Monthly Archives: November 2012

Another interview with Mel Brooks.

In the past here, I've said some nice things about Mike Huckabee and once thought he was the kind of Republican for whom I might someday vote. I no longer think that and was reminded why when I watched his interview with Jon Stewart on last night's Daily Show.

If you didn't see it or even if you did, watch the extended, uncut version of it, not the one that was aired. I'm a big fan of Mr. Stewart's conversations with politicians who usually go on shows and just recite their usual talking points. Stewart asks unexpected but valid questions, knocks them off their rote speeches (to some extent) and has an actual dialogue. I'd love to see a show where he just talked to folks like this for a whole hour, maybe even without a studio audience.

Governor Huckabee disappointed me in last night's chat. Stewart ran a campaign commercial in which Huckabee refers to two Hot Button issues for Conservatives — abortion and gay marriage — and speaks of how God will judge you based on how you vote in this election. In other words, you can't be a good Christian and vote for Democrats. That to me is a cynical manipulation of religious devotion, not that far removed from "You aren't a good Christian if you don't give money to my church." But it's legal and may even be earnestly meant. My problem is mainly in Huckabee's insistence that that wasn't what he was doing. That's just plain disingenuous.

But watch the whole thing and decide for yourself. I just think I lost my last gram of respect for Mike Huckabee. Earlier in the discussion, you can see faint glimmers of why I once had any.

Back in April, Eric Idle staged four nights of an unusual play called What About Dick? down at the Orpheum Theater here in Los Angeles. It was a semi-coherent affair that overcame its confusion by having a stellar cast that included Tracey Ullman, Billy Connolly, Jane Leeves, Russell Brand, Eddie Izzard and other funny folks. Everyone in the house had a very good time, though I doubt a one of them could have explained the storyline…if indeed there was one. My friend Mickey Paraskevas and I had the best seats in the place for the first of the four performances: Front row center.

Mr. Idle has now released What About Dick? as a video you can download for six bucks. I paid my six bucks last night but didn't get it. They give you three download attempts for your money. I tried twice…and each time, I only got the first eight minutes before the download quit. I'm assuming that's because it had just gone online and everyone in the world was trying to get it at the same time…or maybe they just don't have things configured properly yet. I think I'll wait 'til next week to try and use my last attempt. Mickey has seen it and he says you can't see us in the audience. I assume that's because they didn't use much (or any) of that first performance, the one we attended. Comparing notes with friends who attended one of the later ones, it would appear a lot of rewriting was done, including a complete swapping-out of the closing number for a reprise of an earlier tune.

I think it's very much worth six bucks to see those performers perform even if you won't always be certain just what they're performing. Ms. Ullman is particularly hilarious doing whatever it is she does up there. So I'd recommend you go to the site and buy it — but you might want to wait a while. Here's a brief preview…

WonderCon used to be in San Francisco…and I really enjoyed it when it was there. In terms of both facilities and location, the Moscone Center was a great place for a comic convention. Unfortunately, the Moscone Center has more conventions that want those facilities than it has available dates, and they also don't make the kind of multi-year commitments that just about every other convention center is eager to make.

This year, the Moscone has been undergoing renovations and WonderCon had to relocate to Anaheim for 2012. They'd hoped to return to San Francisco for Spring of 2013 but were unable to procure dates…so they booked a WonderCon into Anaheim for March 29-31. At the time this was announced, WonderCon officials said they still hoped to secure dates from the Moscone to have a WonderCon there in late '13.

Well, they were offered a slot but it coincides with another major convention in S.F. that has already driven up hotel prices and would make for cramped quarters. So they've announced there will be no WonderCon there next year. I'm sorry to hear that but at least they're still hopeful for 2014.

I don't know the name of the group but I do like this music video which incorporates Laurel and Hardy footage…

A correspondent who asked to be anonymous here writes…

I'm enjoying your memories of your mom. And I share your concerns abut the rising costs of health care. You said this AM: "…admit that Obamacare is a decent starting point and build from there." One of my many worries about Obamacare is that the non-elected rule-making body (the Palin "death panel") would decide that folks like your mom were going to the hospital too often, not getting better, draining the system, and therefore would no longer be eligible for treatment…perhaps urged to "just get it over with…and we have a doctor who'll do that for her." I wouldn't want that to happen to your mom…or you…or me.

And that's just one reason why I think Obamacare is NOT a decent staring point. I think we need to start over on the conversation. I wonder if Roger agrees.

I'm sorry but I think the idea that a government panel would start recommending suicide is ridiculous. Hey, we have a lot of men and women who come back from military service depressed and emotionally-confused. Many are outright suicidal. Has it ever been a problem that a non-elected rule-making body (the Veterans Administration) started suggesting these people put a gun in their mouth and "just get it over with?"

We do in this country have non-elected rule-making bodies that decide who's going to the hospital too often. They're called insurance companies. As far as I know, Anthem and Cigna have never told patients to just get it over with…and unlike a government entity, they would have a profit motive for doing that.

What they do do is cut people off. As I mentioned, my mother had a great health insurance plan. If you were on the same kind of fixed income she had — my father's government pension — you could not buy a plan anywhere near as good today, even with no pre-existing conditions, of which she had many. When she had her cataract surgery a few years back, I literally paid more to park when I went to take her home than she did for the surgery. (Parking was seven bucks. The surgery was a $5.00 co-pay. Afterwards, I took her to an outside specialist — a highly-recommended Beverly Hills Opthamologist — for a second opinion, just to make sure the Kaiser doctors were doing all that could be done for her failing vision. He told me they were…and that if he'd done that cataract surgery, it would have run her $5,000 and he wouldn't have done any better a job.)

But even her insurance was going to run out. The last year of her life, I twice had her in a very good nursing home way down in Torrance. The first time was so she could recuperate from one of her many illnesses after the hospital said, "We can't keep her here any longer" and politely turned her out. The second time was…well, I don't like saying she went there to die but that's not wholly inaccurate. I was pretty sure she didn't have long to live and pretty sure that letting her return to her home — the only alternative she'd accept — would worsen her condition and pretty much ensure that she didn't survive the next attack and that she suffered greatly when it came. So I talked her doctors at Kaiser into putting her into this place in Torrance.

I couldn't get her in there but they could. Also, if she went into any Kaiser-affiliated nursing home on a Kaiser referral, Kaiser would pay the cost of her being there and send around a Kaiser doctor every day to check on her. My plan was that if she got better there, great. Maybe she could at some point go home. Maybe I could talk her into accepting an Assisted Living facility, a notion she'd been resisting with all her might. (I write more about that problem in the next installment of Tales of My Mother, coming soon to a blog near you.)

Kaiser, however, would only pay for X more days. She was allowed a certain number per year and had used up a lot during the earlier stay. So my idea was to keep her there as long as necessary, even though that might well mean me having to pay out-of-pocket once the Kaiser days ran out. I'm not sure how much that would have cost. The least it would have been was $1500 per week but that's without the Kaiser doctor coming around every day. I could add on the doctor for an additional fee but I never found out how much that was.

I wasn't sure how many more Kaiser-paid days she had but I lied and told her there were plenty. I didn't want her worrying about what it would cost me to keep her there. As it turned out, a few days after she died, I received a notice from Kaiser that her days had run out. So help me, she died on the last day Kaiser was paying for.

I've assumed that was a coincidence. As readers of this blog know, I have a lot of those in my life. But I have to wonder if anyone at the nursing home told her that as of the next day, I was going to start paying for her to be there.

As I wrote here on the day she died, I suspected she may well have just decided it was time to go. She was suffering greatly with no hope of getting much better. She was also feeling terribly, terribly guilty about how much of my time and attention she required. It would not have been at all out of character for her to decide enough was enough; time to do us both a favor and check out. She would have had an added incentive if someone told her that she was going to start costing me that kind of money per week for an indeterminate time. I wouldn't have minded it a lot but she sure would have.

Her situation with Kaiser was the kind of thing Sarah Palin was trying to characterize as a "death panel" — but only if done by a government agency. When a private health insurer does it…well, we all understand that businesses have to make a profit.

The folks who want to chuck Obamacare and start over all seem to believe we should get rid of it, then start looking around to see if anyone can come up with something better. Since the Affordable Care Act has been an issue for a few years and its opponents haven't proposed even a starting point for that "something better," I'm inclined to think there isn't one. In any case, nothing is stopping them from finding it now and offering it up as a preferable alternative.

But they don't want that. They want to kill it now, yanking it out from tens of millions of Americans who cannot otherwise obtain health insurance, while we see if anyone can come up with something better, something that can get through a still-gridlocked Congress. If you have a disease and no insurance, you just might not be able to wait until that happens.

Heard a lot about "The Fiscal Cliff?" Wanna know what it's all about? Kevin Drum explains it for you.

Here we have a 1987 story on CBS's 60 Minutes taking note of the 35th anniversary of MAD Magazine. These pieces always have a tendency to make it seem like the publication is written and drawn by the guys in the office. No one else is mentioned. You briefly see Mort Drucker painting but he is not identified. The history of MAD is discussed with no mention of Harvey Kurtzman or Al Feldstein. It was the same way when reporters visited the Marvel offices in the sixties: Articles and segments that made it seem like Stan Lee wrote and drew everything with at most, the occasional assist from unnamed people.

You'll hear founding publisher Bill Gaines talk about, among other things, why MAD doesn't accept advertising. He was probably sincere in his reasoning but I've spent much of my life around MAD people and heard other things. Gaines was a very eccentric man who had all sorts of (some would say:) odd quirks and it's interesting how so many of those quirks impacted the contents of the magazine. He craved, for instance, a sense of "family" around him. It kept the same guys drawing for MAD for decades to the general exclusion of new people. He was compulsive about certain kinds of orderliness — like, he had the canned soups at home in his kitchen cabinet alphabetized and liked to see his magazine have some of the same kind of predictability in contents.

He kept the staff small and, for him, manageable and didn't allow MAD even at its sales peak to go from eight-issues-per-year to monthly. Why? Because that would have meant bringing in new people, expanding the "family" and him either working harder or delegating duties. His reluctance to ads in MAD may have been a matter of the principles he states but it also may have flowed from a compulsion to keep MAD small and of not wanting to deal with outsiders. He also says in the piece that MAD shuns merchandising. He shunned some and accepted some…and the shunning always seemed to me, at least in part, to be a matter of, again, shying away from those outsiders. He was then making good money without ads or merchandising and just didn't want the headaches. Here's the 1987 piece…

And now, here's CBS News coverage from last Sunday, noting the 60th anniversary. This is for those of you who might enjoy seeing John Ficarra age. I think, for what it's worth, that the writing in MAD is now as sharp as it's ever been. It sells nowhere near as well as it once did but that's pretty much true of all magazines…

Matthew Yglesias says the Bush tax cuts are toast and that's that. Maybe a lot of the reason that certain billionaires fought so hard to defeat Obama is this: They knew that the economy was going to get better in 2013 and even better in 2014 no matter who won the presidency. The difference is that Romney would have extended the tax cut for the rich (and maybe cut deeper) and Obama wouldn't. So as things got better under Romney, they could have argued tax cuts for the rich help the economy and as things got better under Obama, they would have lost that argument forever.

Fred Kaplan on how General David Petraeus scandalized his name and ended his exalted role atop the U.S. intelligence community.

This should be a cautionary tale for men everywhere: If the head of the C.I.A. can't keep an affair secret, what hope is there for anyone else?

One of the earliest cartoon shows I recall loving was Crusader Rabbit, which in most accounts is said to be the first cartoon series ever produced for the new (at the time) medium of television. Lucille Bliss, who died Thursday at the age of 96, was the original voice of Crusader Rabbit.

Lucille was a native of New York who later lived alternately in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. In S.F., she hosted a popular kids' show in the fifties and participated in local television and theater. In Los Angeles, she did hundreds of voiceover jobs. In addition to the first season of Crusader Rabbit (someone else voiced Crusader in the second), her notable roles included step-sister Anastasia in Cinderella, Smurfette in the long-running series of The Smurfs, and Miss Bitters on Nickelodeon's popular series, Invader Zim. She was also heard in dozens of theatrical animation shorts for Warner Brothers and MGM, as well as other TV shows like Hanna-Barbera's Space Kidettes and The Flintstones. She was even more active in animated commercials and often dubbed in the voices of child actors.

Lucille was interviewed for the Archive of American Television and you can watch that interview here. I had the pleasure of seeing her at local animation events, where she was very active when in town, and having her on several panels at Comic-Con and elsewhere. At one, she gave a 10-minute answer to a question about what it means to be a Professional. She spoke eloquently of being on time, taking direction, listening to the director and to other actors, taking classes, always being ready to learn and, in general, always giving 110%. I haven't watched that online video but I hope she says some of that in there. It would give you all a valuable lesson, as well as a good insight into why Lucille Bliss had such a good and long career.

In recognition of Veterans Day, here's Bob Hope's 1967 Christmas Special — all 87 minutes of it. Mr. Hope was criticized a lot for these. Some said he made the trips as personal promotion. Some said he just plain made a ton o' money off them. Some said it was cruel to tease horny servicemen with Golddiggers and Joey Heatherton. Even assuming there was something to these and other complaints, I came to view the tours as a mostly-benevolent endeavor. I've encountered too many veterans who remembered them fondly to think otherwise…

Something I should append to my piece a few days ago about my mother…

Remember her hospital stay at Cedars-Sinai? The one that caused me to fly back suddenly from San Francisco? Here is what happened to her that night.

She was taken in by ambulance. Once she was there, they gave her an EKG, which is a fairly simple and standard test that checks for problems with the electrical activity of the heart. They also gave her a Tylenol. When they determined that she hadn't had a heart attack then, they phoned her regular hospital, which was Kaiser, and Kaiser sent an ambulance over to transport her to its facility for further treatment. So that's all that was done to her at Cedars: An EKG, a physician evaluating that EKG and someone giving her a Tylenol.

Now, as it happened, my mother had very good health insurance. It was a policy my father got in 1959 on a special, limited-time offering that was made then to government employees. It covered darn near everything, it couldn't be cancelled and there were limits on how much the insurer could raise her premiums each year. It was a policy you couldn't get today and it paid for almost every penny of this hospitalization. I think she had a couple of $5.00 co-pays in there. But they did send her an itemized bill for what it would have cost her if she'd been uninsured and was expected to pay out of pocket.

Would you be horrified if I told you she got a bill for $1200?

Would you be even more horrified if I told you that bill was just for the ambulance ride to Cedars-Sinai? The bill from Cedars-Sinai for her emergency room stay was for $7498.00. The whole thing came to eighty-seven hundred smackers.

Now to be fair, if she'd been uninsured, she would probably not have had to pay that full amount. They would have forgiven some of it or had some charity fund pay part of it or settled for some large (to her) amount. But even then, it would have wiped out a good-sized chunk of her life's savings and the money she was counting on for her older-age and just receiving that bill might have sent her back to the hospital. None of this is good for the health of a woman in her eighties.

This was in 2009. I have a feeling the costs have gone up and that evening now would cost well over ten grand.

There is a Health Care Crisis in this country. Take a look at this post by Ezra Klein. It is by no means an insurmountable problem but we can't do nothing about it and those who insist Obamacare is too expensive are ignoring the cost of doing nothing, which is higher and includes massive loss of life. My main joy over the election is that Mitt Romney won't be making good on his pander-to-the-Tea-Party pledge to on Day One of his presidency, take away the health insurance of millions of Americans. He never did manage to explain why it wasn't the same thing he was so proud of installing in Massachusetts.

Here's a theory: That man could have won the Presidency if he'd convinced much of his country he really would and could "Repeal and Replace." If he'd proposed a firm, detailed outline of something better than Obamacare, he'd have gotten more electoral votes than George Will predicted. Democrats and Republicans alike would have voted for him because he'd done a better job than Obama of solving the Health Care Crisis. But he didn't have such a plan.

No one seems to. For all the kvetching about Obamacare, no one has seriously offered an alternative that's any more than Obamacare tweaked a bit. The "Ryan Plan" remains at best a framework for a real plan but it lacks key details including anything to actually lower the cost of a chest x-ray or a patented prescription drug.

My most Conservative pal Roger and I can't talk politics without him going to his fear of a terrorist attack in this country. That is not of no concern but there are other ways to die. Neither of us knows anyone who has died in a terrorist attack but we both know people who've died from lack of heath insurance. We also know a few who've lost everything but their lives paying the bills that result from lack of health insurance.

Readers of this blog write me all the time and ask, "What would it take to get you to vote for a Republican these days?" There are many things but a big one would be to either come up with an actual plan to control the skyrocketing cost of Health Care…or admit that Obamacare is a decent starting point and build from there.

Frank Rich provides a good overview of what a lot of us think happened last Tuesday. Basically for me, it comes down to a moment when one party believed its own bullshit and the other party knew its bullshit was bullshit. The latter will always triumph over the former.