I'm hesitant to say this is the last obit I'll post here in 2016 because we still have more than four hours to go but I want to say something about William Christopher, who made it to the age of 84 before leaving us. You, of course, know him as Father Mulcahy on the TV series, M*A*S*H…and I want to make a point about you knowing him as Father Mulcahy on the TV series, M*A*S*H.
Most people who decide to become actors never become famous and that includes a lot who work constantly. Mr. Christopher might have been one of those actors. He worked a lot — I remember him playing a doctor in The Fortune Cookie with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon — but he got on M*A*S*H so you know who he was.
His co-star Jamie Farr was another one of those actors. He worked all the time in movies and television for the same reason Christopher did. He was good and he was reliable and those who did the casting knew they could count on him. (In the Doris Day movie, With Six You Get Eggroll, there's a brief scene with two stoned-out hippies. The stoned-out hippies were played by Jamie Farr and William Christopher, years before M*A*S*H.)
If Mr. Christopher hadn't landed the role of Father Mulcahy, he still would have worked a lot and done good work but you'd never be able to explain to people who he was. He'd be "that guy you see on TV all the time."
I never met William Christopher. Our pal Ken Levine who was producer on M*A*S*H, says "A sweeter, nicer, more gentle man you'd never find. He was an absolute pleasure to work with. And he took a thankless role and turned it into a vibrant character." I never heard anyone say otherwise.
So I have no anecdotes about the guy. I just wanted to say I think it's great that he landed the job that led to us all knowing who he was. He deserved it. He was great on that series.
Tonight, my friends Stu Shostak and Jeanine Kasun, together with broadcaster Ronnie Paul, are doing a LIVE! six-hour New Year's Eve broadcast from Fresno, California. They're having on guests and contests and clips of classic television and it runs from 7 PM (West Coast Time) until 1 AM.
If you live in Fresno or surrounding areas, you can watch it on your very own television on Channel 43.5. If you don't, you can stream it on the web on the Stu's Show website, on the website of Cocola Broadcasting or on the UStream website. Oh — and for the length of the show, I'll be streaming it below.
(Also: If you have a Roku TV, you may be able to watch it there. This page will tell you how if you want to try.)
I will be a guest via Skype for, I believe, the first half of the final hour. I think we're going to discuss late night TV and Stephen Colbert…but then again, Stu may just ask me whether Peter Potamus eats cole slaw or something. Hope you can make it to the party and that someone in your house is prepared to function as Designated Driver. Here's either the live feed or a little graphic telling you it's over…
Woody Allen reviews a new graphic novel by Edward Sorel. I haven't seen the book yet but I sure hope it's half as entertaining as Mr. Allen's (rave) review.
Fred Kaplan on the sanctions Obama is putting in place against Russia because of the hacking…or maybe I should say "alleged" hacking. I have no idea about any of this and it wouldn't make much difference if I did.
Leif Erikkson was an Icelandic explorer best known (probably only known) for having "discovered" North America long before Christopher Columbus. I guess word of what Erikkson had found didn't get around much or people didn't grasp what it was he'd located so when that Columbus guy happened upon what we now know as a separate continent, he was able to "discover" America all over again.
Which of them really deserves the credit? Here's my absolutely correct answer: I don't care. Doesn't matter to me in the slightest. This article is not about that at all. It's about Pauline Binder. That's not her real name, of course.
When I was back in Elementary School though, I and a number of my classmates would fervently argue that it was Columbus. Why? Because it made our fellow student Pauline Binder mad and we hated Pauline Binder.
There was a reason the other kids hated Pauline Binder and a slightly different reason I hated Pauline Binder. I'll tell you my reason later. They hated her because, as some of them put it, "She thinks she's smarter than we are."
And why would she think that? Well, maybe because she was. Pauline was a real smart young lady. She was even smarter than I was and I was pretty smart.
Way back in this post, I told the story of how I was repeatedly skipped ahead in grades when I was at Westwood Elementary School. What I didn't mention then is that a girl named Pauline Binder was also skipped a couple of times. Some semesters, we were in sync. The counselor who came to the school every few months to test me and check on how I was doing would on the same visits also test her and check on how she was doing.
Pauline and I talked about all this once in a while and as it turned out, we were both unhappy with the skipping. What was the big hurry to get us out of school? Why was it more important than us having friends?
I didn't like being younger than almost anyone else in my class and I didn't like the mixed-blessing label of Class Brain and I didn't like that I had skipped the classes wherein kids were taught certain social skills and how to play certain playground games. I eventually figured most of them out but it took a while and during that while, I was a bit of a freak or outcast among my peers. Pauline had the same problem only worse.
As I said, every few months, this nice counselor lady would come to the school, call each of us out of class for a few hours — Pauline in the morning, me in the afternoon — and make sure we were (a) keeping up academically with the older students and (b) getting along socially and were happily fitting in with others. The answer to the first question for both of us was always yes.
The answer to the second question was always no but that didn't seem to change anything. In our separate sessions, Pauline and I would each tell the counselor lady that we weren't fitting in and that we were somewhere between "unhappy" and "miserable" in that regard. No matter what we said — and Pauline would usually start crying and telling how everyone else hated her — the counselor lady would say, "Well, that will stop soon. I'll see you again in two months."
Pauline was unhappier in her position than I was for three reasons. One was that I had a good memory for all the jokes and silly things I read in comic books or heard on TV. I could sometimes interject one at the right moment and make my classmates laugh. Pauline had no sense of humor whatsoever. In fact, she seemed to be pretty dour most of the time.
Another was that my passion for cartoons had led me to learn how to approximately draw a lot of my favorite characters. Other kids would come up to me on the playground and say, "Jimmy said you can draw Popeye. Can you really draw Popeye?" So I'd pull out a pen and draw Popeye on their book cover — not at all that well but impressive given my age and lack of art training — and they'd think I had a bit of a super-power. I drew a lot of Popeyes and Huckleberry Hounds and Charlie Browns.
And thirdly, if someone picked on me, I could usually do a semi-decent job of not showing the hurt and once I'd done that, gracefully fleeing the situation. Pauline would cry and scream and argue and just put on an incredible tantrum show. Some kids thought it was a lot of fun to get Pauline Binder upset.
I'm not big on that kind of "amusement." I don't like ugly confrontations. I don't like practical jokes except occasionally (and only occasionally) when they're the kind the "victim" will genuinely laugh about. As I got older, I began to get zero pleasure from the pain of others, even people I might think deserve some.
Around the time that many of my classmates thought the greatest sport was not handball but taunting Pauline Binder, some of the boys had another favorite activity — making prank phone calls. They'd gather at the home of one of the guys whose parents were out and take turns. One classmate had a reel-to-reel tape recorder he'd take everywhere and he also had a little suction-cup device that enabled the (illegal, I guess) taping of phone calls. So they'd take turns making the calls, then play them back so everyone else could hear how upset and angry and hysterical the person on the other end of the line got.
There was no wit in these calls, no attempt at anything clever. The idea was just to say hurtful and/or dirty things from behind the shield of anonymity and to get someone pissed-off. I never thought this was fun or funny but in a misguided attempt to "be one of the guys," if I was invited to the party, I went. And since the guys I wanted to have accept me were laughing, I laughed — or at least I pretended to. Like I said, I never thought pissing people off was funny. Not even when I was ten.
Mostly, they called strangers at random, making careful note of their numbers. If they lucked onto someone who got really, really hysterical, they'd want to call that person back and do it to them again. The targets were usually more upset the second, third, fourth and especially the fifth time.
At some point, one of the guys might say, "Hey, Mark hasn't made a call yet. Give Mark the phone!" And suddenly, I'd be on the spot to call some old lady and ask her how many wee-wees she'd sucked lately. I really didn't want to do this. I was just there to try and fit in with other boys my age.
Fortunately, I figured out a way out. When they shoved the phone to me and gave me a number to call, I'd only pretend to dial that number. Actually, I'd dial the number of the phone from which I was calling. Naturally, I got a busy signal and I'd hold the receiver out so the other guys could hear it.
I'd say, "She either took the phone off the hook or she's calling the police on us" and everyone in the room with me believed it. No one was afraid of the cops busting in the door to cart us off to the slammer. We all felt unidentifiable and untouchable over the phone. But everyone would just shrug and maybe joke about how Evanier had such bad luck…every time he dialed, the line was busy. And then someone else would call someone else. My friends never caught on to my little trick.
Told you I was smart.
But not smart enough than it didn't take me a while to make the connection between the victims of these calls and Pauline Binder. The adults who were targeted because they got the most upset weren't bright enough to just hang up the phone when they realized it was one of those damn kids again. There was no fun calling someone who didn't let the guys hear their upset and anger.
Similarly, Pauline — as smart as she was — wasn't smart enough to not cry and get furious and put on a show that only invited more picking-upon-her.
This was during the period when you could get Pauline real upset if you told her Christopher Columbus and not Leif Erikkson had discovered America. So other students kept doing it just to start the show and enliven a recess period. She'd shriek and sob and yell, "No, no, no! How many times do I have to tell you?" Then when she was all worked-up, they'd tell her she was ugly and they all hated her and she'd run off in tears to the principal's office or somewhere just to get away from her tormentors.
There are a number of things I did when I was younger of which I'm now ashamed. Heck, there are things I did last Tuesday of which I'm now ashamed. But looking back at my days at Westwood Elementary, I may be most ashamed that I joined-in on the picking on Pauline Binder. As I said, the other kids did it because Pauline was so snotty about being smarter than them. That's what started it but it was perpetuated by how upset she got and how much fun it was to make her cry.
I did it — and here comes that reason that I promised earlier — because I wanted the other kids to think I was more like them and less like her. After all, I'd been skipped a couple of grades like she had. I could be viewed as "Class Brain" like she was. There but for the grace of Popeye went I…so I joined in the tormenting —
— until one day I made that connection. I couldn't pick on the anonymous victims of the gang's "funny" phone-calling and I realized I couldn't pick on Pauline Binder. One day at recess when others sent her crying and running off to a secluded part of the playground, I followed her. "Leave me alone," she screamed at me through very real tears.
"I came to say I'm sorry," I said. "Sorry for what they said and sorry for the other day when I joined in."
She looked at me in a way that made me sure I'd done the right thing. Then she said — and this is a quote, I remember this conversation vividly — "Nobody ever said they were sorry to me. Ever."
And she stopped crying.
We sat on a bench and talked for a while. She asked, "Why do they always pick on me?" and I told her, "It's because the way you get angry is funny to them." Pauline was a very bright young lady but somehow, that had not occurred to her.
I explained to her about the stupid phone calls and because she was so bright, she understood instantly what I was telling her and what she had to learn from it. She said, "I had it backwards. I kept thinking that if they saw how much they were hurting me, they'd stop." But she didn't think she could stop getting upset when they kept saying Christopher Columbus, not Leif Erikson, had discovered America. That was really a big thing to her.
I said, "Why should you care if they're wrong? Some of these kids get F's on their arithmetic tests. Are you upset because Fred Stein thinks eight times seven is 53?"
That was part of what I did to solve Pauline's problem and make myself feel like I was undoing some pain I'd inflicted. The other part started later that day at lunch period. I went around to some of the kids who'd been insulting her and said, "Hey, let's stop picking on Pauline Binder. She's not hurting anybody." Every single student I said that to said some version of "Sure. I'm just doing it because everyone else does."
So maybe my reason for hating her wasn't that much different from their reason for hating her.
Not everyone stopped right away but some did…and the ones who tried to get her upset found that she didn't put on quite as good a show as she once had. So most of the problem went away and Pauline thanked me over and over for years to come. I felt a lot better too, especially after I stopped joining in when Donny said, "Hey, my folks will be away all Saturday. You wanna come over and we'll make some phone calls?"
I can look back at my life and list all sorts of stupid things I've said and done. If I were to write a post here about each one, we'd have to get another Internet because I'd fill this one to capacity. Fortunately, I can also point to moments when I realized some of those things were stupid or destructive (and that includes self-destructive) and had the smarts to stop and when possible, undo whatever could be undone. This has been the story of just one…the time I corrected my behavior and helped Pauline Binder.
The next time I write one of these, I'll tell the story of how Pauline's problem got worse in high school…and how I couldn't help her there. Nobody could.
There are a lot of fonts around that one can use to letter comic books in a manner that looks kinda like the old, hand-lettered ones. Most of these fonts are pretty bad in design and even worse in spacing and leading. Here and there, you'll find some good ones but you'll find a lot of good ones being offered by Comicraft, the folks who practically invented lettering comics on a computer.
At times, their fonts are pricey but New Year's Day — and only for New Year's Day — they price them as per the year. So tomorrow, they're all $20.17 per font. That includes some that usually sell for a lot more and even a few that normally sell for $19. If you have any thought of purchasing any of their fine fonts, this would be the wise time to do that. Their website is where you do this and you can also learn a lot there about how to use them effectively.
If you're smart, you'll stay in tonight. Drunk drivers will be out and it won't help their navigation that it's going to be raining in much of the country. Also, New Year's Eve parties usually suck. At least, the ones I've been to did…people trying way too hard to have a good time as they drastically overstate how bad the last year was and how nothing bad can possibly happen in the new one.
So if you're smart, you'll stay home. If you're really smart, you'll spend the evening watching as Stu Shostak and his lovely spouse Jeanine commandeer Ronnie Paul's late night TV show that comes out of Fresno, California…with the participation of Ronnie, of course. They're bringing in celebrity guests, games, prizes, classic TV clips, discussion about the world of entertainment and they're doing it live from Fresno for six whole hours! I've written prime-time network shows that didn't last six whole hours.
It starts at 7 PM West Coast Time and runs until 1 AM. Your hosts will be welcoming, among other folks, Jimmy Garrett from The Lucy Show and other programs, Beverly Washburn from Star Trek and other programs, Jeannie Russell from Dennis the Menace, TV historian Steve Beverly and animation authority Jerry Beck. A little after Midnight, they will dial the definition of "celebrity guest" down low enough to pass me off as one. Stu and I will be talking about late night TV…or something.
If you live in Fresno or surrounding areas, you can watch it on your very own television on Channel 43.5. If you don't, you can stream it on the web on the Stu's Show website, on the website of Cocola Broadcasting or on the UStream website. Or you can just come to this page because I'll be streaming it on this site. I don't have to give you a link to that. You know how you got here.
(Also: If you have a Roku TV, you may be able to watch it there. This page will tell you how.)
I don't know how this is going to go. I don't think Stu, Jeanine or Ronnie do, either. Tune in and we'll all find out at the same time.
Okay, so it's a few hours premature but the Carnegie Deli in New York is set to close at Midnight tonight. The owner reportedly turned down an offer of $10 million for the place and your guess as to why is as good as mine.
If you never went there and you're wondering why folks are so verklemmt about it…well, know first that it isn't about the food. The food was no better than most delis. In 1989, they opened a branch of the Carnegie in Beverly Hills, a block or two from the long-established Nate 'n' Al's Delicatessen. Nate 'n' Al's is still right where it's always been but that Carnegie went away after five years. Why? The food was overpriced and not as good.
In fact, I suspect it disappointed people because they'd heard how the Carnegie was the greatest delicatessen in the world and how New York delis are the best delis in the world…and its corned beef did not reverse the aging process or make a blind man talk about seeing again. It was just corned beef…at best, no better than any other deli in L.A. and maybe a notch worse.
What the one in New York offered was history and familiarity…and I'm not sure either feels as special these days as it once did. I also think people today are less eager to pay for and devour a pastrami sandwich that weighs as much as a Subaru Outback and costs nearly the same. I'll miss the place but I won't miss it a lot.
In early 1965, the musical Sweet Charity debuted on Broadway where it was a big hit. Gwen Verdon was the star, Bob Fosse directed and Neil Simon wrote the book…but this doesn't concern any of them. The lyrics were by Dorothy Fields and the score was by Cy Coleman and they wrote, among other grand musical moments, a song in the second act called "The Rhythm of Life."
As the story goes, dance hall girl Charity Hope Valentine has gotten involved with a shy tax accountant named Oscar Lindquist. Oscar invites her to a church service and it turns out to be a cult-like order called the Rhythm of Life Church that was something of a parody of hippie groups. The people in it have glazed looks to suggest they're somehow stoned or high or hypnotized or something. The "church" (I just realized I should put that in quotes) is kind of a sham and right after the number, it's raided by the cops.
You're probably more familiar with the movie version. Sammy Davis Jr did the song in his role as Big Daddy, singing about his phony order in the third person. Here's the first section of the song and that should tell you how legit the "church" and its message were…
Daddy started out in San Francisco,
Tootin' on his trumpet loud and mean,
Suddenly a voice said, "Go forth Daddy,
Spread the picture on a wider screen."
And the voice said, "Brother, there's a million pigeons
Ready to be hooked on new religions.
Hit the road, Daddy, leave your common-law wife.
Spread the religion of The Rhythm Of Life."
And The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat,
Puts a tingle in your fingers and a tingle in your feet,
Rhythm in your bedroom,
Rhythm in the street,
Yes, The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat.
It's a good, funny song about a phony religious movement…but here's the thing: It no longer is. I don't know who did it or when or how but "The Rhythm of Life" has morphed into a song that is sung by choirs — often choirs of children — sometimes in real churches and other places where it is taken seriously. Here is how that same section of the lyrics goes in such venues…
When I started down the street last Sunday,
Feelin' mighty low and kinda mean,
Suddenly a voice said, "Go forth neighbor,
Spread the picture on a wider screen."
And the voice said, "Neighbor, there's a million reasons
Why you should be glad in all four seasons.
Hit the road, Neighbor, leave your worries and strife.
Spread the religion of The Rhythm Of Life."
And The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat,
Puts a tingle in your fingers and a tingle in your feet,
Rhythm in your bedroom,
Rhythm in the street,
Yes, The Rhythm Of Life is a powerful beat.
There are dozens and dozens of videos on YouTube of choirs singing this version and I'm curious, first of all, as to who wrote these alternate lyrics?
Was it Dorothy Fields, who wrote the lyrics for Sweet Charity? They don't sound a whole lot like her. She passed away in 1974 and I have no idea when the "revised" version turned up. If she didn't do it, was it done with the consent of her estate? And how did these lyrics get such wide circulation?
I should also point out that some of the groups that perform this treat it as a serious spiritual song, some make it kind of campy and some rewrite the lyrics further and/or intermingle lines from both versions.
I am reminded of the tremendous lengths some composers' estates go to to try and prevent parodies or lyric changes. Many have apparently eased up in the last few decades but when I was writing variety shows in the seventies and eighties, the Gershwin Estate and the folks representing Lerner and Loewe would practically send a S.W.A.T. team after you if you changed a line of a tune they controlled. Cy Coleman lived until 2004 so he was surely aware of this and probably blessed it…but then, it wasn't his work being changed.
Anyone know anything about this? Here's the original version as performed in the movie by Sammy and Company…
And now, here's a choir doing the song as it's now performed in most places outside of a revival of Sweet Charity. I can't be the only person who thinks it's weird that such a cynical, hippie-like song has now become respectable and performed in formal wear — although at one point in it, they do sing a lot about doobies…
Matt Taibbi is suspicious of reports that it's verified that Russian sources hacked the computers of the Democratic hierarchy to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. He thinks it's quite possible it happened but cautions against believing it unquestioningly. Probably good advice. And yes, I know it's not as important a matter as Peter Potamus but few things are.
Mike Tiefenbacher, who knows a heckuva lot about stuff I know a heckuva lot about sent me this after message after he read what I posted about that most vital of topics, Peter Potamus…
I never saw this post the first time around, but I would have noted three things then if I had:
1) The show was always called The Peter Potamus Show. That "Magic Balloon" thing came from a line of dialogue from a Magilla Gorilla cartoon where he's watching what he calls "Peter Potamus & His Magic Flying Balloon," in what I assume was meant as a joke. There were never any opening titles with that name, and no one I know has even turned up any promotional materials that use the name — and in fact, it doesn't even make any sense since his boat with balloon attached is a scientific, mechanical machine, and isn't magical in any way. So Earl was wrong, for once, and he was just perpetuating one of those online errors we all love so much.
As proof of this, Scott Shaw! asked Jerry Eisenberg, who created the show, and he confirmed that the series — in parallel to all the prior H-B three-cartoon series which preceded it plus Ruff & Reddy (not to mention the other Ideal series, The Magilla Gorilla Show) — it was always The Peter Potamus Show and never anything else. Not having seen every print ad promoting the show, it's possible that one of them did use those words (but you'd have to show it to me) — but in any case it's probably as bogus a name-assignment as the name the internet has pinned on the Touche-Wally-Lippy trio of cartoons (The New Hanna-Barbera Show), which never had a series name because it wasn't designed as a show of its own (rather to be inserted in hosted, live kids shows), even if almost every station aired them that way.
Tellingly, when stations assigned their own title to the show, it was either The Wally Gator Show, The Touche Turtle Show (which it was called in Milwaukee), or The Lippy and Hardy Show, even though each cartoon had its own opening and closing which only used the characters' names, because that's how these syndicated Hanna-Barbera shows were expected to be titled. (In fact, The Atom Ant Show and The Secret Squirrel Show were the last to be so titled, even despite the fact that NBC sandwiched the two together as one show. It's what was expected.)
2) The two aforementioned series did indeed swap characters, both in fact and in their credits, and there were appropriate changes made to all the openings and closings. But the changeover didn't occur immediately after ABC picked them up, and both shows had the original line-ups until they didn't (at some point I can't testify to). So that explains the credits with the Ideal logos, but leaves room for the credit character swaps you (and I) remember.
(Sometime around this change, a similar credit alteration also happened to The Huckleberry Hound Show when they removed the Kellogg's characters in favor of the characters who were on the then-revised line-up of Huck, Hokey and Ding, and Yakky Doodle; Pixie & Dixie had switched to The Yogi Bear Show, but that show's openings and closings didn't feature the supporting cast so there was no revision needed there).
3) The closing goodbye from The Peter Potamus Show was the sole time I ever heard anyone refer to Breezly as "Breezly Bear." In every other instance, it was Breezly Bruin. "Bruin," of course, wouldn't have scanned in this tune, so maybe it was done on purpose, or maybe it was because the cartoons' opening titles only ever said "Breezly and Sneezly," and Joe or whoever wrote the lyrics thought that was really his name. Had they gone with Breezly Bruin, neither "Ricochet" or "Ricochet Rabbit" would have worked in their lyrics.
One thing you're wrong about, though: there isn't anything too trivial to be mentioned in a blog, especially when it had to do with classic-era Hanna-Barbera.
I have a hunch "Peter Potamus and His Magic Flying Balloon" was a name used at some point — maybe even for only a few hours — early in the development process. A lot of H-B shows went through dozens of names, some of which no one could remember from day to day. Remember that Joe Barbera was the master of the Sliding Pitch, meaning that when he went into a client to sell a show, he would keep changing the idea on the fly, modifying it to appease the body language and expressions of whoever he was pitching to. I once watched in awe as Joe described one idea for a new show to CBS execs and when they didn't seem to be liking it, effortlessly turned it into a completely different idea with misdirection that would have fooled Slydini.
The Magilla Gorilla Show debuted eighteen months before Peter Potamus. Maybe the week they recorded that Magilla cartoon with the mention, the Peter Potamus project was actually called Peter Potamus and His Magic Flying Balloon by someone around the studio.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to think those two shows went on the air at the same time. They didn't — and the year of Magilla was one in which Daws Butler was on the "outs" with Hanna-Barbera — a quarrel over money and how much of it Daws should get when he voiced a star character. He did a little "day player" work for the studio during that period but after having initially cast him to voice Magilla Gorilla, they replaced him with Allan Melvin and didn't have Daws play any regular characters on that series. By the time The Peter Potamus Show got into production, his agent had patched things up so Daws played recurring characters on that show. Then there was another dispute and he wasn't on much of anything for H-B for quite some time after.
The cartoons of Wally Gator, Touche Turtle and Lippy & Hardy aired in Los Angeles on Channel 13 in a show called The Touche Turtle Show and later The Beachcomber Bill Show with a live host named Bill the Beachcomber, played by Bill Biery. He had a little set that looked like a beach shack and he'd banter between cartoons with Wally, Touche and Lippy. Some puppeteer (I don't know who) did pretty good impressions of those characters as he operated pretty-good puppets of them. I wondered at the time — and still do not know — if Hanna-Barbera was somehow involved in the design and manufacture of those puppets, making them available with the cartoons to local stations. Mr. Biery soon migrated to WPIX in New York where he showed the same cartoons but henceforth worked with original puppets.
He was another one of those kid show hosts whose jobs went away. I'd like to see Donald Trump try to bring those back.
Josh Marshall has an interesting theory about why Donald Trump is so hysterical in insisting that the Russian computer hacking not be investigated. It's not that Trump knows it's true. It's that he can't be sure that it isn't.
My pal Kliph Nesteroff just posted a link to this to Twitter. It's an old Saturday Night Live sketch from January 11, 1997 with Norm MacDonald, Mark McKinney and Kevin Spacey spoofing what David Letterman's show had turned into by then. Wanna know why Leno started beating Letterman? I think this hits on some of the main reasons. Kliph says Stephen Colbert contributed to the writing of it, by the way…
Eric Levitz says Donald Trump is mad that Barack Obama is acting like he's still President of the United States of America. The nerve of that guy for thinking his term doesn't end until some time in January!
We haven't heard much lately about building that wall on the Mexican border. I have the feeling Trump's family is going to build a golf course down there and then Donald will tell everyone that's what he always meant by "building a wall."
In the meantime though, we're hearing a lot about repealing Obamacare. It's working pretty well…but those who predicted it would never work have to kill it before it works even better. Trump promised to replace it with "something terrific" but in six years, no one has come close to devising anything better and the uncertainty caused by repealing it without a replacement in place will throw the marketplace — and therefore the lives of those who rely on it — into chaos. Jonathan Chait has more.
And another problem looming for health care is that Trump's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services wants to bring "balance billing" to Medicare. What is "balance billing?" It's kind of a way to make sure that Medicare doesn't cover as much as it used to and that sick people have to dig into their savings to pay what it no longer covers. Ryan Cooper explains.
Trump's promises to bring back jobs to America may hit a snag. People seem to think those jobs went overseas but an awful lot of them never left the country. They just went to robots who do those jobs for less.
Lastly for now: As we've mentioned here, Trump financial advisor Larry Kudlow has a pretty bad track record when it comes to being right about anything. As Steve Benen notes, Kudlow's new bit of wisdom is that it's great that Trump is surrounding himself with so many rich people because — and this is a quote — "Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption." That isn't even true of all the wealthy people in the room when Kudlow meets alone with the president-elect.
Well, that's a kick in the gut. As you've probably heard, a day after her daughter Carrie Fisher died, Debbie Reynolds has passed away. I have no idea how one tragedy might be connected to the other and neither do you. We just sense that one led to the other.
I have absolutely no stories about Ms. Reynolds. I loved her in Singin' in the Rain but so did everyone. I admired how hard and often she worked, not just at performing but in her attempts to build a Hollywood museum. I met her a few times at the mansion I mentioned in this message. Nothing memorable was said either by her or me. I just thought she was a classy lady who had the beauty and talent to be a star for a very long time.
