• The people who have to fill Trump's twice-daily "folder of praise" have it easy this morning. They just have to print out Nazi chat sites.

If you're recording tonight's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, you might want to pad the running time a bit. The show just announced on Twitter that it will run five minutes longer than usual. Not all TiVos or DVRs will get the message.

Here's a clip from The Dinah Shore Chevy Show for 1/13/1957. Dinah and her guest Art Carney wander over to the St. James Theater where the Broadway show Li'l Abner was then running. Well, actually, they wander onto a set on her stage that was supposed to pass for backstage at the St. James but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Stubby Kaye is there and they perform "Jubilation T. Cornpone" from Abner, which had then been running for about two months…

And as Matt Yglesias just pointed out on Twitter, there are state legislators who want to make it legal to run down protestors if you can convince someone it was an accident.

Just reading about the violence in Charlottesville and, like any decent and sane person, I'm horrified. Trump's tweet about it called for unity (behind him, no doubt) and was so vague that it sounds like he thought, "Hmm…how can I condemn this without losing the support of white nationalists?" Some people on the 'net aren't altogether clear who he believes are the victims and who are the victimizers.

He used to get hysterical that Obama wouldn't identify certain terrorists as "Radical Islamic Muslims." Let's see how he describes the kind of person who would try to kill people like this. Betcha he focuses on the "one lone nut" aspect of it, saying darn near nothing to upset the kind of beings who smiled at the news, wish there would be more of it and, like David Duke, see the Trump presidency as a giant step towards white people taking "their" country back.

And just so we're clear: I don't think Trump is a racist. If anything, I think he discriminates against everyone, white or black, who isn't working to the betterment of Donald Trump. The problem is that he won't say or do anything to lose the people who turn out to cheer him.

I just got an e-mail from Cirque Du Soleil telling me that one of their shows, Luzia, will be in Los Angeles in December and telling me that "pre-sale tickets are now available." Apparently, these are tickets that are now on sale before tickets are on sale. The performers in the show perform incredible acrobatics and so do the copy writers.

So I'm wondering if there were pre-pre-sale tickets on sale before the pre-sale tickets. Those would be tickets that were on sale before the tickets that were on sale before the tickets were on sale. And knowing them, they might even have had pre-pre-pre-sale tickets…and at this rate, by the time the tickets go on sale, there won't be any seats left.

From 1949: It's Herbi Hardt and His Jesters with the timeless song, "16 Old Ladies Locked In The Lavatory." You all know the words so sing along!

All of a sudden, we're hearing a lot about The Opioid Epidemic, which has apparently been with us for a while without a whole lot of notice. Here's what seems to be a good explainer about it.

There is pretty close to a zero chance of me ever developing an addiction to opioids. As I wrote here a few years ago…

My mother used to consume Vicodin like those great Molasses Chips bars that come in assortments of See's Candy. The time I took my one and only Vicodin, which was in connection with some minor surgery, I got violently seasick on dry land.

I had my [knee] surgery on Monday. After, there was much pain, especially if I did anything foolish like moving my leg or exhaling. They gave me Norco. It had no effect. They gave me a higher dosage of Norco. Still no effect. Then they tried Dilaudid. That did have an effect: It made me nauseous and dizzy. The leg remained indifferent and ablaze.

The Dilaudid experiment was in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning. Once it had failed, doctors were unreachable and my nurse wasn't authorized to give me anything else so I suffered until about 7:30 AM when my surgeon made his rounds to see how I was doing. When he found out, he ordered up a new nerve block for my leg, like the nerve block they'd used along with other anesthetics during the surgery. For reasons they explained but which I'm not sure I can replicate here, the second block wouldn't take so we plunged back into trying other drugs.

Morphine didn't work on me. Percoset didn't work on me. OxyContin didn't do a thing for my pain but it did make me very, very stupid for most of one night. Finally, I understand this Rush Limbaugh thing.

They finally tried a muscle relaxer plus a couple of more conventional pain medicines and that worked. I was supposed to take them for six weeks but I quit after ten days and I probably could have stopped sooner. Since then when I read about folks with terrible addictions, I wonder how many of them could simply have stopped sooner? Might the problem not be the drugs but the duration? Someone made a lot more money by issuing me a six week supply than if they'd given me a two-week supply plus a prescription for refills.

I'm not suggesting some folks don't need this stuff for a long, long time. The two most important people in my life lately — my mother who died 2012 and my lovely friend Carolyn who left us this past April — were loaded with opioids and other drugs in their last years and clearly needed most if not all of them. Okay, but those were women who were dying and in great pain. There are people who take these drugs to good effect. The trouble might be for some of them that they don't stop when they no longer need the drugs and before they develop a dependency.

The other day, Trump gave one of his typical know-nothing answers when he said, "If they don't start, they won't have a problem. If they do start, it's awfully tough to get off. So if we can keep them from going on and maybe by talking to youth and telling them: 'No good, really bad for you in every way.'" That's stupid because it's not true. They're good for you some times in some ways. When we lie to kids, they don't listen. It's just like when people try to tell horny teenagers that sex outside of marriage is not a good thing. They know damn well that it is a good thing in some ways so they don't learn any lesson there. Few campaigns in this country have been more spectacular failures than Abstinence Education…

…and here's Trump trying to tell kids that drugs that alleviate great pain for some are "really bad for you in every way" and not to ever take them. He's also treating the problem as if it's unique to kids, which clearly it is not.

I don't know how to curb the Opioid Epidemic and of course, it's not my job or even my problem. I'm just tossing out there the thought that maybe the solution starts with being really realistic about the good and bad of it, which includes acknowledging the good. And maybe it wouldn't hurt to tell people that they should discuss with their doctors if they really need the full dosage that is printed on the bottle. Maybe some of them are taking things for six weeks that they really only need for ten days.

Dachshunds bathing…

The latest Trump Tweet that suggests something wrong with the guy is yesterday's in which he said, "My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before…."

As FactCheck.org and others have pointed out, that's really misleading. Trump ain't renovated or modernized anything. He signed an order (and it wasn't even his first as President) to have a review done to see if upgrades were necessary — as every Chief Exec does. That's about it. If our nuclear arsenal is far stronger and more powerful than ever before, and it probably is, it's because of what Trump's predecessors in the job have done.

Our friend Kevin Drum asks, "Was this a false claim or was it a lie?" He offers five possible descriptions of what happened there…

• Trump knew it was false, but he said it anyway. He lied.
• Trump literally doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He continues to consider his lies to be "truthful hyperbole," the term he applied to generalized puffery during his real estate career.
• Trump is delusional. He thinks that ordering a review magically makes things happen.
• Trump is surrounded by sycophants who have assured him that the US nuclear arsenal is stronger than it was six months ago. He believes them.
• Trump is losing control of his faculties. He vaguely remembers some kind of nuclear order and figures it must mean that our nukes have gotten better.

I would like to offer a sixth possibility…

• Trump doesn't care if what he says connects to reality. He says (or tweets) whatever at that moment works for him at that moment and doesn't think past that.

It is imperative with this man to retaliate immediately against every criticism and to lash out at every opponent without delay. If he can do it with facts, great. If he can't, he'll make them up because it's the instant response that matters. It might be that he believes his base will ignore the misinformation as long as he maintains his image as guy who always wins. If that's how he thinks, we can all understand why he thinks that…but he may not even think that.

Consider what happened when he was roundly criticized for his speech at that Boy Scouts Jamboree. The Boys Scouts leadership felt the need to apologize for it and Trump immediately fired back saying, "No, they loved it. They even called me and said it was the greatest speech ever!" He didn't even pause to consider that maybe the Boys Scouts leadership would then make him look even worse by saying, "No, we didn't call him."

Betcha this guy never played Chess in his life. In Chess, you have to think at least a few moves ahead — and the farther ahead you think, the greater your chance of winning. Trump never thinks ahead. On the campaign trail, he promised that Mexico would pay for the wall and that everyone would have better healthcare and it would cost less. He had no idea how to make those things come about and he didn't care. At that moment, those things seemed like the right things to say…and no doubt, he thinks (a) that those were the right things to say then, given that he won the election, and (b) that he can weasel out on them just as he's weaseled out on countless business deals.

I had an acquaintance years ago who bragged to me that he'd bedded a certain very attractive young lady by promising to loan her — interest-free and without a due date! — the cash to buy a new car. This acquaintance didn't have the dough to buy even an old car for himself and he also prided himself in never doing anything for anyone but himself. One of those guys.

I suppose I already knew the answer but I had to ask, "So…how are you going to make good on your promise to this lady?" He just looked at me like I had to be out of my mind.

Hey, let's watch a cartoon! Take this full-frame if you can…

Haven't done one of these for a few days. But then Trump hadn't said anything that stupid until he decided, apparently on an impulse, to threaten nuclear war with North Korea. That would certainly be such a good thing for everyone on the planet. John Cassidy tells what happened.

And as Jonathan Chait reports, his aides are scurrying to walk back his threats and calm down the whole matter.

Matt Yglesias explains the looming battle over the debt ceiling. This should be a simple matter but nothing in Washington is a simple matter any longer.

"Reform" is a word that's used by politicians of all stripes and it always triggers my skepticism. Exactly what is "Tax Reform?" It's changing the tax laws in some unspecified manner. That is not necessarily good. You kind of have to know what's being altered to know if it's for the better. Anyway, Trump is now patting himself on the back for reforming the Veterans Administration. What has he done? As Kevin Drum notes, darn near nothing.

Trump seems to veer back and forth between trying to categorize Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a partisan witch-hunter and as a fine public servant. One suspects that at some point, things will switch to the first of these views, all the time. When that happens, it might by good to remember that, as Joe Conason reminds us, Robert Mueller is a far cry from Ken Starr.

I spent most of yesterday directing a cartoon voice session. In the above pic, I'm the tall guy who's looking worried because he knows how much else we had left to record at that moment.  The voice actors are, left to right, Gregg Berger, Frank Welker, Audrey Wasilewski and Jason Marsden.  Frank, by the way, does the best Donald Trump impression I've ever heard…and that's pretty awesome considering how few people there now are on this planet who don't do a Donald Trump impression. I think it's down to me and the lady at the place I take my dry cleaning.

Speaking of pictures of me: At Comic-Con, Tom Richmond presented me with a caricature he did of me…and at the con, he even knocked out a quick (and uncanny) likeness of my lovely friend Amber. The man is, of course, the best practitioner of this art form working today, as is evident every time you pick up MAD magazine. He also, unlike other experts in this field, teaches the art and writes books about it, and I've heard more than a few professional cartoonists remark that Tom is the best tutor of this specialized skill.

There are a lot of amazing artists who simply cannot explain what they do. It just comes out of them and that's fine. I'm impressed by Tom's work and also by the fact that he really, really understands what he does for a living. If you'd like to do that — for a living or just to show off for your friends — grab up Tom's books and maybe even consider signing up for his in-person seminars. Sometimes, those who "can do" teach.

Here's an interesting bit of video from January 14, 1993. Jay Leno was hosting The Tonight Show. There had been a brief period when NBC was considering dumping him and handing the job over to David Letterman, and an offer was even made to Dave, though some question whether the network would ever have made good on it, especially if Jay's ratings went up during the duration of his contract. Looking back, that whole squabble strikes me as kind of childish but it got a lot of attention at the time.

There finally came a moment when Dave rejected the offer (whatever it was worth) from NBC and signed on with CBS. On 1/14/93, Jay Leno held a press conference in Los Angeles to announce, basically, that he hadn't been fired. Then Letterman held one in New York to discuss going to CBS. This is the raw video of Dave's press conference, surrounded by CBS brass and a bunch of reporters — including Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert — who only managed to get Dave to say what Dave wanted to say. Have a look…

I'll be in a recording session the rest of the day pretending I know how to direct cartoon voice actors. More stuff should appear on this site later today.

I'm also busily working on the June Foray Celebration which takes place Tuesday, September 19 at the Academy of Motion Pictures in Beverly Hills. Details on how one gains admission to this event should appear here and elsewhere within a matter of days.

Also, for those of you who were wondering: Volume IV of Walt Kelly's Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips has gone off to press. I don't know the on-sale date yet but boy, are you folks gonna love the material in this book. It's my favorite cartoonist at the height of his creative powers.

Okay. Gotta go play Director. And believe me, I am playing.