Monthly Archives: September 2016

I keep telling everyone here on the blog and in political conversations to watch the Electoral College. There has not in this election been a point when Hillary Clinton seemed seriously in danger of losing there. Her "lock" states has fluctuated from a low of 218 to a high of about 340 but she's always been ahead by a few points to get her over the necessary 270. (Right now, Nate Silver's three models have here between 291 and 312.) Trump has never been close to a lock on 218.

It might not also hurt to keep one's eye on favorability ratings. As Harry Enten notes, "In every election, the candidate who was leading in net favorability ratings in late September won the Electoral College and the election." Right now, Clinton is more than 10 points ahead of Trump in the favorability rating race…and with Trump ranting about Miss Universe and the new revelations about shady Trump business deals, I have the feeling he's going to lose ground there.

All of this however should be qualified with the reminder that a lot about this election is unprecedented. We never had a Republican nominee brag about his penis size before. And neither candidate is particularly well-liked. Whoever wins is going to be the most unpopular winner ever in that sense…and that's a new thing for America. Usually, we wait until our leaders actually take office before we hate them.

It's been announced that the legendary Carnegie Deli in New York will close at the end of this year. That's sad but not surprising. Not that long ago, the Stage Delicatessen — which was one whole block away — went outta business. For years, they were dueling delis, fighting for your brisket dollar, both often with lines out the door. People would argue over which was the better of the two.

At times, it was hard to get a seat in either and when you did, you were crammed into a tiny, noisy space. In the Carnegie, you had the risk that often, it would be right next to Jackie Mason. Still, I liked the place…and no trip to New York felt quite complete unless I'd dined there once. It was the history of the place more than the food. There were and still are better delicatessens in New York. There are also places where you can get a sandwich that is smaller and cheaper the way you'd really prefer your sandwich to be.

Every Carnegie sandwich presented the dilemma of what to do with the two-thirds of a sandwich that you had to pay for but couldn't eat. I never went there on my way to the theater; only after. I didn't want to have to carry 65% of a corned beef sandwich with me into the play and I didn't want to abandon all that pricey meat.

I'm wondering how much of its demise is due to that, how much is due to its recent closure because of an illegal gas hookup, how much is due to people just wanting to eat healthier and how much is due to the business problems of running a restaurant in Manhattan. All but the gas line were cited in the Stage shutdown. I'm also wondering if some buyer isn't going to swoop in, grab the location and the famous name and try to reinvent the Carnegie. I can imagine someone doing wonders with it if they post an "Under New Management" sign, retool the menu a bit and bar Jackie Mason.

But the Carnegie is not completely doomed. Sez here its owners will maintain the name, use it for wholesale distribution and continue to operate Carnegie Delis in Bethlehem, PA and Las Vegas. So if you have a craving for good, old-fashioned New York deli food, just head for the Mirage Hotel in Vegas. It's in the casino, right next to the California Pizza Kitchen. Same food. Not the same vibe.

In the debate, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of living in his own reality. Since then, Trump seemed to be out to prove her right, insisting that he'd won the debate by a landslide. His evidence? Online polls where it's easy for one person to vote thousands of times. In all the polls conducted the way real polls work, Clinton came out on top by a wide margin.

His supporters all know this. No way would any of them say Hillary had won if the online polls said so and the real polls did not. But just as Trump and his surrogates can deny every fact and stat that indicate good news for the current economy, they can deny any poll that doesn't show them winning. Other politicians might say, "Okay, she did well but look how Mitt Romney did in his first debate against Barack Obama and then look who won the next two and the election!" Not these folks.

The polls for the general election may not yet show a huge bump for her but they do indicate movement in her direction. Keep in mind that if you're looking at an aggregator like Nate Silver's, it takes a few days for changes in polls to register on an aggregator. And some of those polls are rolling polls where, for example, each day they survey one-seventh of their sample. So what happened last Monday will not be fully reflected in the poll until next Monday.

The vice-presidential debate will be October 4. No one cares.

The next presidential debate is October 9. This one will be "town hall" format with the candidates talking directly to audience questioners…a format which does not favor Mr. Trump. Ms. Clinton's husband was the master of this format, talking to people instead of at them. Also, one of the moderators is Anderson Cooper, who Trump has said is unfit for the position or something like that. This oughta be interesting.

The word today is that Trump's surrogates are being sent out to hit Hillary on two fronts: Bill's infidelity and sleazy business dealings by the Clinton Foundation. Given Donald's history with women and the flow of scandals coming out of the Trump Foundation and Trump University, it's hard to see how he can get a lot of mileage in these areas. I can just see Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway on The View saying, "Well, Donald does have two less rape allegations against him than Hillary's husband…"

One of the most prolific comic book artists of all time, Richard T. Moore died in his sleep September 7 at his home in Templeton, California. Known professionally as Sparky Moore, he worked in comics, comic strips and animation from 1951 until shortly before his death at the age of 91. "Sparky" was also the nickname of Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame but unlike Schulz, who got his handle because of Sparkplug, the horse in the Barney Google newspaper strip, Moore became "Sparky" because he was a radio operator in the military.

Sparky Moore was born in Philadelphia in 1925. As a kid, he had two passions: Drawing and horses. He raised and bred horses for much of his adult life while drawing in a nearby stable. Sometimes, he combined his two interests. He drew hundreds of western comic books and he also carved intricate wooden rocking horses. Soon after serving in World War II, Moore met and married Helen Sheedy and they had a family that included one set of twin boys and one set of twin girls. They were married until her death in 2005.

Moore's professional art career began in the late forties but really took off in 1951 when he began drawing for Western Publishing Company, producing work that appeared in Dell Comics and also in Western's activity books, childrens books, puzzles and toys. He was extremely versatile, able to adopt an adventure style to draw movies and TV tie-in comics or characters like Rin Tin Tin, Lassie or Tarzan, or to switch and do funny animals and Disney characters. In his later years, he did mainly the latter. For Western's Gold Key and Whitman lines, he drew Disney's Robin Hood, The Aristokittens, Scamp and Winnie the Pooh, among others. For Disney studios, he did long stints on the Scamp and Winnie the Pooh newspaper strips.

During the sixties, he worked often in animation for Grantray-Lawrence on the Marvel Super Heroes cartoons, and for Hanna-Barbera on shows like Jonny Quest, Mightor and Space Ghost. He also drew comic books of the H-B super-heroes for Gold Key. He was very good at drawing in other artists' styles and I have seen Sparky Moore animation drawings for the Marvel show sold and represented as the work of Gene Colan, and drawings Moore did for Hanna-Barbera sold as Alex Toth's work.

For the most part, he was anonymous but very good…and very reliable. At Grantray-Lawrence, he met a young artist named Mike Royer and he gave Mike some of his first work in comic books and one vital piece of advice. I just phoned Mike for background and he told me, "The best piece of advice I ever got as an artist came from Sparky. He said, 'You get your first job based on your ability and all the rest based on your dependability.'"

Mike added, "Whatever success I've had professionally as an artist…I owe a lot of that to Sparky Moore."

I was a fan of Sparky Moore's art long before I could put a name to that style. He drew a lot of comics based on TV westerns for Dell in the late fifties, including Elfego Baca, Wyatt Earp, Texas John Slaughter and Rex Allen. For a change of tone, he also drew The Three Stooges and many of the Disney movie adaptations for the company. When I was in a position years later to hire artists for comic books, I kept trying to get him but he always declined gratefully, citing a full plate of other assignments. He was well-liked by editors for delivering superior work on time and by his colleagues for helping other artists. Royer said, "I got an awful lot of work because Sparky recommended me for things and everyone took his recommendations."

Most comic book fans reading this are probably not familiar with his name but if you're anywhere near my age and liked Dell Comics, you read a lot of books he did — and I haven't even gotten into the many times he ghosted books or strips allegedly by other artists to help out a friend. I doubt anyone could even assemble a checklist of his work and make it reasonably complete. But he was real good at what he did and he sure did a lot of it.

Millicent Martin, David Kernan and Gemma Craven sing a medley of songs with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Lerner gets overlooked a lot when people speak of great Broadway lyricists but he sure wrote a lot of memorable numbers…

This election frequently presents some of us with a great dilemma: When, if ever, is it okay to stoop to the other side's low standards? We now have Howard Dean — who let's remember was a doctor before he was a politician — is out there suggesting that Donald Trump's sniffling during the debate "might" be an indicator of a bad cocaine habit. Now, before I decide what I think about that, I have a few things to consider…

• I've always thought it was unseemly to try and do a medical diagnosis on a person from afar. It's unfair when a layman does it and much worse (and maybe unethical) when it's done by someone who's entitled to put "Doctor" before his or her name. Back when a woman named Terry Schiavo was on life support and this whole country took an abnormal interest in her situation, the Republican Senate majority leader was a man named Bill Frist, who was also a heart surgeon. He started spouting off medical opinions about her condition based on a few videotapes he'd seen of this woman he'd never examined. I thought that was very wrong — wrong for a leader to do that and wrong for a doctor to do that.
• I felt the same way when Hillary's enemies were recently out there claiming they had incontrovertible proof that her medical problem was not pneumonia but Parkinson's Disease. They did not have proof of that, no matter how desperately they wanted to believe that and make others believe it. They had unnamed sources and wild speculation.
• It also bothers me when people make an accusation without accepting responsibility for it. Trump does that a lot. It would be one thing if he said, "I believe my opponent kills puppies." It's more his style to say "Some people are saying my opponent kills puppies" without ever saying who those people are or why their accusation is worthy of considering. I mean, thanks to the Internet, we can find "some people" who think Elvis is living on Neptune with Hitler. That doesn't mean that needs to be part of a public discussion.

So there are two possible reactions to Howard Dean suggesting Trump is a coke freak and that someone should look into that. One is that it's just plain wrong the same way the Parkinson's thing was wrong and it's craven to hide behind "I'm not saying it's true…I'm just asking questions." That's another weasely Trump trick.

And the other, of course, is that it's nice to see Trump getting a dose of his own medicine. It's turnabout, it's fair play, it's fighting fire with fire. And it exposes hypocrisy when he screams "Foul!" about his own tactics being used against him.

I'm sorry. I don't like it. I understand it but I don't like it. There's an awful lot in this election I understand but I don't like…to say nothing of all the things I don't understand and don't like. It scares me that this might be what Politics will be like for the rest of my life.

In case you're one of those rare Americans who cares about the issues in this election — as opposed to the real issue of who can look tougher — here's a nice rundown of where Clinton and Trump stand on most of the key topics. I say "most" because there's nothing in there about what each would do about protecting me from cole slaw.

Here's an article about Stephen Colbert's show last night and about how he's trying to remake the show to boost its ratings.

This video is wrong. You can vote naked. You just have to do it absentee…

For obvious reasons.

National Public Radio has posted a transcript of the entire debate — with fact-checking and annotations. Give it a read.

Matthew Yglesias explains that even in the areas where he's supposed to be an expert, Trump doesn't know what he's talking about.

I awoke to find Donald J. Trump making the rounds, yelling insults at a Hispanic woman who once won his stupid Miss Universe pageant. Clever of Hillary Clinton to bring up an issue where Trump's behavior will remind both women and Hispanics why they don't like the man.

Last night, Trump said Lester Holt did a great job as moderator. Today, he and his surrogates are out there saying Holt was hostile and biased. Make up your mind, Donald. Also, he's complaining his microphone was defective. Was there anyone who couldn't hear this guy? I not only heard him every time he was talking, I heard him every time anyone else was talking.

I'm thinking that one of the things that really hurt Trump was his insistence that he never said that Global Warming was a hoax concocted by the Chinese. It was real easy for everyone to find that Tweet where he said exactly that. Sometimes, there's wiggle room where you can say, "Well, I didn't say exactly that." Not this time. His supporters have been able to deny or rationalize a lot of fibs but there's no way around this one.

In the debate, I don't believe an important topic was mentioned and it certainly wasn't discussed. That would be the Supreme Court. Jeffrey Toobin reminds us what's at stake there.

Anyone expecting a massive jump in Hillary's poll numbers will probably be quite disappointed. Numbers don't move that fast anymore. But last night sure changed the dynamic of this election.

I liked Stephen Colbert's live show that followed the Great Debate…and I'm wondering how much of it was actually done live. The cold opening certainly wasn't but after that, it seemed like it was all in real time. When he did those "live" shows following the conventions, a lot of the interviews were recorded earlier in the evening. This one was pretty good, though I am still not enjoying Colbert's Late Show as much as I should or even as much as I did his first few months on the air.

By the way: Two different people wrote me in the last few days to ask who the new female announcer is. One wrote, "And why doesn't she get her name in the end credit?" Well, she does but as one of the writers. It's Jen Spyra, who also has a nice career as a performer and who also does the voice of the cartoon Hillary Clinton who sometimes appears on the program.