The most important link I have for you today is to Ezra Klein giving you his take on the Michael Wolff book. I still have a little trouble with the premise that Trump didn't really want to win the presidency. I would have trouble with the suggestion that Donald Trump didn't want to win a game of tic-tac-toe.

In fact, if you played tic-tac-toe with this guy and he lost, the first thing he'd do is tell you you're wrong, he actually won and it's Fake News to say otherwise. You cheated, he got three-in-a-row and it was misreported, seeming to lose was all part of a master plan which he has won, et cetera, et cetera. As I am writing this, I just got a new pop-up that says "Trump says he would beat Oprah in 2020." Well, of course he'd say that. He would say he would beat anybody.

You know the old line about the dog who chased a car, caught it and then didn't know what to do with it? I think Trump may be like a dog who caught a car and then figured that proved he knew how to drive.

Anyway, read Klein. The "he didn't want to win" premise makes enough sense in some areas that I'm not able to dismiss it. I'm just not convinced. Now, this…

• Politifact takes a look at Wolff's book. They point out a number of inconsequential errors but raise some serious questions of the "How did Wolff know this?" variety.
• We are now to the point with Donald Trump where most people will believe any story about him that contains elements of outrageous lying, outlandish self-obsession or utter cluelessness. I hope the anti-Trump movement does not develop an in-the-bubble mentality like the pro-Trump movement. Rod Dreher thinks we're getting there.
• I kinda agree with Yascha Mounk that calling Trump "mentally ill" is not going to solve anything and might make it worse. I also have a bit of a problem with anyone, including licensed psychiatrists, making that diagnosis from afar.
• But then I also like what Kevin Drum suggests about how Trump could disprove all those allegations about his sanity or lack, thereof. He needs to give a calm, rational address which deals with issues of policy and not with his two favorite topics: Revenge Against His Enemies and His Own Greatness. That's all.
• Will Trump sit for questioning by Robert Mueller and his investigative team? Cristian Farias says any lawyer in the world would tell him that's a crazy thing to do…which would ordinarily make me assume he'll do it but I'd like to think he's not that crazy. It would be kind of fun to watch all the Republicans who insisted Bill Clinton had to be ousted because he didn't tell the absolute truth in one deposition have to defend everything Trump would get wrong if he was questioned under oath.
• Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux dives into the question of whether a sitting president can be indicted for criminal actions. The folks who might have done that to Richard Nixon during the Watergate investigation side-stepped that question. My guess is that will remain the default action.
• Remember how Trump was going to be the guy who was going to make Coal Mining a great, booming industry again and save the noble profession of Coal Miner? Well, that seems to be over.

And speaking of Coal Miners, remember how John Oliver is being sued by a coal magnate for allegedly defaming him on Last Week Tonight? Some months ago, I read where the case was going before a judge on 1/10/2018. I don't know if it still is but there oughta be some news about it soon. I gather from various articles that the plaintiff, Robert Murray, is not as enchanted with Mr. Trump as he used to be.

• Apparently, when Trump announced he was going to give out his awards for Fake News yesterday, that was Fake News.

Volume 4 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips has stopped being a pre-order at Amazon. In fact, they've been shipping copies for a few days now, plus I've heard from folks who got copies more than a week ago — i.e., last year — from other sources. I am so, so happy to have this out. I will be so, so happy to see Volume 5 emerge, maybe in time for Comic-Con International in July. It will have an introduction by Jake Tapper, taking a brief respite from his current profession of swatting down White House factotums.

I think Walt Kelly's Pogo is the greatest comic strip ever done…and I thought that long before I became (cough!) involved with Mr. Kelly's daughter. I even have the original art to a Pogo Sunday page framed and hanging in my kitchen, right next to a framed Peanuts Sunday page that Charles Schulz gave me. I don't recall where I got the Pogo page but I probably paid good money for it, long before I met Carolyn. I'm going to tell you a little story about it but first, we have to break for this brief commercial message…

Volume 4 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips contains two whole years — 1955 and 1956 — of daily and Sunday Pogo comic strips…with the Sundays printed in color for the first time in any English language reprint collection. There's also historical material, a little tribute to my love Carolyn and a foreword by Neil Gaiman. This link will allow you to order one from Amazon — which at this moment has shipped out so many that they're temporarily out of stock. But order anyway. It won't be long.

You can also order a lovely boxed-set of Volume 3 and 4 via this link or order the boxed set of Volumes 1 and 2 at this link for about the price of one volume. If you care about great comic art, these books are must-haves. And now, back to you, Mark…

Thank you, me. As you may know, Carolyn was my "companion" (sounds classier than "lady friend") for about twenty years. Ah, I remember our first real date…

I took her to a great Japanese restaurant that was so great, it went out of business a week later. Then we went back to my house where a quick tour has been known to scare off other women. Of course, I showed her the framed Sunday page by her father. We were standing in front of it when the following occurred…

She had noticed some books I have about magic and she asked me if I did any tricks. I told her I don't perform often but, yes, I have a few feats I can do with a deck of cards. They do not cause Copperfield to sweat the competition but they can astound the easily-astounded. She insisted I do one for her so I grabbed up a deck.

(Before I forget: Don't read this story if you're viewing this site on a cell phone. You're going to need a big computer monitor to get the punchline.)

Magicians aren't supposed to reveal how a trick is done but I think it's okay to reveal this one if I don't tell you what the trick is. It involves the Queen of Diamonds. I write "Queen of Diamonds" on a slip of paper, fold it up and hand it to (in this case) Carolyn to hold without looking at it. She has no idea what I've written. Then I shuffle the cards and do some fancy moves which I don't think I can do any more…then I have Carolyn pick a card, seemingly at random. I say "seemingly" because while she may think she has a free choice of any card, I have tricked her into selecting the Queen of Diamonds.

Then, as usually performed, there's some mumbo-jumbo and stalling and drawing it out but I finally say to her, "All right. You could have picked any card [a lie] and you picked the Queen of Diamonds! Now, open that slip of paper I handed you and tell me what it says!" She opens the paper, sees that it says "Queen of Diamonds" and she is amazed and impressed. At least, that's the way it usually works. This particular time, it went like this…

I said, "Now, I'm going to have you pick a card —" and before I could shuffle the deck and force the Queen of Diamonds on her, she just blurted out, "Queen of Diamonds!" This happens to every magician once in a while. Every so often, your audience inadvertently does your trick for you and doesn't realize it. I immediately told Carolyn to open the folded paper and see what I'd written on it, which she did. Upon finding the name of the card she'd thought of ten seconds before, she shrieked and ran out of the room in a panic.

I started to run after her but then my eyes fell for some reason on the Pogo strip on the wall — which was right behind her as I'd performed the trick. I laughed, went and got her and showed her what happened on that Pogo page. Life doesn't always imitate art but it nearly always can replicate a good comic strip.

Daniela Galarza explains to us why Costco and other places will never raise the price of their rotisserie chickens. I suspect they might but a market rotisserie chicken will probably always cost less than what it would take to buy a raw chicken from that same market and cooking it yourself at home.

A little under four minutes of a baby panda and his (or her) mommy…

I just browsed some political debate sites and I'm starting to not understand what the word "elite" means anymore. Clearly, a lot of folks using it are employing different definitions. To some, it seems to mean "anyone who isn't me." To others, the working interpretation is — and read this carefully — "anyone who I think thinks they're better than I am."

The Merriam-Webster people say it means "individuals carefully selected as being the best of a class," which of course is a very high compliment. You would think then that to be called an "elitist" might also be a compliment but no. The folks at Merriam-Webster say an elitist is not a noun but rather an adjective meaning "being or characteristic of a person who has an offensive air of superiority and tends to ignore or disdain anyone regarded as inferior." The way they phrase that makes me think they're elitists.

Dictionary.com meanwhile does recognize "elitist" as a noun and says it's "a person having, thought to have, or professing superior intellect or talent, power, wealth, or membership in the upper echelons of society." That doesn't sound so bad. I'd rather like to be a person who has — or is thought to have — superior intellect or talent or power or wealth, etc. But maybe not if I'm also being perceived as having an offensive air of superiority.

Question: By that definition, is it possible to be superior at something and not have an offensive air? Last night, I was at the Magic Castle and I spent a little time with my friend Richard Turner, who a lot of magicians would tell you is the best handler and manipulator of playing cards in the world. He's certainly way superior at that than I am by a factor of a zillion or so. I sensed nothing offensive in the atmosphere.

In fact, I think people really like superiority and seek it out. The entire premise of sports is that some human beings are better than others at some things: This guy runs faster, that lady can jump higher, etc.

Browsing the 'net, I see a lot of people condemning the "Hollywood Elite" or "The East Coast Elite" or "The New York Elite." They don't seem to like anyone in those vague categories they decry but they're wild about a president who can't seem to string two tweets together without bragging about his superior intellect, talent, power, wealth, etc. They even like that he has an offensive air of superiority and don't think that he means superior to them, which of course he does.

So I'm completely lost on what it means these days to be a part of some "elite" and I also don't know if I want to be, nor do I know if I want to be ruled by elites. I'd sure like the Secretary of Defense to know more about war and how to avoid it than I do and the folks who manage the economy to be vastly superior to me in math and understanding business and commerce and such. I could live without any offensive air of superiority but, hey, I entrust my life to doctors who I hope will know absolutely everything about what they do. The more superior they are, the more I like it and I'll settle for some whiffs of offensive air.

The folks who form Voctave sing a song from West Side Story…

For some reason, I've recently begun to have trouble with online ticket merchants. Most small theaters contract with an online company to sell their seats. That makes sense but it means that when you get to the theater and discover there's a problem with your tickets, they say, "We can't do anything to correct this situation. You'll have to discuss that with the online company." And there are two things wrong with that from the customer's position, one being that Customer Service at the online company is usually closed in the evening — you know, just when you're at the theater and you discover a problem with your tickets.

And the other thing wrong with that is that when you get in touch with them the next day, the online company says, "We're sorry but we can't do anything to correct this situation after the event has transpired." In other words, "You should have contacted us when you didn't know something was wrong." If you press the matter further, all you get is "We can't do anything to correct that. You'll have to take that up with the theater." All the companies I've checked that sell tickets on the web have a policy statement somewhere on their site that basically says they will never give you a refund for any reason — no way, no how — especially after the event has taken place.

That's not exactly true. I have persuaded some sellers and theaters to correct mistakes but they kind of reserve the right to not fix them and they do not make it easy to fix them. At times, the back-and-forth between theater and ticket seller remind me of when I worked for Hanna-Barbera…

If I had a problem with something the studio did, I'd go to Joe Barbera and tell him and he'd say, "I'm not in charge of that. You'll have to take it up with Bill." So I'd go to Bill Hanna, tell him and hear him say, "I'm not in charge of that. You'll have to take it up with Joe." It took me a while to realize that even if they hadn't planned it that way deliberately, they still weren't about to change it. Neither are online merchants who've discovered that being an online merchant makes it possible to configure a Customer Service department that never has to service any customers.

David Letterman increasingly looks like he's going to tour in a one-man show as George Bernard Shaw but he isn't…as far as I know. He is however about to debut his new show for Netflix in which he sits around for an hour having a conversation with someone who really interests him. This is in contrast with his old show where he sometimes conducted fifteen-minute interviews with people you got the feeling he couldn't have cared less about.

The show is called My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman and the first one, with our previous president in the guest chair, starts Friday, January 12. It will be monthly thereafter and his guests will include George Clooney, Malala Yousafzai, JAY-Z, Tina Fey, and Howard Stern.

In 2014, around the time CBS announced the date of Dave's last Late Show for them, I wrote here…

Personally, I'd love to see him do a weekly one-on-one interview show. Dave lately seems to average about one guest per week who he seems genuinely glad to have there and is interested in. Have those folks on for the hour and let them just talk: No stunts, no stupid human tricks, just a conversation. Of course, the trouble with this idea is that Letterman is notoriously reticent to be in prime time — and such a low-key show might look chintzy in prime time — and there's real no place to put it in late night. If they put it on Saturday nights at 11:30, it would get slaughtered by SNL.

When I wrote that, he was in talks with CBS about remaining in their "family" so I didn't entertain the notion of him going somewhere like Netflix. I guess he did because CBS had no place to put that kind of show…or maybe Netflix just offered way more cash…or both. In any case, I'll be tuning in.

This has been announced all over the 'net and on the pages where commenting is allowed, one sees much outrage from people who don't like Liberals and loathe the whole notion of an hour where a Liberal host interviews Liberal guests. Okay. I don't like Hannity or Fox and Friends or Tucker Carlson's program but it doesn't upset that they're in my TiVo's Programming Guide.

What's the problem here? I doubt Dave will spend the entirety or even most of any episode bashing Donald Trump or discussing the news, especially since some of these shows are apparently being recorded months before they'll be released for viewing. Trump makes it very easy to write political jokes but they all seem to expire in forty-eight hours when the next insane utterance or revelation hits the front page.

Seems a lot of people are bothered that there is no entertainment show where a beloved entertainer talks, unafraid to reveal right-wing beliefs. In those comment threads, I see the view that the "mainstream media" (i.e., everyone except sometimes Fox News) would never give a show to a Conservative host…and that runs counter to my belief that the folks who run TV networks will put on anything (a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g) that will get ratings. There are programming guys who would dangle their grandmothers naked over a crocodile pit for tune-in and I'm wondering who that Conservative host would be. Kelsey Grammer? Scott Baio? James Woods? I think Dennis Miller has long since had his three strikes and out.

I discussed this a few weeks ago with a comedy-writer friend who's far from me on the political spectrum, though that doesn't stop him from making nastier cracks about Trump than I do. After hearing a flurry from him about Trump's hair, hands, lying, ego and misogyny, I asked him if he would vote for the man again in 2020. His reply? "Absolutely — as long as he's running against Hillary Clinton!"

Challenged by me to name a Conservative who could helm the kind of show Colbert, Kimmel or Meyers does, he came up with Drew Carey but admitted Carey already has maybe the safest high-paying gig in television and probably isn't all that right-wing or interested in pushing any political agenda. We kind of agreed that Liberals ain't good at doing the Limbaugh/Hannity/Carlson act and Conservatives don't excel at the Stewart/Colbert/Meyers kind of thing…so it's kind of a wash.

I don't care if Letterman does or doesn't do a Liberal Talk Show because, first of all, I don't see him as a person who's particularly well-read and knowledgeable in that area. And secondly, what he does best is to be funny…and if he's not going to be that, there's not much point in anyone watching a David Letterman show. I sure won't.

Sorry to hear of the passing yesterday of Jerry Van Dyke.  He was a funny man who deserved to be thought of as a lot more than You-Know-Who's brother.  That's usually a problem when someone gets into the business via a more famous relative.  They get an access and opportunity that they might otherwise have never had but with it comes an expectation.

I once heard Rob Reiner talk at some length about the blessings/curse (it was hard to separate them) of him breaking into the business.  No doubt he got acting auditions he would not have gotten had his name been Rob Schwartz…but with them came expectations that he had the exact same skill set as his father.  He had much to offer but not always to producers who expected him to be Carl 2.0. Jerry was not Dick and the more people came to realize this, the more successful he was.

Jerry was born on July 27, 1931 in Danville, Illinois, which is where he and his brother Dick grew up. (Dick was born December 13, 1925 in West Plains, Missouri…so Dick was a little over five and a half years older.) Jerry began entertaining in nightclubs right out of high school and then in Special Services in the Air Force. He became a local star on TV in Terre Haute, Indiana and went national with two two-part guest appearances playing Dick's younger brother Stacey on The Dick Van Dyke Show. The first two were in March-April of 1962 and the second two aired in January of 1965.

In-between the two, he'd been a regular (briefly) on The Judy Garland Show and he'd hosted a game show (briefly) called Picture This, both for CBS. He reportedly turned down the role of Gilligan on Gilligan's Island and the position of replacing Don Knotts on The Andy Griffith Show. He did accept the leads in two short-run situation comedies — My Mother, The Car (1965) and Accidental Family (1967) and a supporting role on another that lasted one season, Headmaster (1970). It wasn't until 1989 that he landed a regular role on a hit when he played the eternally-confused Luther Van Dam on the nine-season sitcom, Coach.

He was pretty busy before that and after though with guest shots on other shows and in movies, TV commercials, stage plays and tours with his comedy act. I saw him perform live once in Las Vegas at (I think) the old Marina Hotel. He charged onto the stage with his banjo and entertained the hell out of an audience that was still chuckling when they left. I remember thinking his performing style couldn't have been less like his older brother's. He was brash, loud and fast-paced…but it sure got the job done.

The other time I saw him perform was in April of 2011. He and Dick did a short run (five performances) of The Sunshine Boys at a small theater Dick helps support in Malibu. Jerry was pretty damned good as Willie Clark, as I wrote about here.

I did not know Jerry well…mostly as a fellow dining companion when Show Biz Folks convened in some deli. He seemed to jump from cranky to friendly and back again with enormous speed, often in a voice that could have drowned out Joanne Worley screaming. He seemed like the kind of guy who never had an opinion he did not express with 100% confidence but I still liked him on-screen and off.  I tried to tell him that but I'm not sure he heard me.

I have no idea how much of Michael Wolff's book is to be believed but I do know…

1. It's selling like crazy.
2. It's driving Donald Trump off the deep end.
3. When a book sells like crazy, it's followed by many more just like it.  Every best-selling book that insisted Barack Obama was a Kenyan Socialist Mole spawned ten more.

Other authors may not have whatever access Wolff had but it's now established that there's an eager market out there for books that say Trump is full-goose-bozo banana-wackie.  If you're a fan of the guy, brace yourself for the flood.  Even as we speak, book publishers and authors are figuring what they can write that will top Wolff's book — and of course, it's important that it be something so outlandish that Trump himself will denounce the book as garbage, preferably in a string of incoherent tweets.

This has very little to do with the running of our country. It's just how the Free Market works in publishing. If your book can make him feel he has to tell the world he's a "very stable genius," you can probably retire on your royalties.

The book I'm waiting for is the one that will tell us, with sufficient credibility, how these unhinged tweets happen and what (if anything) the more rational folks around Trump have done to try and control them. Does he write them all? Does he run them past no one before he sends them out? It does seem his spelling has gotten a little better.

Years ago, I worked for a TV producer who had his own company and who considered himself a visionary genius…and he was successful because he had indeed come up with some brilliant ideas. Some of them were not so brilliant and many of them were very, very expensive. The network would give him $250,000 to do a show and in the excitement of some concept that came to him in a dream, he'd spend $400,000 to put it on the screen. Needless to say, you will not have a company if you keep doing this.

So he hired a Very Sane Person and said to him, "I'm making you the president of the company. Your job is to stop me from spending money foolishly." And thereafter, the Very Sane Person would occasionally veto some decision made by the owner of the company. He'd just say, "No, we're not going to fill the studio with Guacamole and dress all the dancers in tortilla chips!" — or whatever that week's profound but exorbitant vision was.

The owner of the company would not overrule his employee. He believed he was a genius, maybe of the very stable kind. He certainly told us all often enough that he was a genius. But he was wise enough to believe that his genius had its limitations; that it was somehow lacking in cost-efficiency.

I'm curious if Donald Trump knows or cares how much a majority of Americans thinks he's out of his friggin' mind. He knows this new book claims he is but how much does he care if 55% of the country thinks that? When he was on the campaign trail, he tried real hard to convince us that he was moderate on many issues and might even be to the left of his opponent on some. As Harry Enten notes, those days are gone. Those who thought he had some liberal views got sucker-punched.

I understand him being concerned that his base may start to think he's nuts. Does he care if we, who'd never vote for him in a million years, do? If he does, he needs to have a Pretty Sane Person read those tweets and sometimes say, "You shouldn't send this one." Then again, maybe he has someone doing that and the supposed Very Sane Person is not Very Sane.

Here's an "In Memoriam" reel from NBC News.  June Foray and Rose Marie are both in there…

My shoulder healed itself — without so much as one Ibuprofen — so I am able to type this special edition for you. It deals, of course, with Michael Wolff's new book on the Trump White House…

• Matt Taibbi hopes that that new book is correct in portraying Trump as a buffoon. Taibbi's logic is that if D.J.T. knew how to accomplish anything, he might really be dangerous. I'm not sure I buy this.
• William Saletan tackles the part of Michael Wollf's book that says Trump never wanted to be president and says that explains a lot. I'm pretty sure I don't buy this but I might believe he was unprepared to win.
• Did author Michael Wolff actually have access to the White House — a claim Mr. Trump seems to be denying? Politifact says yes.
• So…how much of this book should we believe? Andrew Prokop offers some guidelines. I'm thinking the rule should be that a book about a famous person doesn't have to be totally accurate. It just has to be more accurate than the famous person.
• And here's one of many online excerpts of the book.

Meanwhile in other news: Mathematicians have discovered a new prime number and it takes 23 million digits to write it out. This will come in so handy.

Donald Trump believed that brilliance and leadership would blossom in his White House and he wanted to make sure someone would be around to record and report it. So unfettered access was given to Michael Wolff, a writer who specializes in gossip and stories of dubious sourcing and he was allowed to observe and interview and gather material which he used in a book called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which is full of tales of chaos, interoffice hatred, incompetence and maybe even a little treason. The book depicts Trump himself as childish, mean and very interested in tricking friends' wives into having sex with him.

Trump's response has been to insist his lawyers — who presumably told him there was zero chance of this succeeding — use the court system to block publication of the book, even though there are plenty of copies around that would be uploaded to the Internet if they could somehow stop it from being sold at Barnes & Noble. And of course, the fact that he wants to suppress it has given tons of publicity to the book and catapulted it to the top of every Best Seller list. This is in addition to the fact that other reporters are already excerpting and spreading its more salacious and damaging sections…but somehow Trump will prevail. Do I have this right?