I believe one of the reasons Donald Trump won the last election was that he and his crew very effectively sold a lot of lies to the American people about Joe Biden and (especially) Biden's economic record. The lying continues and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post discusses a lot of recent claims about job loss and globalization.
As a kid, I somehow always enjoyed it when Jack E. Leonard was on television. I didn't understand half of what he said but I liked his rhythms…the way he said whatever the hell it was he was saying. Often, he could make absolutely nothing sound like a real joke…and he didn't even wait for the laugh, if any. Whether the audience laughed or not, he'd just roll right on into the next line as if nothing had happened. He dealt mostly in insults but they were relatively malice-free insults and for every three or four he lobbed at others, he'd direct at least one towards himself.
He was on TV a lot and for a few years there, he was always talking about a forthcoming cartoon series in which he'd play some sort of sheriff who was the fastest fattest gun in the west. He was animated at times as a mailman selling Post Alpha-Bits cereal but I never saw any trace of the promised western series.
As an adult — if you could ever call me that — I still didn't understand half of what the man said but I could enjoy the delivery. I liked him more than I liked Don Rickles, a man of whom Jack E. once said, "I don't mind him doing my act but the son-of-a-bitch stole my head!" Here's ten minutes of Leonard just jabbering semi-coherently on The Merv Griffin Show…
Republican Senator Rick Scott from Florida says that "The number of full-time jobs [was] dropping almost the entire Biden administration." Politifact says this ain't so. I believe the answer to the question of why Kamala Harris lost involves a number of contributing factors but a biggie was that Trump and his mob managed to convince a lot of Americans that the economy was much worse than it was…and they're still selling that line.
This is kinda interesting. In 2012 when NBC had the Super Bowl, they shot a little video to precede it and promote all their shows and stars. Notice if you will what gets a lot of screen time and what doesn't. They single out Smash, which was debuting the day after the Super Bowl…and which was not quite the smash the network expected. They only devoted a few seconds to The Voice, which was their highest-rated show that season, and to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which might have been their most profitable.
(A friend of mine who worked on the show with Leno said one of the most impressive things about it was how high its ratings were despite the network doing so little to promote it…and how rarely Jay complained.)
And if you don't blink, you might spot a fast glimpse of Howie Mandel, the sole representative of one of NBC's biggest shows, America's Got Talent. Mandel is allegedly in the crowd scene shot outside in New York and I wonder if he flew there just for that or if that shot was done elsewhere. (While you're at it, see if you can spot Seth Meyers who definitely was in New York.)
Putting together a piece like this, coordinating all the shows and the stars and their shooting schedules, is a helluva lot of cat-herding. As you'll see very few are really singing. There are many copies of this production online but this one includes credits for the musicians and the actual vocalists. It also strikes me as odd that they decided to build the spot around the Frank Loesser song from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. That was an odd choice because…
…but hey, it's a catchy tune and I guess that's all that mattered. And it even has one word in it from Donald Trump…another guy who had a hit show on NBC that's given as little recognition as possible.
There are a number of tributes and remembrances online for the great political blogger Kevin Drum. A lot of you have sent me links to this piece by another of my favorite political bloggers, Josh Marshall. And a number of you have told me that for the first time, you went to Kevin's page, read some items he posted and now see why we'll miss this man.
Trump is probably regretting the needless fight he picked with Canada because there's no way he can possibly sell the notion that they're the Bad Guy Aggressors or that everything that's going wrong was Joe Biden's fault. But he's trying, including — as CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale notes — just plain misrepresenting what's going on with those tariffs.
Ever since I posted this video clip introducing the song "Pick Yourself Up," folks have been sending me links to other interpretations so…why not? Here's Mel Tormé who, in this video, is not sitting at Farmers Market reading a newspaper. The pianist is the great George Shearing and I should warn those unfamiliar with Tormé that he liked to take strange detours in the middle of songs — in this case to Johann Sebastian Bach…
It's possible to point to some bad economic statistics from the four years Joe Biden was in the Oval Office but there were a lot of great numbers, too. As Steve Benen of the Maddow Blog points out, some Republicans are fudging numbers and fibbing to soil the previous administration's record.
For quite some time on this blog, I've quoted or linked to posts by a gent named Kevin Drum. Of all the folks I've come across on the 'net writing political commentary, he seemed to be the smartest and the most fact-based, meaning that he almost always backed up his views with statistics and history…and this is rare: He was willing to amend or reverse an opinion when the facts warranted it. Too many people double-down on bad calls and defend them to the death.
For some time now, his political writings have been interlaced with reports on his health. In 2014, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and last Friday, it took his life. He spent some of his last days blogging feverishly, which in his case meant meticulously reading and studying what he was writing about. I invite you to read some of the recent postings on his blog at https://jabberwocking.com/. I have no idea how long it will remain up but I hope forever. Lots of wise writings there.
Kevin and I had a brief e-mail friendship which led to a lunch together one day. I asked him about political issues and he asked me about comic books and we also spent a lot of time discussing great places to get barbecue. Very nice man. Very smart man. I'm already missing being able to go to his page and learn things. One thing I learned from him is that an awful lot of Bad News we see in the headlines is not as bad as it seems.
Many folks probably aren't aware that Craig Ferguson was and still is a stand-up comedian but he is and he's pretty good at it. I spotted this on the website of my buddy Paul Harris and thought I'd share it here with you. Enjoy…
Factcheck.org takes a look at some of the recent statements by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about health and human services. And what they see is that he's still dispensing uninformed, unqualified medical advice and that when he does get it right, it usually involves contradicting something he's said in the past. By now if you follow this blog, you know what I think about people who never graduated medical school advising on matters of health and medicine.
If you don't count five days at Comic-Con last July, last night was the first time I've left my house for non-medicinal reasons since I busted my ankle in January of 2024. I'm not 100% back to how I was pre-break but I'm close enough that I thought it was time for an outing. Amber was unable to go with me so I asked my friend Gabriella Muttone to accompany me…and also to drive. Gabriella is an award-winning photographer and designer…and I thought she would appreciate the event — which she did.
Well, she appreciated the first half of it but we'll get to that.
The event was at the Hammer Museum in Westwood — a program (which I mentioned back here) called "The Genius of Jay Ward: Rocky, Bullwinkle, Rarities and More." Judging from the turnout last night and the applause of the audience, there are a lot of people who recognize that genius and not just Jay's. Brilliant work was done at his studio despite cost restrictions that made some of those shows look like they were animated at a Dollar Tree store while it was having its annual going-out-of-business sale.
In the fifties, Jay was the other major guy inventing reinventing animation to suit the budgets and schedules of television — "other" besides Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. They all attempted to use clever scripts and excellent voice work to compensate for animation that had to be done on the cheap and in maybe a tenth of the time that theatrical animation was produced. The earliest episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle looked (but did not sound) slapdash and crude on our 19" Zenith TV in 1959 and they looked even worse on the big screen last night…but we loved them, then and now nonetheless.
And like I said, it wasn't just Jay. He assembled a fine crew of artists and writers, most of them veterans of the U.P.A. Studio. The key one — and a very brilliant gent I brag about knowing and working with a little — was Bill Scott. When you merged Jay's sense of humor with Bill's, you got cleverer and more memorable cartoons than most of what Bill and Joe were then producing. I loved Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound but I didn't laugh out loud at them the way I did at the Ward Studio's output in '59 when I was seven and last night when I was seventy-three.
I'd never set foot in the Hammer Museum before. It's a lovely place that, thanks to one or more benefactors, offers art and film history at little or no cost to those who visit. Gabriella and I arrived early and actually ran into Tiffany Ward (daughter of Jay) and her husband in the elevator up to the on-the-premises restaurant, Lulu. We dined and then leisurely strolled — well, she strolled while I hobbled — over to the Billy Wilder Theater there. Long line to get in.
Tiffany spoke. Our pal Jerry Beck spoke. Films were shown, starting with newsreel-type footage of when Ward's people actually got the city to let them block off all but one lane of traffic on Sunset Boulevard for the unveiling of the famous Rocky and Bullwinkle statue. There were signs that said something like "Watch the Bullwinkle Show or we'll close off this lane, too!"
That line struck me as a great yardage marker of one of the things that made the Jay Ward output different from all other cartoons of the day: You got the sense there were some wild maniacs behind their cartoons…folks unafraid to not only break but break down the fourth wall and anything else that got in the way of a laugh. There were always enough of them to appease the kiddies but plenty there for any parents who peeked in. The first half of the show included those early Moose-and-Squirrel episodes, a Super Chicken (the one about the monster toupee), a Fractured Fairy Tale (Rapunzel), a Peabody's Improbable History (Napoleon), some bridges, Bullwinkle's Corners, commercials and a strange unsold pilot that most in the audience had never seen, The Watts Gnu Show.
Apart from a few seconds of animation and a few more of old stock live-action footage, The Watts Gnu Show was all puppets voiced by Bill Scott, Paul Frees, June Foray and other members of the Ward Stock Company. It was a half-hour that was pretty darned insane and way ahead of its time, its time probably being when The Muppet Show was the most popular show on this planet. Watching it, my thought was that it didn't sell because the puppets were chintzy and ugly and didn't move around much so you just kept looking at how cheap and ugly they were.
Keith Scott's book, which is pretty definitive as a history of the Jay Ward Studio, said it had offers but Jay would have had to share ownership with other parties and he refused to do so. It was pretty strange but admirable in that sense. They showed it in full last night, then paused for an intermission.
The second half of the show was…without us present.
We left. The Billy Wilder Theater is a lovely construction — everything in the Hammer is quite splendid — but whoever configured the seating obviously had a hate on for anyone over about six feet tall. I'm 6'3" and I found my seat so unbelievably cramped that I was seriously worried about reinjuring my almost-healed left leg. Maybe if I still had the flexibility I had back when I hit fifty, it wouldn't have been so bad but I had to turn to Gabriella and say, "Do you mind if we leave?"
This morning, I had e-mails from folks who were there asking if I found something objectionable or hated the show or something. No, no, a thousand times no. I just couldn't deal with the seat and the lack of legroom. After an hour or so sitting there in increasing pain, I could barely make it to Gabriella's car but once we were outta there, I got better. Wish I'd been able to stay because most of me had a very good time.
A bald eagle nest in Big Bear, California…
The folks over at Snopes correct a load of misinformation about the personal wealth of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He doesn't have most of that stuff some claim he owns and may not even have a double-Y in his last name.
What was I doing on March 25, 1961? I was almost certainly watching this show…