Our magical friend Misty Lee does a mystical feat every Wednesday over at this website. Here's last Wednesday's, in which she reminds us all never to listen to baked goods…

• Kansas just passed a law banning police officers from having sex during traffic stops. How often has this been happening that they needed to pass a law?

I'm seeing a batch of discussions on the web about racism at the moment, more specifically about whether — to quote Kevin Drum — "liberals call out racism too often, which just alienates conservative white people and makes them even more sympathetic to racist arguments."

I don't have a strong opinion about that. I would guess some folks are unfairly accused and some folks aren't and some of the people who are sympathetic to racist arguments were going there anyway and didn't need to be driven there. I just thought I'd toss out a thought I've had over the years. It's that there are some folks in this world who are fingered as racists when the truth is that they're just bigoted towards anyone who isn't them. They just aren't capable about giving a damn about anyone but themselves. They might be able to fake concern for others on occasion if and when it seems advantageous…but really, down deep, they simply don't care.

I'm recalling a fellow who worked in an animation studio wherein I once labored. There had been one of those stories in the news — the kind we now see with appalling frequency — where a bunch of white police officers had beaten the crap out of some poor black guy. The poor black guy had done something to warrant arrest but it was, like, shoplifting a Mars bar or a crime of equal severity. It wasn't anything to warrant the kind of beating that leaves permanent damage.

The incident was talked-about at the studio and everyone was appalled…everyone except this one artist. He just kind of just shrugged and said, "Well, he probably deserved it." Or maybe it wasn't even that bad.

People started making remarks about this guy being a bigot. Some took to calling him Archie Bunker. Someone else said he'd rushed to see the movie The Great Race because he assumed it was all about Caucasians. Comments like that. Me, I thought the guy was just the kind of alleged human being who wouldn't have cared if it had been a white guy or an Asian or anyone else, just so long as it wasn't him — one of those "somebody else's problems are somebody else's problems" kind of person.

Calling him out as a racist did no good because he knew he wasn't one; that he had no particular feelings about one race over another. I wonder how many other seeming racists fall into this category…and please understand that I am not saying anyone's any better or worse a human being because what looks like racism is actually a combination of self-obsession and misanthropy. I'm just suggesting that if you're going to deal with assholes, it might be helpful to understand just what kind of assholes they are. We have a great many species.

Neither rain nor snow nor sleet will stop Dave Portnoy from reviewing every damn pizza place he can find. One bite. Everybody knows the rules…

Dave Gordon writes to ask…

Given your comments about Trump and the Nobel Prize, I wonder if you would like to comment on the awarding of that prize to Barack Obama two months after he became president the first time. Since that means he was nominated at least six months before he was elected, it seems…rather presumptious, certainly premature. I'm no fan of Trump, etc etc, but as I've said elsewhere, he was elected by the same system that gave America Abraham Lincoln and J.F.K., and (insert name of any other president you think was a good one). A lot of people, probably in what you guys call the "flyover states" (that name is probably another symptom of the problem) think Trump is at least doing what he promised before the election.

Abraham Lincoln and J.F.K. were elected due to Russian meddling and a ginned-up phony scandal about their opponents' e-mails? Wow. You learn something new every day.

I don't think much of any awards, especially those where the process — who votes, how they vote, what criteria is applied — is generally unknown. The Nobel Prize certainly qualifies for my indifference. Do you know how it's determined? I sure don't, though I do get that if a lot of people say you and I deserve it, we're misunderstanding or misrepresenting the actual nominating process if we then go around and say we were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

So my answer is that I don't really think much of Obama's prize or any selection. It's an award, it's well-known and there's some money attached. That seems to be enough for some people (especially when they win it) to treat it as a great honor. But his was, like you said, certainly premature. If he ever deserved one, he probably didn't deserve it then.

And hey, before we wrap this up, let's discuss two other things, one being your idea that "you guys" refer to "flyover states." I don't know who "you guys" are but I've never used that term. This blog has 25,416 posts in it and that phrase never turned up in any of them. If you're talking about people in Hollywood or Los Angeles thinking that way, I've never heard that term used by anyone around me. With the whole world connected by the Internet these days, I can't imagine why anyone would think that way.

As for Trump doing what he promised before the election…well, he promised a great universal health care system that would cover more people than Obamacare did and be much cheaper. We haven't seen a trace of that. He promised a new prescription benefits plan that would save $300 billion a year and drastically lower the cost of medicine. The plan he's supposed to announce today does almost none of that. He promised to invest more money in U.S. infrastructure than Hillary Clinton was proposing and the White House has just announced he's not going to do any such thing.

He promised to renegotiate NAFTA into a much better deal for the U.S. That was supposed to be one of his highest priorities and that hasn't happened. He promised to "drain the swamp" of lobbyists and influence peddlers and then he recruited from their ranks for his cabinet and administration. He promised tax reform that would hurt people like him and he promised a wall which ain't being built and today's news says that he's been screaming at his staff about their inability to close borders as much as he promised. I think he even promised not to play a lot of golf, didn't he?

The same cynicism I have for awards extends to my not expecting any elected official to make good on all or most of their campaign promises. I think though that Trump has had a lower score than most and a profound belief in his ability to fast-talk his way around admitting when he's reneged or reversed. I'll start changing my mind about him when we see even a semi-workable proposal for that health plan where "everybody's going to be taken care of, much better than they're taken care of now and the government's going to pay for it."

Boy, Chita Rivera is amazing. I know it's not polite to mention a lady's age but last night at the Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills, every single one of us in the audience was thinking, "She's 85 and she can still sing and dance!" No, not with the vitality and flexibility of when she was in the original West Side Story or Bye Bye Birdie or any of her huge Broadway hits…but even at a reduced capacity, she's still amazing. On the way out, a lady in front of us said, "I'm going to still be tingling tomorrow morning" and I don't know if she is but I sure am.

Broadway historian-accompanist Seth Rudetsky does these shows every so often at the Wallis and perhaps elsewhere. He brings in some legendary diva of the musical theater and it's half-interview, half-performance. Chita answered questions charmingly and amusingly about her career and she sang eight or nine of her tunes from her many stage triumphs, closing with "All That Jazz" and "Nowadays" from Chicago. ("Nowadays" featured a funny, loving impression of her late co-star in that show, Gwen Verdon.) Her sheer energy impressed us all, all the more so when we remembered that she did two performances last evening and we were at the second.

Mr. Rudetsky is also a very fine host and pianist. I said the same thing about him a year ago when he did the same kind of show on the same stage with another pretty talented woman, Audra McDonald. Can't wait to see who he drags there next season.

While we're on the subject of talented folks singing show tunes, I've been too busy 'til now to report on another peachy evening. Last week, I took Amber to the Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood to see my pal Jason Graae performing with his pal, Liz Callaway. I felt a little inadequate there. The place was packed with performers and I was maybe the only one present who wasn't qualified to get up there and do a number. (We were sitting with Frank Ferrante.)

If you know Graae and Callaway, I don't have to rave about their talents, individually or collectively. If you don't know them…well, you oughta. Jason probably won't be doing a lot of cabaret performances for a while. He joins the National Tour of Wicked when it opens next week in Omaha. Unless he gets his ass fired, he will be in it when it plays Toledo, Toronto, Detroit, Tulsa, San Antonio, Albuquerque, San Diego, Los Angeles and other cities. He is playing, of course, The Wizard but I'm betting that if he's still in it when it gets here they'll have upgraded him to Glinda or Elphaba. Touring schedule here.

I could tell you how good Liz Callaway is but I already showed you back here…and here's a link to a video I posted of Jason in performance. Put these two on the same stage and it was another reason to wake up the next morning still tingling. Audra McDonald, by the way, is performing down at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown L.A. the afternoon of May 20 and there still seem to be cheap tickets available on Goldstar.

Just got back from seeing an 85-year-old woman sing and dance…and boy, was she wonderful. Tell you all about it in the morning.

I get into an elevator in a Beverly Hills building that's full of doctors, including my own.  Before the car heads upwards, another man gets in with me.  My keen eye for recognizing people tells me it's Paul Shaffer, famed bandleader-sidekick to David Letterman.  He's wearing dark glasses and a hat that does not completely cover his totally-bald head but it's definitely Paul Shaffer.

Except that it isn't.  In the second glance I take at him, I see that he is not Paul Shaffer but rather an incredible facsimile.  I say nothing but he says to me, "No, I'm not Paul Shaffer."

I say, "I realized that on second glance.  How many times a day do you have to tell people you're not Paul Shaffer?"

He says, "When I'm out in public, about once every half-hour.  Sometimes, I can hear them whispering or I know from their faces and I just let them think that."

I ask, "Is it better now that Letterman's gone off?"

He says, "A little, yeah. For a while there, I was thinking of flying to New York, robbing a bank near where Letterman tapes and watching them arrest Paul Shaffer."

And that's when I get off on my podiatrist's floor. Except that before I get off, I tell him, "I know how you feel. I'm sick of telling people I'm not Jon Hamm."

As the doors close, he says, "I wasn't fooled."

Some folks are upset this morning that Trump is saying "everyone agrees" he should get the Nobel Peace Prize for a peace that has barely begun to happen. What they don't get is that Trump means everyone on Fox News agrees he should get it. It's just the way the guy talks. Everything he does is perfect. Everyone agrees. What is that lying media talking about when they suggest otherwise? Meanwhile, in other Fake News…

• Joe Conason on why pulling out of the Iran deal might not be good for America but it could be great for Russia. Of course.
• And Daniel Larison writes at some length here and here why it'll be bad for America. Apparently, the main reasons the Iran agreement is "the worst deal ever" in the eyes of Trump and folks like John Bolton are that (a) Obama negotiated it and (b) it somehow doesn't make Iran cease to exist.
• George Will says Donald Trump is not the worst person in our government. That honor, he argues, now belongs to Mike Pence. Frankly, I think the difference between Trump and Pence is about as meaningful as the difference between the Chicken McNuggets at McDonald's and the Crispy Chicken Nuggets at Wendy's.
• Frank Rich is asked if Trump will face any political penalty for his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear pact. Rich replies, "Honestly, I doubt Trump will still be in office when the full fallout of this blunder is felt. The blunder, one should add, is not only to pull out of a deal that was working but also to have no "better deal" (or policy at all) to take its place. But the interesting political piece about both this decision and the onrushing summit with Kim Jong-un is that Trump has persuaded himself that big bold foreign policy moves, however harmful to America and its allies, will rescue him from the rampaging scandal at home."
• A number of corporations gave huge, suspicious cash amounts to Michael Cohen…for what? Andrew Prokop runs us through some of their explanations of what they thought they'd be getting for that money.

So here's what I'm wondering about. We get this steady stream of stories about Trump off-camera being pissed about this or furious about that…stories that obviously have been leaked by sources within the White House. Who's leaking these and how have they been able to remain within the White House?

Another duck story with a happy ending…

I used to spend a lot of my life in second-hand book stores…and not just hunting for old comic books.  I bought books on old movies, books on popular culture, books on politics and history, fiction by favored authors and sometimes just books that looked interesting if they were cheap enough.

This more or less stopped with the rise of the Internet.  I once carried a little list in my wallet of rare books I was seeking and for a long time, I was lucky if I came across one of them every two or three years.  I had more or less written the rest off as ungettable until one day, I located and ordered every single one of them via the worldwide web.  And that really did happen in one day.

I have rarely been in such a store since, partly because I have been seeking no old books I could not find on eBay and partly because since everyone else buys theirs that way now, such stores have largely disappeared.  We're about to lose another.  Robert Spina — thank you, Robert — sent me this link to an article about the closing of Book Castle-Movie World out in Burbank. It was the domain of a gent named Steve Edrington and as you'll read, he is closing it after being in that line of endeavor for 51 years.

I don't think I ever even went to Steve's present store but I was in a previous one, at least two decades ago. He remembered me from his first such establishment, Bond Street Books on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood. I was at Bond Street a lot back in the sixties buying old comic books and many non-comic books.

If there's a skill to running that kind of business — and obviously, there is — Steve had it well-mastered. I hope he doesn't regret his decision to close down, though I'm assuming he didn't have a lot of choice. It's sad in a way that there are so few of those places left. True, I haven't supported any of them this century but it's hard to not be nostalgic for something that once upon a time brought you such joy and added value to your life.

One bite. Everybody knows the rules…

• I think Michael Avenatti's just out to see if he can be on TV more times this year than Steve Harvey.

Fred Kaplan on why it was wrong for Trump to decide to opt out of the Iranian nuclear deal. I think Congress should have intervened. They might not have been able to stop him but maybe they could have passed a law that said that in the event of war, the first men drafted to go fight it would be older ones who play a lot of golf…even if they have bone spurs.

In the immortal words of Deep Throat: "Follow the money!"

Staggering Revelations

Tonight we have what I'd say may be the most staggering revelations since the tangle of "Trump/Russia" investigations began almost two years ago. This is not hyperbole.

The most important ones are that a Russian oligarch paid more than $500,000 into the shell company that Cohen earlier used to make his payment to Stormy Daniels. The money is nominally from the US affiliate of Viktor Vekselberg's holding company. But this is a direct connection.  AT&T made payments totaling $200,000. Novartis, the drug manufacturer, chipped in almost $400,000. In what still must be considered preliminary reporting, The New York Times now says that transactions totaling at least $4.4 million flowed into "Essential Consultants LLC", the shell company Cohen used as the vehicle to pay Stormy Daniels and then later used to arrange another hush agreement at least nominally for billionaire Elliott Broidy, a then-RNC deputy finance chair who is tied up in the Trump/Russia probe through fixer George Nader. The payments all end in January 2018. That's when the name "Essential Consultants LLC" was first published by The Wall Street Journal as part of the Stormy Daniels story.

Click here to read the whole thing.

And by the way, I don't think the real "Deep Throat" (Mark Felt) actually said "Follow the money." At least, no one ever said in public that was a direct quote from him so it may have been invented by William Goldman for the movie, All the President's Men. But someone said it.