David Corn thinks Barack Obama is playing his second-term cards quite shrewdly and getting amazing results for a "lame duck president." I dunno how calculated the scenario with Syria was from our end but if we can get out of bombing a lot of innocent civilians, that's great. Even if it does disappoint John McCain and the neo-con crowd.

People keep asking me how long I think the Comic-Con International will remain in San Diego. I have no inside info on any negotiations between the convention and the city but I have a prediction: A long, long time. San Diego officials would be six levels below Brain Dead to let it get away…and the convention operators have that space so well mastered and figured-out that they shouldn't want to go elsewhere.

I've run through the alternative cities before here but briefly, assuming they don't want to move to another part of the country, you have Vegas, Anaheim and L.A. In none of these venues would we be the Main Event in town the way we are in San Diego. There, the con just isn't just inside the convention center. It's in every hotel, restaurant and available space for miles around. In any of those other towns, the local industry (gambling, Disneyland and show business, respectively) would upstage the con.

The summer heat in Las Vegas is reason enough not to go there. The tourist traffic in Anaheim during the summer is oppressive enough without Comic-Con there. And the Los Angeles Convention Center is just a terrible, terrible place for any convention. (You think traffic is bad around Comic-Con? Try going to anything at the L.A. Convention Center the same night there's a sports event at the Staples Center and a concert at the Nokia Theater.) San Diego is Shangri-La compared to any of them, especially in and around July.

And the San Diego Convention Center, as you'll see in the video below, is expanding. This is a promotional tool for them and it may be promising some add-ons that won't happen or won't happen for a long time. In any event, this is the direction that place is moving. And the stats they give for how valuable the convention center is to the city? They're probably true and Comic-Con had a lot to do with that whole center being built, along with the hotels and tourist-friendly areas around it. I remember what that part of San Diego was like before the city planners realized how a new convention center could revitalize that ghetto of sailors' bars and tattoo parlors. (This was back when tattoo parlors were low-class places.) It was Comic-Con that convinced them.

Watch the video. And thank Douglass Abramson for letting me know about this…

If you want to know what's going on with all this Ted Cruz/Shutdown stuff, the best source of news I've found is Dave Weigel. Read this and read this, then keep on reading Dave Weigel at Slate. That is, if you can figure out Slate's new design.

Ken Levine's annual reviews of the Emmy Awards are always a lot more entertaining than the Emmy Awards. Okay, Ken deserves more praise than that but you know what I mean. Just go read him.

If you liked the Jeff Hoover clip I linked to last night, here's another one. It co-stars Tim Kazurinsky, who at one point was the only funny person on Saturday Night Live…or at least, it seemed that way. The announcer guy is comedian Mike Toomey and Jeff plays Goofus.

William Saletan points out a neat example of the hypocrisy of Senator Ted Cruz. When 53% of Congress voted to destroy Obamacare, it was an act of courage. When 54% of the Senate will vote to not destroy it, that will be an abuse of power. Yeah, yeah. I don't know about you but I really have the feeling that this whole battle is about nothing except Ted Cruz and a few of his colleagues trying to prove to one sector of their party that they're tough guys who will never admit defeat, even after they've lost.

I'm reminding of an eyebrow-raising conversation I had with someone at a party a year or three ago. This otherwise-wise woman started babbling on about how Obama's birth certificate was an inarguable, proven-beyond-all-doubt forgery and as all such folks do, she had no answer when asked about the contemporaneous birth announcements in Hawaii newspapers. To the surprise of me, she announced that her heroine was Orly Taitz, the fanatical dentist lady who keeps filing lawsuit after lawsuit to force Obama out of office.

I asked, "You admire someone who loses 100% of the time and makes your side look insane?" The lady replied, "Her heart's in the right place and she has guts."

Those are usually commendable qualities but, I dunno…I kinda like my champions to show some ability to win and there's much to be said for not fighting unwinnable battles. But in the eyes of this woman — and too many others, I'm afraid — what matters is that leaders lead…even if they lead you off a cliff.

I'm sure 97% of the people who'd come to this blog completely understand String Theory. But the 3% of you who don't know a fermion from a boson might still enjoy this video from McGill University graduate Tim Blais and his Einstein puppet. At this very moment, Stephen Hawking is probably rocking out to it…

I've never met Jeff Hoover but I occasionally delight in his performances as part of the WGN Morning News in Chicago. He's the guy who did the great Jerry Lewis impression and the great Christopher Walken impression and he's done other very funny spots for them.

A few days ago, as I'm sure you all know, we had National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Jeff appeared on the morning show to talk like a pirate and learned it ain't so easy when your TelePrompter isn't working…

[EDIT, later: This video insists on autoplaying and we don't like that here. So here's a link to go watch it, if you want to, on the station's website.]

I'm a big fan of Neil Patrick Harris as an award show host. I guess he had to disappoint me, sooner or later. I thought tonight's Emmy Show was tedious, self-important and lacking in substance. Okay, so that's most award shows and some of that at the Emmys simply comes from the fact that because people like to get awards, the Academy keeps adding categories. They now have to present thousands of those statuettes a year, broken up over a few hundred different telecasts or ceremonies. Or at least, that's the way it feels.

A certain percentage of every award show is simply going to be boring and overflowing in the egos of successful people. That's a given. But Mr. Harris has usually come up with a few great moments, usually in song, that made the tune-in worth it. This time, no. The opening with the former hosts was especially grim.

What did I like? Well, Neil mentioned a few times that a lot of the winners were unexpected. The most interesting one of those to me was that The Colbert Report got the awards that always seem to go to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

And I feel a bit uneasy thinking like this but I'm really glad that Phil Spector movie didn't win anything. I'm really surprised it was even nominated, what with Al Pacino playing a part he could have Skyped in on his lunch hour, and the whole "indict-the-victim" theme. Next, I suppose, David Mamet will remake The Boston Strangler and try to open up the possibility that every woman he supposedly killed was a worthless slut who offed herself.

But getting back to what was wrong with the telecast: I was speed-TiVoing through some of the non-essential moments but often when I watched, what I saw made me imagine a game show where really rich people win large sums of cash. Would you watch such a program? Obviously, a lot of Americans wouldn't…which is why a lot of Americans don't watch the Oscars or the Emmys. I need to remember to try that.

Okay, so the Emmy Awards are tonight and the ceremony will include the traditional "In Memoriam" reel of prominent TV folks who've passed since the airing of the last "In Memoriam" reel. There will also be special, separate tributes to five folks: James Gandolfini, Jonathan Winters, Jean Stapleton, Gary David Goldberg and Cory Monteith. They selected those five over others who might have merited such recognition including Larry Hagman and Jack Klugman. Some, like Jack Klugman's son, are irate that Mr. Monteith — a younger performer with no Emmy nominations who died of a drug overdose — is getting that standalone moment in lieu of, say, Jack Klugman's son's father.

There is, of course, no way these selections are ever going to be free of controversy and the hurt feelings of those whose loved and departed ones didn't make the cut. There are probably at least a hundred folks around who would say to Adam Klugman, "Yeah, maybe your father deserved more mention…but at least he's getting a mention. My father, who worked his whole life in the TV industry and then died this past year isn't being mentioned at all!" Every time an award show does one of these, someone has a job I don't envy: They have to decide that these people get named in the montage and those people don't. There are always many who could be included but there just isn't time so there are always friends and relatives who are hurt by some exclusion.

Did Jack Klugman contribute more to television than Cory Monteith? Sure. But I'm not sure anyone is saying otherwise.

But remember how these montages started. They weren't about who'd contributed the most. They were about who were the best-known. It's only fairly recently that they've included people like costume designers and studio execs and composers and cinematographers at all. The Emmy reels still ignore a lot of past winners of multiple Emmy awards because they aren't deemed by someone as well-enough known. A fellow like Jack Klugman, who starred in The Odd Couple and Quincy to name but two shows, was always a lock for inclusion. The writers, producers, directors, art directors, composers, sound technicians, etc., who also made those two programs successful never, in life or death, receive quite the same kind of recognition.  Where would Jack Klugman have been without them?  To say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of artisans who crafted and applied his toupées?

I suspect that if the producers of this year's Emmys had been ordered to also do a special tribute to Klugman — and while they're at it, Larry Hagman — it would not have been Cory Monteith who got bumped. It would have been Gary David Goldberg, the producer-writer of Family Ties, Spin City and Brooklyn Bridge.

A lot of folks are irate about the Klugman "snub." He's not being snubbed. He's in the montage. He's just not being mentioned as prominently as someone else. But for most of his career, Jack Klugman was mentioned more prominently — and probably paid better — than 98% of the people who worked on his shows. Even if they left him out of the Emmy Awards completely, he'd still continue to be better known than every one of them except, arguably, Tony Randall.

Thanks to the invention of the rerun, the man is in zero danger of being forgotten, and viewers still unborn will get to see how good he was. I'm not saying it's right to single out Cory Monteith to the exclusion of others. But when you're a star of the magnitude and longevity of Jack Klugman, you spent most of your career being singled out to the exclusion of others. Tonight, a lot of people who were as good at their jobs as Klugman was at his won't get mentioned at all.

Hey, you know those anti-Obamacare commercials that are running? The ones that show a creepy version of Uncle Sam administering government-run health care by preparing to rape a young women who has that kind of coverage? Yeah, those. Jonathan Bernstein has the same theory I have, which is that they're basically being made for the same reason Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom produced Springtime for Hitler.

Hey, how about a good, rousing song about sexually-transmitted disease? Here's Tom Lehrer…

So why are Republicans pursuing this "defund Obamacare, which you're not going to do, or we'll shut down the government and destroy the economy" threat? I'm not afraid they're going to succeed. I am eager to understand just where they think this game of Stratego is heading and are we giving them too much credit by presuming they know?

Jonathan Bernstein comes up with what seems like the simplest answer to it all, which is that they don't know…or care. It's all just a phallus-measuring competition. Here are two paragraphs that sum it up…

Remember, Republicans have mostly just given up on developing real, conservative public policy. We saw that in the 2012 campaign, in which Mitt Romney couldn't be bothered to come up with a tax plan that came close to adding up. We've seen it in the failure to come up with a "replace" bill on healthcare reform as part of their promised "repeal and replace" plan. Unlike in Ronald Reagan's era, or even Newt Gingrich's era (or perhaps more to the point, unlike in Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton's presidency), there's no conservative policy agenda beyond just rejecting everything Democrats want.

Simply put: When you've reduced your entire movement to saying "no" to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, is it any surprise that whoever shouts "NO" the loudest will wind up defining what counts as "conservative"?

Between 1969 and 1993, a man named Alan Cranston was a senator from California, and just after he was elected, he came and spoke at my high school. We had an "in" to get him since his son Kim was in my class. Overall, I thought Cranston was a good man but the speech he gave that day, though officially about issues like The War and The Economy and The Infrastructure was really all about The Senator. It was about him. It was like he was paying his speechwriter by the ovation. I thought he said little of substance; just lines that would get us to cheer him.

I think we often underestimate how much of what our leaders say and do is primarily about trying to remain our leaders; trying to amp up personal support for them and, of course, donations and volunteerism. I do not hear them often discussing The Issues. It's more like them discussing how vital it is for them to win re-election so they can continue to fight for what's right on The Issues. I wonder if before he agreed to address his son's high school, Senator Cranston remembered, "Those kids are going to be voters by the time I run for another term." And with the lowering of the voting age to 18 then seeming likely, we were probably going to be voters well before that.

What's driving the Republican "defund Obamacare" drive right now may simply be politicians who think their stance will give them dominance in their party…and they can worry later about what the extreme stance is doing to that party's chances for winning elections. Clearly, after all those predictions of a Romney landslide, they habitually underestimate how the average voter outside "the bubble" will respond. Heck, some of them even think or thought they could sell their constituents on the possibility of Obama signing, as opposing to vetoing, a bill that is never going to reach him anyway to destroy Obamacare.

NBC is developing a mini-series based on the life of Johnny Carson. There's a limit to how much I believe in prejudging a project but I'm skeptical, first of all, that they can make Johnny's life interesting enough to be a mini-series; not unless they delve into scandal, marital dirt and affairs, Johnny's ruthless side, etc. Otherwise, it's not a story of struggles so much as of ongoing success. Yeah, Johnny had some career setbacks before The Tonight Show — actually, before Who Do You Trust? — but not many. Will people want to watch a mini-series about a guy who managed his career really, really well and had pretty much nothing but varying degrees of success for most of his life? Will the production treat as great drama those moments when he was fighting with NBC execs for another million a year in salary or worrying because his ratings were dipping slightly?

But the big problem for me is: Who the heck do you get to play Carson? The man is so well known and bio-pics rarely work if the viewers can close their eyes and see the real guy, then open them and see that how much the fellow on the screen doesn't look like him, sound like him, act like him, etc. Since the most interesting part of Carson's life would be his early days when he did struggle (a little), they'll probably want to hire a young actor. Then they could age him as the story progressed, which is easier than hiring an older actor and trying to "young" him up. And are they also going to hire acts to play Doc and Ed and Don Rickles and Charles Nelson Reilly and folks like that? Sounds to me like a casting nightmare…

I'm eager to read the Bill Zehme book on which it's to be based but a dramatization…? I dunno about this…

Fred Kaplan on the hard-to-believe possibility of some sane diplomatic gains with Iran. Hard to believe…but if Fred's right, we have nothing to lose by trying.

From 1967, we have a few minutes of Merv Griffin interviewing Neil Simon. Simon then had four plays running on Broadway — a stunning achievement — though his latest, Star-Spangled Girl, was not one of his best. It was a play he later regretted writing…though on the strength of his name and previous hits, it sold enough advance tickets to run 261 performances. That's not a flop unless you measure it against his two previous plays — Barefoot in the Park (1530 performances) and The Odd Couple (964). (By the way: Merv makes it sound like Odd Couple came along after Sweet Charity. Other way around.)