However good or bad your Sunday is going, it can certainly be improved by ten and a half minutes of Gershwin music…

I was busy with other matters when TV producer-host Chuck Barris passed away last March and I got a lot of messages asking me if I had anything interesting to say about him. You can be the judge of that.

Barris was at least an interesting guy. He started in television as a page, worked his way into programming and then quit and tried to sell shows to the folks who'd filled his old job. His first sale, The Dating Game, is said to have gotten on the air partly by accident. Some other new series that was supposed to go into ABC's daytime schedule was suddenly not and a replacement had to be found in a hurry. Barris had submitted his and while the programmers were semi-indifferent to it, it had two big things to recommend it: It was really cheap and it was so simple, they could throw it together and start taping almost immediately.

So it went on and I'm told most folks at the network thought of it kind of as a placeholder and immediately began discussing what would go into that slot for real…but it found an audience. Better still, it found an audience and it was still cheap. And before long, they were asking Chuck, "What else you got?" and a mini-empire was born.

Barris founded that mini-empire on a couple of principles, the main one being the one that started things off: Do it cheap. You get as much money as possible from the network or syndicator or whoever's paying for it…then you do the show for as little as possible. There was no such thing as a high-budget Chuck Barris Production. There were only higher-budget Chuck Barris Productions, which were the ones where he was a little less frugal.

Some of his shows were done for almost no money because that was the only way to sell them. There are producers who go for The Impossible Deal, meaning that some buyer wants a show but it's either going to be done on a rock-bottom budget or they ain't buying. Other producers might say, "I can't make anything doing a show for that" and pass. Impossible Deal producers figure out a way to pocket some bucks doing a show for that.

And some of his shows were done on the cheap deliberately to make up for the money he didn't make on the shows where there wasn't much. That's where Mr. Barris made his money. The network will pay X for a show. You produce it for Y. Subtract Y from X and what's left is your profit. Barris would get Y low…real, real low. Another producer might not get Y that low. He'd figure that it would be a good investment to not make shows for as little as possible. If you spend a little more money, those shows might have lives.

Not Barris. He did The Dating Game for his low, low version of Y. If he could persuade the network or syndicator to pay him 2X, he would still do it for the same Y and just bank the extra dough.

I knew a fellow who worked a long time for Barris and he told me dozens of stories like this…but he was still happy working there. The pay was low but it was constant. Barris always had a new series. Whenever one got canceled, another one would come along and as long as he wasn't missing a chance to get the show done even cheaper, Barris would hire the same people. He was loyal to those who did their jobs well and didn't demand more money.

That is a powerful thing for a TV producer…to always be in production on something. Most jobs in TV are very transient. You work 13 weeks here, then 26 weeks there. Then there's nothing for six months. Then you get four weeks on this show. Then nothing for a long time as you nervously watch your savings and your career dwindle. Then another short job. Along the way, there are a lot (a lot) of near misses. You're up for this job that you don't get, then you're up for that one that disappears on you. Then you're told "we'll definitely use you on our new show" but then that new show doesn't happen. Even when you're working on a series, you're well-aware that it could end unexpectedly and then what are you going to do?

This is not the greatest way to live, especially if you can't build up a little cushion in your checking account. You tend to be really appreciative of jobs that feel almost permanent, at least for a while. You think: So what if the money is low? At least it's pretty dependable. At least I'm not spending half my life worrying what I'm going to do next month.

I actually knew a number of folks who worked for Barris and thought that way. One or two resented the hell out him: He made four million dollars last year off the shows we sweat to make happen. The least he could do is pay us a few more dollars a week. Most though were very glad to be working there…and every once in a while, someone would prove to be so valuable that even the cheapest boss in the world would see the value of paying them a few more dollars a week.

Never having worked for Barris, I never really knew him. Still, I was around him on several occasions, including visits to the set of The Gong Show when my friends Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall were panelists. Those tapings were enormous fun and I think one of the reasons that show was so successful was that a lot of that fun seeped out onto the screen.

ABC has just revived The Gong Show in an hour format with big celebrity judges and a host who is apparently Mike Myers doing his least-interesting character ever. I usually love Myers in his various guises but I don't yet get what he thought was fun about this guy. Then again, I only made it through about a third of the first episode. It struck me as having some amount of fun but not enough to last a whole hour.

This is not the first time the show has been revived. In 1988, there was a version hosted by San Francisco disc jockey Don Bleu. It only lasted one year.

Ten years later, there was a version called Extreme Gong done for Game Show Network. It was hosted by George Gray, who's now the announcer on The Price is Right and it was another one seasoner.

In 2008, Comedy Central gave us a Gong Show hosted by Dave Attell. That one got gonged after eight weeks.

I wonder how many of these failed revivals failed because their makers underestimated the importance of the camaraderie and chemistry of the host and panelists on the original. I wonder how many of the revivers thought it was just a matter of putting a fresh spin on a proven format. I don't think the format was ever what made the Gong Show work. I think that to the extent it worked, it worked because of the atmosphere…and that atmosphere was set by Chuck Barris. He was an unpolished, amateurish Master of Ceremonies but he ran a happy set and he had one thing going for him that others didn't: He was willing to look as stupid as they wanted everyone else on the show to look.

On the old Truth or Consequences, host Bob Barker loved it when the contestants got hit with pies…but nobody dared lob any meringue at ol' Bob or even muss his hair. Monty Hall on Let's Make a Deal never came out dressed as a large radish. Nobody on Candid Camera ever caught Allen Funt in the act of being himself.

I really don't like shows where the idea is to make people look ridiculous. Increasingly as I get older, I don't like pranks or most hidden camera stunts or anything where the whole point is to laugh at people making fools of themselves. The Gong Show as hosted by Chuck Barris at least had the sportsmanship to make its host and owner look as ridiculous as anyone on it…and it occasionally had moments of genuine entertainment.

Back in 2006 here, I wrote about visiting the set of the Gong Show and experiencing the sheer electricity when they brought on an NBC stagehand named Gene Patton and let him dance. When Barris died, an online columnist named Zachary Leeman wrote about that and said the following…

There may never be something that quite captures the mix of creative freedom and wacky randomness of the show as Gene, Gene, The Dancing Machine. Gene Patton, a stagehand, would get in front of the cameras and start boogying. He wasn't all that good — and audiences were known to throw junk at him. It was another odd segment that strangely clicked with viewers.

Blogger Mark Evanier once recalled on his since-discontinued site, News From Me, how weirdly exciting the segment was if you were in the live audience. "I've been on many TV stages in my life. I've seen big stars, huge stars — Johnny, Frank, Sammy, Dino, Bob, you name 'em. I've seen great acts and great joy, and if you asked me to name the most thrilling moment I've witnessed in person, I might just opt for 'The Gong Show' electrifying Stage 3 for all of 120 seconds."

I am amused that this seems to have caused Leeman to think this site was closed forever and he was also wrong that it was the audience that threw junk at Gene while he was dancing. It was the stagehands who were told to do that. But the article was right about creative freedom and wacky randomness. I suspect if the new Gong Show fails, it'll be because it's too polished and perfect, and also because its host does the exact opposite of what Barris did. He tries to lend dignity to the program instead of meeting it on its own level. Myers would have been better off as Wayne of Wayne's World, especially if they'd broadcast from his basement on a Public Access budget.

Anyway, one thing I liked about Chuck Barris was that he wasn't trying to be a polished, perfectly-coiffed host on a show that expected everyone else to wear chicken suits. One thing I didn't like about him, apart from the tales I'd heard of his niggardliness, was that every time I was around him, he was complaining about the same thing.

Barris built his fortune on shows like The Newlywed Game, which encouraged newly-married couples to embarrass themselves on network television in exchange for a new Maytag washer-dryer combo. People who applied as contestants for that and other Barris game shows learned that the way to get on was to make them think you might say something really mortifying on the air. That alone would have made me not like the guy but every time I was around Barris, he was complaining about people criticizing him or mocking him for putting stupid shows on television. Two of the four times I was in his presence, he was upset because Johnny Carson had done yet another joke about how Chuck Barris was a schlockmeister who put junk on television.

Once, he said to an imaginary Carson in the room, "Hey, Johnny! The same people who bought my show bought yours!" And clearly, he thought Johnny did some pretty undignified TV at times, booking airhead starlets and making jokes about their low I.Q.s and high breast measurements. He wasn't wrong that the line between The Gong Show and The Tonight Show wasn't always as bright and thick as Carson made it out to be but "Come on, Chuck," — you wanted to say to him — "Those jokes are the price you pay for cashing your profit checks from Treasure Hunt!"

He was a good sport on The Gong Show playing stooge to The Unknown Comic but he wasn't a good sport about that…and I'm afraid the shows Carson and others mocked are his legacy; that and being a good Job Creator for decades for an awful lot of people.

And I suppose I should add that every time they revive The Gong Show — and no matter how long this one lasts, there are more in our future — he looks better and better to me in that capacity. Maybe they should have seen if Mike Myers could just do a good Chuck Barris impression.

We've been talking about Al Franken here.  This is almost an hour of him being interviewed at Google earlier this month when he was there to promote his book.

Obviously, I like the guy but he's a politician and politicians I like tend to eventually disappoint me. In fact, so many of them disappoint me that they've almost ceased to disappoint me because I expect the disappointment. It remains to be seen if Franken turns out to be one of those who doesn't disappoint me by disappointing me. Or something…

I'm sure some folks who come to this site would rather find a post about comic books or TV or where Frank Ferrante is appearing than more stuff about Trump. I would too and I'm going to try to strike more of a balance. But if Trump's main goal is to have everyone talking and thinking about him — and at times, that does seem to be the only non-monetary thing he craves — he's got to be getting sick of winning. I spend an unhealthy percentage of my life with him in my brain and conversation.  And since this blog is about what's on my mind…

(Hey, if you want to know where Frank Ferrante's appearing, I'll tell you where he'll be today at 12:30. He'll be lunching with me at the Magic Castle in Hollywood.)

We're aiming for a Trump-free weekend here at newsfromme.com but first, I feel compelled to do this…

• The best article I can point you to today is Andrew Sullivan's essay on how Trump doesn't really seem to care what happens to health care in this country or to the people who find themselves without it. It's all about the win. I have no doubt that Sullivan is right and that if the Trump Team gets what they want — and they're certainly in a good position to — a lot of Americans will suffer and perhaps die due to being unable to afford needed treatment.  Oh, yeah — and a surge of medical bankruptcies.   I also have no doubt that the response of the folks who made that happen will never be "We did the wrong thing." It will be to insist that it's a lie; that health care is better and cheaper than ever before and that the statistics about people who have lost their lives are all a hoax. You know, like the Sandy Hook Massacre and all those imaginary dead children…
• And here we have Matthew Yglesias expanding on the same theme.
• Doug Bandow explains how Trump is acting against American interests (and in support of Castro's communist dictatorship) by reversing what Obama did about Cuba. But I guess he can't resist reversing something Obama did. He probably has people working night and day trying to figure out how to bring Osama Bin Laden back to life.
• As Steve Benen reports, Trump continues to tout and brag about supposed job growth where there either is none or where it was achieved during the Obama administration. No doubt Trump will eventually have some legitimate successes in this area but it's too early for that to happen, though not too early to try and set up the narrative that everything he does is wildly successful.

Do you ever get the feeling that I'm not too pleased with this president? Me and, as of today, 55.7% of the country.

So Trump's saying now that he never recorded James Comey. I was pretty sure that despite his tweet, he hadn't and I told you so here. But this is the kind of thing Donald Trump has done to us: Now that he's denying he did, I'm kind of half-wondering if maybe he did.

You could make the case. I mean, he posted that Comey had better hope that there were no tapes of their conversation. Who might have taped them besides Trump? Was he trying to hint that maybe Obama was "still" spying on him — inside the White House now? So the theory would be that Trump did tape Comey and then when he had aides check those tapes, those aides reported back that they confirmed — not disproved — what Comey said was said, so now Trump had destroyed them and is denying they ever existed.

I don't believe that but it's at least as sound as any proof ever offered that Obama was not born in Hawaii…and that was a charge that had to be investigated eighty-seven different ways and left as a very real possibility. The Mysterious James Comey Tapes deserve nothing less. And now, this…

• Sarah Kliff explains the "Better Care Plan" and why it sucks in some detail.
• If that gets too deep into the weeds for you, you can read Ezra Klein and his simpler explanation: "Poor people pay more for worse insurance." And somewhere, there's a Republican saying, "Hey, they should feel lucky we let them have health insurance at all!"
• Trump explains why his cabinet is full of rich people. It's because they'll give him better advice. Leaving aside the question of whether he'll follow it, that almost makes sense on certain issues. The question though is whether those rich people advising him will then only give him advice on what's good for rich people. I mean, no matter what you do, wealthy folks are going to run the government to a very large extent. The question is whether they'll be wealthy folks who give a damn about non-wealthy folks (i.e., those who need that kind of help).
• Ronald A. Klain says Trump will never accomplish all or most of the items on his stated agenda because he's lazy and indecisive. I don't think I buy this but it is a nice thought.

At this very moment, someone at Saturday Night Live is writing a sketch in which Sean Spicer, as played by Melissa McCarthy, is in some other job trying to employ the same evasive hostility as he displayed as press secretary…like he's working in a market and every time someone asks him where to find the peanut butter, he lectures them on bias, claims it's a stupid question that he already answered, and then calls on someone who'll ask him a question he prefers to answer.

A crab eating chips or crisps or whatever they are…

This is probably not so but I keep thinking that the reason the Republican Health Care Bill is so utterly terrible is so Donald Trump can step in and say, "Wait! I promised the American people we would not cut Medicaid and that everyone will have great, affordable healthcare and I cannot allow this!"

Then they'll improve it a little. Instead of being really, really, really, really bad, it will just be really, really, really bad. They'll still cut Medicaid but maybe by a few million less. Trump will then proclaim it a great bill that fulfills all his promises and he, of course, is a hero…and a lot of people will believe this when he signs the damned thing. We're actually to the point in this country when they might be able to get away with this for a while.

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As he expected, John Oliver is being sued by the main coal mining company that he blasted in this week's episode of Last Week Tonight. You can read the complaint here and while I'm no lawyer, it does seem written by an attorney who was thinking, "This'll never stand up but the old man is furious, he wants it done and I'm being paid well so…" It sounds like the complaint Trump's lawyers whipped up when Bill Maher suggested Trump's father was an orangutan.

I just looked up that suit, by the way, because I wasn't sure if it was an orangutan or a baboon. It was an orangutan but I noticed this in the articles about the suit being dropped: "Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Trump, is playing down the move, saying 'the lawsuit was temporarily withdrawn to be amended and refiled at a later date.'" I believe that's lawyer-talk for "We had a losing case but we don't want to admit it."

Back to Mr. Oliver and the Coal Baron: Good for John Oliver. More journalists — and that's what he is, no matter how he professes to be just a comedian — should be doing stories that make big companies angry enough to file lawsuits. And I'm surprised they didn't directly sue the guy in the squirrel suit.

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Comic-Con International is now less than a month away. Please do not ask me if I can get you passes, no matter how many terminally-ill children you promised.

Also do not ask me if I can help you get some panel added to the schedule. That ship has sailed. Invariably though, I hear from someone days before the con who wants to know how they can get a big room to promote their latest project. The program guides have already been printed and they just now realized the utter necessity of doing a panel, preferably in one of the larger halls on Saturday afternoon.

I will be on or hosting 13-14 panels, several of them about Jack Kirby. When you add in planned meals with friends and business associates, business meetings, interviews, presenting the Bill Finger Award, signing copies of the new edition of Kirby, King of Comics and other obligations, my personal schedule for the 4.5 days (including Preview Night) is at 25 items. If I can figure out when to add "Sleep" somewhere in there, it will be at 26.

The full Programming Schedule will be online for your inspection two weeks before the con. We're not supposed to reveal a lot before then but folks keep writing me to ask if there'll be some sort of memorial for my beloved Carolyn Kelly. There will be a panel about her, her father and her father's possum on Friday morning at 10:30.

So you're having a bad day. Your job's in jeopardy. You can't pay your bills. Republicans in the Senate just unveiled a really horrible Health Care bill. Well, don't despair. Just take a cue from composer Jerry Herman and singer Anna-Jane Casey and Tap Your Troubles Away…

Someone asked for an Amazon link for Al Franken's book so they could order it and I could get my teensy commission. Here it is and thank you very much. I haven't had time to finish it yet but I'm enjoying what I've read. It is not one of those books that even politicians I support usually write which are (a) obviously ghosted and (b) all about how we're right and they're wrong and you just have to keep supporting me and supporting me and we'll save the world.

Franken is an interesting fellow and I've thought that since a time when no one would ever have believed he'd amount to anything, let alone a U.S. Senator. When I was doing variety shows for NBC, he was on Saturday Night Live. One rarely heard his name in the halls here on the opposite coast without the word "asshole" somewhere in the same sentence and often the word "smug" preceding it. He was anything but a politician, alienating people left and right, seeming to enjoy when they thought he was rude and insensitive, just so long as his career was advancing.

At the time, if you had said that guy would wind up in the senate, it would have been a joke. In fact, it would have been the exact same joke as at the end of National Lampoon's Animal House where they say that Bluto — the John Belushi character — wound up as a United States Senator.

At some point though, Franken seems to have realized that he was on a dead-end path. His partner in writing and performing was a funny but self-destructive guy named Tom Davis, and Franken finally separated from him and explored new career possibilities. How he wound up as the junior senator from the great state of Minnesota is what this book is about and it's also kind of about how he changed as a human being. I'm up to the part where he begins running for the senate and his opponents are taking many of his old jokes and citing them as examples of serious (and insane) policy proposals that he had supposedly once made. It would be like if someone claimed that Robert Klein had a physical affliction that made him actually unable to stop his leg.

I've met Franken twice. One time was when my old friend Aaron Barnhart was in town. Aaron was the TV critic at the Kansas City Star and one Friday evening, we went over to CBS Television City on a two-part mission. The second part was to be in the audience for that evening's telecast of Dennis Miller Live. The first was to visit the offices of The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder prior to that show's taping for the evening. Aaron wanted to meet one of his heroes, TV critic Tom Shales, who was a guest that evening.

I was not a fan of Mr. Shales and Aaron kind of wanted to be alone with him so he went into Shales' dressing room while I waited in an outer office with the other guest for that evening. It was Al Franken and while we chatted a bit, he was mostly talking with the guest host for that evening, a guy named Jon Stewart. I said darn near nothing as the two of them conversed but I remember thinking I was in the presence of two of the smartest people I'd ever met. I also remember thinking, "This is the guy everyone kept saying was a smug asshole?" Not that evening, he wasn't. He still hadn't thought of running for public office then but when he did, I was probably less surprised than most people.

The other time I met him was in 2003 and I wrote about it in this post. Reading it now, I can't understand why I left out part of the story. I wrote about how at the public appearance, Franken was verbally assaulted by one questioner and he offered to talk one-on-one with the guy after the event. He had a lot of copies of his book to sign before he could get around to that.

I was there with my good friend, the late Earl Kress, and with my best friend, the late Carolyn Kelly. My, how things have changed since 2003.

We got signed books from Franken and talked with him as long as we could — a matter of seconds because there was a long line of others waiting for autographed books. The guy who'd gotten so outraged at Franken was at the end of the line, still fuming and eager for his face-to-face with the not-yet-Senator. I sensed a chance of trouble and suggested to Earl and a couple of friends that we stick around. It did not seem impossible that the outraged guy might get physical and I thought that might be less likely if Franken was flanked by a bunch of us. Also, I kind of wanted to see what was going to happen.

The outraged guy was upset that something in Franken's new book — the one he was signing, the one about how some right-wing pundits fibbed and got facts wrong — was factually incorrect. I don't recall what the supposed error (or "lie") was but it seemed pretty trivial to me…one of those arguable discrepancies that you could write off to one awkward choice of words. Whatever it was, Franken gave the man way more time and respect than I thought was warranted. As it turned out, that was about all this person really wanted — to have someone actually listen to him and not dismiss him as a kook, which would have been a natural dismissal, given the way he was acting.

I am paraphrasing from memory here but as I recall, Franken said something like this: "I don't think you're right and I don't think this is a big or even a medium-sized issue but I'll look into it." And then he said — and I think his confronter liked this because he knew Franken was being candid with him — "The honest truth here is that even if I did get it wrong, there's not much I can do to correct it. I'll mention it in some public appearances if I can squeeze it in but the way our press works, corrections almost never catch up with the original error. And since no one else, including the people it's about have ever complained about the alleged error, I really don't think anyone's going to care. But you care about it obviously because you came out here and I care about it because I hate making errors…so I'll look into it and I thank you for bringing it to my attention."

If that doesn't sound like it would have satisfied a guy who a half-hour earlier was screaming and frothing, maybe I'm not recalling it with enough precision or maybe you just had to hear Franken saying it. He looked the man right in the eye and gave him all the time the guy wanted to state his case and then respond, and it did satisfy him and I was really impressed.

We had not told Franken we'd hung around as contingency bodyguards but he'd figured it out. Once the fellow was gone, he turned to us and said, "Thanks for sticking around to protect me, guys, but as you can see, I didn't need it. Besides, I used to wrestle in college. I think I could have taken him." The man had eight inches and at least a hundred pounds on Franken so we all laughed.

I've liked him ever since that moment…or maybe it would be better to say I've liked what he's turned into. I'm eager to finish the book and see how he did it.

I know there are people reading this who think that Senator Al Franken is no less the smug asshole than the putz talking about his very own decade on Saturday Night Live. If I wanted to see Donald Trump's agenda succeed, I might think so, too. Nevertheless, I'm really, really impressed with people who find it within themselves to change for the better. I think Al Franken did and that's why — never mind the political stuff — I'm enjoying reading how he did it.

As readers of this blog are aware, my lovely friend Carolyn Kelly left us on April 9. She fought cancer until the end but there came a day when I knew she knew she wasn't going to survive. It was when she said to me, "If I don't make it, will you make sure the Pogo series is completed, just the way we planned it?" I promised her it would be.

I also promised we would maintain the same high standards she had set for the project, which was the most important non-medical thing she ever tackled in her life. Understand please that by "important," I mean important to her. The series, which is reprinting her father's classic newspaper strip in full, may also be important to you but I didn't promise you it would be finished. I promised her. Either way, there will be no more delays.

Volume 4 will be out well before Christmas of this year. It will include a remembrance of her, a foreword by Neil Gaiman and some of the most brilliant cartooning ever done. Here's the cover…

I started this blog on 12/18/2000 without much idea how long I would do it…and also without blogging software. What was available at the time wasn't very good and I decided to hand-code the messages here for the first few years. I had no idea I'd still being doing it 6030 days later.

Over the years, I've deleted some posts and rerun some posts. I suspect the two numbers about coincide so let's just ignore that. As of when I post this message, there will be 24,459 posts on this site, which works out to a smidgen over four per day. At this rate, I will hit the 25,000 mark on November 3 of this year. I have decided that Post #25,000 will be my response to one of our "ASK me" questions where you send in a question and I write something that I hope will answer it.

Please keep sending those in. I will continue to answer them but I'm going to save the best one I receive between now and October 15th to be #25,000. There will be an actual, tangible prize for the submitter of that question — a copy of some Groo book (my choice) signed by Sergio Aragonés and me, and if I can get them, Stan Sakai and Tom Luth. And no, second prize is not two Groo books. There is no second prize. And there's no prize if I answer your question but not as #25,000.

I'm looking for something that will prompt me to write something kinda long and of interest to most of the folks who come to this blog…and I'm probably not going to pick a political question.

Don't rush. You have plenty of time to come up with one and send it to this address. May the best Blog Reader win!

Wondering whether or not you should believe Bill Cosby? Well, Laura McGann does and she gives us a good way to look at the whole ugly story.

Here's Chapter Three in our little reality show as ace magician Misty Lee builds her new show, a process which started with auditioning and hiring dancers.  The show debuts July 28-30 at the El Portal Theater in North Hollywood and tickets can be scored here.  This installment deals with a part of the audition process which is usually a lot tougher than the auditioners imagine.  It's the part where you make the decision about who you hire and who you thank so much for coming in. If you're just joining us, you might want to first watch Chapter One and then Chapter Two…

I'm going to write a longer post about this one of these days but I've been thinking lately that some of us need to realize something: That in politics nowadays, consistency of thought and principle is nowhere near as important as winning. Not even close.  Republicans were outraged that Obamacare was passed without enough transparency or time but are fine with their alternative being passed with way less of each. It doesn't matter. We no longer fault our politicians for saying or doing today the opposite of what they said last Tuesday.

Remember "I'd rather be right than president?"  There is no honor today in making that choice.  If you lost, you're a loser.

I mean, it might make us uncomfy down deep to see our side fudging or even reversing itself on principles.  Not winning, however, makes us less comfy so we look the other way, double-talk our way past the flip-flops and refuse to admit the bullshit factor of at least one of our two contradictory firm positions. Democrats do less of that than Republicans but that may just be because Democrats aren't winning.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep pointing out when someone is saying or doing exactly what they said was horrible when said/done by the opposition. We just should maybe stop expecting it to matter so much. Now, this…

• Ezra Klein writes about how one of Trump's big problems is that he doesn't listen to his staff, doesn't operate on the premise that you hire people who just might know more than you about something. That is why he keeps contradicting what his own spokespeople say. Klein writes about Al Franken and Franken's new book, which I'm now in the process of reading. What impresses me about the book so far is that the book is not "I'm great so here's why you should always support me," which is the message of most books by active politicians. Franken really writes about his own experiences and what he's done right and wrong. Often, what's he's done wrong is that he hasn't grasped that his new job (U.S. Senator) is a lot different from his old jobs in show business. It's a lesson Trump could stand to — but will probably never — learn.
• Matt Taibbi believes Megyn Kelly vivisected Alex Jones in that much-publicized interview. I caught some of it and thought, "Yeah, people who know the guy is full of crap will grin that she made that obvious. People who like what he says will ignore any cracks in his credibility." A real vivisection would change some minds among his followers…though I think those folks are more likely to reassign their genders than their faith in a guy like him. I do however agree with other things Taibbi has to say here.
• As Eric Levitz notes, hardcore Trump supporters think this whole Special Counsel Russia Thing is a "witch hunt." When does anyone who doesn't like where an investigation is going not dismiss it as a "witch hunt?" I actually know one Trump voter whose support for Donald J. is waning, not because he thinks the administration colluded with Russia but because Trump's reactions to the charges have made the guy look incompetent and insane. My acquaintance who is falling out of love with Trump says, "He doesn't look like an adult who can rationally deal with things."  Makes you wonder why.
• Jonathan Chait makes an interesting point: The Republicans are now not attempting to pass the idealized dream of Health Care that Conservatives have always wanted. That clearly will never fly with the voters. What the G.O.P. is trying to pass is a castrated version of Obamacare that will allow Big Tax Cuts For The Rich now and will hide some of the downsides for the poor and middle class until after the next election or two.

Make sure you see the segment John Oliver did about coal on his program last Sunday night. The only thing I don't like about Oliver — and I'll put up with it, of course — is certain interjections of irrelevant, distracting jokes into some of his pieces. This one was so on-target and informative, I wish he hadn't made some of those pit stops along the way to go for laughs.

The TV Academy has put together a very nice page about Bill Dana, full of history and quotes and videos. Go see it.