Despite being a terrific actor, Alec Baldwin has a tendency to apologize for verbal faux pas, whether it involves a telephone call to his wife and daughter that is being recorded or, more currently, about making a joke on The Late Show with David Letterman about Filipino mail-order brides.

The politicians in the Philippines may be overreacting a tad. If anybody in this country took Baldwin so seriously, he would not have been the leader of the F.A.G.s in Team America: World Police. The Russians, being more worldly, apparently did not make a reactionary statement to the part of his sentence involving Russian mail-order brides.

I doubt his position on 30 Rock is in jeopardy as a result of this incident. If anything, he's gotten more publicity out of it.

He just should have said the mail-order bride was from Arkansas. At least the incident would not have been an international one.