A music video with Josh Groban, Lindsey Stirling and the Muppets…

Anne Pluta says that the trouble with Donald Trump voters is not that they are uninformed but that they are misinformed. Biggggg difference. Uninformed people just plain don't know. Misinformed voters think they do but they're wrong — and they're usually determined to never admit it. Relevant quote…

In 2000, James Kuklinski and other political scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign established an important distinction: American citizens with incorrect information can be divided into two groups, the misinformed and the uninformed. The difference between the two is stark. Uninformed citizens don't have any information at all, while those who are misinformed have information that conflicts with the best evidence and expert opinion. As Kuklinski and his colleagues established, in the U.S., the most misinformed citizens tend to be the most confident in their views and are also the strongest partisans. These folks fill the gaps in their knowledge base by using their existing belief systems. Once these inferences are stored into memory, they become "indistinguishable from hard data," Kuklinski and his colleagues found.

Furthermore, in 2010, political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler found that when misinformed citizens are told that their facts are wrong, they often cling to their opinions even more strongly with what is known as defensive processing, or the "backfire effect."

This is why I've given up having political discussions with certain friends and probably why some of them would say they've given up having them with me. Never mind that we can't agree on what should happen in this country. We can't agree what has happened. I say unemployment is down since Obama took office. One guy I know is certain it's way, way up and the stats I'm citing are just government lies. Those arguments never go anywhere. It's easier just not to have them.

Michael Grunwald thinks all the talk about America going to hell in one of them handbaskets is ridiculous; that while some things could be better, they're already pretty good and heading in the right direction. The economy is up, crime is down, etc. I generally agree.

The folks who opposed Obamacare from Day One are still running around insisting it's a disaster that's gotta go. Jonathan Chait says they're in denial; that it's working fine and what is a disaster are their efforts to destroy it. And after all these years of shouting "Repeal and replace," they still don't have an actual replacement plan…at least not one they'd like better.

We mentioned here at the end of November that Pat Harrington, Jr. — a fine comedian and human being — was in bad shape due to Alzheimer's. His wonderful life and career came to an end last night at 11:15 PM. He was 86.

He was Pat Harrington Junior because his father was a vaudeville star. Junior worked constantly as a comedian, comic actor, game show host and panelist, voice actor and occasionally even a dramatic performer. He first came to prominence as a member of Steve Allen's comic troupe along with Don Knotts, Louis Nye and others, and for his appearances on Jack Paar's show. Often, he assumed the character of Guido Panzini, an Italian golf pro. He was so convincing in the role that at one point, the immigration department checked, found no record of Panzini's entrance into this country and went looking for him.

Later generations knew Pat (Jr.) as Dwayne Schneider, the building superintendent on the situation comedy, One Day at a Time. It won him an Emmy, dozens of other roles and countless fans. Among his many voiceover jobs, he played the Inspector — the Clouseau-like character in the DePatie-Freleng cartoons — and supplied the Groucho-like voice of the stork in the Vlasic Pickle commercials.

Pat was widely (and probably unanimously) loved by other comedians and just about everyone he ever worked with. He was a genuinely nice, funny man with an endless supply of jokes, most delivered with expert timing and a wide range of flawless accents. He was also a very good audience for other funny people. Not all comics are.

He was a founding member of Yarmy's Army, a club for comedians and other funny people that somehow admitted me. It was a joy to see Pat at the meetings. He was one of those people who made you feel happy just because he was in the room. At the next meeting, I'm sure we will all tell stories about him but it won't begin to make up for his absence.

Fred Kaplan on that alleged Hydrogen Bomb test in North Korea. Fred says the problem isn't the bomb. It's the guy who claims he has one.

Alan Alda remembers the late Wayne Rogers.

Specsavers is a British retail chain that sells glasses, contact lenses and such. Their new commercial features John Cleese as Basil Fawlty…though I'm not sure how we're supposed to know it's Basil Fawlty, as opposed to just John Cleese being a big jerk…

[UPDATE, EIGHT MINUTES LATER: Six people so far have written to me to point out that they play the Fawlty Towers theme and that Fawlty did the branch-thrashing bit in the series. Guess my mind was elsewhere and that it's been too long since I saw the show.]

The other day, North Korea claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb. There is some question as to whether this is true and we should hope it isn't. As Daniel Larison notes, no one in our country seems to have any idea what, if anything, we should do about this.

Why do major motion pictures cost so much to make? Well, Gavin Polone thinks it's because crooked studio accounting has made profit-participants figure, "They're never going to pay me my share so why should I try to save them money?" An excellent point.

Jonathan Chait says that people are wrong if they think Marco Rubio is a moderate. He's just trying not to be as hysterical as Trump or Cruz while pushing pretty much the same far-right agenda.

Our pal Frank Ferrante is performing his show, An Evening with Groucho, this weekend at the Pasadena Playhouse. Some seats may still be available and if they are, you can order them here.

I've praised and recommended this show so many times that further comment may be unnecessary. Basically, it's just what the title says except that at the matinees, it should be called An Afternoon with Groucho. And if we really enforced truth-in-labelling laws, maybe An Evening (or Afternoon) with a Guy Who Does an Uncanny Impression of Julius "Groucho" Marx and Creates a Fantasy Where He's Still Alive and Performing and is Very Funny. Something like that.

Here's a piece in today's L.A. Times that will tell you more about Frank and how good he is. Just in case you don't believe me.

The current issue of Art in America magazine contains an article on Jack Kirby entitled, "Genius in a Box." The piece was written by Alexi Worth and an intro paragraph says…

A legend among comics fans, Jack Kirby was the gifted, overworked illustrator who made Marvel Comics possible. Two recent exhibitions reveal his artwork as an inventive "side-channel" within pictorial modernism.

I agree with all that and appreciate this appreciation of Kirby but I have a few small quibbles, one being Worth's doubt that Jack anticipated his own immortality as an artist. He's wrong. Jack, in a surprisingly non-egotistical way, talked often of how his work would outlive him…as would the work of other great comic creators. He absolutely expected it to be reprinted in editions with deluxe printing and to be exhibited in galleries.

Also, there is the assertion that Jack's new books for DC in the early seventies "flopped." They were canceled prematurely by a company that was crumbling from all corners at the time and had to be rebuilt, almost from the ground up, a few years later. New management looked at the sales figures for the books Worth says "flopped" and promptly revived and reprinted them…and they continue to reprint them over and over and to reuse the characters and concepts introduced in them. I would save the word "flop" for something that went away and was never seen again.

And I guess I oughta take issue with what Worth writes about a Hulk poster that Kirby drew and which was then redrawn somewhat by Herb Trimpe…

As his friend and biographer Mark Evanier tells it, "someone at Marvel" evidently decided that Kirby's Hulk poster was too eccentric. Another artist, Herb Trimpe, was assigned to lightly deKirbify the poster, giving the Hulk ordinary knuckles and fingernails, normal feet and recognizable pectorals.

That's not what his friend and biographer Mark Evanier said. What I said in my first book on Jack was…

…someone at Marvel decided that the proposed line [of posters] had too much Kirby in it and ordered that four of Jack's posters be replaced by the work of other artists…[they] liked the design of Jack's Hulk poster. They just felt it should be illustrated by Herb Trimpe, who was then the artist on the Hulk comic. Trimpe was told to trace Kirby's drawing, which he did, effectively just re-inking it and altering the head as per his version of the character.

I never said it was deemed too eccentric, nor was Trimpe told to change the knuckles, fingernails, etc. The alterations were almost all of the character's head and any other changes were just Trimpe doing things the way Trimpe did. Worth also deduces that the exaggerated pose related somehow to the one 3-D comic Jack had drawn more than a decade earlier — which of course it didn't. Jack's super-hero work was always filled with that kind of extreme pose, dating back to before he first drew Captain America.

I cringed at Worth's description of Kirby as a "hack" — but then I always cringe at that word, especially when applied to someone of earnest intent who was giving his employer way more than he had to in order to get the paycheck in question. It's a word that in 50-some-odd years of reading comic book reviews and essays, I have seen applied in a myriad of ways ranging from a compliment for sheer productivity to a synonym for "knowing producer of crap." I'm sure Worth wasn't using the latter definition but to Jack, during a period of his career when detractors were calling him "Jack the Hack," it was the supreme insult, condemning not only the work but the integrity of its maker.

Also: The article identifies Fantastic Four #76 as coming out in 1975. Perhaps a reprint of the story in it did but the original publication was in 1968. And I think that's about all that bothered me: Not all that much and not at all the central thesis.

I hope I'm not being too negative about a piece that I am quite glad was published where it was published. Jack's work deserves recognition from all quarters and I'm glad Worth talked about it as sequential art. Too often, people approach Jack as an illustrator and liken his individual pages and panels to works of art meant to be complete in themselves. Jack was an illustrator and yet again, he wasn't. To get the "big picture" (to use a term he used often), you have to view him as a storyteller if not a writer.

That was the only way Jack viewed his work: Not whether he'd done a good drawing but whether he'd done the right drawing. To him, if it conveyed what he wanted the panel to convey, it was a good drawing. When I spoke at the wonderful, recent exhibit of Jack's work out at Cal State Northridge, I tried to make the point that to fully appreciate and comprehend his work, you have to consider the art in the context of its intention.

Which doesn't mean you can't hang Jack in galleries and discuss him in the same breath as guys who unquestionably belong there. It just means that in addition to looking at panels or pages, you ought to read the comic. I hope pieces like Worth's will prompt more people to do both those things.

From 1979: Excerpts from an interview that Merv Griffin did with Gene Wilder…

Jeffrey Toobin says the judge in the Cosby case in Pennsylvania will probably come down to one central decision by the judge. And he explains what that decision is.