Tax expert David Cay Johnston explains how Donald J. Trump may have been able to get out of paying income taxes for eighteen years and even profited in other ways from the losses declared on his 1995 tax form. All legal? Apparently. But it sure won't endear him to the many people who, because they just work for a living, can't do tricks like that.
I think I understand some of Trump's appeal in terms of coming down on foreigners and terrorists and other people that scare some Americans. I think I also understand that some Americans seem to want a strong Daddy who'll protect them and won't let silly things like laws and The Constitution stop him from keeping us safe. I don't get why they think he's that guy but I think I get why they yearn for someone to be that guy.
What I can't really grasp is why they think Trump — with all his failed businesses and investors who think they were cheated and secrecy about his wealth — is a great businessman. Amazingly, there are people in this country who think he came from humble beginnings and wasn't born rich and subsidized. Somehow, they also think that any skills they think he has in the public sector would translate readily into the private. You know, "creating jobs" by hiring people to work for minimum wage in your casino is not the same thing as nursing the nation's economy in a way that would lead to job creation. And you can't handle the National Debt the same way you handle personal debt.
Just noticed someone posted this to YouTube. Back when I was doing Garfield and Friends on CBS Saturday mornings, I had this idea of having the opening titles end each week with Garfield saying a different line. I wrote hundreds of these — way more than we needed — and at each recording session, I'd have the late/great Lorenzo Music read a new batch. Since Garfield's mouth didn't move, it was easy to have the editors just drop one into the beginning of each show.
Twice, I got in trouble. One time, I had Garfield say hello to "all you lovely Nielsen families out there." Apparently, directly addressing people with ratings boxes on their sets is a no-no. It's viewed as an attempt to rig the ratings. NBC complained when I did that and the Nielsen folks wound up voiding the ratings for that morning. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it in an article I quoted here. As I pointed out, they were outraged but had somehow waited to object until the seventh time the show had run.
The other time, it was the season opener of the year when NBC dropped all its cartoon shows and went for more "teen" type shows like Saved by the Bell. Garfield started his season on CBS by saying, "Don't bother checking NBC, kids! They're not running cartoons anymore!"
This time, NBC complained the Monday morning after the first time the show was broadcast. I'm not sure why they objected since it was true, and I'm not sure why CBS ordered us to replace the line for reruns but it only ran the one time.
Anyway, someone apparently had an audio tape of it and someone else apparently laid that audio over a clip from one of our main titles and here it is…
A man who once worked as a dishwasher at the Carnegie Deli in New York says that he has put together an offer of at least $5 million bucks to buy the place which its current owner plans to close forever at the end of this year. A happy turn of events? No. He also says the owner refuses to consider any such offer. I don't get it either, people. Here's the latest.
I have yet to see anyone come up with any explicit charge of wrongdoing on the part of the Clinton Institute. Most of it is in the realm of "Well, they could have done this…" But we're sure hearing a lot about unethical and possibly illegal matters with the Trump Foundation. Rebecca Berg has the latest in a string of revelations that will probably continue right up until Election Day and beyond.
I've decided that for a while here, our video links will binge on moments from those self-congratulatory specials that the three major networks did any time they had anything they could claim as an anniversary. There were quite a few of them and they all seemed to be built on the goal of getting as many familiar faces on screen as possible. In some, you could sense the conflict between celebrating the network's long history and plugging their current offerings.
They don't do these anymore and I suspect a lot of that is because they don't have too many people now they can trot out with any sense of history. In the seventies and eighties, there will still plenty of stars from the forties and fifties who were alive and ambulatory. Today, I don't think a gathering of stars from forty years back would be all that impressive.
This clip is from an ABC special that aired February 5, 1978. It's a song led by Toni Tennille…and I'm puzzled as to why since her ABC series had been canceled a year earlier and the network had current stars to promote. Needless to say, though her microphone was live, it was probably the only one on stage after the first half-dozen stars joined in the song. Most of the group singing is a pre-recorded (or possibly live offstage) chorus of professional vocalists, not the stars gamely mouthing the words to the song which were probably on some very large TelePrompters scattered about.
It's really a great "Where's Waldo?" video and I wish the director had panned the crowd more as I'm sure a lot of folks never got on-camera. I don't quite get the presence of some people in there like John Wayne and Ed McMahon, and it looks like some of the biggest ABC stars fled for the outside fringes of the crowd and some of the lesser-known crowded to center…and could Paul Lynde have looked less like he wanted to be there? If you were ever on ABC — or if you even just watched it more than once — you're probably in there somewhere…
Susanne Craig is the New York Times reporter who got her mitts on Donald Trump's 1995 tax records and vetted them for publication. In this article, she tells how they came to her and what she did with them.
If the article is to be believed — and I do — the Trump organization was reached for comment early on Saturday…so that's when Donald found out they had and were about to release his '95 returns. His Saturday evening speech seemed nasty and incoherent even by Trump standards, so we have to wonder how much of that was because he was worried about the revelations from those forms…and whatever else will come out before Election Day.
You may recall that on this site, I used to relentlessly pimp for the Creamy Tomato Soup offered from time to time at Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes restaurants. That sounds like two separate restaurant chains but it's really one that operates some outlets under one name and some under the other. I told you how wonderful that soup was and I even mounted a little campaign to get them to make the Creamy Tomato Soup one of their regular offerings.
My urgings were rebuffed. They did send me a lot of free meal coupons, especially after my crusade directly caused a mention of them and their tomato soup on The Big Bang Theory. But they did not take my advice.
I stopped pressing the matter because it seemed futile but also because after a while, I found that the food at Souplantation was going down in quality…and not just at one outlet. Whatever they were now doing to their cuisine, they were doing it at four different Souplantations, which to me was sampling enough to give up on all of them. The vegetables increasingly tasted canned and not fresh. The soups began lacking in taste.
I complained on this blog a few times — here, for instance — and sadly stopped patronizing their businesses. I don't want to claim credit but I hope you'll assume that's just me being modest when I mention here that the company that operates Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes has filed for bankruptcy.
The press release says that the Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. plans to close 20-30 of their outlets (they had 124, last I looked) and soldier on. I know how they can succeed. They need to undo whatever it was they did to cheapen their cuisine a few years ago and they need to get the Creamy Tomato Soup into their regular lineup and use the old recipe. But will they listen to me? The Love's Barbecue chain didn't and look where they are today.
According to another article I consulted on this, Garden Fresh is the ninth restaurant operator to file for federal debt protection since November 2015. That's a high number when you consider that Donald Trump is not a restaurant operator.
As we've mentioned here, a special BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award was presented last night to Monty Python's Terry Jones for him work in film and television. It was a bittersweet event as Mr. Jones is suffering from dementia…but as you'll see in the video he obviously understood what the event was all about and was very touched. The presentation was made to him by his longtime friend and collaborator, Michael Palin.
I have embedded below the video of the entire ceremony but I have configured a bookmark which in most browsers will cause the video to commence at the presentation to Jones, which was the final event of a long evening. If it starts at the beginning, you'll need to move the slider to 2:05:35 to get to it. You can also probably figure out how to watch the whole video if you are so inclined. But do watch the presentation as it is very touching…
So the new charge is that one year, that great genius of business Donald Trump lost nearly a billion dollars and therefore was able to avoid paying federal income taxes for perhaps twenty years. Did he do this? They don't seem to be denying it too loudly and if he does, he may have to release all his tax forms to prove it. (The New York Times, meanwhile, is not saying that they don't have more of his to release.)
How is a rich person able to avoid taxes through losses? If you want to understand it, read this and this.
I kinda like the Trump camp's argument that if he did do this, we should elect him because he knows how to change the rules so other wealthy people can't get away without paying taxes. Hey, maybe we can stop all murders by electing Phil Spector.
Once upon a time, if you weren't in front of a TV set when a certain show aired, you didn't see it…often, ever. To cite one example of many, I remember watching The Tonight Show one night when Albert Brooks did a spot that may have been the funniest thing I ever saw on television. (I wrote about it here.) After I recovered from laughing, I got to thinking that (a) if I hadn't been watching at that moment I'd never see it because (b) it was probably gone for good.
Joey Bishop was guest-hosting that night and they never reran episodes with guest hosts. And since they never reran those episodes, I wasn't sure they even preserved them. The time John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared on The Tonight Show in 1968 was already lost since Joe Garagiola was the host that night. All that seems to exist of it today are a few poor audio tapes recorded off the air at the time by fans.
Technology has changed all that. I guess it started when home video recorders came in. If the network or studio didn't preserve the program, maybe some viewer did. It also became cheaper for the networks or studios to save old shows…and when the marketplace yielded an increased opportunity to "monetize" them via home video sales or new channels, more proprietors made the effort to keep them.
There are TV shows from the sixties and seventies that simply no longer exist because no one can locate even a bad 16mm print of even one episode. I doubt that will be the fate of very many programs done since someone began selling old shows on Beta or VHS. (All this is also true of movies, of course. It used to be expensive to preserve film negatives. Now with digital technology, it's easy and cheap to have back-up copies…and people all over the world have them.)
My first VCR looked a lot like this one.
Once I had my first VCR, I no longer had to be home at the proper time to see a TV show I wanted to see. My first video recorder was a Panasonic U-Matic machine that took 3/4" tape cassettes. It was huge and heavy and the tapes were expensive so it cost serious money to build any kind of library. Most of the cassettes only held an hour. One or two companies made 90-minute cassettes but the tape in those was thinner and tended to snag…and once it did, you pretty much had to toss the tape away so those longer tapes were to be avoided.
But I remember that on evenings when I might not be home in time to catch Johnny Carson, I would set up my machine and its timer to record from 11:30 (his start time then) until the tape ran out. I could come home at 2 AM and still see two-thirds of Johnny's (then) 90-minute program. I could even watch him the next day or play a great moment from the show for some friends the following week.
I cannot tell you how liberating and empowering that felt at the time.
I felt like I owned TV instead of the other way around. I no longer had to arrange my life to please television…and it only got more liberating when I acquired my first Betamax. It had cheaper tapes which recorded longer, plus it had a simpler timer. Then came VHS with even longer tapes and — one great day — TiVo. Three clicks and I'd never miss any of my favorite shows.
I had one of the first TiVos made, purchased at a time when that invention wasn't even publicized much since the TiVo company couldn't yet make them fast enough to fill even the orders from folks who knew about their wonderful machine. For a few months there, I'd gleefully demonstrate mine for friends who came by — how you could set it to record your favorite shows whether you were home or not; how you could watch them and rewatch them whenever you wished; how you could pause in the middle of a live broadcast, then resume watching later; how you could slow-mo and replay the action.
The movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High had been on HBO or Showtime and I showed a friend of mine how I'd recorded it. He had me playback, slow down and freeze frame the scene with Phoebe Cates (men, you know the one) about thirty times. After the second time, he had his wallet out and was asking, "Where can I get one of these right this minute?" He was heartbroken to find out there was a waiting list and it would take almost a month.
As it turns out, you don't even need a Tivo or DVR these days. Even without one, you rarely miss anything on TV that you want to see. Shows that were broadcast last night can often be watched online the next day on the network's website or elsewhere. An awful lot of the best clips are on YouTube almost immediately.
There are several shows I never record but I see their best moments. Saturday Night Live and the talk shows of Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Conan O'Brien, James Corden and a few others are rarely captured by my TiVo. But when the Internet buzz tells me there was something wonderful on one of them, I just go to YouTube and find that segment. If one of my favorite guests — say, Lewis Black or Jim Jefferies — is on one of those shows, I might set the TiVo but increasingly, I just think, "Why bother? I can watch their spots online and I don't even have to fast-forward through the rest of the show."
I didn't bother setting the TiVo for the Presidential Debate last week. Twelve different channels were replaying it in whole or part after and since they stopped, there are still eighty places I can watch it or download it. I'm not going to bother recording the Vice-Presidential Debate tomorrow night. As boring as it promises to be, there will still be sources for it.
Actually, it may not be that boring if Tim Kaine or the moderators bring up some of Mike Pence's past statements about gay people. Those alone peg him as about as loathsome a human being as has ever held public office. But that gratuitous political comment aside, the point is that I don't have to watch to see the highlights, if any. YouTube and various news sites will do that for me. Or I have the option to watch the whole thing if and when I want. The C-Span site will have it even if no one else does.
Obviously, I am telling you nothing you don't already know here. You've all learned the same ways to locate content you wish to view and you probably all have a TiVo or some variation on its working principle. I just felt like celebrating how my life has changed because of this particular thread of science. I celebrate it more when I recall one incident from my childhood…
Back when I was eight, my favorite mustn't-miss show was The Flintstones, which was on ABC on Friday nights at 8:30 PM. That's how we knew it was an "adult cartoon," which was how they initially billed it. It wasn't on at 7:30, which was when prime-time began back in 1960.
No matter what else was happening in my life, I was in front of the TV each Friday evening in time to see the cold opening and every subsequent moment of that week's episode. Here — I'll embed an image from the show's opening its first year. I removed the color since the show, though produced in color, aired them in black-and-white…
I loved it but then one week came trauma: Someone gave my father tickets to a Lakers game one Friday night. Let me tell you how long ago this was. The Lakers had just moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, the players were all white and everyone was talking about this guy named Jerry West who was supposed to be amazing. Still, then as now, my interest in watching a basketball game was about the same as my interest in watching mold spores form in a dish of tapioca pudding.
My interest in watching The Flintstones could not, however, have been greater. I pleaded with my parents to leave me home alone with the TV but they insisted no, I was too young to be left by myself. Love me though they did, they were not about to miss this opportunity and I had to go along with them. I begged, pleaded, wheedled…everything. If I'd thought of it at the time, I would have said, "You know, someday I'm going to have a lucrative career writing Flintstones comic books and working for Hanna-Barbera so you may be harming my future earning potential."
But I didn't know that then. The best I could do — and I really did try this line of argument — was because I once heard someone say that the only really interesting part of a basketball game was the last quarter. I tried to convince my parents that we could leave the house at 9 PM, get there for the last quarter and still not miss anything important.
They somehow didn't buy that so I was dragged to the Sports Arena when I could have/should have been home watching Fred and Barney. I hated the whole stupid thing and did everything possible to communicate to my parents how miserable I was every minute of what they inexplicably thought was an exciting game. I must have done it well because they never did that again.
Still, that awful night, I actually missed an episode of The Flintstones! A whole, actual episode of The Flintstones! On Monday, I pumped my schoolmates who'd seen it for details…and expressed shock that some of them could have watched but hadn't. What the hell was wrong with those children?
I consoled myself that all was not lost; that some (not all) of the episodes were rerun near the end of the season…so I had a chance. As it turned out, this was not one of the ones that was repeated and I figured sadly I would never see it. Who knew at the time those would all be rerun and rerun forever and someday, I'd even be able to buy a copy of it and watch it whenever I wanted to? I finally caught it a year or three later in syndication by which time my interest in The Flintstones was somewhat diminished.
So let us pause to remember that because of technology, no child ever has to endure that pain today. Whatever ten-year-olds are watching today — Son of Zorn or Bob's Burgers or Elena of Avalor or Naked and Afraid — they never have to miss an episode.
For the record, I think Barack Obama has been a pretty good president. Like all of them, his record is a mixed one to everyone but those who come to it eager to say "He did everything right" or "He did everything wrong." I have a few friends in each of those categories and I've learned not to discuss the matter with them because they're not interested in the actual record; just in some validation of a view they formed long ago.
New York magazine has some really good pieces for those who are interested in a real evaluation of the man's eight years. There's this timeline of the events of those eight years, some of which involve President Obama and some of which don't.
Then Jonathan Chait interviews Obama about the challenges he's faced, most of which were from Republican obstinance. I am still not happy with everything that involves drones and the killing of people overseas but it doesn't shake my endorsement of the view that for much of his term, Obama's been the only grown-up in Washington politics. I believe history will view this man very well.
Lastly, I would also recommend this conversation with Vice-President Biden. There are a few places where he sounds a bit like Hank Kingsley talking about Larry Sanders but I think Biden looks pretty good as he gets close to stepping-down. And they also have an interview with Bernie Sanders about Obama's record dealing with Wall Street. All of this is well worth reading.
I am not a fan of the Dodgers. I am not even much of a fan of baseball. Once upon a time, I had some interest in both largely because my father did. This was back when the Dodgers were Maury Wills, Frank Howard, Willie Davis, Tommy Davis, Jim Gilliam, Johnny Roseboro, Don Drysdale, and Duke Snider.
And — oh, yeah — Sandy Koufax.
Only one member of the team is still at it today: Vin Scully. No, he didn't put on the uniform but he was the single most indispensable person in the stadium when the Dodgers played. And I always suspected he was secretly managing the team. Walter Alston was officially the manager then but it was easy to imagine Alston, just sitting in the dugout during the game, listening to Vin Scully like everyone else in the place. I'd hear Scully say, "This is the time when Walt Alston is probably deciding to take out the pitcher and bring in Ron Perranoski to throw to the next batter" and I was sure Alston would listen to that, then turn to someone and say, "Bring in Ron Perranoski to throw to the next batter."
At least, it sure felt like that.
I'm not sure how someone who hasn't lived in Los Angeles for a few decades can fully grasp what Vin Scully means to this town. He's beloved and he's respected. I can't think of anyone who does what they do better than how he's done what he's done. Here's Keith Olbermann with a personal reminiscence. Scully is a right-wing Republican but no one who isn't lets that get in the way of their affection for the man.
Vinnie's retiring after calling today's game and as far as some people are concerned, he might as well take baseball with him. There are dozens of great moments I could pick to embed here but here's just one. I like this because there's no video and thanks to the colorful narrative by Vinnie, you ain't missing a thing…
I'm still kind of amazed how the entire election has changed since that first debate last week. Before, Hillary was on the defensive with lots of stories about her health, her involvement with the Clinton Institute and her general honesty. Now, she seems to have pretty decisively won the "Who has the right temperament?" argument and the stories are on Trump's defects as a human being, his mistreatment of women, his non-payment of taxes and his use of the Trump Institute for personal benefits.
As others have written, it sure looks like the Clinton side sprung a trap on him, bringing up the Alicia Machado matter, whereupon Trump stepped into it more fully than they could have dreamed. At best, he looks like a man who may have been wrongly criticized but who got way too upset and obsessed with firing back at and hurting this woman…a man unable to rise above anything. Telling everyone to check out her "sex tape" is really wacko since, first of all, they'll only be disappointed to find out that what he was calling one isn't one. He and his wives have been in steamier films and photos than that.
And if I were a voter who was looking for President Trump to change things about immigration or the economy or social issues, I'd be really bothered about how easily he seems to be distracted by personal slights. This week, he probably spent more time talking about Rosie O'Donnell's obesity than he did about securing our borders. Talk about not looking presidential.
The next debate is next Sunday and it's "town hall" style. That means that the questions will be a bit less predictable. (The charge that Hillary Clinton got the questions in advance in the first debate is really silly when you consider that anyone on either candidate's staff could have made out a list of 30 likely questions and almost everything Lester Holt asked would have been on it.)
Next Sunday though, the questions come from audience members and Trump will not only have to field them but largely address his replies to those audience members. That means being civil to them and saying, "Thank you for that question" when they ask something he'd rather not talk about. If you're going to prove you can be nastier than her and you want to bring up Bill's sexual exploits, as Trump seems to be promising, that's not the ideal place to do it.
I dunno. Maybe he can pull it off. I think he needs to relax…maybe take a day off or something. He should spend the afternoon at the zoo, calling the baboons all sluts and fat-shaming the elephants.
Our pal Kim "Howard" Johnson gives us a heads-up: Terry Jones is today receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from BAFTA Wales as part of the British Academy Cymru Awards Ceremony, commencing in just a few hours. BAFTA is the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Terry won't be speaking (sad to say) but it will be presented by Michael Palin and Terry's son Bill and it will be streamed live on the Internet at 19:30 GMT, which by my reckoning is 12:30 PM Los Angeles time…so it's about two and a half hours from when I'm posting this, though the Jones segment will probably not kick off the proceedings. Here's the link to watch the entire ceremony. Kim writes, "It's nice to see Terry get the recognition he has earned, and I couldn't be happier for him and his family."
Here's a nice tribute page on the BAFTA website, and I believe Kim supplied some of the photos. One can only hope Mr. Jones is well aware how appreciated he is, which is a lot.
This afternoon, I attended a lovely private memorial for Janet Waldo, the wonderful cartoon voice actress best known for playing Judy Jetson and Penelope Pitstop, along with many, many others. The home she lived in was filled with family, friends and some very fine caterers and her loved ones (by relation) threw a perfect party for her loved ones (not by relation). I won't start naming who was there but I did spend a very nice time chatting with the lovely Jackie Joseph, who along with all her very fine TV and movie work was in the voice cast of the Josie and the Pussycats cartoon show with Janet.
There were wonderful clips of Janet's long, long careers including some amazing screen tests she did for Paramount long, long ago. She was a fine actress but as her kids noted, she didn't like appearing on camera. She much preferred to do her acting on radio and later on animated cartoons. She was sure good at it and, as the mood of the room today made clear, very much beloved.
In other news: I'm getting lots of questions about the new autograph law and I can't answer a one of them. My answer to all is I Don't Know…and one of these days, I'm going to write a piece here about the power and frequent accuracy of I Don't Know as an answer. Too many people who don't know don't like to admit it…or they say "I don't know" and then they launch into wild, baseless speculation. In this case, I Don't Know is my answer. And the fact that there seems to be so much that We Don't Know is a good indicator to me that there's a lot wrong with this law.
Several folks though did suggest I link to this article about how much cash some celebrities are now hauling home from autograph shows. I don't want to say this too loudly but I have a hunch we're going to be hearing a lot more about this industry soon…in news reports that will include mentions of the Internal Revenue Service.
Should you be interested in reports of corruption on the part of Donald Trump, the name to watch for is David Fahrenthold, who is digging up immense amounts of scandal over at the Washington Post. Trump and his forces are dismissing everything as lies and/or Election Year Shenanigans…but if they had this kind of stuff on Hillary Clinton, they'd be calling for her immediate incarceration. As Fahrenthold sure seems to have solid proof of the shady, often illegal dealings. You can follow him on Twitter here or read his pieces for the Posthere.
Real early Tuesday morning — starting at 7:30 AM on my set — Turner Classic Movies is running four of the first five features that Buster Keaton starred in for MGM. The first and best is The Cameraman, which was followed by his last silent feature, Spite Marriage. Keaton's grand career as a maker of great comedies ended about the time he moved to MGM — or rather, was moved against his own wishes.
Sound came in, the studio interfered mightily and Keaton made a shambles of his personal life and began drinking heavily. The cause-and-effect relationships between those factors can be debated but clearly, his once-brilliant work went downhill. His third MGM film (and his first talkie) was Free and Easy, which TCM is showing. It shows a great talent losing his way. Then he made Doughboys, which TCM is not showing Tuesday and which was a little better. Then he made Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, which they are showing and which was quite a fall, even from as recently as The Cameraman.
Nothing he did was ever without interest or wonderful moments so you have a choice. You can watch to see the great bits or you can watch to see the great comedian grow less great before your eyes. I'd suggest you TiVo or DVR all four, then watch them in the reverse order.
