Matt Yglesias explains the new theory of presidential power that Trump's White House is advancing…and why it would give dictatorial powers to our Chief Exec. No one who is for this would have been for this if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton had proposed this while they were in office.
Daniel Larison explains why Trump's tariffs and trade wars are bad ideas that will wind up helping no one be better off.
Initially when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, we heard that 64 people had been killed. More recently, we're hearing that the actual number is 4,645 which is quite a jump. So which is it? Probably neither, says Washington Post truth seeker Glenn Kessler. He thinks it's more like 1,000 which is still horrifying but not as horrifying as 4,645 but still indicative of a government that doesn't care about human life.
Here's another view of John McCain, this one from a reporter who has covered him a lot. And lastly…
Since he took residency in the Oval Office, Trump has uttered 3,251 false or misleading statements. You know…in a way, that's kind of impressive.
My lovely friend Amber and I are back from eleven days and ten nights in Las Vegas, Philadelphia and Manhattan. Those days, nights and cities were all too busy to allow me to file contemporaneous reports…so taking it one day at a time — Hey, good name for a sitcom! — I'm going to do it here. Come on along and join us on…
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
When I fly to Vegas, the odds of my luggage arriving on the same flight are about the same as the odds of winning big on Keno. This trip, Amber and I got lucky — at Luggage, not Keno. We got there with our bags but without much sleep the night before.
It was not the comfiest of flights. All the way there, I was in a middle seat with Amber snoozing to my right, which was fine…but there was this Vomiting Supermodel to my left. You have no idea how unattractive an attractive lady can be when she spends an entire 50-minute flight making grotesque moans, filling an airsick bag and apologizing to all around for making grotesque moans and filling an airsick bag.
"This always happens to me when I fly," she explained during a brief pause in the grotesque moans that sounded like a water buffalo giving birth, not that I've ever actually witnessed that. "It happens when I'm a passenger in a car too," she added, "but not when I'm driving." She was changing flights in Vegas to head elsewhere and I suggested she ask if they'd let her fly that plane.
Amber and I cabbed it to the Excalibur Hotel where, at any hour, there's always a long line at check-in. Fortunately, I'd had the good sense to sign up for their Automatic Check-In Service where you claim your room online, then you go to a kiosk and it dispenses your room keys. Sounds great, right? Well, it might be when the key dispensers are working. Fortunately, there was only a moderate wait at the special line they'd set up to service the people who were smart enough to sign up for the Automatic Check-In.
I asked one desk clerk, "Does it work when it works?" She said, "I couldn't say. I'm new here and I haven't seen it work yet." If a nickel slot machine was busted, you know they'd have had it fixed faster than you could say "Bugsy Siegel."
Upon reaching our room, Amber — operating on two hours of sleep — promptly went beddy-bye. I — functioning on almost four — hiked over to the Mandalay Bay to pick up our badges for the main reason we were in town…the Licensing Expo!
What, you may well ask, is the Licensing Expo? Well, I'll tell you. It's a convention of folks who can mainly be divided into two categories. You have your Licensors, who are people and/or companies who own properties that they exploit on t-shirts, dolls, games, posters and other kinds of what they all seem to call "merch," that word being short for "merchandise." The other category are the Licensees — those who buy the rights to exploit the brand names, characters and various properties of the Licensors. Each year at the Licensing Expo, Licensors and Licensees get together for an odd version of The Dating Game that could potentially result in mutually-profitable deals.
I am in neither category but many of those who engage my services are present so I have little biz-type meetings with them to discuss current and possible projects. The whole event looks a lot like this promotional video which, since it was released before this year's Expo, probably features video shot at last year's…
They wouldn't give me Amber's badge but I got mine and wandered around in the hall for an hour or two, getting a few of my biz-type meetings done. It's a pretty big room full of exhibits and celebrities and people in weird costumes and I had to keep reminding myself that I didn't have to rush upstairs soon and host six panels.
I attend the Expo every three years or so and I've become very skilled at separating hype from reality. I met one gent, for instance, who was promoting a new cartoon series he created that does not, by any reasonable definition of word "exist," exist. Still, if you saw his booth and heard his sales pitch, you might not know that. His characters recently beat The Simpsons for Name Recognition according to a recent poll, probably of his immediate family. Roaming the hall, I saw a lot of illusory successes, a lot of genuine well-known properties and a startling number of characters designed by Jack Kirby.
The thing I enjoyed most was in the Expo Lobby, outside the main exhibit hall. There, they'd set up a reasonable facsimile of the street and front stoop we all know from Sesame Street. And there, sitting on a stool for most of the day (and part of the next one) was David Rudman, the current custodian-actor of Cookie Monster.
I love Cookie Monster. Always have, always will. I think he's one of the funniest, most wonderful creatures ever created in any medium and if the guy who took over the role from Frank Oz wasn't doing right by him, I would be damning his name on this blog three times a week. You know how I feel about Trump? He would be the second-biggest threat to decency in the world today. Joyously, Mr. Rudman is doing C.M. as well as any human being today could do him. He sounds right, he acts right, he even ad-libs absolutely in character.
I already knew this but I got the chance to witness it up close at the Expo. I just stood there for maybe a half-hour, watching and listening as Mr. Rudman and the blue, shaggy superstar with the goo-goo-googly eyes worked the line. People — a few small kids but an awful lot of big ones in my age range — queued up for a few moments and a selfie opportunity with Cookie Monster. Rudman was perfectly "on" the whole time I watched, and also later and the next morn when I passed by, giving all comers an expert performance.
He was sitting right there in full-view with one of his hands operating Cookie Monster's mouth and the other serving as one of Cookie Monster's mitts…but the effect is so total, so complete that you can ignore that human being sticking out of the monster you came to see. And hour after hour, he did that gravelly voice which sounds hard on the throat but I guess isn't on his. I just watched one person after another have a delightful serving of quality time with Cookie Monster — an experience that they will never forget.
I entertained the notion of getting in line but the end of it would have put me out of eavesdropping/observing range for too long…and anyway, I really wanted five minutes with David Rudman more than I wanted the two minutes with Cookie Monster they were offering. Four Comic-Cons ago, I got a photo and about forty seconds with David and C.M. as one of my panels followed one he did with Eric Jacobson, another expert Muppeteer who does as-good-as-it-gets mimicry of others' characters. I only briefly got to tell them both how, because of my years working for Sid and Marty Krofft and my years directing cartoon voices, I think I really, really understand how difficult it is to do what they do…and how well I think they do it. I am now more impressed than I was then and I was pretty damn impressed then.
In my many trips to Las Vegas, I have seen many great shows by some of the world's greatest entertainers. I can't think of one I enjoyed more than watching Cookie Monster greeting his public.
I hung out for a while with Jim "Garfield" Davis and another friend who takes good care of a famous cat — Don Oriolo, guardian of Felix — and attended a cocktail party thrown by King Features. I don't drink but I do eat little delicious shrimp hors d'oeuvres…and I had a lovely conversation there with C.J. Kettler, the newly-installed president of that fine operation. Our chat got interrupted but we agreed to continue it later that week in Philadelphia, where we were both heading for the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Weekend.
Finally, Amber texted that she had awoken from her coma and I trammed back to take her out for some of that glamorous Vegas night life. We staggered to a Walgreens for supplies and grabbed barely-edible burgers at the only bad Johnny Rocket's I've ever found.
We were both still exhausted so as we chewed on our putative hamburgers, we stared at each other and said and/or thought, "This is just the first day. Can we possibly get through ten more days of this?" Reading this report, you may be thinking the same thing but it'll be better when we (you, Amber and I) aren't exhausted. So get some sleep and tune in tomorrow for more in Las Vegas with our special guests, Penn and Teller.
Everyone in the extended family that is MAD Magazine is shocked this morning at the news that Nick Meglin died this morning of a sudden heart attack. Nick worked on MAD for close to half a century, starting as an Idea Man and Writer, moving to an Associate Editor position and then to being co-editor (with John Ficarra) and then, upon his retirement in 2004, becoming a Consulting Editor. Given his wicked sense of humor, Insulting Editor might have been a better title.
Many of us are especially jarred because we spent last weekend with Nick at the National Cartoonists Society convention in Philadelphia. I had lunch with Nick a week ago today and a week ago tomorrow, moderated a MAD panel in which he participated. He was alert and funny and seemed like a guy in good health for a man of 82.
Since leaving regular duties on MAD, he has mostly been involved in writing musicals and was looking forward to the opening of the stage version of Grumpy Old Men (based on the movie) at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine in August. Nick did the lyrics for that show and for the musical Tim and Scrooge, a sequel to Dickens' A Christmas Carol, he wrote both book and lyrics.
But, getting back to MAD: I want you all to know this about my friend Nick. The sense of humor that permeated that magazine from about 1957 into the eighties was mainly Nick's. The editor of MAD for much of that period, Al Feldstein, was a skilled craftsman at producing a magazine on time and in giving the best possible presentation to the work of his freelance writers and artists…but Feldstein wasn't all that funny.
Meglin was funny. He wrote much of MAD's editorial material (intros, ads, etc.). He rewrote or punched-up articles that were in need of extra laughs. And he recognized comedic talent in writers who submitted work and encouraged them and guided them. At least half of MAD's best writers during that period were "found" by Nick as were many of its artists. When I researched my now-outta print book, MAD Art, I interviewed just about everyone who'd ever worked for the magazine and was still around to be interviewed. A lot of those folks told me that had it not been for Nick, they never would have had their proud association with the magazine.
I've talked to a few of them again today. They're all very sad about this news and so am I.
This should be the last Mushroom Soup Day for a while. I'm home from a long trip: Amber and I did two nights in Las Vegas, four nights in Philadelphia and four more in New York. We saw shows, ate at amazing eateries, socialized with great friends and I even snuck in some biz-type meetings. I'll tell you all about the adventure over the next few days. Right now, I'm going to get into my own bed and sleep 'til Sunday.
A whole lot o' apologizing going on, though of course never any from this White House which thinks never saying you were wrong is the same thing as always being right. Trump reminds me so much of people I've encountered who believe that never saying you were sorry is a way of being tough. No, it isn't. It's a way of telling people you're too scared to own up to your own mistakes.
One of the reasons that what Samantha Bee was wrong is this: She did a report that made some serious allegations about Ivanka Trump — allegations that oughta be discussed. But nobody's discussing what Ivanka did. They're just discussing what Samantha did.
In other news, one of Roseanne's personalities apologized for her stupid tweet, two of them are fighting back and the other nineteen have not reported in yet. And so it goes.
Samantha Bee should have tried telling everyone she's been taping her show while on Ambien. Which, by the way, is a less effective sleep aid than being on TBS.
You can have a double-earful of Evanier this week. Up now on Ken Levine's nifty blog is Part One of a two-part interview he did with Yours Truly. We recorded it a few weeks ago so don't expect to see us debating which of us has a lower opinion of Roseanne. But we do talk about comic books and Jack Kirby and animation, and I think there's more about my dubious career in Part Two, which goes up next week. You should be listening to all of Ken's fine podcasts but at least listen to the two with me.
Then! Tomorrow (Thursday), I make a return visit to Tell Me Everything with John Fugelsang, which is heard on the Insight channel on Sirius XM Radio. It's done live from 11 AM to 2 PM on the West Coast, 2 PM to 5 PM on the East Coast and I'll be on in the last hour discussing…well, I'm not sure what we'll be discussing. Call in and maybe you can tell us what you'd like us to discuss. This is another show that should be on your must-listen list even when they don't have me on. I do not have a link for you. I think you have to be a Sirius XM subscriber…and if you do, I think the Insight channel is 121. That is all.
The evening before Lyndon Johnson was sworn in for his full term as president (January, 1965), NBC aired a great special called Allan Sherman's Funnyland. It starred (of course) Allan Sherman and his guests included Lorne Greene, Jack Gilford and Angie Dickinson.
Since no one had gotten around yet to inventing the VCR or the DVR or anything that would record both video and audio off the TV, I recorded the latter on my Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder and played it over and over and over. A few years ago, I managed to obtain a DVD of the show and it really was as good as I always remembered. Here's a number from it…
I'm in complete agreement with your post about the justification for the speedy cancellation of Roseanne, but I would like you to clarify one little detail for me.
It's the part where you posted: "I'm guessing there were execs at ABC who for whatever reason already wanted to dump the show and the tweet put the vote to do that over the top." For the life of me, I can't figure out what you're basing that guess on.
The speed with which the decision was made as well as the star's reputation for…I'll be polite and say "instability." Deciding to ax one of your most popular shows is not an action taken on impulse. It's the kind of thing you run past a lot of people including lawyers to determine any unforeseen legal complications. It would usually take a day or three…unless some execs there had already asked the musical question "What do we do if Roseanne returns to her old antics?"
Like I said, it's a guess. But a lot of people anticipated this kind of thing might happen. I linked to Stu Shostak but Ken Levine also saw it coming and, I'm sure, many folks at the network. (Ken, by the way, has a terrific guest on his podcast this week. It drops this evening over on his website.)
I should also have mentioned I see both sides of an argument here: I don't like the idea of someone being fired because of a joke, even a bad joke, even a joke in terrible taste. I assume we'll hear Bill Maher make a strong defense of Roseanne on his show this Friday night. But it's not endangering your Freedom of Speech if I exercise mine to not want to be associated with you. And there's nothing wrong with a network deciding they don't want to support the fame and fortune of someone who says something like that and is likely to do even worse before long.
If the remark had been tweeted by someone without her history, maybe we could see it as an outlier or even buy her excuse that it was the Ambien talking. Some stars possibly could have apologized more effectively and kept their shows. But this is Roseanne with a long history of acting like Roseanne. If you point your ear towards the ABC building and listen hard, I bet you can hear an awful lot of "I told you so"s.
I guess I should write about the whole Roseanne matter. I'm an absolute First Amendment champion but I've scoured that fine piece of legislation and nowhere in it do I see a Constitutional Right to have your own TV show. Nothing in there about getting paid millions of dollars to do that show, either.
I never argue "funny" with anyone. If you laugh, he or she or it is funny to you. Roseanne, with or without her various last names and on TV or stage, has never been funny to me, which is why I haven't watched her new show and only briefly watched her old show…I think only when Stan Freberg was on.
I saw her at comedy clubs a few times before her first series was a hit. Didn't laugh and neither did most of those audiences. Obviously though, other audiences did. Her appeal escapes me but so does the appeal of a lot of shows and performers who are quite popular. That does not bother me one bit.
Once after her first series was a hit, I was backstage at the Comedy Store with a friend who was about to go on with an act, much of which I had written. Roseanne walked in and demanded that whoever was on stage at that moment get off because she wanted to go on, do a new hunk of material she was breaking in and then get the hell outta there, A.S.A.P. There and at other clubs, I had seen Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Garry Shandling, Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno and others show up and ask if they could go on when there was an opening. None of them demanded, none insisted on bumping another comic but Roseanne had to go on immediately.
She was accommodated. The comic on stage — I think it was Dennis Wolfberg — was given a signal to cut his set short. Roseanne went on.
You ever see a cat throw up? You know how hilarious that is? That's about as hilarious as Roseanne was that night. She left, cursing the crappy writer who'd sold her those jokes. I thought the performance was at least as much to blame but, hey, she's done well for herself so what do I know?
Her new series was a big hit upon its debut but with diminishing popularity since. As I understand, it was picked up for another season but because of her Twitter remarks, the pick-up was rescinded yesterday. In a way, I think ABC shouldn't have put it on in the first place if they were going to yank it off because of some racist thing its star said.
It's not like anyone couldn't have imagined she'd do such a thing. My pal Stu Shostak even predicted it on his podcast. So far, the best argument I've heard that ABC was wrong to yank her show is a pretty weak one: That they knew what they were buying. It would be like canceling an appearance by Willie Nelson because it came out that he was smoking pot.
The most surprising thing about this to me was the swiftness of what happened. Up went the tweet, down came the hammer. ABC didn't even wait a day or two so they could claim, true or not, that they heard from a lot of advertisers who said they'd no longer buy time in Roseanne. I'm guessing there were execs at ABC who for whatever reason already wanted to dump the show and the tweet put the vote to do that over the top.
This story may not be over. Roseanne will probably do something to portray herself as a victim…and as I write this, Trump has yet to weigh in. By the time I awake, he probably will and there will be some new twist to this whole matter. See you in the morning.
Outraged about ABC canceling Roseanne because of what she said? I'll believe you'e standing on principle if you said the same thing when the same network canceled Bill Maher.
It just dawned on me that last Saturday marked twelve years since I had Gastric Bypass Surgery and lost…well, it's hard to say how much weight I lost. I lost a large amount between the time I decided to have the surgery and 5/26/06 when I actually went under the knife or the laparoscopic tools or however you'd phrase it. That was because I began to change my eating habits including the abandonment of all carbonated beverages.
After the surgery, I ate almost nothing for a few weeks without the slightest craving or ill effects. The rate at which pounds evaporated slowed as I began eating again and various after-effects of the surgery settled down. At one point though, I realized I'd lost 72 pounds in 72 days — or maybe it was 75 pounds in 75 days. Something around that. In the morning, Carolyn would wake up, look over at me and ask, "Who are you and why are you in Mark Evanier's bed?"
My weight went up and down as is the norm with everyone…and I guess the best answer to the "How much did you lose?" question is just to say I'm now 90 pounds under my top weight and five or six waist sizes.
What I'm remembering today is something that was said to me before the surgery by the doctor who helped me through the process. I was in pretty good health back then. I was just too large to fit into the world in which I was trying to live. He said, "If you have this surgery now, you'll breeze through it because all your vital signs are great. If you have it in ten or twelve years, you'll be doing it to save your life and you'll have a much rougher time of it."
He was right. I didn't exactly "breeze" through it. It was more like a stiff wind with gusts up to 40 MPH. But it was a lot easier than if I'd waited until, say, now. That doctor no longer practices and doesn't want me mentioning his name but he reads this blog and I want him to know how grateful I am to him for all the wisdom and caring he bestowed on me. May you all have a doctor who's that good at what he does.
As I get older, I find myself more and more starting sentences with the phrase "As I get older," as in "As I get older, I find myself more and more starting sentences with the phrase "As I get older…"
One thing I hope I never do is something a friend of mine started doing around the time he hit 75. Almost every sentence that came out of his mouth contained a phrase like…
"Well, speaking on behalf of us old farts…"
"Well, you won't have me around much longer…"
"We dinosaurs have to stick together…"
You can't avoid getting old but you don't have to surrender to it the minute simple math passes some arguable date that you think is old. For one thing, I believe that thinking you're old will age you. For another, anyone who cares about you is really sick of heaing how you'll be kicking the bucket any day now.
I'm 66 and I'm not ruling out the possibility, slim though it could be, that I have some good years ahead of me. Don't give up before you have to.
We continue our parade of soup cans today, expressing our usual amazement at the slippery stylings of the guy who says he's president but sure doesn't act like one. I suppose you've heard about this one…
Matt Pottinger, who serves on the National Security Council, gave a "background briefing" to a large number of reporters. It was about the state of U.S. relations with North Korea and the possibility of rescheduling the canceled peace talks.
A background briefing is where some government official gives info to members of the press and they can report it but are not supposed to release his or her name. I'm not entirely certain where this practice started and the ethics of it might be arguable but it is certainly not new or rare. In this case, Pottinger initiated this briefing, gave it from the podium of the White House briefing room and many audio recordings of it exist.
Reporters reported what was said without naming Pottinger. Trump's tweet on those stories read as follows…
The Failing @nytimes quotes "a senior White House official," who doesn't exist, as saying "even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed." WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.
Lately as I read this kind of thing, I imagine a guy who's been relentlessly cheating on his wife, maybe even with a porn star. He knows that the lady next door is about to tell his wife about it and all he can think to do is to go to his wife and say, "That neighbor lady! She's insane! She's a pathological liar! You can't believe a word she says!"
Because Trump knows there's a lot of very bad stuff coming…
