the premises and hypotheses we came up with the night before have come to pass, and what's the video evidence," Stewart says. "And we take that and we start to knit it together for writing assignments. And those writing assignments are usually coming back in at 11:30, at which point we begin to read them. Then we go over the notes of how we're going to attack it. The day basically goes as sort of a little dance between writing and rewriting and including all of the other elements — graphics and other things."

The final hours before the 6 p.m. live taping are spent rewriting chunks of the script that didn't work during the dress rehearsal, or adding material that the staff has found between writing sessions. Sometimes, Stewart says, entire elements are completely reworked during the show's rewrite — and then performed for the first time in front of the studio audience.

But even though The Daily Show often comes up with facts and stories missed by other news sources, Stewart says, it would be wrong to describe what he does as "journalism."

"We don't do anything but make the connections," he says. "We're just going off our own instinct of, 'What are the connections to this that make sense?' And this really is true: We don't fact-check [and] look at context because of any journalistic criteria that has to be met; we do that because jokes don't work when they're lies. We fact-check so when we tell a joke, it hits you at sort of a gut level — not because we have a journalistic integrity, [but because] hopefully we have a comedic integrity that we don't want to violate."

Stewart  is the co-author of America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democratic Inaction and Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race. He also hosted the 78th and 80th Academy Awards and has received two Peabody Awards for his work on The Daily Show's election coverage in 2000 and 2004.

This October 30th, will you Restore Sanity with Jon or Keep Fear Alive with Stephen?

You know those YouTube videos with that manly Old Spice guy and his hilarious responses to Twitter fans? Of course you do. So does everybody, it seems, because Old Spice body wash sales have increased 107% in the past month in part thanks to that social media marketing campaign.

Already published stats from video analytics company Visible Measures that made it clear that the Old Spice guy was a hugely successful initiative from marketing firm Wieden + Kennedy, achieving millions of viral video views quicker than past hits like Susan Boyle and U.S. President Barack Obama’s election victory speech.

The statistic of the 107% sales increase over the past month comes from Nielsen, which also revealed that sales increased 55% over the past three months. Individual products that were slipping in sales saw spikes after actor Isaiah Mustafa showed them off in the TV and Internet video ads. Those numbers were cited in an article at BrandWeek.

The campaign began with simple TV ads, which then went viral on YouTube. The follow-up program in which Mustafa recorded funny videos in response to fans, bloggers and Twitter influencers hit it out of the park in the zeitgeist. Adweek quotes Visible Measures’ Matt Cutler saying that the total web views for all Old Spice brand videos have reached 110 million, “surpassing the reach of traditional broadcast.”

Adweek also reports that Old Spice is working on a new campaign, but that it’s “unrelated” to the Mustafa videos. That’s a tough act to follow, but we don’t think anyone at Old Spice is complaining today.

Update: Some readers have pointed to news stories saying that sales for Old Spice went down. Not exactly.

The earlier reports of drops in sales referred to the Old Spice product Red Zone After Hours, which experienced a 7% drop. WARC, the source for that story, also acknowledges Nielsen’s data, saying, “Despite reports to the contrary, Nielsen data shows that sales of the Old Spice Body Wash range as a whole rose by 55% over the last three months, and by 107% in the last month alone.”

We will acknowledge the point that there is simply a timeframe correlation between the boosts in Old Spice sales and the ad campaign.

This morning i had a chance to aee the "Old Spice Guy," otherwise known as Isaiah Mustafa, on "GMA." He has been responding to tweets with personalized YouTube videos. Last night I sent a tweet and asked how President Obama can gain back some of the female support he has lost.

Old Spice Guy had these suggestions:

--From now on Obama should only be seen in a towel.
--Obama should begin his State of the Union address with "Hellloo ladies" instead of "My fellow Americans."
--And finally, end the speech with a "presidential ab point."

“I’m setting the example, and it’s going to be puzzled over and studied and followed, from now on.” – John Doe, Seven.

Although Wieden + Kennedy had a very different aim than the homicidal “John Doe” character from David Fincher’s thriller Seven, this is probably what the advertising agency behind Old Spice’s latest marketing campaign must be thinking right now.

The campaign, in which the “Old Spice guy” — as actor Isaiah Mustafa, who starred in most of Old Spice’s recent commercials, has come to be known as on the Internet — ended today. In his final tweet and video, Mustafa says that “like all great things this too must end.”

And then he catches a giant fish that falls from nowhere.

The team behind this amazingly well-run campaign managed to engage half of the Internet, and provoke almost unequivocally positive results from social media sites such as Reddit and Twitter. Hell, even the comments on YouTube were overwhelmingly positive — and that never happens. The Old Spice Twitter account accumulated tens of thousands of new followers and the YouTube videos amassed hundreds of thousands of views.

Everything was run perfectly. The Old Spice guy recorded his video responses in rapid succession, an amazing feat in itself which cannot be truly appreciated if you’ve never been in front of a camera. His answers were a key mix of coolness and the stuff internet memes are made of. The actual brand — Old Spice — was never shoved down viewers’ throats. Most importantly, all of it was incredibly fun to watch.

The team behind the campaign took great care to engage celebrities, influencers, common folk and popular social media sites in balanced quantities. And it knew exactly how to talk to them. In his penultimate video, the Old Spice guy talks directly to his daughter, explaining that until recently, he was just a struggling actor no one has ever heard of. When was the last time a marketing campaign spoke directly to you in such a frank way, making you laugh and cry at the same time?

Wieden + Kennedy have set a standard marketing experts will admire and follow in the years to come. This is the future of marketing.