• Trump says his administration is "running like a fine-tuned machine." Yeah, one he acquired from the estate of Jack Kevorkian.

Just checked in over at Nate Silver's site, which I've somehow not visited for a while. He has an interesting essay up about why some revelations about Donald Trump become big news stories and some don't. I've always been curious about this, and not just about Trump. Seems to me this is the case with most public figures. Why did people suddenly start talking about Bill Cosby as a rapist? Did one YouTube video by a comedian most people had never heard of really cause all that?

They're also doing articles over there like this one trying to forecast the Academy Awards. I am unmoved from my belief that they're trying to predict the unpredictable. This is because there is too little meaningful data available. Trying to extrapolate from other awards or Google searches or other factors does not seem to me to be any sort of proven science.

I think a lot of factors go into determining who wins Best Whatever and they're not the kind of things you can put on a chart. Best Acting awards seem to me based largely on subjective evaluations of which performer is doing more courageous work — not necessarily better and not necessarily in the film for which they were nominated. And it has a lot to do with whose acceptance speech they'd like to hear. Every big movie studio has in-house "experts" with theories on how to promote a film or an individual for Oscar consideration…and even they're just guessing and usually wrong.

Posting will be light today here but our hard-working staff (i.e., me) came across these links of interest…

• Matt Taibbi on how on the campaign trail, Trump promised all sorts of things that would reduce corruption among financiers and lobbyists…and among the first orders of business at his White House is making sure the government doesn't stop those folks from doing whatever they want. Did anyone really believe Trump when he said he'd put Wall Street on a leash? Anyone?
• So are a Republican House and Senate really interested in a proper investigation of Russian influence in the Trump administration? That's what John Cassidy wants to know. Heck, that's what a lot of us want to know.
• Steve Benen says Trump is really, really afraid of major news outlets. You know the major news outlets…they're the ones who in a few cases are starting to do real fact-checking.
• And we now have a lot of psychiatrists saying all kinds of things from afar about the (perceived) mental and emotional stability of Donald J. Trump. I have a hard time taking this stuff seriously. I mean, I'm not sure a lot of doctors who deal in this kind of thing can even properly diagnosis patients with whom they've spent a lot of time. Evaluating someone they've never met? Based on public speeches? No, sorry. When you become a licensed practitioner in the field, you have a responsibility to not say those things as casually as us laypersons.

You get the feeling that Trump still doesn't grasp the "public servant" aspect of his job and the fact that there are laws and other branches of government that limit what the President of the United States can do? That's feeling like the subtext for all that's gone wrong since he was elected. That's not a psychiatric evaluation. I just don't see anything in his speeches or actions to indicate that he wants to "work with" anyone unless you define "work with" as taking orders from him.

Here's some extraordinary video of Min Min, a panda living in a wildlife reserve in China, giving birth after a three-day labor. If my mother was still around and saw this, she would have said, "That's what I went through with you!" And she might even have added, "At least Min Min got an adorable baby panda out of it!"

• Trump's new plan for press conferences: He'll just denounce the media and have Breitbart ask about the awesome size of his victory.

Hey, where's the statue of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose that used to be up on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood? Answer: It's in storage.

We have here a 20-minute TED Talk with Norman Lear — a fascinating man indeed…

Dale Herbest wrote to ask…

How do you respond to career critics? And I'm not just talking about people who critique the work you do (i.e., a "The Garfield Show isn't funny" kind of thing). I'm talking about people who say to you that what you do for a living is not "real work" and not at all "useful?" I'm sure at least once, someone has come up to you and after you mention what you do for a living, they're like "Oh, writing's not a real job" or "Acting isn't a real job" and "Directing isn't a real job." I personally don't agree with this but what do you think?

I think no one's ever said that to me…at least I can't recall an instance. What I can recall are a few folks who, in a more baffled tone, tossed out the view that a writing job wasn't a "real job" because it was not permanent and maybe because I've done most of them from home. They think a "real job" is something where you go into a building, work 9 AM to 5 PM five days a week with holidays and scheduled vacation time off and then you get a guaranteed paycheck on Friday and the amount is no surprise.

Oh — and also, you stay at that company for years and years and years until you retire. That's sometimes part of it.

As someone who's been basically a freelancer for a few months shy of 48 years, I've heard that a few times but it's usually not a put-down. It's more like, "Well, uh, when are you going to stop screwing around and get something permanent?" 48 years of pretty continuous work sounds darn close to permanent to me but there have been times when I never knew quite what I'd be doing in six months.

But no one's ever said what I did was not "useful." I mean, it obviously isn't but you can say that about a lot of professions…probably everything in the field of entertainment. How necessary are all those Kardashians?

This article may be a little premature in declaring Stephen Colbert "the Most Popular Person in Late Night" — let's see how long his current ratings increase lasts — but it's true that he's doing well lately. And given the monster ratings on Saturday Night Live in recent times and how well Seth Meyers (arguably the best Trump-basher on TV) is doing, it's obvious that ridiculing the current president is popular with the American people. Then again, so was covering his campaign speeches.

Trump seems to have set a new record for how few days into an administration people would start asking, "What did the president know and when did he know it?" And they don't even seem to have their story straight with Kellyanne Conway running around today denying reports that Trump demanded Flynn's resignation and Paul Ryan insisting Trump did. If this had happened in a Democratic president's administration, Republicans would be launching impeachment proceedings right now. At the very least, they'd begin a string of hearings and investigations that would run longer than The Price is Right.

But to paraphrase D.J.T. himself, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and the House Oversight Committee would not look into it. They'd probably schedule a few more hearings on Benghazi instead. Here's some reading material…

• David Corn on why this whole Michael Flynn thing needs to be investigated.
• David Dayen on what Trump, who once promised to watchdog Wall Street, is planning to do. Basically, he's going to let them do any damned thing they want. I cannot fathom why anyone ever thought he would do anything else but apparently a lot of people did.
• And Joe Conason has more about Trump and Wall Street and why we're going to be seeing a lot of the word "bailout" in the future…which, of course, applies only to saving rich people who didn't make as much money as they wanted. The Trump Administration ain't bailing out anyone but Donald's buddies.

And I have a busy day so that's it for now. You can find plenty of other articles online about all this. Me, I'm going to post this and then go try to think about other things.

This runs 43 minutes but I'll bet some of you will watch the whole thing and enjoy it. It's a 1961 program about American musicals and the guest is Stephen Sondheim who at the time hadn't even composed the entire score yet for a produced Broadway show. He was "just" the lyricist for West Side Story and Gypsy. About 22 minutes in, Sondheim gets on the subject of what he didn't like about some of his work in West Side Story, which I find interesting…

To the surprise of zero human beings on this planet, Playboy has announced that they will be reinstating photos of nude women. Actually, they never went away. They got tamer…but every issue I've received has had a couple pix of women with no clothing on. Basically, they reverted to the kind of nudity they had in 1965.

I don't know anyone at that magazine anymore so this is not inside info…but it looks to me like what happened was that someone decided that if Playboy was going to survive, they had to get a big influx of advertising. That meant lowering the ad rates which were way high for its circulation. It also meant toning down the nudity which scared off some advertisers. And it also meant slashing the budget of the magazine.

It didn't get a lot of attention because the big story was that Playboy was getting rid of nudity but what they really did was get rid of most of the budget. Say what you will but he used to do a very lush magazine with top writers and great photographers and the best-looking models and some of the best cartoonists in the business. They got rid of all that and wound up with a pretty crummy magazine which no one wanted to buy.

So now they're bringing back full nudity but I'm guessing they're not about to bring back the great writers and cartoonists and other expensive elements…so they'll still have a magazine that no one wants to buy. This is not going to end well.

• Hope there's video somewhere of Trump telling Michael Flynn, "You're fired!"

• I've decided that anyone who doesn't agree with me must be a paid protester. If you don't agree with me on that, you're definitely one.