Fred Kaplan on why Trump's ill-advised Muslim ban was ill-advised. For one thing, it alienates Muslims who are working with us to make the world safer.

Boy, Trump's executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim countries (none of which have any history of terrorism on U.S. soil) and various other refugees sure caused a lot of chaos. Kevin Drum thinks it was deliberate; that they could have lessened the pain and discomfort by making clear it did not apply to holders of green cards but they wanted to slap those folks around a bit, too. Sadly, he may be right.

I dunno. I usually hold to the credo, "Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence." In politics especially, I think it's important to separate the two. No matter what your political beliefs are, somewhere out there there's an elected official (or wanna-be-elected official) who shares them exactly but is too inept to enact that agenda. He or she may even be such a bungler that they discredit your beliefs or empower the opposition. I'm wondering how many folks who love what Trump promised them are worried that he'll do just that, the same way the mission of the Affordable Care Act was undermined a great deal by bad website design.

As this country gets more and more polarized, competence seems to play less and less a role in our elections. I get the feeling that most people would vote for Gomer Pyle if he mouthed the right (to them) viewpoints and promised "the right things;" never mind that he lacked the skill and judgment to get those things done. It would be nice if we had leaders who knew what they were doing, not merely what they were supposed to accomplish.

In the meantime, I'm just sore that Dick Cheney said, of Trump's desire to ban Muslims, "It goes against everything we stand for and believe in." I hate it when I'm on the same side of an issue as Dick Cheney. If he ever came out against cole slaw, I'd probably start eating the stuff.

• Looks like Trump has grabbed the Statue of Liberty by the pussy.

Back in this message, we saw three current Broadway performers re-create the "Good Morning" number from the classic film, Singin' in the Rain. There's also a stage musical version of that movie and here's that number as it was performed in an Australian production. The folks in it are Gretel Scarlett, Adam Garcia and Jack Chambers and they do some pretty fancy hoofin'…

I did not see either of the televised tributes last week to Mary Tyler Moore. What I did see was an awful lot of folks on the 'net complain that they were obviously put together in great haste and without a lot of care. I don't get why that would be. It has been no secret for quite some time that Ms. Moore was in failing health and could leave us at any moment. At least two years ago, it was obvious such tributes would be needed soon. Did they really wait until she'd actually passed to start work on them?

In any case, I thought I'd link to this list by Stephen Bowie of the best performances Mary gave on The Dick Van Dyke Show. I have no quarrel with anything on it.

And here's a list by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong of the twelve best episodes (in her opinion) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She does not include "Chuckles Bites the Dust" because it's mentioned too often. I wouldn't have included it because I always thought it was, to use one of Mr. Trump's favorite insults, overrated. I thought lots of episodes of that show were better and funnier.

You've all seen the side-by-side photos of the crowd at Obama's first inauguration and the crowd at Trump's first (and let's hope, only) inauguration. They clearly show a helluva lot more people at Obama's.

Mr. Trump is said to be furious because everything he does is the biggest and the best and he never loses fair and square…not even in competitions that exist only in his own, narcissistic mind. He's arguing, I guess, that the photo of his audience is a photo from before the speech when everyone had yet to arrive. That might be valid if he could produce some photos taken during the speech that showed the unoccupied areas filled-in…but apparently, he can't. Thousands of photos must have been taken that day but apparently none that show the audience he insists he had.

Meanwhile though, there are Trump supporters who don't want to believe their guy has lost in any conceivable way. They don't believe his approval rating is at a historically dreadful 36%. They don't believe Hillary really did better in the popular vote. And they look at those photos of the two inaugurations and insist that even in those pics which enrage Donald, his turnout was better.

Why do they see something different? Alan Levinovitz discusses the human tendency for self-deception.

We seem to be in full obituary mode here at newsfromme.com.  Mike Connors, best known as the star of TV's Mannix, passed away yesterday at the age of 91.  He had a long career as an actor and was very active in social causes such as animal rights and trying to lift some of the stigma surrounding mental illness.

I liked the Mannix series but never met Mr. Connors.  Fortunately, for those who come to this blog seeking anecdotes about the departed, I have a friend who worked with him the last time he played the role of Joe Mannix.  This is my buddy Lee Goldberg. He and his partner wrote the last appearance of Joe Mannix…

I'm sad to hear that Mike Connors, who played Mannix, died today. I loved the show when I was growing up and wished I could write for it. I made that wish come true. When Bill Rabkin and I were producing Diagnosis Murder, we came up with idea of bringing back Mike Connors as Mannix, continuing an old case from 20 years ago, and using an old episode for flashbacks (and bringing back the old guest cast, too).

But first we had to convince Mike to do it. So we called him up and he invited us to lunch at the Riviera Country Club. That alone was a thrill. He was incredibly nice but worried we'd make fun of Mannix instead of treating him with respect. We assured him we loved the character, too, and wanted to see how he'd changed in the decades since the series ended. He signed on. We wrote the episode…and I still remember the thrill of writing the words "Joe Mannix" for the first time in the script. A childhood dream came true.

He was an absolute joy to work with on the episode and we became friends. The episode became the highest rated in Diagnosis Murder's history and I believe it played a big part in convincing CBS to promote us to the showrunners. I still remember a wonderful lunch we had with him and Robert Stack at the Riviera Country Club.  It took all of my self-control not to geek out.

We lost touch over the years, but I'm glad to say I ran into him on the street last spring and we had a nice conversation. He's a big reason why I'm a writer today and I'm grateful I had the chance to know him.

Can't add much to that except that I never heard anyone with a bad word to say about Mike Connors.  Not a one.  Thanks, Lee.

I'm mentioning this because I doubt a lot of the press will give it the attention it deserves. Bob Holiday, who had the title role in the 1966 Broadway show It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman died this morning at his home in Hawley, PA. He was 84.

The show opened March 29, 1966 at the Alvin Theater in New York. It received what they call "mixed notices" and it closed there July 17, losing its entire capitalization.  Usually, shows that have that short a run and are not by Sondheim are never seen again but productions of Superman are still done all the time. I attribute the many revivals to how much fun it sounds like it would be to do a musical about the character, not to the merits of this particular musical about Superman. In any case, Mr. Holiday was expertly cast. He had made a rep for himself in the musical Fiorello! and as anyone who has heard the cast album can attest, had a fine singing voice.

He subsequently played the Man of Steel in several touring companies and revivals but for the most part, transitioned out of show business and into building homes. Still, he remembered the show as a great time in his life and was always available for ceremonial appearances and interviews. His performance does not seem to exist on video anywhere but it will live on thanks to that cast album. And he will always be the first singing Superman.

I've been telling friends lately not to get too rankled over Trump tweets and public statements. Remember that he's not talking to us. Trump almost never talks to those of us who didn't vote for him and are unlikely to ever vote for him or cheer him. It's all about playing to his base, keeping them enthused about his greatness, making them believe they're winning, winning, winning.

In some ways, he's a natural extension of George W. Bush, whose credo in his presidency was to never admit anything didn't go exactly the way he wanted. It was kinda tough after 9/11 but he never even said, "Gee, maybe I should have read some of those memos." Remember all the times Bush was asked about his biggest regret or if he could name one mistake his administration had made? He always looked surprised that anyone could ask such a thing, like it should be obvious to all that he and his aides were flawless. Trump is all about everything being not just a victory but also the most terrific, super-spectacular victory ever.

Every time our new White House resident talks about building a wall, I can't help but think of the wall he's built around himself — a wall behind which he got more votes than Hillary, behind which he got a bigger turnout for his inauguration than Barack, behind which he gets the credit for every bit of good economic news that has happened since November 8, including the ones — like the Dow hitting 20,000, etc. That last one was on target to happen around now even if we'd elected the puppy-monkey-baby from the Mountain Dew commercials.

I dunno how much of his self-idolatry is conscious strategy and how much is due to some sinkhole in his own ego…but he no doubt attributes much/most of his successes in life to that "I always win" attitude and ain't about to abandon it. In that sense, he will be on the campaign trail for his entire life. At most, at some point, he will occasionally acknowledge some failure that even he can't spin as a Huge Win and he'll briefly go into humble mode for that one thing.

I once worked for a producer who insisted he was right 99% of the time. He would have claimed 100% but he seemed to believe that admitting the 1% error made him more human and credible when he bragged of his 99% perfection. I pegged his real success rate at around 50% — or about what you'd hit if you just flipped a quarter every time you came up against a yes or no decision.

That, incidentally, is not the worst way to make decisions, at least in the fields in which I work. I've worked for editors and publishers who carefully evaluated and studied each decision they were required to make and could still only be right less than 40% of the time. They could have done much, much better flipping that quarter.

I don't expect I will hate everything Trump does as president. I do expect to be repulsed by the way he will exaggerate all his successes (including taking credit for things that would have happened anyway, as he's already doing) and lie about all his failures, insisting they're successes and anyone who says otherwise is lying. I'm going to have to keep reminding myself that he's not talking to me. That's his act and it got him to the White House so there's no way he's changing it.

Fred Kaplan tells us what's going on with our State Department. Like so much of our federal government this week, things have happened that don't make a whole lot o' sense.

John Cleese has a point to make and I could care less…

I feel I've failed when I need to explain a joke but I will. In the piece about Frank Ferrante in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, I said that the character of Max Prince "is basically Sid Caesar rolled into one." I now have a half-dozen e-mails from folks who think I left some names out of that sentence.

I didn't. What I was trying to say is that the character was like Sid Caesar if you'd mixed him with Sid Caesar and then thrown in a few touches of Sid Caesar, Sid Caesar and maybe — just for a different approach — a bit of Sid Caesar. In other words, Sid Caesar rolled into one. Sorry for the confusion.

• 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.