From 1965: Walt Disney guests on The Jack Benny Hour…

Hey, here's another installment of Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live. This installment takes us through Season 22, a season I didn't watch often, though I had a lot of friends who told me I should. I find these recaps fascinating though and it's hard to believe that the folks making them aren't even halfway through the run…

Dozens of online sources are reporting the passing of comic book writer-editor Jim Shooter at the age of 73, the cause being given as esophageal cancer. That's one of those "it shouldn't happen to anyone" ways to go.

Jim had several enviable careers — writing for DC when he was a teenager…serving as Editor-in-Chief of Marvel for a long, lucrative but controversial period…launching several new companies that failed to last, etc. The details of his life are already being recounted in dozens of places across the Internet.

I've been sitting here for a while trying to decide what I could say about him and I finally decided the following; that the best course of action is to sit this one out…at least for a while, probably forever. There are enough people out there writing about him that you won't miss me.

Here's a little piece of history that I stumbled across while Facebooking. It's a big card that a bunch of us signed for June Foray, the First Lady of Cartoon Voicing as some of us called her. She was a dear, sweet lady who was so, so generous with her time and talents. She had way more of both than most people have. She lived to the age of 99 years, 10 months and 8 days. That close to a hundred!

The card, as you can see, is dated 2011. June left us in 2017. The last time I saw her was a month or so before she died. A very wonderful voice actress named Julie Nathanson wanted to meet her and to tell her what an inspiration and pioneer she was. Today, there are an awful lot of women making what are sometimes very good careers in Voiceover…but June worked just about every day back when there weren't many ladies in that profession. You can see the shaky signature of one of the others on the card: Lucille Bliss, who among other characters was the voice of Smurfette on The Smurfs and way before that, the voice of Crusader Rabbit. Lucille died in 2016.

I knew June for along time and attended so many birthday parties for her that I don't remember when and where I signed this card…with a pen that was obviously running out of ink. One party for June I remember well was not a birthday celebration, just one of many tributes. It was on June 17, 1994 at the Beverly Garland Hotel out in the valley. Everyone in the animation community was in one big ballroom but almost all of us were ducking over to another room where there was a TV set. On that TV set was live coverage of the L.A. Police Department chasing a white Bronco with O.J. Simpson in it. Even June was more interested in that than in her party.

Getting back to that last visit with June: Julie and I met for lunch out in Woodland Hills, then I drove us to June's home where she'd lived since, I believe, the fifties.  It was like a museum with artifacts of her career.  To find a place to sit, you had to move huge stuffed Bullwinkle or Rocky dolls.  June was confined to a wheelchair and was getting loving care from her friend/driver/historian Dave Nimitz.  She was not working and was very unhappy not to be working but delighted to meet Julie, who said all the right things.

Almost a year to the day after June passed, we filled the Motion Picture Academy Theater with a Who's Who of the animation business and there, other people said all the right things.  She was most beloved and respected and I wrote about that night here.  If you click over there, you can see a larger version of the above photo and see a list of all the important ladies in it. They and so many more are now in the voice biz because June kicked open the door for others. I miss her so I was glad to come across the card and be reminded of who she was and all she meant to us. A lot there to think about.

Here's an important video John Oliver's show tonight…

So…what's in this bill that Trump is insisting Congress pass? Well, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says it will make the deficit go way, way up and make the number of Americans who have health insurance go way, way down. Here's The New York Times reporting on the CBO. And here's one of their reporters, Andrew Duehren, going into greater detail about it.

Meanwhile, here's Daniel Dale over at CNN and one of his colleagues listing some of the things Trump has said about it and explaining why they're false.

And here are Politifact and Steve Benen doing more of the same.

Lastly for now, Jonathan Cohn discusses what the slashing of Medicaid will do to some people in North Carolina. This may be of special interest because G.O.P. Senator Thom Tillis — who's looking like a "no" vote on Trump's bill — just announced he will not seek another term. His seat is therefore up for grabs next year and it's one the Republicans probably need to hold onto if they're going to keep their majority in the Senate.

Mark is very busy today and when Mark's very busy, he sometimes picks out a long post from a long time ago on this blog, writes a short intro to it in the third person and then posts it here. This first ran here on April 17, 2014…

This story occurred in 1978. I was the Head Writer — I think that was my title — on a Saturday AM TV show and on this program, I'd learned the best way to get the scripts done was to not go in to work.

When I went into work, first of all, I couldn't sit around in my pajamas, unshaven and unshowered, satiating my occasional need for food by walking six yards, making a quick sandwich and taking it back to my desk to eat as I worked. When I went into the studio, I had to shave and shower and get dressed and then drive all the way out to the studio in the valley, which was 45 minutes each way — longer if traffic was bad and traffic was always bad. I had to greet people and make small talk and get dragged into meetings to discuss various aspects of the show and then someone would always say, "Hey, we have things to talk about…let's do it over lunch." Lunch was two hours right there.

I couldn't get anything written if I went to the studio. At home, I could get plenty done so I tried to go in no more than once a week. Twice was sometimes necessary.

A new writer had come on staff and he'd just handed in his first script. I thought it was very good so I fixed a few spelling mistakes and had the Production Assistant copy it and distribute copies to everyone who needed copies. The next day, I planned to not go in so I worked all day and into the evening and didn't stop there. Writing seemed to be flowing out of me at a good clip so I stayed up until around dawn, pounding away on my state-of-the-art (then) typewriter. You can work that late when you don't have to go into an office the next morning.

Or at least I didn't think I did when I went to bed close to 6 AM. At 10 AM, the telephone rousted me with one of those sharp rings that makes you just know something is serious. It was. It was the show's producer calling — a nice, bright lady who was in a state of Utter Panic. I was only about one-third awake as I asked her, "What's wrong?"

"It's this new writer's first script," she said. "I just got it and it's a disaster. An unmitigated disaster. Mark, we have a Major Crisis here."

I told her I thought it was fine. She told me it was not fine. It was a Major Crisis. In fact, it was now two Major Crises. Major Crisis #1 was that the new writer had written this unmitigated disaster. Major Crisis #2 was that the Head Writer did not see it as an unmitigated disaster. Suddenly, I was like a doctor who hadn't noticed that the patient was bleeding from all orifices. "You have to get out here right away," she said. "We have to talk about this."

I said, "I was planning on coming in tomorrow. Can't we discuss it then? This script isn't scheduled to go into production for another week or two. If there's anything wrong with it, we have plenty of time to fix it!"

The panic in her voice grew. "Mark," she said, "I feel the whole show slipping away. We need to fix this now."

I got the message. She was worried they'd not only hired the wrong new writer but the wrong Head One as well. "Okay," I said. "Keep your wrists closed. I'll be there as soon as I can." I had to. After all, it was a Major Crisis.

So I shaved and I showered and I got dressed and I got in my car and I drove to the studio which was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and I walked into her office and I said, "Okay, I'm here. What's wrong with the script?"

She picked it up and said, "It takes forever to get started. It's dead time. Everyone's just standing around talking."

The writer had started the script with a joke — a good joke, I thought — then commenced introducing the plot around the middle of page two. I took the script from her, crossed out three lines on Page 1 and three more on Page 2 and handed it back to her. She read it over and said, "Oh, that's fine. The story gets started quicker now."

I said, "What else bothers you about it?"

She said, "That's it. I haven't read past the middle of Page 2 yet."

Evanier's Rule of Thumb: Any Major Crisis you can solve in under a minute was never a Major Crisis. It wasn't even a Minor Crisis.

A Major Crisis would be…well, let me give you an example of a Major Crisis. The script we're talking about here was for a Saturday morning series produced by Sid and Marty Krofft Productions. The particular episode revived some characters who had appeared on their 1973-1974 Saturday morn show, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.

In '74, I was working a lot for Western Publishing, makers of Gold Key Comics. One day, I was up meeting with my editor and as I started to leave, I heard the receptionist remind him that Marty Krofft was coming by for an appointment in half an hour. I had not met either Krofft then but I'd admired the output of their operation. I mentioned to the receptionist that I might hang around the office until he got there so I could introduce myself — or better still, be introduced. I just wanted to tell him how much I liked what they did. Western was then doing a few comics and activity books based on H.R. Pufnstuf and other Krofft properties and Marty was coming by to discuss future publishing plans.

I went back to chat with Bernie Zuber, who basically constituted the entire Production Department at Western's offices on Hollywood Boulevard. Bernie was staring out the window at a huge fire — billows of ebony smoke filling the air — about a mile off. We guesstimated it was somewhere around Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea.

And as we were guessing, the receptionist came and found me to say, "If you're still waiting for Marty Krofft, his office just called and he won't be in. That fire you're looking at…that's Goldwyn Studios. The Kroffts are taping a show there."

Goldwyn Studios was an old, venerated facility smack-dab in the middle of Hollywood. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks owned the place when it had a different name. Wuthering Heights was filmed there. So was Some Like It Hot. So was Guys and Dolls. So was West Side Story. So were hundreds of other memorable films and TV shows.

The fire had started on the set of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Something electrical had sparked near something combustible and within the hour, three of the studio's five soundstages were gone, along with an office building.

That's a Major Crisis.

And that's how I didn't meet Marty Krofft that day. Four years later when I went to work for him, I did and found much to admire about him and his brother, one being Crisis Management. Or maybe I should say "crisis management" with non-capitalized letters because no problem that occurred when I was there rose anywhere near that level. But there were problems. Freightloads of problems. Most of the projects I worked on for them were variety shows and producing a variety show is basically an exercise in dealing with one problem after another after another after another. Sid and Marty and the kind of people they already employed proved to be real good at coping with problems…solving most, working around those that couldn't be solved. The producer lady who had the moment of panic I described above was pretty good at it, too. Just not all the time.

I hope some of that rubbed off on me but I did get a lesson the day she dragged me out to the Valley because one script got off to a slow start. The lesson — and I'm sure you knew this but I can be real dumb at times — is that the first thing you have to do to solve a problem is to accurately and unemotionally gauge its size and scope. Big Problems require Big Solutions. Little Problems need Little Solutions.

If you try to solve a Big Problem with a Little Solution, it won't work. The problem is bigger than the solution. If you try to solve a Little Problem with a Big Solution…well, that might work but it's likely to create other problems because you have Too Much Solution. It's like if you tried to kill a cockroach in your kitchen by rolling in a Sherman Tank. You might crush the cockroach but you might also crush your stove, your refrigerator, your cleaning lady, your box of Rice Chex, your tuna-noodle casserole, etc.

One day, early in my days with Sid 'n' Marty, Sid got to talking about the fire. It was in no way his or the company's fault but he felt bad about the headaches it had caused everyone. No one was injured but many tenants of that office building had lost treasured personal items. But then he got to recalling the funny aspects of that afternoon — like Rip Taylor in the grotesque make-up he wore on the show, carrying Billy Barty in his Sigmund costume to safety. There were also all the technicians and crew members and puppeteers and little people fleeing out onto Santa Monica Boulevard to escape the flames. That he could laugh about it now, just four years later, and smile at how everyone had helped everyone else was a very good sign.

On that first show I did for them, a Fire Marshal came on the stage to make certain our sets were non-flammable, which they were. He had been around for the Sigmund experience, before and after the fire, and he told me he was amazed how well the Kroffts and their entire staff handled matters, valuing people over property…and then, with all of their sets and most of their costumes lost, bouncing back and finishing production on the series so that no air dates were missed. "I've worked a lot of fires," he said. "And the first thing you learn is that the panic often does more damage than the fire."

That's a good thing to remember…and you can minimize that panic if you don't treat the minor crises of life like major ones. Of course, that means being able to tell the difference.

Here at newsfromme.com, we love barbershop quartets…or any group singing a cappella. And no, this is not a video of one or more people singing "For the Longest Time." We also love TV theme songs, especially TV theme songs from shows for kids. We are therefore way-too-pleased to present a group called The Ashatones Barbershop Quartet singing, sans musical accompaniment, a whole lotta themes from shows for a younger audience…

I love images — still or moving — of old Los Angeles. Here are some of the moving kind as filmed back in the thirties. The audio and color work are fake but the rest of what you'll see is real…

My favorite game show is…well, if you go way back, it would be something like I've Got a Secret or What's My Line? that gave witty people a chance to be witty, usually on live, anything-can-happen television.  If we get into more recent ones — polished, edited, taped five or more a day — I really liked the original daytime version of Press Your Luck. It ran on CBS from 1983 to 1986 and was hosted and hosted well by Peter Tomarken. It was was a game that was cleverly crafted to create frequent moments of Sudden Death and contestants going head-to-head. Unlike a lot of game shows, there was some genuine strategy involved. If you wanted to win, that is.

The current prime-time version hosted by Elizabeth Banks is okay but it does feel a little overproduced to me, like someone always has their finger on an APPLAUSE button and all the contestants are receiving a constant intravenous solution of pure glucose. The video below consists of moments from the original daytime version. This is what's called a Sizzle Reel — a collection of highlights that someone makes up to sell the show to some potential buyer or something. Since the series had been on the air a while before this was made, I'm not sure who they were trying to sell with it. Perhaps it was to entice buyers in other countries to buy the rights to do a version of the program for their local markets. There were a number of them.

Whatever the purpose, this reel shows off the excitement of the original show well. Beginning around the 4:35 mark, there's an excerpt of a spin-passing battle between two ladies and it actually went on a lot longer than what is shown here. I remember seeing the whole thing when it aired and thinking that when this occurred in the studio, one of the creators of this game — like, say, Bill Carruthers, whom I'd met — turned to someone and said, "See? That's exactly what this game was configured to make happen sometimes!"

The main thing folks remember of the original series is that a man named Michael Larson figured out a way to "beat" the game board, got on the show and hit them for a then-staggering $110,237. That would be three-to-four times as much in today's money but it would still be only mid-range impressive when many game shows offer a shot at a million and up. Still, Larson's take-home pay was Game Show History at the time and it's still a very rare example of a turn of events on a game show that its producers did not anticipate.

The exact outcome of a game show is not pre-determined. They don't know in advance who'll win or what they'll win but the result is always something they knew could and would occur, Michael Larson being one of the rare exceptions. If you have the time, you might enjoy this documentary that was made a few years later that explains what happened, how it happened and what happened afterwards to Larson. One of the "talking heads" you'll see interviewed in there is a friend of mine, Bob Boden, who has worked in every corner of the game show world for many years now, including time at CBS (when Mr. Larson worked his Whammy-avoidance wizardry ) and helping found the Game Show Network, for which he caused this documentary to be made…

As you saw if you watched it, or can guess if you didn't, it's a fascinating story and there were several attempts made to dramatize it into a motion picture. I think the first person who tried it was me. I had a friend other than Bob who worked on the show then and she called me the evening of that fateful tape day and told me what had transpired. She was still in a state of semi-shock.

What intrigued me about the story was the panic and uncertainty that transpired offstage and especially in the control room.  After Larson passed $20,000 or $25,000, they got to worrying: Was the game board broken?  Had someone tampered with it?  Someone who was in collusion with Larsen?  There was the obvious concern about how much dough he might be taking away but CBS had that much in petty cash.  Some folks behind-the-scenes were more worried about the show being damaged, perhaps irreparably, by whatever the hell it was that was happening on that stage.

There was also a big worry about getting an airable show out of whatever resulted.  The half-hour format for Press Your Luck allowed for one game per episode.  In the past, they'd always over-taped the host chit-chatting with the contestants so they could fill out the time if a game was short.  If the game ran long, they could do judicious editing and trim a minute or so.  But the way things were going with Michael Larson, the show would run too long to edit down to thirty minutes.

A (slight) sigh of relief was exhaled when his run seemed to be lasting long enough that they could cut it into two shows.  But then there was the "When will he stop?" worry that he'd keep going for a million or more.  He finally stopped shortly after reaching the $100,000 mark.  Worry over?  No because he still had four spins and he had some mystical way of never hitting a Whammy and always landing on a square that gave him moola plus a free spin.  If he had hit a Whammy and gone down to zero, he could have started building the total up again…and again…and again.  They could have wound up with a round that ran for hours.

And if this guy wound up hitting record amounts and then crashing and going home with a case of Turtle Wax…well, that wouldn't have been a pleasant thing to broadcast, would it?

Oh — and what if one of those worries about a game board malfunction or collusion turned out to be  true?  Would they have to void the game and not award the money?  What kind of legal mess would that create?  What kind of bad publicity?  Would CBS find some reason to cancel the show because of this?  The panic went in so many directions that it sounded like a great movie or (more likely) TV movie to me…or maybe a book.

With my friend's help, I visited the set of the show on its next tape date.  I think I was more curious to find out how the show was done than I was to turn the story into a writing gig.  I talked to Peter Tomarken (the host), Rod Roddy (the announcer) and others who were there.  The stagehands had the most intriguing tales to tell…but then they always do.

Soon after, I had a meeting with Bill Carruthers, the head guy behind the program. With his blessing, I showed an edited version of the incident to a major producer of TV movies as part of a "pitch."  He pitched it in turn to buyers (including CBS) and for a while there, it looked like it might turn into a TV movie and he even had a great idea as to who he wanted to have play Michael Larson: Mickey Rooney.  I had an idea as to who should play Peter Tomarken.  I wanted to use the actual video footage of Peter Tomarken from the show.

But like many things in Hollywood, the TV movie never materialized.  We got as far as my agent and the producer negotiating what we'd demand the network pay me for a script if any network had enough interest to commission a script.  Alas as it turned out, there were those at CBS who wanted to pretend the whole thing never happened.  They began, I was told, arguing with the division that was considering buying it.  I was also told that at this point, CBS still had private detectives investigating Michael Larson to determine if there was anything more to his story than just some guy on his own finding a loophole in the  way a game board worked.

Meanwhile, the other networks weren't sure they wanted to air a movie about a rival network's program.  They weren't sure they did and they weren't sure they didn't.  Also, Larson was still alive and sounding very litigious and/or demanding, especially after (as you saw if you watched the doc) he lost all the money he'd won on the show. There were other hurdles so it didn't happen for a while…and then it didn't happen for a longer while…and then a longer while still…

…and that's the way a lot of projects in show business don't happen. There's never a moment when anyone says it's off. It just percolates for so long without going forward that everyone just kind of forgets about it. I forgot about it…though there were occasional reminders and occasional attempts by others who had the same idea. At one point, a movie was reportedly in the works with Nicholas Cage attached not as its star but as one of its producers. They had Bill Murray, they claimed, lined up to play Michael Larson. Bill Murray might have been a real good idea but again, it didn't happen for a while…and then it didn't happen for a longer while…

Recently, someone actually did make such a movie. It's called The Luckiest Man in America and it was directed and co-written by Samir Oliveros and, according to IMDB, shot partly in the U.S., partly in Colombia, partly in Canada and partly in Chile. Here's the trailer for it…

You can probably catch it streaming somewhere but I don't recommend it. I saw it and it's one of those films — and I could name many — when filmmakers fictionalized too much of a true story where the truth would have been more interesting. They made Peter Tomarken (a helluva nice guy) and many of the behind-the-scenes people look like clueless boobs.

Mostly, they invented scenes…like in the middle of the taping, when Larsen still hadn't won all that money and could still have lost every dime, they had him wandering off the set and onto a nearby stage where he somehow became a guest on a live-in-progress talk show hosted by a Tom Snyder type. They also had the producers, in mid-taping, find out via some detective-type work what Larsen was up to, whereas in reality, they had no idea.

There are other departures from reality that I think make the whole thing sound unreal. It's like in that recent Saturday Night movie, they had Lorne Michaels — minutes before the show we now call Saturday Night Live was going to go live with its debut episode — wander out of the studio.  He wound up in a bar where he watched a bad stand-up comedian and hireds the guy's writer to add jokes to the show they were minutes from broadcasting.  Or the decision to air the show being made one second before they did.  Or the whole thing with Milton Berle.

No one was expecting a documentary but there were many moments when that film ventured into "That could never have happened like that" territory. I do understand that a true story must sometimes speculate and fictionalize, and some of my favorite movies did. But I don't think it's always the right way to go.

Then again, you might see The Luckiest Man in America and love it, especially if you aren't familiar with the real story that they chose to sort of tell.  If you aren't and you might someday see the movie, maybe you shouldn't watch that documentary that I recommended you watch thirteen paragraphs ago.

Here's a tour of the office and home of Mr. Robert Petrie, the head writer of the popular program, The Alan Brady Show. The folks who put these together, carefully researched what we saw of those locations on The Dick Van Dyke Show and ad-libbed their way around the other parts. When we're looking at the office, the host tells us this is how it would have looked if you were in the audience looking at the set. Well, I was in the audience once looking at the office set and their version looks like what I remember seeing except that I think their re-creation is a lot more spacious.

I remember noting how much smaller the office looked in person. (Before anyone asks: The episode I saw filmed was the one in which Rob and Laura bought their house in New Rochelle and the only scene that took place in that house was in the basement. In that basement there was a huge rock which had not been there in an earlier episode in which Rob was hustled in a pool game that took place in his basement.) But it's all a fascinatimg exercise in architectural rendering — or whatever you'd call this kind of 3-D tour…

Hey, remember Kilmar Armando Abrego García? The man that ICE and its associates deported, then admitted he'd been wrongfully deported but it was impossible to bring him back, then they brought him back and now he's getting some Due Process and standing trial? I know, I know…so much has happened lately that it's hard to remember what you were outraged about just a few weeks ago.

So he's on trial and the case against him is said (by this attorney) to be "wobbly." In public, Attorney General Pam Bondi said they had an airtight case against him for a whole list of nefarious crimes. Well, now that it's in court, they aren't even prosecuting him on some of those crimes and the proof for the others looks, like the man said, wobbly.

So what is the Trump organization going to do? Well, they might be able to stop the trial if they deport him again. Read both links in that order.

Here we have an intriguing question from the fine funnybook artist, Christopher Cook…

Hey, Mark! In your youth, did you have any cartoon crushes? The cartoon girls who you wish were real so you could get to know better? The girl you'd readily offer a shoulder to cry on?

My first cartoon crush was Betty Rubble. I melted when she was crying in the episode were she and Barney try to adopt Bamm-Bamm. Since then, I've had cartoon crushes in my teens and, unhealthily, adult years. These included Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Melody (from Josie & the Pussycats), Velma (from Scooby-Doo), Dotty (from Clue Club), Brenda Chance (Captain Caveman), Lydia Deetz (Beetlejuice) and Blossom (The Powerpuff Girls, which I got to work on for DC Comics for eight terrific years).

If we're just talking animation, no. I had a lot of what you might call "crushes" in my teen years but they were all about flesh 'n' blood ladies — a few at school, some on TV. The latter list included, in no particular order, Mary Tyler Moore, Barbara Eden, Yvonne Craig, Julie Newmar, Susan Silo, Judy Carne, Sue Ane Langdon, a couple of Golddiggers on The Dean Martin Show…it was a long list and some of those infatuations didn't linger after the object of them had her TV show canceled.

But cartoons? I can't think of one. I guess the thinking — to the limited extent that I was thinking — went something like this: If you're going to fantasize about a woman from afar, it's healthier to go with the one-in-fifty-million chance of even meeting a real person (like Mary Tyler Moore) rather than the zero-or-less-in-a-million chance of Betty Rubble coming to life and then I get to meet her. Oddly enough, I eventually met — in some cases, briefly — most of the real ladies on my list. A lot of things have happened to me, good and bad, that I never imagined were possible.

The closest I came to crushes on females who were drawn, not born, were a few comic book characters but only when drawn by certain artists. I was fond of Supergirl but only when drawn by Jim Mooney, Kurt Schaffenberger, Mike Sekowsky or Bob Oksner. I was fond of Wonder Woman but only when drawn by Mike Sekowsky. I was fond of Mera in the Aquaman strip but only when drawn by Nick Cardy.

In fact, I was fond of any female character in a comic book drawn by Cardy, Sekowsky, Dan Spiegle, Wally Wood, John Romita or one or two others just as long as the lady depicted wasn't wearing a mask. A good analyst could probably spend hours explaining me not being attracted to any woman wearing a mask. My Yvonne Craig crush was limited to her portrayals of Barbara Gordon, not Batgirl.

I can't think of a character in the world of animation that ever did it for me…although when I was the writer-editor of a Jetsons comic book, I did have the artist draw Judy Jetson in a bikini. Does that count?

I've decided to end the daily posts of various folks singing this song, though more may grace this site in the future. You and I need a break from these so here's three more and then tomorrow, I'll post something different. This is a group called The Overtones…

This is a group made up of Chris Bandy, Cory Blackmon, Cooper Case, Mark Denman, John Frederick, and JP Stephens…

And finally — for now — here's Billy Joel himself doing it with Boyz 2 Men…

If you want to know how our bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities turned out — and wouldn't that be a nice thing to know? — Fred Kaplan has written an article that's free from partisan spin and premature conclusions. Those two flaws seem to be the trouble with most of what we've heard so far. The truth is that there's a lot that just plain isn't known yet and there are folks out there unwilling — or unable because of their job descriptions — to wait for solid information.

To put it in simpler terms: Fred's article is entitled "The Iran Strike Seems to Have Been More Effective Than Initial Intel Suggested." It may be a while before it is known how much more effective.