I mentioned Daws Butler here the other day. We lost this wonderful man in 1988 and I still miss him. I miss hearing him on new cartoon shows and commercials but even more than that, I miss talking with him, being around him, hearing That Voice come out of an actual human being and hanging on every word he uttered.

That Voice — or maybe I should say Those Voices because he had so many — meant a lot to me when I was a kid. I heard him on darn near every TV show I loved and there was something so comforting about a Butler voice. Many of those cartoons had what we might politely call minimalist animation, "minimalist" being a much nicer adjective than "cheap." There sometimes wasn't a whole lot of personality in the characters visually but Daws more than made up for it with the voices he created for Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Hokey Wolf, Quick Draw McGraw, Augie Doggie and so many others. It was like audible comfort food.

I have been privileged — and don't think I don't appreciate it — to know and work with a number of extraordinary creative talents in TV and also in comic books. Many of them were people whose work I loved when I was a kid watching TV and reading comic books. Then amazingly, I got to meet them and found that for the most part, I loved those people. Daws was one of the nicest, most generous men I have ever met.

And honest. That voice of his could do just about anything but lie. Every single thing Daws ever told me checked out. He was wrong once in a while but he was honestly wrong.

Another great, talented man I got to know was Daws' former partner, Stan Freberg. Stan was a very honest man too but he had a tendency to embellish stories a bit, plus his memory wasn't quite perfect. He would tell me a tale about the old days, back when he was doing voices for cartoons or co-starring with Daws on the Time for Beany puppet show. The story would be so hilarious and wonderful that I would wonder how much of it was true.

So the next time I saw Daws, I'd ask him…and it would usually turn out it was like 97% or 98% — a most acceptable percentage. One little detail here or there was off. Later, I'd ask Stan about some anecdote Daws had told me and Stan would say, "If Daws said it happened, it happened." Once, he said, "If Daws told me my last name was really Schwartz, I'd probably figure I'd been wrong all these years."

That was one thing about Daws. Another was the high standard to which he held himself. And yet another was how it felt like his talent was contagious. It wasn't, of course, but you felt smarter and more gifted around him. He was totally non-competitive and able to bring out the good in everyone.

There are people who in subtle ways let you know that just because you share a room with them, that doesn't mean you share any part of their greatness. Daws treated you like you did, even though you both knew you didn't. That was a magical trait he shared with another man I was blessed to know — another man who was at the absolute top of the field in which he worked. I'm talking about Jack Kirby.

Daws was a teacher — a very good teacher whose classes output some of the best new voice actors of their generation. I have zero ability in that arena but Daws was nice enough to invite me to some of his classes and — to use a term I always thought was silly — you could get a great "contact high" from being surrounded by so much talent. It helped me as a writer.

And another of the many wonderful things Daws gave me was a great friend. His name was Earl Kress and he was a writer and actor who was one of Daws' students.

I just typed that and instantly realized it was inadequate because Earl was more than a student to Daws. There was a bit of a father/son relationship there and a vast amount of mutual affection. Daws thought I should know Earl and that Earl should know me and he was, naturally, right. We were the best o' buddies until Earl passed away back in 2011.

Daws gave us all so much. I miss Earl too but if Daws was still around, he'd be 100 years old today so I'm especially missing him this morning. And not so much for your benefit as for mine, I felt like telling you.

Why did Trump win? Kevin Drum lists and evaluates some of the prevailing theories. There's probably at least a smidgen of merit to each of these and in some cases, a pretty large smidgen.

This is the wonderful Sharon McNight (not to be confused with any non-wonderful Sharon McNights in this world) singing a tune she performs to great acclaim in cabarets. A few years ago, I linked to a clip of her performing this number but here we have a newer, better video of it and the song's worth hearing again anyway…

I'm being very sparing in linking to articles that theorize about or claim to know what will happen during the Trump Presidency. Most of them remind me of the oft-quoted (on this site) adage about the press and pundits: They're not paid to say "I don't know" even when they don't know. But I'll link to a few which bring up important points that we do know.

Stephanie Mencimer reminds us that Mr. Trump is facing a whole heap of civil lawsuits. Republicans pushed for and got a Supreme Court decision that a sitting president cannot delay civil suits until he leaves office. This was because they thought the Paula Jones civil suit would drive Bill Clinton from office. Now, that's the law of the land so one of three things will happen…

One is that Trump will have to make time for all those lawsuits and defend himself while he is trying to do whatever he's going to try to do as president. Another is that he's going to have to settle all those suits, which could be very, very expensive and embarrassing. And the third is that Republicans in Congress are going to decide that since the sitting president is of their party, they need to pass a law that says he cannot be sued while in office…you know, like a Democrat was.

I get asked a lot about Steve Ditko, the great comic book artist who is perhaps best-known for being least-known.  Ditko was a brilliant illustrator and innovator in his day and though his two greatest works — Spider-Man and Dr. Strange — have since been handled by legions of talented folks, I don't think anyone has come all that close to what he did on those characters. He left them in 1966 and the best thing I can say about his work since then is that occasionally, it reminds you how good he used to be.

He has famously refused interviews and photos and has repeatedly asked the world to leave him alone. This, of course, makes some people all the more eager to not leave him alone. In the last quarter-century, I have received perhaps two dozens calls or e-mails from journalists — in the comic art field and outside it — who were confident that their persistence and tact would result in them getting the grail. Each was going to be the one to land the first-ever real Steve Ditko Interview in which he would open up to them, lay bare his soul and tell all.

This has not happened and I suspect that if it did, people would wind up knowing less about Ditko and his career than they do now. But there is much to say about this man and there's a new article up by Abraham Riesman that says a lot of it.

Not that I like every word of it. Let me start by disagreeing strongly with Riesman's history of Spider-Man…

Historians generally agree that the idea for Spidey originated with Lee, who has variously claimed that he was inspired by seeing a spider on a wall or remembering a pulp hero called the Spider. He also thought it would be interesting to have this new character be a teenager, an age group previously reserved for sidekick roles. Kirby drew five pages of a Spider-Man story that historians believe depicted a kid who used a magic ring to become a spider-themed hero, though the whereabouts of those sketches are unknown. Lee decided Kirby's hero looked too beefy and conventional, and opted to give the project over to Ditko.

I don't know any non-partisan historians (i.e., those who have no financial reason to say so) who believe strongly that the concept of Spider-Man began with Stan Lee. Many would tell you it started with Jack Kirby telling Stan about an earlier Spiderman (no hyphen) character he'd worked on with Joe Simon, which he certainly did. My view is that it's arguable which of those two men first said something like "Hey, let's do a character called Spiderman" but it's a fact what they then started to do was a retread of that earlier premise offered up by Kirby.

I also think making the character a teenager was a later idea and I never believed the story that Kirby was replaced on the project by Ditko because Jack's depictions were too heroic. I'm finishing a long book about Jack in which I explain in grand detail what I think happened and why. Basically though, my theory is that it was because the Spiderman that Stan and Jack were developing was coming out too much like another character owned by someone who was quite litigious.

All that said, Riesman's portrait of Ditko today seems to me as accurate as it could be about someone who refuses to sit for such a portrait. Is it everything some yearn to know about this man? No but it's probably all you're ever going to get and it may be more than you're entitled to know. (Full Disclosure: I was interviewed for the piece.)

I admit to mixed feelings about Steve Ditko. I met him a few times long ago and corresponded with him for a time. He was nice to me up until the point when I disagreed with him on anything. As I get older, I more and more find the worldview of Ayn Rand repulsive, though maybe not as repulsive as the way it's interpreted by some of her followers. I have one good Rand-loving friend who repeatedly reminds me not to confuse what she actually believed with those interpretations, especially Ditko's.

So that colors my view of his recent work, as does the sheer preachiness of it at all. And the fact that before I gave up on it, I often didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

Still, he did some of the best work in comics that anyone's ever done in comics and I feel he has been undercredited and surely at times undercompensated. Some time ago, I decided that the best way to thank him for that is to accede to his wishes to leave him alone. He wants to let his work speak for itself? Fine. And if I don't understand what he's saying sometimes? Or don't like it? Well, those are fine too in a way.

If that's all we ever get out of him, I'm satisfied. He already gave us more than enough.

The other day here, I wrote about a great character actor named Billy DeWolfe. That's him on the right in the above photo. The man on the left is Larry Storch, another pretty funny guy. The still is from the very short-lived 1969 sitcom The Queen and I, which featured the both of them. The show was on the CBS schedule and off in a flash, and I don't think all the episodes they made were even aired. Perhaps because I never saw the show again after it went off the air, I have good memories of it.

Mr. DeWolfe left us in 1974. Larry Storch is still with us and still working at the age of 93. Here's a story about Larry that is also about Billy…

When I was doing the first season of Garfield and Friends, I was casting a number of my favorite voice actors and, of course, I wanted Daws Butler on the show. If you visit this site, I assume you know who that is. If you don't, do some Googling and find out about the man I think was one of the two or three best voice actors who ever lived…and he was also a very nice man, beloved by all who knew him. You could start here with this three-part article by me.

Daws had worked for years with Stan Freberg (another great voice actor, along with all else he did) and sometimes when Daws was telling me stories about those days, he'd lapse — often without realizing it — into a very funny Freberg impression. I asked him once if he'd ever used that anywhere in a cartoon or commercial or anything and he didn't think he had.

I had a role in one Garfield episode for an arrogant boss and I decided to book Daws and have him do that impression. I wanted to have him on the show anyway and I thought this would be a way to preserve the impression so others could hear it. Also, this was before I started booking Stan himself to do characters on the show and I wanted to see if anyone would call me and say, "Hey, Evanier! Wasn't that Freberg doing that voice on the show last Saturday?" I'll bet someone would have. (When Daws first created the voice of the cat Mr. Jinks on the Huckleberry Hound Show, at least one reviewer thought it was Freberg. Actually, it was Daws doing a rough impression of Stan's rougher impression of Marlon Brando.)

Daws was all set but a few days before the recording, he phoned and asked if I'd do him a favor. I said, "Of course! Anything!" If Daws had asked me to box the Heavyweight Champion of the World, I'd have been in trunks faster than you could say "Muhammad Ali." But what he wanted was to be let out of the booking.

Daws had suffered a stroke not long before and while he had returned to work — on a prime-time special I wrote, in fact — he was still very concerned about not being able to perform up to his very-high standard. I would have taken him at his worst because it was still better than most actors' best but he said, "I'm having some trouble lately with my peripheral vision." That meant that it was harder for him to "read ahead" a bit in his script and that, he feared, would have affected his performance. He said, "If you really need me, I'll come in and give it my all but if there's any way you can replace me, I'd like you to."

I agreed to replace him and he suggested a few actors who he thought would be fine and even said, "Why don't you get Stan Freberg? I've heard he does a good Stan Freberg!" I joked back, "Naw, he's all wrong for it," and told Daws I'd try to book him again in a month or so. He said, "Great. I'm thinking this thing will clear up and I'll be better by then. Thanks." As it turned out, he passed away before we could get him in.

I don't know why but after that call, I didn't try to get Stan. Instead, I called a voice agent I knew and asked him if he had any interesting clients to suggest. If you'd been listening to that conversation, this is what you'd have heard:

"Well, Larry Storch is in town I'll take him!"

The first six words were the agent talking. The last three were me, agreeing instantly with no air between one speech and the next. A few days later, Larry Storch walked into our studio and we made the obvious Big Fuss over him with not just Yours Truly but everyone in the building telling him how brilliantly funny we all thought he was. He seemed a bit overwhelmed by it…and oddly a bit anxious. He had not done cartoon voices in over ten years, he said. He was afraid he was outta practice.

From his billfold, Larry pulled a tattered three-by-five card. On it in very tiny handwriting was a list of all the impressions he did. Almost all of the cartoon voices he'd ever done were impressions of celebrities. He said, "Here's a menu of what I can do. Pick the voice you want."

I had abandoned the idea of a Freberg soundalike so I just looked it over for a voice that would be right for the arrogant boss character. There were many there to choose from: Frank Morgan, Sidney Greenstreet, Jimmy Cagney, Peter Lorre and about three dozen others, all of that vintage. Many of them would have been fine but I turned to Larry and said, "I just thought of someone who's not on your list but I'll bet you can do him."

He looked even more worried. "I really only do the voices on that list. Who do you have in mind?"

I said, "Billy DeWolfe."

And Larry Storch broke into the biggest grin. "Billy," he said. "What a wonderful man. What a sweetheart." A pause, then: "Okay, I'll take a stab at it." He did quite well with it and after, he told us a half-dozen anecdotes about how lovely and funny his friend Billy was. Larry was pretty lovely and funny himself.

That's one of my proudest moments of casting, partly because it worked well on the show…partly because Larry seemed so happy that we were preserving a little bit of his friend…and partly because of a phone call I got after that episode aired. A friend called me up and congratulated me on thinking to hire Billy DeWolfe. He said, "He's such a great talent and no one's thought to hire him for years. Isn't that disgraceful?"

I said, "Yeah. Well, some producers have a silly prejudice against hiring the dead."

John Oliver's show tonight — his season finale — was kinda depressing and after this terrific show last week, a letdown. He made a half-assed attempt at the argument that one big problem with this country and why we have the Big Problem heading for the White House is the preponderance of fake news. People believe what they want to believe whether it's true or not. I'm wondering if the fact-checker sites like Politifact have ever really convinced anyone that some story that seemed too good to be true wasn't true.

Anyway, read this. Basically, it's about a fake news story on a fake new website and all the people who believed it enough to spread it. I don't think Oliver made his case as well as that article does.

But I do think he was right to say that no one really knows what's in store for us from the Trump presidency. We know we won't like most of it but there will have to be some good things. A Republican Congress that said "over our dead bodies" to some good ideas of Obama's will probably pass some of the same ideas when Trump gets behind them. Because, you know, it was never about doing what was right for this country. It was about not letting the Democrat do it.

I also suspect the people who voted Trump in won't like most of what happens but will be real slow to admit that. In any case, I'm going to stop reading articles about what he might do. Since he doesn't seem to know, I don't think the pundits do.

In the meantime, I still don't like the anti-Trump protests going on around the country. Any real angry protest is going to inconvenience a lot of people and is likely to cause some destruction. If you're going to have one, at least don't put the inconvenience and destruction on people who might have had nothing to do with what you're mad about and may even have been on your side. Also, don't make your side look like hoodlums who don't respect the law, thereby giving away the moral high ground. It may be the only high ground we have left.

Fred Kaplan on some of the international damage Donald Trump can do. Read this only if you want to be really worried.

Hey, I've got a great theater recommendation for you — providing you live in or near Los Angeles and providing you can get tickets. It's a new production of the musical Hairspray and it's in for a too-limited run at the Cupcake Theater in North Hollywood. As you may have heard, NBC is soon to telecast a live, big-budget version of this show packed with stars and that's all well and good. But I can't imagine they could do a better job than what I saw last night at the Cupcake.

The Cupcake is where I saw that great production of Little Shop of Horrors which I raved about here. What they did with Hairspray would be impressive in a big, fancy theater but is even more impressive in a small, not-so-fancy facility that was obviously not built to be a theater. I was in the second row and the dancers were practically dancing in our laps. Not that that would be a bad thing with some of them.

There was almost no scenery but there was surprisingly good costuming and, best of all, a very high level of talent displayed by the two dozen performers. You kind of excuse the lack of sets because there wouldn't be room for them with that many actors (about two dozen) crowded onto a stage that would seem full with a two-person play. And also, Hairspray kind of looks right with, costumes aside, about half the budget of a high school musical.

The show was directed by Wendy Rosoff, who I know primarily as an actress. She delivered Broadway-quality staging and since I don't see a choreographer listed in the program book, she seems to also have been the one who provided the Broadway-quality choreography. If so, amazing. The live band headed by Nick Petrillo was spot-on perfect.

Now, here's where I'd ordinarily start praising the stand-out cast members by name and that's tough because, like I said, there two dozen of them and they were all good. So I'll just mention Brittany Thornton dazzling as an energetic Tracy Turnblad, comedian Teddy Margass getting every laugh possible as Tracy's mother Edna, David J. Hall and Nic Olsen (both perfect as the two leading men — one black, one white.), Carly Lucas being scintillating and devilish as the conniving Velma, Joey Langford in fine voice as the slick Dick Clark doppelganger, and Terika Jefferson taking the roof off the dump as Motormouth Maybelle.

Everyone was great but I think the actress who most impressed me was Claire Adams, who plays the vapid, clumsy Penny Pingleton. I once heard an acting teacher say that the measure of an actor was whether he/she is properly in character when they aren't speaking and don't have the main attention in the scene. Do they still stand and hold their characters, reacting properly when they're in the background or off to one side? The teacher suggested watching Gene Wilder in any of his films and noting what he's doing when you might not normally be looking at him. That's when you appreciate what a fine actor he is (or now sadly, was).

So there's this lady named Claire Adams playing Penny and Penny is goofy and funny and awkward every time the script gives her something goofy and funny and awkward to say or do. Fine. But I kept noticing Ms. Adams somehow being goofy and funny and awkward every second she was on stage, even when all eyes but mine were on some other fine performer belting out a tune…and I found myself laughing at Penny's body language. Or at her expressions which perfectly supported the scene…

…and I kinda fooled myself. I knew — because I know the play, SPOILER ALERT! — that at the end, Penny is going to lose the nerdy glasses and the Supercuts hairdo and J.C. Penney back-to-school outfit and suddenly become, at least for a few moments, the hottest woman on stage. So intellectually, I know they've cast a stunning actress and dressed her way, way down to make her look as blah as possible.

Right. I know that. But she looks so uber-drab that I couldn't see the slightest trace of potential in her Penny and I actually thought, "Gee, I wonder how they're going to make her look good at the end." Well, of course, all Ms. Adams had to do was take off the wig and glasses and probably just be herself. Boy, she's a good actress.

Of course, she's surrounded by good actors and actresses and expert producing. After the show, it was too late to get into Spumante, a fine restaurant across the street where Ed Asner seems to be in permanent residence, so we went to another place about two miles away. By coincidence, about 45 minutes later, in walks Michael Pettenato, who was the producer of the show and, I believe, he owns the Cupcake Theater. We talked to him for a while about how great the show is…and it was delightful how delighted he was with it and everyone in it. He has a right to be proud. Local theater — created on such a low budget in an improvised performing space — isn't supposed to be this good.

This Hairspray is there through December 17 but they only do three performances a week. You can buy discount tickets at Goldstar but even the full-price tickets at the Cupcake Theater website are a great deal. If you can afford it, go for full price because this place needs all the financial support it can get.

If you have kids who've never experienced a genuine musical comedy up close, this would be a great one to show them what it's all about. Half of them will want to see more shows like this one and the other half will want to be in shows like this one.

Okay, so some of you probably do need to know who this Billy DeWolfe is…or in this case, was.

Billy DeWolfe was a character actor of a kind that I don't think exists anymore. It's the performer who did such a good job playing men who were probably gay that you assumed the actor himself was probably gay. That is, if you thought about such things and most people didn't. There were people who were shocked one day to discover that Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly weren't just really good straight actors playing campy the way Bill Dana played a Mexican.

DeWolfe played prissy, fussy men and he was very funny doing so in a lot of movies in the forties, mostly for Paramount. In some of the drearier ones, he's today the only reason to watch them.

Before that, he was a dancer who segued into acting. Wikipedia says, "At some point during World War II, he served in the United States Navy until he was discharged for 'medical' reasons in 1944." I think the quotes are someone's way of suggesting that maybe he was really kicked out for being a homosexual. I don't know nor do I particularly care if he was one but we should remember that not all that long ago, you could get booted out of the military just for that.

However, you could still have a good career on stage and screen, sometimes playing roles that suggested gay stereotypes — and DeWolfe did. He sometimes turned up on shows playing a character named Mrs. Murgatroyd who was kind of a "Dear Abby" type dispensing advice to the lovelorn. His neatly-trimmed mustache added an extra note of the bizarre to the sight of Billy DeWolfe in drag.

In an interview I once heard, he said his career stalled out a bit in the late fifties, early sixties. I'm not sure anyone noticed that but him. What he said resurrected it was his guest appearance on The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1965. He played the proprietor of a beauty salon for dogs in one episode and so totally stole every scene he was in that other shows raced to hire him. Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, who'd written for the Van Dyke show, cast him as the station manager in their one-season 1966 sitcom, Good Morning, World.

DeWolfe was on a lot of other shows but there are two I'll bet a lot of people reading this remember him from. One is that he did the voice of the crummy magician Professor Hinkle in the 1969 animated special, Frosty the Snowman. And then at one point, Mr. DeWolfe became a favored guest of Johnny Carson, who couldn't mention his name without lapsing into an impression of Billy doing his catch-phrase, "Busy, busy, busy."

I'm remembering one night when Johnny had Billy on. This was probably around the time he was a regular on The Doris Day Show. It was probably not long before Mr. DeWolfe passed away, which happened in 1974.

The guest before was Sammy Davis Jr., who really tore up the place with a great musical number followed by another great musical number. Then Carson introduced DeWolfe who came out, took the guest's chair and said something like, "Johnny, I don't know why you'd want to talk to me when you have this fabulously talented man here. He should do another song!"

Three things then happened almost simultaneously: The audience applauded wildly, Johnny started to say that he wanted to talk to Billy instead…and Sammy leaped up, walked to center stage and told his musical director which song to start playing. Mr. DeWolfe went largely uninterviewed that evening.

I don't think this was prearranged. Maybe it was. Maybe since Sammy was so good, Johnny or his producers were afraid anything else would be anti-climactic so they told Billy to say that and promised to have him back real soon to make up for it. But my impression at the time was that it was real. In fact, it seemed like Johnny was a bit annoyed that he'd lost control of his own show because suddenly, Sammy was out there doing his third song — an unrehearsed and unplanned number. It went fine of course but you weren't supposed to perform on Johnny Carson's show without Johnny's okay.

That kind of thing — this happening outside the host's control — did sometimes occur on talk shows back in the era when they weren't as carefully planned as they all are. Still, I can't think of another time on one of those programs when a guest unexpectedly donated his screen time to another guest.

Anyway, that was Billy DeWolfe. Oh — and I forgot to mention another series he was on — a highly-forgotten, quickly-terminated 1969 CBS sitcom called The Queen and I about the crew of a luxury ocean liner. This was what Larry Storch and a lot of folks involved in F Troop did after F Troop was canceled, with a couple of refugees from McHale's Navy (including the great Carl Ballantine) climbing on board for the brief voyage.

I remember it fondly and have been curious to see it again, just to see if it was as good as I remember it to be. I'm not expecting that would be but you never know. I had fond memories of The Munsters and My Favorite Martian until I tried watching some again years later. On the other hand, the episodes of The Defenders that are now out on DVD are now even better than they were when they were first telecast.

I've never seen an episode of The Queen and I anywhere since it went off the air. Some scholars of such history tell me they haven't either and wonder if any still exist. But mentioning that show has reminded me of a story about Larry Storch and Billy DeWolfe that you might like. I'll try and tell it here tomorrow.

• It's November 11, I'm in a KMart and they're playing "Little Saint Nick." #WayTooEarly

Back just to say two things. One is to remind you that the London production of Gypsy starring Imelda Staunton airs tonight on PBS as part of their Great Performances series — and it truly is a great performance. It reruns, at least on my TV here in Los Angeles on 11/17 and 11/18 and probably other times after that. In case you care, Turner Classic Movies is running the 1962 movie version on either 11/18 or 11/19 depending on which time zone you're in. I don't care for the movie but as this week has reminded us all, there are people in this world who don't see the world the same way we do.

Also: I wrote here that I didn't see the point of protesting in the street over the election of You-Know-Who. Over at his blog, Bob Elisberg explains what he thinks the point is and how valid it all may be. I kinda/sorta agree with some of it but I'm thinking there's gotta be a better way to send that message without the kind of protests that, at least in California, mainly punish other people who voted for Hillary.

Gee, I wonder what Bill Maher's going to talk about tonight.

In the immortal words of Mr. Billy DeWolfe: "Busy, busy, busy!"

And by the way: This is one of the few blogs on the web where I'd assume most of the readership knows who Billy DeWolfe was.

Here's another number from Big Daddy, the band that takes songs written after '59 and arranges them like songs written before '59. This time out, "Once in a Lifetime" — a song recorded by Talking Heads in 1980 — gets rearranged into "The Banana Boat Song," a tune first recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956.

The lead singer is Tom Lee. One day back when we were doing the original Garfield and Friends cartoon show for CBS Saturday morn, I wrote a song for an episode about a cat that sang rock n' roll like Little Richard. I was already a fan of Big Daddy then and I'd been impressed with Tom's Little Richard impression so I hired Tom. He was so good, I later wrote another musical episode to use him in. Very talented man…

Julia Azari over at Nate Silver's site says pretty much the same thing I said about how we ain't getting rid of the Electoral College, only she said it a lot better and with more information.

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And I'd like to say a few words on behalf of Nate Silver, who's getting trashed a lot as a pollster who got the election "wrong." First thing: Nate Silver is not a pollster. He polls no one. He takes the polls that others compile, analyzes their accuracy and methodology and weights them accordingly to create an intelligent determination of what the polls say. And usually, all this works.

Silver said for a long time that Hillary had an 80+% chance of winning and there's no reason to believe he or the polls were wrong at that point. As we got closer to Election Day, he raised Trump's chances and lowered hers, prompting many to suggest he was letting some personal opinion override what the computer models indicated. I don't think he did. I think his models picked up on a late-breaking shift.

At the dawn of Election Day, I believe his projection stood at a 71% chance of Hillary winning, which was lower than most other poll analysts working with mostly the same data. That's not a prediction she'd get 71% of the vote and the 30-or-so% chance Trump had does not translate to Hillary winning. People do beat the odds all the time.

Years ago, I auditioned (mainly for fun) to be a TV weatherman. An experienced TV weatherman told me he had an 80% rule, If he said that if he said there was a 70% chance of rain and it didn't rain, his viewers would understand. A 30% chance of no rain is not the same thing as saying it's not going to rain. But if he said there was an 80% chance of rain and then it didn't rain, people would call him and yell, "You said it was going to rain!"

Oddly enough, it didn't work the opposite way. If he said there was a 20% chance of rain and then it rained, no one complained he'd said it would not rain. And Nate Silver did not say Trump could not win.

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Lastly, getting back to the Electoral College for a moment, Mark Joseph Stern agrees it will not be abolished but explains about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is kind of a workaround for this. I can't tell you why but I don't like the idea.