Sorry I haven't been here today for you, dear newsfromme readers. I've been so busy that I didn't even have time to watch Bill Maher's show when it was telecast two hours ago. I can't imagine what he had to talk about.

I'm going to make this a Trump-Free Weekend on this blog mainly because I don't want to waste my time thinking about him. I still think we're a loooonnnggg way from knowing how things are going to turn out in the Democratic Primary, let alone the November election. (By the way: I got my by-mail primary ballot the other day. It says "The ballot must be received by the elections office no later than 3 days after Election Day." Don't they know that we're California, the big primary? Assuming the rest of the ballots are actually counted on the evening of March 3, someone's going to declare victory. No one's going to presume that ballots that come in three days later can change anything.)

---

Here's something that I think I understand but I'm not sure. I subscribe to a number of online newspapers…mostly ones that I link to a lot on this site. For a long time, I didn't subscribe to the Los Angeles Times. When I looked up what Digital Access would cost, the price was as follows: $1 a week for the first four weeks, then $4 per week thereafter. That works out to $196 per year. No thank you.

They keep mailing me offers and I really didn't look at them. Right into the trash they'd go because I figured that even if they give me half-off, that's still too steep. Well, the other day, I paused to read one of those offers. These all involve entering a promo code included in the mailer I received.

It offered me Complete Digital Access for 99 cents a week. That's a little under $52 a year, down from $196 for the first year, over $200 a year thereafter. Sounds like quite a bargain, right?

It is but it gets better. They're really, really eager to send me a physical newspaper also. I assume this has something to do with ad rates keyed-in with print circulation. There are all sorts of different packages — daily delivery, Sunday only, Saturday and Sunday…all including Digital Access.

I picked Sunday only. And I just signed up for Sunday delivery plus Digital Access…for $9.88. That's per year.

That's how it works, people. I can get Digital Access for $196.00 a year or they'll discount it to $52 a year. But if I let them dump a copy of the Sunday paper on my front lawn each week, I get the paper plus Digital Access for an entire year for $9.88. This may not be in every zip code but it's in mine. Like I said, I think I understand it. But I'm not sure.

Ali Velshi, who you see a lot if you watch MSNBC, interviews John Oliver, who you see a lot if you watch what I think is the best show on TV — or it will be when it returns with new episodes on February 16…

As we all know, Utah senator (and 2012 Republican presidential nominee) Mitt Romney cast the only G.O.P. vote to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial. He's now being hailed as a man of conscience and a hero and a leader by a lot of folks who not so long ago were aghast at the notion of him becoming president. Conversely, many who supported him back then are now using descriptors like "traitor" and "disloyal." Donald Junior is insisting that Romney be kicked out of the Grand Old Party while others wonder how someone gets kicked out of a political party.

Here's my take on it. I believe that at some low level in our government — maybe some folks who sit on a city council somewhere — men and women act out of conscience and put the needs of The People ahead of their own careers and certainly their own parties. But it doesn't happen much higher than that. Probably at the state level and certainly above it, there is only one consideration: "How will this benefit me?"

They may put personal wealth ahead of personal power or vice-versa. They may care about fame more than money. They may even convince themselves that's what good for them is good for their constituents and for the nation. (That's kind of the Alan Dershowitz defense of, I suppose, all wrongdoing.) No matter why they want to serve, when it comes time to vote Yes or No, they vote based on what's better for themselves. That may or may not match up with what's better for the majority.

I do not mean almost everyone thinks like that. I do not mean everyone except the candidate I support. I mean absolutely everyone and I don't think I'm being overly cynical to say that. It includes Trump, Obama, Biden, either Clinton, Sanders, anyone named Kennedy or Bush…and of course, Mitt Romney.

Look: There's no place for this guy in a Republican party that asks "How high?" when Donald tells them to jump. We just saw his control of it. Men and women who thought he was guilty voted to acquit and they're now lambasting Mitt because he only voted that way once instead of both times. He wrapped his decision in Faith and Sacred Oaths Before God and following one's conscience and made it sound almost like a voice from the Heavens told him to vote as he did…and even folks who identity as Evangelicals are calling him a Judas.

Which I'll bet is fine because he's positioning himself as the candidate of Republicans who think Trump is destroying their party and might take the world along for the cataclysm. I dunno how many there are right now but it does not seem unlikely that their number could grow. If Trump really does shoot someone on Fifth Avenue or just babbles on at an increasingly incoherent rate, there could be a lot more Republicans who want an alternative to D.J.T. Romney hasn't yet said that's where he's setting up shop because people are mad enough at him for just the one vote.

But I think it's a nice trial balloon to see if there's a movement out there he can lead. And in the meantime, it's exposing all the marionettes in the G.O.P. who do not have it in them to say, "I disagree with my colleague over what the evidence shows but I respect him for putting conscience over party." What they're all saying is that if he does that, he has his priorities backwards. Me, I think his priority is another run at the White House.

An auction house is now taking bids on bound volumes of DC Comics that were once part of the library in the DC offices. There seems to be some mystery as to how these went from being company property to being on the auction block but I am not suggesting wrongdoing; just that some people who worked for the firm are puzzled.

A discussion about this on one of the comic book history forums of Facebook prompted me to tell the following story, which I don't think I ever typed out before. I've expanded it a bit here so it makes more sense to the kind of person who wouldn't be caught dead in a comic book history forum on Facebook…

When my then-partner Steve Sherman and I first visited the DC, Marvel and MAD offices in July of 1970, we spent a couple of days meeting people who'd done comic books we'd loved for years. We also spent a day and a half with Steve Ditko.

Up at DC, we were visiting with longtime editor Julius Schwartz when artist Irv Novick arrived. Julie apologized to us and said he needed fifteen minutes with Irv, then our talk with him could resume. So he took us over to the DC library, which was filled with bound volumes of (allegedly) everything the firm had ever published and he told us to browse and read whatever we liked until he came back for us.

So we were browsing and I don't think we'd even opened a book before a burly gent marched in and told us that whoever we were, we weren't allowed to be in there. Some volumes had been stolen recently and it was now off-limits to anyone but bonafide staff members. He was kinda brusque about it and didn't even ask who were were or who'd told us we could be in there.

He waited until we exited the room and closed the door and then walked off. I remember thinking that if it was so wrong for anyone like us to be in there, why wasn't the door locked?

Later in the day, Nelson Bridwell, who was an assistant editor there, introduced us to the man who'd thrown us out of there and he apologized for being so officious. It was Joe Kubert.

I believe the missing volumes were replaced when the company purchased copies of the issues in question from Mark Hanerfeld, who at one point claimed to have a triple set of everything DC had published, accumulated back when you could buy a Superman #1 for like $50.

Before anyone guesses that the bound volumes now being sold are the ones that were stolen before our visit, they should know that a lot of what's being sold is comics done well after 1970. Also, only two or three bound books had been stolen then and the auction house is offering 99 of 'em. I can imagine someone sneaking three bound volumes out in a briefcase or something but not 99. If I hear a solid answer to this mystery, I'll post it here.

[UPDATE: And now we're hearing the auction has been suspended. Curiouser and curiouser…]

Donald Trump just gave his third State of the Union address — or as some call them, his State of His Own Greatness address. That's pretty much what all three have been about.

In his 2019 speech, he called on all Americans to "reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution, and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good." That's an actual quote.

The speeches he's giving this week seem to be all about embracing the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution, and rejecting the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good. Not that he ever followed the 2019 version, but now he seems to have quit pretending.

It's hard to mourn a guy who had such a fabulous career, lived to the age of 103 and saw his son become almost as big a movie star — or, arguably bigger. I sure hope the Motion Picture Academy is moving mountains to get a tribute to Kirk Douglas into the Oscar telecast this Sunday. Maybe, just maybe someone there had the foresight to already have something at least partially assembled, just in case. I mean, it's not like it was impossible for a man that age to leave us any day now…

I have no story about meeting Mr. Douglas because I never did…but I sure saw a lot of great performances by him in a lot of real good movies. My fave was easily Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival) which was done by Billy Wilder. It's a film that still hasn't received its proper attention and it's more relevant today than when it was made in 1951. Douglas played a truly horrible human being and there isn't one second in the film where he did a little gesture or wink to the audience to indicate he really wasn't that bad a guy or that he was just an actor playing a role. Just a fabulous performance.

If you're never seen it or you yearn to see it again, it's out on home video and isn't hard to get streamed to your computer for a few bucks. But it might be even easier than that. You just know Turner Classic Movies will schedule a Kirk Douglas Tribute shortly and show a bunch of his best films. That one should certainly be in it…and there are plenty of other classics to keep it company. Here's the trailer…

• I'm embarrassed to admit that I worked on a couple of TV series that were on television for a shorter time than this year's Iowa Caucus.

Marvel just issued a book called Captain America: The End written and drawn by Erik Larsen. I haven't read it yet but Erik always does fine work and that's not why I'm writing about it and it's not (yet) why folks on the 'net are talking about it. The discussion is all about how on the title page, it says "Captain America created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby."

For the enlightenment of anyone reading this who doesn't know what's wrong with that: Captain America was created by the team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Stan Lee didn't even write anything for the company until the third issue of the Captain America comic book.

A credit like this is a very sensitive issue. There have been times when creators were denied such credits…and I don't mean because there was any dispute as to who had created a given comic book or character. There were publishers who flatly refused to identify anyone as the creator(s) of one of their books. Sometimes, since the company usually claimed ownership of the property, they didn't want to give the actual creator any help should he decide to get a lawyer and contest that ownership.

Sometimes, it was more a matter of not wanting to admit a debt to the creator or to admit that the company had not created the comic. And there were publishers and editors who wanted to claim that prestigious (and perhaps valuable) creator credit for themselves, even though they had minimal — perhaps zero — input into the birth of the idea.

For a time when Joe Simon was suing Marvel for the ownership of Captain America, he ceased to exist. When they reprinted a story that said "by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby" on it, they removed both names and it was forbidden to mention Joe anywhere. During that time, the science-fiction writer Ted White was engaged to write a Captain America prose novel and the dedication in it read, "To Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, without whom there would be no Captain America."

This kind of thing happened a lot in comics. Kirby probably would not have left Marvel in 1970 if they'd been willing to put "Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby" on books like Fantastic Four and Hulk, as they do now. But they refused back then and I witnessed first hand how nasty they could be about it. Jack in his lifetime endured a lot of such nastiness…and of seeing Stan credited so often as sole creator of all the properties they launched together and even, on occasion, Captain America.

But before anyone gets outraged about this latest miscredit — well, it's too late for that but before it gets to be too widespread — let's remember a very useful aphorism: Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence. I usually change it a bit to "Don't automatically attribute to deviousness…" but the point is basically the same. There is such a thing as an accident. There are things done that shouldn't be done but are because someone screwed-up or just didn't know any better.

Some of the wronging of creators in the past was, it's clear to me, in the "accident" category or at least the "didn't know any better" one. Some, but certainly not all. A lot of folks who worked in comics had such limited experience in other forms of publishing or creative fields that they just assumed that was the way things were done. There were also creative folks who, due to ego or because they felt undercompensated for what they were doing, grabbed credits they didn't deserve from their colleagues. That's another topic for another time.

For now, it's pretty clear to me that crediting Stan instead of Joe in this new Captain America book is an accident. And in the current world of comics where many are trying to right a lot of past wrongs, including credit denials, it's a pretty embarrassing accident. Joe gets his proper credit almost everywhere else now. There's no reason to intentionally do him wrong in this one publication.

If you went to work for a comic book company today, you would find yourself paying for a great many sins of past owners and employees. I have worked in comics for half-a-century and met more people in the field than you can imagine. Leaving aside a few holdovers from the old days who are dead and buried, I don't think I've met anyone at DC or Marvel who defended all past dealings. They all condemn — in private if not in public — some of the shitty things that their predecessors did to the men and women who created the material and worked so hard on it, often for parsimonious fees. Many of the newer people have heroically done and continue to do whatever they could or can to make up for bad pay of the past and other mistreatment.

I am not suggesting the scales are properly balanced or ever can be. But some effort to undo past sins is a whole lot better than no effort. And the bad motives of the past should not instantly be ascribed to those who now work for a company of the same name. Most of them these days are at least trying to do the right thing.

As you well know, almost every Wednesday, my pal Stu Shostak hosts Stu's Show and spotlights some corner or crevice of the TV business, often with very impressive guests or me. He had a few scheduled for today's webcast but due to one guest's sudden unavailability, that lineup will have to wait. So today instead, he has three television experts on to discuss recent news about the world of television. The experts are Steve Beverly, Wesley Hyatt and me.

Stu's Show, in case you don't know, is a simulcast. You can stream the video on a Roku-enabled TV or device or on your computer or you can just listen to the audio. To find out how to do this, go to this page…and you can even watch it there at the appointed time. That time begins at 4 PM West Coast Time, 7 PM in the east and other times in other time zones. It'll run at least two hours, maybe longer. I'll be on around sometime after 5:15 West Coast Time. It's live and it's free, and after the webcast, you can download the show from a different section of the same website for a very reasonable price. And while you're there, check out some of the other fine episodes of Stu's Show which you can also download for a reasonable price.

• Still waiting for Vladimir Putin to release the results of the Iowa Caucus. We'll probably hear Donald Trump won the Democratic contest, too.

A few days ago here, we introduced most of you to the Ames Window, a mesmerizing optical illusion. Here's an upgraded version of it that's even more amazing…

The news media seems pretty mad this morning at folks in Iowa who are still, as of this moment, insisting on getting the vote totals right before releasing them. Their failure to announce them last night when the networks expected them was indeed a screw-up but it was one that left a lot of network reporters having to fill, fill, fill and not deliver what their viewers tuned in to hear. Some of them resorted to trying to find out and announce the totals for individual precincts, which are of course of no real meaning. So one precinct out of 1,681 went overwhelmingly for Mayor Pete. What does that prove?

I don't even think the final results whenever the hell we get them mean much. This is like trying to project how the baseball game will turn out after the first batter in the first half of the first inning. And if you don't believe me, ask the Republican nominee from 2016, Ted Cruz. He won the last Iowa Caucus.

I have a certain interest in live television in those moments when the folks who are supposed to tell us what's going on have no friggin' idea what's going on. It's why I like the coverage of police pursuits. It's why I loved that episode of the game show Press Your Luck when Michael Larson got control of the board and was running up a fortune compared to what the producers thought was possible. I still think guys like Colbert, Kimmel and Meyers should do their shows live — or at least without editing — and when things collapse, as they eventually will, have to see what they can build out of the wreckage.

Most so-called "Reality Television" doesn't do this. The folks in charge don't know if the contestant will pick Door A or Door B but they have a script ready for either option. After last night, some of the newsrooms are going to do contingency planning for what to put on when the totals just plain aren't there to be announced. What I would have done is have the anchors explain why the results of the Iowa Caucus, whenever they show up, aren't really that significant. And then fill the time by telling dirty jokes or maybe having Brian Williams do a number.

If you need a reminder of how much stupidity there is in the world, there are these people who call you — I just spoke to one — claiming to be computer technicians who need access to your computer to fix something that's gone horribly wrong with it. You have to have an I.Q. near single digits to not spot this as a scam in under three seconds…but since they still do this, someone somewhere must be falling for it.

I just got a call from "Sanford" from a 415 area code telling me he's the technician who helped me with my computer the last time, alerting me I have a deadly virus that is sending out my personal info, including all of my credit card data and passwords, to thieves around the globe. I must immediately log into the website address he'll give me so he can enter my computer, remove the virus and inoculate my computer against further infections.

Quick Rule of Thumb: Never get an inoculation from someone who doesn't know how to pronounce "inoculate."

I'm kinda curious as to how much this guy might clear if I did go, "Duh, okay!" and give him control of my P.C. I also wonder how many "go fuck yourself, you criminal asshole"s he has to hear before he stumbles across a rube…but I guess the occasional jackpots make it worth it. I get about two of these a month.

And I guess the callers themselves are pretty dense too because even after I told the guy, "Your mother would be ashamed of you for doing this, you lying piece of shit," he was still saying to me, "No, no, I am not lying. Your computer has a deadly virus!" A person any smarter than a salmon would have realized instantly he wasn't going to sell me and would have hung up and tried the next guy on his Potential Sucker List.

Maybe I should have tried telling him, "You're lucky you called me, Sanford! I just got an alert that there's a deadly virus on your computer and it's sending out your personal info, including all of your credit card data and passwords, to thieves around the globe. Quick! You must immediately log into the website address I'll give you so I can enter your computer, remove the virus and inoculate your computer against further infections!"

If I do that with every one of these clowns, I'll bet one of them will fall for it. After all, I'll even pronounce "inoculate" properly.

• ‪My prediction for the Iowa Caucuses tonight: Someone wins, someone finishes way too far below expectations and the media makes way too many assumptions about what it means.

After last night's Super Bowl game, as I'm sure you know, that guy in the Oval Office tweeted…

Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game and a fantastic comeback, under immense pressure. You represented the Great State of Kansas and, in fact, the entire USA, so very well. Our Country is PROUD OF YOU!

Someone must have pointed out quickly that while the states of Kansas and Missouri kinda share the Chiefs and there is a Kansas City in Kansas, the Chiefs are technically based in Kansas City, Missouri. A few minutes later, the first tweet was deleted — as if deleting a tweet received by millions makes it disappear as if it never existed — and Trump tweeted…

Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game and a fantastic comeback under immense pressure. We are proud of you and the Great State of Missouri. You are true Champions!

I would have had a higher opinion of D. Trump if the second tweet had been more like…

Oops! My thumbs got carried away. I meant to say that the glorious states of Missouri (where the Chiefs play) and Kansas (which roots for them) both have a right to be very proud.

But that would have violated a cardinal rule of the Trump administration, one that I actually suspect is drilled into everyone who joins it as part of the welcoming orientation. Donald Trump never apologizes for anything and he only admits he's wrong about one out of every thousand times he is. And if I'm wrong about how often he admits errors, it's because the actual ratio is worse than that.

I'm kind of amazed he doesn't see the value of admitting errors, at least about little screw-ups that don't matter one bit. Would he have lost a scintilla of respect from even one person who respects him if he'd owned the mistake instead of pretending it never happened? It might make it more credible when he denies errors about something important…like whether or not Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama. (Newly released e-mails reveal just how bad a lie was being disseminated when Trump defended his error to the death, as he does with most of them.)

Today, Trump backers are out in force trying to claim that Trump's first tweet (i.e., the one that was quickly deleted) was not wrong…and they don't even believe that. It's just something you have to say when it's verboten to admit he was wrong about anything. And then of course, they make the leap to "Obama did the same thing" bringing up some mistake he made, like the famous time he referred to "all 57 states." But there are two differences there.

One is that Obama never thought there were 57 states. Sometimes, we all misspeak…like a verbal typo. I occasionally mistype my own name and don't notice. That does not mean I don't know how to spell my own name. In his speech when Jimmy Carter accepted his party's nomination to run for president, he sought to praise one of the men he'd bested for the position. Even though it was right on the TelePrompter and right on the typescript in front of him, he referred not to Hubert Horatio Humphrey but to "Hubert Horatio Hornblower."

Trump makes those kinds of mistakes all the time. We all do. They do not indicate stupidity or lack of knowledge. Ah, but defending them suggests a lack of humility and maybe a stubborn belief that the people are so stupid, they can be convinced you didn't X when they all heard you say X.

And of course the other difference is that Obama admitted his gaffe and laughed about it. Trump rarely demonstrates any ability at all to laugh at himself and on the rare occasions when he tries, it sounds forced and awkward. I don't know about you but I'm scared at the prospect of any person in power who, when caught in a mistake, can't own up to it; whose first instinct is to double-down on the error.

There's a difference between one of those verbal typos and actual mistakes because of missing or faulty knowledge. And then there are the premeditated, deliberate lies…like when you know your administration is doing its damnedest to remove coverage for pre-existing conditions and you're out there saying, "I stand stronger than anyone in protecting your Healthcare with Pre-Existing Conditions."

And in Trump, we often get a fourth category of lie, which is denying what he said even though there were eight cameras and twenty microphones there capturing it. So we get all these lists of Trump Lies, like the one maintained by the Washington Post. On the third anniversary of Trump's inauguration, it stood at 16,241.

I think some of the ones they list are unfair because they're in the "misspeak" category and a lot of them — like saying "We've never had an economy like this before" — are subjective. You could probably argue that at any day in the history of the U.S., the economy was not exactly the same as it was on any other day, good or bad. But what's horrifying about the list is the number of times he said something that was blatantly untrue and said it over and over and over. Those are not verbal typos. Obama only mentioned the 57 states once.

This is not me trying to convince anyone Trump is a dishonest man. I operate on the assumption that no swing voters read this blog, that the Trump supporters who do come here are small in number and that if they do change their minds about him, it will be because of his words and actions, not because of me or anyone else. Every now and then though, I feel the need to articulate (if only to myself) one of the many reasons I think he's an awful president and a worse human being. And that disconnect from the truth and inability to admit mistakes is a big one.

[Correction: The original version of this post referred to Trump as "a worse human being." In truth, it has not been established that he is a human being at all.]