• Steve Bannon says the press should "keep its mouth shut." Let's all respond as Sean Hannity would have if Obama had said that 8 yrs ago.

For eons on this blog, I've told you about my buddy Frank Ferrante, a wand'ring thespian who fills two roles. One is that he tours the world brilliantly impersonating Groucho Marx in An Evening With Groucho. The other is that he plays a character named Caesar who stars at times in productions of Teatro ZinZanni, a superb dinner show theater in San Francisco and Seattle. We have some news to report…

Frank's doing something else. Last night, he opened in a production of Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia, PA. Wish I could get back there to see it. Frank directed the production and also stars as Max Prince, a character who is basically Sid Caesar rolled into one. It's there through March 5 and if you, unlike me, can get there, tickets are available here.

There's a special joy for Frank to be performing at the Walnut Street since it was Groucho's favorite theater. The Marx Brothers' first Broadway show, I'll Say She Is, played at the Walnut Street — which I trust has been cleaned since then. It is highly appropriate that Frank will be performing An Evening With Groucho on that stage on one of his days off, February 27. Same link for tix.

He may or may not be appearing again soon at Teatro ZinZanni, a wonderful institution that is becoming sadly homeless. A few years ago, they lost their San Francisco location. A new one is being erected but is still quite far from opening for business. And they seem to be losing their Seattle location as this article explains.

I've only been to Teatro ZinZanni once but it was a great evening…kind of a Cirque du Soleil for adults, and I don't mean it was naughty in any way. Just funnier and more mature with a gourmet dinner served as you watched singers, acrobats, jugglers, dancers, etc. I went to the one in San Francisco before they got evicted there. Looks like I won't make it to Seattle before they get evicted there. I sure hope they find a couple of good homes for a great place to see great performers.

The guy in the White House — the one who spent a lot of time trying to convince Americans that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. and that there was a mountain of evidence that would put Hillary behind bars — is upset that people are smearing him. They're claiming he didn't win the popular vote! And that's because somehow, utterly undetected, millions of illegal aliens voted!

Josh Marshall runs down some of the reasons why claims of massive voter fraud are ridiculous.

Jack Mendelsohn died a few hours ago. He was 90 and the cause was lung cancer…and though his friends all knew it was imminent, the news was still a jolt. Jack was a very sweet, very funny man who had a glorious career in comic books, a glorious career in newspaper strips, a glorious career in animation and a glorious career writing for live-action TV shows. Let me go through these and the biographical stuff and then I'll tell you about the man himself. And I apologize but he did so much, I am unable to do all this strict chronological order…

Jack was born November 8, 1926. His father was an agent for many cartoonists and newspaper columnists including the legendary Winsor McKay and Jack, growing up in Brooklyn, watched cartoons avidly and filled notebooks with his cartoons. In his teen years, he lived next door to two men who became famous cartoonists. On one side was David Levine, soon to be among America's great caricaturists. On the other side was Norman Maurer, who was already making what then seemed like vast sums of money drawing comic books. Three or four decades later in Hollywood, Jack would replace Norman as the story editor of the Richie Rich cartoon show for Hanna-Barbera.

Being around so much cartooning determined Jack's future. He did some assistant work on comic books for the Jerry Iger shop in 1942 while still in high school. Then he quit high school to join in the Navy and fight in World War II…though even in the service, he dabbled in silly pictures. When he got out, he began selling gag cartoons to magazines and scripts to comic books.

His earliest known comic book work was for DC's More Fun Comics in 1946 and Animal Antics in 1947. He worked for dozens of publishers, mostly writing but occasionally drawing teen comics and funny animal titles. Among the "name" comic books he did over the years were Nancy and Sluggo, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Miss Peach, Beetle Bailey and Felix the Cat. He also wrote the Felix the Cat newspaper strip for a time and ghosted for other strips.

And I'll mention two other credits of many: When EC Comics decided to put out its own imitation of its hit funnybook, MAD, Jack was the main writer for that imitation, which they called Panic. And when Tower Comics put out its imitation of Archie, Jack wrote most of the issues of Tippy Teen.

Jack also wrote for MAD and for a time, worked as an artist at Famous Studios in New York, the animation outfit owned by Paramount. There, he met cartoonist Howard Post and they formed a longtime friendship and collaboration. Most of the funny animal comics drawn by Post for various publishers were written by Mendelsohn. Years later, when Jack's newspaper strip Jacky's Diary became popular, Famous/Paramount brought him back to write TV cartoons for Beetle Bailey and Krazy Kat the studio let him write and direct several short theatrical cartoons. For King Features, he wrote the Saturday morning cartoons of The Beatles and co-wrote the animated Beatles feature, Yellow Submarine.

Jacky's Diary started in 1959. Drawn in a childlike art style by Jack and signed "by Jacky Mendelsohn, Age 32½" (or whatever age he was each year of its run), it was enormously popular for a time. Jack called it the fastest sale in the history of newspaper strips. He submitted it one afternoon to King Features Syndicate and they bought it on the spot. The run was recently collected in a beautiful hardcover book from IDW Publishing.

I am bouncing around in his career here because for a long time, Jack bounced around. In the late fifties, he lived for a few years in Mexico where he became friendly with a Mexican cartoonist named Sergio Aragonés. This was well before Sergio came to America and joined the Usual Gang of Idiots (including Jack) at MAD.

Around 1966, he moved from New York to Los Angeles to work for Hanna-Barbera and contributed to most of their shows for the next decade or so including Abbott & Costello, Scooby Doo, The Flintstones Comedy Hour and Hong Kong Phooey. He snuck over to Jay Ward's studio and wrote George of the Jungle, Super Chicken and many of the Cap'n Crunch commercials. He went over to Filmation and wrote Shazam! and Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down? and he created and wrote The Groovie Goolies. He also for an independent studio wrote Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert!, the first animation of Bill Cosby's character.

Somewhere amidst all this animation work, Jack segued into writing for live-action, prime-time TV shows. The list included Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, The Carol Burnett Show, Three's Company, Van Dyke and Company, Chico and the Man and The Love Boat.

His later animation credits included Richie Rich, Muppet Babies, Dennis the Menace, Beverly Hills Teens, Camp Candy, The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin and a huge number of episodes of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He story-edited most of these shows, as well.

He was nominated for three Emmy awards. In 2005, the Writers Guild of America presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in animation. And in 2014, he appeared at the Comic-Con International in San Diego to accept the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. I will embed video of that ceremony below.

This is a very incomplete list of Jack's achievements and honors.

I'll post more about him in a few days because he really was an amazing man. Right now, I need to tell you he was one of my favorite people…a very dear, compassionate man who loved writing and cartoons and creativity. I was aware of his work and a fan of it well before I met him. When I met him, he became one of my closest friends within a matter of minutes. That was the kind of guy Jack was. He had a wonderful career (and a wonderful wife, Carole) and he sure deserved both.

Here's the video of the 2014 Bill Finger Awards. That's me with Athena Finger, granddaughter of the late Bill Finger. The presentation to Jack begins at 9:50 into the ceremony…

Once again, I was groping for a way to say something here on my blog and someone else said it much, much better than I could. Here's Kevin Drum…

One of the things Donald Trump taught us last year is the ultimate hollowness of the Christian right. Trump is the most obviously unreligious person to run for president in — well, probably forever. He doesn't go to church. He hasn't read the Bible. His lifestyle would make Hugh Hefner blush. He doesn't pray. He doesn't ask forgiveness from God for his sins. He's not born again. There is literally nothing in his 70 years on this earth that suggests he's anything but a stone atheist.

But that didn't matter. All he had to do was make a few awkward and obviously fake protestations of faith, and that was that. His insincerity was palpable to anyone paying the slightest attention, but everyone decided not to pay attention. As long as he mouthed the right words, everything was fine.

The Christian right has never been about actual faith. Like any other interest group, they just want what they want: abortion restrictions, money for private schools, opposition to gays, and so forth. As long as you're on board, they don't care what's in your heart. They never have, and that's why the suggestion that Democrats need to be more publicly devout has always been so misguided. Faith doesn't matter. Empathy for people of faith doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is supporting the Christian right's retrograde social views, and Democrats were never going to do that.

Every guy my age I know — even the gay ones — had a crush on a couple of women who were on TV or in Playboy in the sixties. Chronologically, I think Mary Tyler Moore may have been my first. This was not a crush that acknowledged her intelligence or talents or accomplishments. It was all based on the fact that I thought she was beautiful on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Forgive me my shallowness. I was ten at the time. I wasn't quite sure what women were good for except to look at.

I thought she was beautiful in black-and-white on our little 19" TV set. When I attended a filming of the show and saw her in person and in color…oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Later, I realized how good she was on that show as an actress and that made me like her even more.

I have had the pleasure — and it's happily always been a pleasure — to get to know some of the women who had a big impact on me back then but I only met Ms. Moore once for a few seconds and it was a moment of great embarrassment. You will therefore like this story very much…and as a bonus, it also includes a moment of symbolic parallelism.

On the old Rhoda TV series, produced by Ms. Moore's company, there was an unseen character named Carlton the Doorman. His voice was done by a lovely man named Lorenzo Music, who was one of the producers. In 1979, someone had the idea to do a spin-off show of the adventures of Carlton…but to do it in animation. At the time, it had been many years since there had been a successful cartoon show in prime-time but the MTM Productions company had the clout with CBS to get the project bankrolled.

CBS ordered a pilot and two back-up scripts. The pilot would show what the series would be like upon its debut and the back-up scripts would demonstrate other things that could happen to the characters. I had experience in both cartoons and sitcoms so I was engaged to help out on the pilot and to write one of the back-up scripts. That's how I got to know Lorenzo, a few years before he also became the voice of Garfield the Cat. A few more years after that — and there was no connection here — I was hired to write and voice-direct most of the Garfield cartoons.

The Carlton, Your Doorman pilot was recorded and animated. Eventually, CBS decided to not pick the show up as a series but the pilot aired as a special in May of 1980, and later won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program. Before it aired, there was a screening of it on the CBS Radford lot for various execs and folks who'd been involved in it and I was invited.

When I got there, I was supposed to have a pass to drive onto the lot and park but someone had screwed-up. No pass. I had to go find parking on the street, which turned out to be a space blocks away. Then I had to talk the guard into letting me onto the lot. By the time I got in, the lights were down, the screening had just started and the only open seat was at the far end of a row so I had to squeeze past about nine people, which I did with great awkwardness. I have feet the size of gondolas and one of them stomped on the toes of a lady in the second seat.

You'll never guess whose foot that was.

I didn't. When I reached my seat, I made a mental note to apologize profusely to the lady, whoever she was, once the film was over. When the lights came up and I saw it was Mary Tyler Moore, I briefly contemplated just staying in that seat for the rest of my life. Somehow, I managed to go over and apologize about eighty-two times to her and she was nice enough about it but there was a certain frostiness in the air so I never really got to talk to her. Some of that frost may have been because she apparently didn't like the pilot very much.

Those of you who know The Dick Van Dyke Show have probably have already noticed the symbolic parallel. In a flashback episode to the time Rob and Laura first met, we saw how Rob (DVD) was instantly smitten with Laura (MTM) but Laura thought he was a creep until he stepped on her foot, broke it and then was so charming in his apologizing and visiting her in the hospital that she finally fell for him.

In my case. I instantly fell for her, then I stepped on her foot and that was pretty much the end of any possible relationship. Maybe if I'd tripped over an ottoman…

I still think she was wonderful on Dick's show and also on her own. She died today at the age of 80 but I will always smile when I see her at a much earlier age, dancing in the Petrie living room, trying to convince Rob that they didn't bring home the wrong baby from the hospital, or apologizing to Alan Brady for telling the whole world that he was bald. And boy, was she an important part of television history.

Today on Stu's Show, Stu Shostak welcomes Bob Leszczkak, who's an expert on TV situation comedies that last but a single season. Bob has written a couple of books on the topic and they'll be discussing programs like Guestward Ho!, The Cara Williams Show, Margie, The Practice, Bridget Loves Bernie, Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers, Amanda's By the Sea, I'm a Big Girl Now, One of the Boys and animated shows such as Top Cat, The Alvin Show, Calvin and the Colonel and The Jetsons. Hope they have time for a few others I remember fondly like The Hero, Mona McCluskey, He and She and Captain Nice.

And as they say in infomericals, That's Not All! Immediately after the program, Stu and Bob will continue the discussion on UStream TV with a video version of Stu's Show on which they'll show several of the programs they've been talking about! Listen to the audio version or check out Stu's website linked below to find out how to watch!

The audio version of Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there and then. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond. Then shortly after a show concludes, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. Best deal of the year so far!

Trump may have no respect for non-canine, non-puppet reporters but surely he respects the incisive journalism of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog…

• I'm tired of people who spent 8 years hating Obama and claiming he wasn't qualified to be president telling me, "Trump won. Get over it!"

Lately — with all the uncertainty and worry about the future of this country — a lot of folks have taken the time to debate the question, "Would the creator of Captain America have punched a Nazi in the face?" They mean Jack Kirby, the co-creator of the character along with Joe Simon. This has gone around the 'net enough that it's now become a Snopes article which quotes various sources, including my book on Jack.

The first thing that should be noted is that when Jack was in the Army, his main job was to kill Nazis and he was quite willing to do that. Generally speaking, if you're prepared to kill someone, you should have no problem with punching them in the face. You might be disappointed that you don't get to kill them also but I suspect my dear friend Jack would have settled for whatever he could get.

The second thing that should be noted is that that was in a time of honest-to-God, all-out declared war. As far as I know, Jack never harmed a Nazi after that. Yeah, he hated them but a lot of us hate Nazis and never punch one in the face. I don't think he would have shot one if he wasn't in a wartime context so maybe he wouldn't have punched one in the face either.

Then people tell the story that I heard many times from Jack. This was before he went off to war, when he and Joe were doing the early issues of Captain America…

On occasion the Timely office would get phone calls and letters from Nazi sympathizers threatening the creators of Captain America. Once, while Jack was in the Timely office, a call came from someone in the lobby. When Kirby answered, the caller threatened Jack with bodily harm if he showed his face. Kirby told the caller he would be right down, but by the time Jack reached street level, there was no one to be found.

For what it's worth, I don't think that story had as much to do with Jack's feeling towards Nazis as it did with his natural response to anyone — Nazi or otherwise — who threatened him. He was real big on standing up to threats of any kind. Then again, that incident would have happened in 1941 when Jack was 24. When I met him, he was 52 and the father of four. I can imagine a kid in his twenties being more willing to use his fists than he would be later in life.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't know for certain and you don't and we never will. There are certain "What would Jack have done?" questions that I feel pretty confident I can answer but a whole lot where I don't. He surprised a lot of us at times with the way his mind worked. It was a brilliant mind but it "saw" things that mere mortals cannot…often a much wider, larger picture. Still, I can't imagine the Jack Kirby I knew just punching anyone who posed no physical threat to him.

So my answer to the question "Would the creator of Captain America have punched a Nazi in the face?" is that it would depend on the situation but probably not.

And that whole question flows from an incident at the recent inauguration when a man clad in black ran up and socked Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer, who was being interviewed on camera and presumably at that moment, not pointing a gun at anyone or threatening to punch them first. I feel confident in saying that in that situation, Jack would never have hit anyone. What he might have done is gone home, taken his contempt for Spencer and used it to create a story that would have been more devastating than punching the guy in the face. I would have liked to have seen that.

Eric Levitz notes that only four days into the Trump Presidency, some of his closest aides are already leaking stories to press about how the man is outta control and they have to try and avert his gaze from news that will infuriate him. This is not a good sign.

It's John Cleese. Just click and watch it…

If you read only one thing about Donald Trump today, make it what Matt Yglesias has written about him. It's the most convincing analysis I've seen as to why Trump won and it has to do with too many Americans figuring Hillary had it in the bag so they could simply not vote or vote for someone else. They could even vote for a guy like Trump they didn't want. Yglesia drops a couple of intriguing (if true) statistics like…

[Trump] got 17 percent of the vote of people who said he wasn't qualified to serve as president, 19 percent of the vote of people who said he lacked the temperament to be president, and 23 percent of the vote of people who wanted the next president to be more liberal than Obama.

Yglesias also says Trump won the electoral votes of seven states in which he failed to capture a majority of the vote. Something's sure wrong there.

What intrigued me especially was when Yglesias noted that "[His] antics have taken Trump much further than anyone predicted they possibly could, and so he evidently has no intention of abandoning them." I've been thinking that Trump reminds me in many ways of a certain TV producer I worked for, once upon a time. This guy had built a very successful career — unlike Trump, out of nothing — by a string of petty, borderline illegal tricks. Some were not so borderline. They were ways of delaying payments to people, defaulting on some bills altogether, etc.

He conned and swindled people until he had a few hits of such awesome success that he became very, very rich. When I was working for him, he was probably making $100,000 a week. That's right: I said "a week." But he was still doing all the old tricks to cheat a messenger service out of $20 or to set up dummy companies to run up bills and then disappear. You'd think that once he owned three homes, he would stop doing that kind of penny-ante con job but no.

One of his business associates and I discussed it one time and the associate said, "He's afraid to give up the two-bit swindles because he's convinced they're what made him successful. When I tell him to knock it off with the petty larceny, he says 'Hey, that petty larceny got me where I am today.' Last week in a 7-Eleven store, I saw him shoplift a Hershey bar apparently because he's done that all his life."

The analogy of that guy to Trump only goes so far but our new prez does seem to me like a guy who can't believe his act has succeeded and he's afraid to change anything about it. Which explains why his inauguration speech sounded just like one of his campaign speeches. I was surprised he didn't take a moment during it to call Rosie O'Donnell a fat pig.

Anyway, I think Yglesias is right. Most presidents seem to come into office and be surprised at how much they can't do. Trump seems more surprised than most. He thought he was elected Absolute Monarch…and with the marches against him and the press reporting that which he thinks should not be mentioned, he's finding out otherwise.

In tribute to the late Debbie Reynolds, three extremely talented Broadway performers re-create the "Good Morning" dance number from Singin' in the Rain. They are Christopher Rice (The Book of Mormon), Clay Thomson (Newsies, Matilda) and Eloise Kropp (Cats, Dames at Sea)…and boy, do they do it well. Stay tuned for some outtakes at the end…and it wouldn't surprise me if they had a lot fewer of them than Gene, Donald and Debbie…

• Trump's next excuse for not releasing his taxes: "You wouldn't be able to understand them anyway. All the amounts are in rubles."