David Letterman, who's looking a lot like Santa Claus in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special these days, made a public appearance last Thursday. It was at a salute to the U.S.O. hosted by another bearded refugee from late night TV, Jon Stewart. The President and Mrs. Obama, as well as the Vice-President and Mrs. Biden were present and there was a comedy show with Judd Apatow, Jeff Ross, Hasan Minhaj and Kristen Schaal. But the big moment was when Dave came on. Here's some footage from the event…
Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard and he's listed some of the myths relating to the economy that one hears a lot, especially in election years.
The sad thing (of course) is that some of these will never ever be disbelieved by those who want to believe them — like the one about how cutting taxes, especially for the rich, is a guaranteed way to stimulate the economy. No matter how many times it's tried and doesn't work, some people will insist it just has to be tried again — and again and again and again. Remember the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
You know one of the reasons Donald Trump won the Republican nomination? Because the folks in his own party who oppose him are really lame at that. They dithered and delayed, long past the time there were viable alternatives to sell to potential Trump voters. By the time they decided they had to do something, the only other options they could offer were Kasich and Cruz. Kasich hadn't impressed many people as actually even being in the race. And Cruz is the guy that even other Republicans compare to Satan.
So now, here's the new plan: Some Republican leaders want to recruit a non-hysterical, traditional conservative candidate to run a third-party candidacy and to articulate the sane right-wing view, as opposed to whatever it is that Trump's selling. They recognize that this third-party candidate cannot possibly garner 270 electoral votes but that's not the point. The idea is that he or she (almost certainly a he) would split the votes so no one — Hillary, Donald or this contender — would make it to 270.
This would then throw the election into the House of Representatives which is more or less under the control of the Republican establishment. They then could award the country, not to the candidate who got the most votes from the American people or even the most electoral votes, but to a person chosen by the G.O.P. House. It could be the third-party conservative or even someone whose name didn't appear on any ballot. Correction.
Yes, it's come to that: "Let's not let the people choose the President. They pick people we don't like."
As Jonathan Chait points out, this idea cannot possibly work. The third-party conservative might cost Clinton a few raw votes but would instead take most of them from Trump. Hillary, who already starts with a tremendous electoral vote advantage, might well win states that Trump would otherwise win.
It's hard to believe they'll try this. Yeah, this is the year when a lot of stuff is happening that it's hard to believe but this one is really hard to believe.
I have been friends with my fellow writer Tony Isabella for around 48 years, which is amazing when you realize we're both in our late teens — emotionally, at least. He wrote to ask…
Was there one special moment or one special comic book that made you realize that you wanted to write comic books? For me, it was Fantastic Four Annual #1. I kind of sort of knew I wanted to be a writer. I had been writing since I was four years old, but it was that comic book that flipped a switch in my head.
No, no one in particular. As I've explained here about as often as comics and movies retell the origin of Batman, I decided when I was around five or so that I was going to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I was going to be a writer of. At heart, I guess I wanted to do everything — books, TV, movies, plays, magazines, comics, cartoons, fortunes for fortune cookies, whatever — but I knew that couldn't happen. I kinda figured I'd wait and see which if any of those became feasible and then I'd be satisfied with any one of them. Little did I suspect I would eventually get to do most of 'em.
I loved comic books and had more than all the other kids I knew put together but I don't recall any particular longing to write them. Back in the sixties, the few times I came across articles or interviews that detailed how the business operated, I read that you had to live in New York and be able to go to the publishers' offices. That wasn't exactly true but I took it as true.
Living in Los Angeles, it just seemed more natural to stick with the kind of writing that was done in my city. It felt like I was living on a different planet than the one on which comic books were written, whereas TV was not all that far away. My family was not in show business but the lady who lived next door to us was a regular on The Andy Griffith Show and the man who lived across the street from us was the Technical Advisor on Dr. Kildare and we had brushes with others.
A life-changing force (in a way) was The Dick Van Dyke Show, which I watched with zeal. It made writing for television look like a great job and then when I got to go see an episode of it filmed, that really skewed my future plans in that direction. Hey, if you want to see the one I saw that night and don't mind sitting through some commercials, here it is. That thirteen-year-old kid you might hear laughing in the background? That's me.
Like you, Tony, I began writing letters to the letter columns in comic books. I did it, as I imagine you did, as a way of bonding with comics and feeling closer to them. I had a lot printed and I still remember a certain chill/numbness, such as I'd never felt before and have never felt since, when I purchased a copy of Aquaman #28 and found my letter printed. It was a dumb letter but it was mine and there was my name…and I recall thinking that it was an important moment in my life though why, I had no idea.
I had more printed and more…and even suffered the professional writer's dilemma of being drastically rewritten a few times. That annoyed me. I mean, you can rewrite me if you pay me but not if I'm writing pro bono and especially not if you change what I wrote so I seem to hold some viewpoint that isn't mine. I was giving up writing letters to comics when to my surprise, three East Coast comic book editors — Mort Weisinger and Jack Miller at DC, Dick Giordano at Charlton — individually wrote to invite me to submit scripts for their comics.
I tried it, doubtful it would lead to anything…and indeed, it did not. But it was a valuable learning exercise and soon after, I met Jack Kirby and then got recommended to write for Disney Studios and Gold Key Comics and one odd day, I realized I was writing 3-4 comic books a month without ever having imagined I could have a career in comics.
Because of this, I often tell beginning writers not to lock themselves into one conceivable career. If you have any talent at all, you can write many different things and while you can't pursue them all at once, you can be open to them. If you can envision ten different careers for yourself that would work for you, you have a much better chance of achieving success than if you have but one.
Tony Isabella photo by Bruce Guthrie
But you know that, Tony. Thanks for the question and I'll return the favor by suggesting everyone pick up a copy of Black Lightning, Volume 1, a fine collection of the ground-breaking comic you wrote for DC back in 1977. It's just been released and it can be purchased many places like this and it should be.
Do you have a question you'd like me to answer on this blog? If so, read this.
As Josh Voorhees points out, this election is all about stopping the person you don't want to see in the White House. The primary motivator for Trump voters is to stop Hillary. The primary motivator for Hillary voters is to stop Trump. This can't be healthy.
That stand-off on the 91 Freeway ended shortly before 9:40 PM, which means an awful lot of folks sat in their cars, stuck there for two hours. The unidentified suspect was taken into custody. He was not, as seemed likely for a while, dead. He sat there for a long time, prolonging the inevitable.
S.W.A.T. units arrived around 9 PM and someone began trying to negotiate with the driver. I'm not sure what he had to offer except giving up without further delay or trouble, or what the cops had to offer except not shooting him. Anyway, somehow they couldn't come to an arrangement so after about the half hour on the scene, the S.W.A.T. guys busted the back window of the car, lobbed in a tear gas canister and the suspect was forced out and chomped on by a K-9 Corps pooch. I still think the hero of the evening was Stu Mundel.
As I was typing the above, I got a notice on my iPhone that Stu was broadcasting again on Periscope. He was showing us that after a long evening, he and the chopper were finally heading home. A job well done.
I'm watching a fascinating overlap of social and traditional media here — the live coverage of a car chase out on the 91 Freeway. A murder suspect in a black Mercedes led police on an hour-long chase and it's been reported — on my iPhone, then on my desktop computer and now on an early edition of KCAL-TV Channel 9 News — by my favorite newsguy, Stu Mundel. He's in a helicopter and he and his pilot were the first on the scene.
At first, Stu was covering it on Periscope and Twitter. That's where I first got notice of the pursuit. Then I switched over and watched it on the KCAL-TV 9 website, which is where it was streaming. The chase started in the city of Compton where police tried to pull the driver over. He ran and soon was on the freeway, sometimes driving about 20 MPH but occasionally speeding up. At points when he ran into slow-moving traffic, he began swerving and squeezing through cars, scraping and bumping several autos.
At one point during the slower portions of the chase, Stu announced on the web that he and his pilot had to stop covering the pursuit, go to Fullerton Airport to refuel, then they flew back and resumed coverage. Around 7:20, he excitedly announced that the coverage would start on broadcast television at 7:30. Channel 9 had to wait until a rerun of Two Broke Girls concluded.
When it did, Mundel was no longer a one-man show as he was joined by the in-studio KHJ anchors. They went with it just in time to watch the Mercedes hit a couple of spike strips on a long stretch of freeway with no other cars. The tires went out, the car began swerving and hitting the rails until it finally came to a halt. As I'm typing this, there's a standstill out there: No sign of activity in the Mercedes, a bank of police cars watching it a few yards back. The suspect was reported as "possibly armed" so they don't want to approach and Stu says they're waiting for a S.W.A.T. team to arrive, though everyone suspects the driver inside took his own life fifteen or twenty minutes ago.
None of that interests me so much as the fact that "social media" had the story first…and there were Stu Mundel and his pilot broadcasting to cellphones and computer screens for an hour or so. There are probably motorists stranded in the massive traffic backup on the 91 who have been watching this on their phones and some of them have also contributed. Channel 9 is showing photos which were taken by some of those drivers. They sent them in or posted them to social media and now they're part of the TV reporting.
This is a new kind of news coverage. I was not only watching it as it happened, I was watching before the TV channel started covering it. Stu — the man I refer to as the Vin Scully of Police Chases — was doing a great show, talking to Periscope followers, answering questions from Twitter, discussing not only what was happening below him but also explaining the problems and challenges of covering it all from the air. In a time when news couldn't be more distrusted and (often) somewhat phony, here's raw, unedited reporting getting to us immediately in real time. Amazing.
In the current presidential election, this is the only thing that really matters — the breakdown of the Electoral College and who's gonna hit 270. That's a link to the Cook Political Report, which is a non-partisan entity. That of course means it's non-partisan to most folks when it tells them what they want to hear and it's deeply, undeniably biased when it doesn't.
I'm just dumb enough to believe that it's honest even when it doesn't tell me what I want to hear. Of course, one must remember that it's 186 days until the election, we don't yet know who the running mates may be, what anyone will say in their next five hundred speeches or at the conventions, what new issues or scandals will erupt, etc. Right now, it looks very good for Democrats, not so good for the Republicans. If this was a normal election, I would say it's all over but we don't have normal elections in this country anymore.
I said here last January I wouldn't believe Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee until Nate Silver said it was possible. Well, Silver has been saying for some time it was possible and here he explains why his earlier predictions that it wouldn't happen were wrong.
Of the three guys recently in the race, I think Trump will be the easiest to defeat and I kinda feel that if he did get into the White House, he would be less of a disaster than Cruz or Rubio. That's more of a hunch than a reasoned opinion. I also still think that any Democrat would have a tremendous advantage in this election for reasons that Chris Cillizza explains.
From now until November, folks will be cheering and fretting at all sorts of indicators that Trump is more or less likely to win. I've decided to only pay real attention to the electoral vote counts. Show me how Donald has a credible path to 270 and I'll believe it's possible. Which of the 24 states that have voted Democratic in four, five or all six of the last six elections will go red this time? I'm not saying it can't be done…just that saying things such as "Trump's getting better turnouts at his rallies than Hillary" or that "Hillary's popularity nationally is down three points" are meaningless unless accompanied by something like "Polls show neck-and-neck races in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania."
I guess I'm disappointed in how things have gone because a brokered Republican Convention looked like it would be a lot of fun to watch in a kind of Thunderdome way. On the other hand, it's going to be fun watching so many Republicans who are appalled by Trump and Democrats who didn't want Hillary try to convince everyone including themselves that they got the nominees of their dreams.
And then there's a certain unpredictability to this whole election that is kind of exciting. Startling, unprecedented plot twists do not occur one at a time. Something else that once was unthinkable is going to become highly thinkable. And if you think you know what it might be, that probably proves you're wrong.
Never mind the election. Let's get down to the important topics…like how do they make Cheez Doodles? And this video will also tell you how they make those packaged "Onion Ring" snacks, though they'll only tell you that they combine "dry ingredients and water." They won't tell you what those dry ingredients are. Suspicious? I am.
