Jonathan Chait discusses the bind that Republican leaders like Florida's Ron DeSantis are in. They're trying to frame their anti-mandate policies as taking a stand for individual rights. But that puts them in league with folks who think the vaccines turn you into zombie chipmunks…and they don't want to alienate that kind of supporter.

Meanwhile: Most observers seem to feel that the Recall Election in California will fail to unseat Governor Gavin Newsom. As Ed Kilgore notes, his main opponent — talk show host Larry Elder — is not waiting until the ballots are counted to allege fraud. Of course.

Kevin Drum points out The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in America today. There's a lot more of The Good than you might expect.

Here's another one of these…

• I am sometimes amazed at the number of people in this world who would jump off a cliff if you told them that the Common Wisdom among most people is that it's not a good idea to jump off a cliff.

Ever since I learned there was a Garfield & Friends channel on PlutoTV, I've been watching occasionally. They're running shows I wrote in 1991 and 1992 and haven't seen since. One or two, I'm not sure I ever saw at all. So I sit here, occasionally amusing myself or more often thinking, "Why the hell did I write that?" Yesterday, I heard a minor character speak and I thought, "Who was that? We had such fine actors in the cast, I can't believe one of them gave that bad line reading or that I let it through."

And then I realized who it was. It was me. Yeah, I occasionally did a bit part…and when Garfield's creator Jim Davis was in town, so did he.

It's fun and educational to watch these now. I can't look back on old work without learning something. I learn it too late but at least I learn. I also have an emotional response that I'm not sure I can describe to hearing the voices of actors who worked on the show but are no longer with us. Lorenzo Music, Gary Owens and Howard Morris — three great actors and great friends — were in every episode. I'm also hearing Stan Freberg, June Foray, Rip Tay;or, Don Knotts, Paul Winchell and a few others we've lost.

I'm relatively new to Pluto TV and I still don't understand some things about it. Although they presumably have access to all 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends, they only run a select chunk of shows at a time. I'm not keeping close track but it seems like yesterday, they were running thirteen or fourteen shows over and over, not always in the same order. Today, it seems like they're running a limited number of shows — probably the same number — but some were in yesterday's rotation and some weren't.

But I may be wrong about this. I'm not making a close study.

Each show is interrupted several times with a little "we'll be right back" message which is like a commercial break only it isn't a commercial…though Friday, I did see one actual commercial in there. For some reason, they don't put these little "time out"s between cartoons. They stick them in the middle of a cartoon or near the end. So a character says the next-to-last line of the cartoon and there's a funny end line coming but you have to wait a minute or so for that last line.

I don't understand why they do this. Perhaps I would if I understood the business model of PlutoTV. Is there any revenue stream apart from the occasional few bucks from the occasional commercials? I have a feeling that when I get my cut of what they're paying to run these shows day and night, it'll be about enough for an order of McDonald's french fries. A small order of McDonald's french fries.

One of my favorite cabaret performers is a gent named Mark Nadler who, in non-COVID times, tours the country performing. Sometimes, as in the video below, he has a small band with him. Often, it's just him and a piano. Either way, he's a great entertainer.

Our video today is a show he did on PBS back in 2015 and the theme of the show was the year 1961 — which, not coincidentally, is the year Mr. Nadler was born. But it was also a year in which a surprising number of great songs were born and his show was filled with them. What's embedded below will have a special resonance with you if you're familiar with a lot of the music but it should please anyone.

I am here offering you three choices, one being to not watch it at all. I do not recommend this but you're free to do as you wish and you won't hurt my feelings one bit. Well, maybe one bit.

Secondly: I have set this video embed so it starts 40 minutes and 32 seconds in, thereby giving you the last sixteen-or-so minutes of his show. In those minutes, he performs one of the strongest pieces of cabaret material I have ever witnessed. If you were to ever perform on a stage in front of a live audience, you would pray to have a "closer" this good…and again, it will help if you know the music of '61 somewhat.

Or you have a third option, which is watch the whole show which runs close to 57 minutes. To accomplish this, click on this link. It's all good but if you don't have the 57 minutes, just click below and enjoy the last sixteen. The guy is really good…

The Internet is full-to-bursting this morning with remembrances of 9/11 and a wide array of answers to the question, "What did it mean to us?" I read a number of them and stopped after this essay by Lucian K. Truscott IV who says, basically, that we lost the War on Truth…

The legacy 9/11 has left us is that there is no common set of facts we can agree on about anything: Not about the COVID pandemic and masks and vaccines; not about the climate change that has killed hundreds and left town after town burned to the ground or under water and destroyed by tornadoes and hurricanes. We cannot agree that votes counted amount to elections won or lost. We cannot even agree on the common good of vaccines that will save us, that science is worth studying, that learned experts are worth listening to.

I think we lost a certain amount of that before the planes hit the World Trade Center but 9/11 certainly turned the partisan divides into impenetrable walls.

Anyway, this is not a remembrance of 9/11. My experiences were no more special or worth recounting than yours or anyone's. Maybe one thing we can agree on is that it was horrible and that it changed the world in many ways, few of them for the better. And I think I'll do myself and maybe you a favor by not dwelling on it today. The posts on this blog this weekend will not be about that. If you need that, you have an entire World Wide Web of it just one click away.

I sometimes tell people that I got into "show business" (including the comic book business) for the anecdotes. I love great stories about things that happened and like most folks, I often settle for "probably happened" or even "might have happened." I have sometimes repeated a story acknowledging it might be spurious and saying, "I hope this actually happened."

For instance: In the comic book field, there's a tale about a freelancer working for DC Comics who grabbed one of their editors and dangled him out a very high window. I don't know how many times I heard that from people who claim to have been there and witnessed it.

The name of the freelancer changed. The name of the editor changed. The reason for the dangling changed. The number of stories-up the window was changed. But either lots of freelancers dangled lots of editors out windows there or the tale has been reimagined by a great many tellers. I doubt it ever happened even once.

Here's a clip of Billy Crystal on with David Letterman, telling a Redd Foxx story I've probably heard from a dozen different people who claim to have been there and witnessed it.  I don't know who told it to me first but I wrote about a version of it in a column I did in 1996. You can read it on this very blog at this link.

The story is always about Redd Foxx but the name of the act that preceded him changes from telling to telling and the punchline is always the play-off with the theme from Sanford and Son.  Some of the other details are flexible.

There are a few things amiss with Billy's story. The clip starts with a mention of the MGM Hotel and a mention of him being at a fight between Ken Norton and Larry Holmes in the afternoon. The way the clip is cut, we can't tell if he said the fight took place at the MGM but in reality, Norton fought Holmes in the evening of Friday, June 9, 1978 but not at the MGM. The fight was at Caesars Palace.

Also, Redd's 2:30 AM show probably wasn't at The Frontier Hotel. It was probably at the Silverbird Hotel, which is where Foxx played in 1978 and did, as the ad above shows, a 2:30 AM show on Friday and Saturday nights. And without further adieu, here's Billy…

What especially intrigues me is that the story is about Foxx doing a show with almost no one in the audience…and I've met so many people who claim they were in the audience for that performance.  If this actually happened, maybe the reason so many people claim to have been there for it was that it happened more than once. Maybe that's all Redd Foxx ever did at his 2:30 AM shows.

I do know Jack Goldfinger, the magician Crystal says was on the stage just before Redd and the next time I see Jack, I'm going to ask him about this.  In the meantime, you can decide for yourself if it actually occurred and if you believe Billy Crystal was present when it occurred.  He sure sounds convincing but so did everyone else who ever told this anecdote.

One other thing: You'll notice Mr. Crystal says that before the show, someone was hawking Redd's comedy record, You Gotta Wash Your Ass. I posted its cover at the top of this article and if you can't tell, the thing on the right is the rear end of a donkey. The joke might have evoked at least a little laughter if you could have perceived that.

The dates check out on that since it came out in 1975. I wrote in the above-linked article that as a collector of funny albums, I was always intrigued by the sheer number of different "party records" (i.e., dirty records) Foxx made and how many zillions of them were sold. I also wrote…

I always wondered what was in those albums. The jackets divulged nothing about the contents but I somehow knew my parents wouldn't be thrilled to catch me buying one. It was many years later that I came across one in a second-hand shop and bought it, wondering just where all the others had vanished.

I took it home, put it on my turntable and…well, I made it through about half of the first side before giving up. There were a lot of jokes about women being basically worthless and stupid and men being even more worthless and stupider. There were a lot of references to body parts not generally itemized in mixed company. I didn't laugh but the audience on the album sure did, proving that you can laugh at anything if you're drunk enough.

Well, the Redd Foxx record I listened to was You Gotta Wash Your Ass and I thought it was pretty poor. You may feel otherwise if you listen to it and you can listen to it here. Good luck.

• With his new vaccine mandate, Joe Biden has lost the support of all Americans who were never going to support him no matter what he did.

I got behind in posting these. Each week, Sergio Aragonés and I answer a question or two from Groo readers. Here are Weeks 3 and 4…

Fred Kaplan delves into why Donald Trump has a sudden veneration of Robert E. Lee…and, of course, a complete distortion of who Lee was and what he did.

Fred writes, "It is unclear why Trump is so passionate about Lee" and then offers up some theories. I'll offer two of my own. One is that Trump has a pretty good sense of what his followers want to hear and he just says such things with no regard as to truth or even how what he says might sit with those who are not solidly in the Trump camp. The other is that Trump admires a loser who people wrongly think was a winner.

If you get Pluto TV, you can now watch the Garfield & Friends channel — a channel that just runs a show that I wrote, 24/7.

If you don't get Pluto TV, you can watch it online at this link. These are copies of the show that were remastered a few years ago to be in high-def and wider in screen format. The opening and closing titles had to be re-created and we took the opportunity to fix some mistakes in the closing credits, especially in the voice credits.

There are no commercials on this channel — at least, not now — but every so often at random times, they interrupt the programming to show you a little animated graphic that tells you "We'll be right back." I have no idea why they do this or why they don't do it between cartoons instead of in the middle of them.

I couldn't find a good online video of Art Metrano doing his "Amazing Metrano" routine to the tune of "Fine and Dandy."  That's odd because there was a period there when you almost couldn't turn on your TV without seeing it.  He did it on Carson, he did it on Laugh-In…I think he was the entire house "orchestra" on one of Tim Conway's many shows…

He was also a darn good comic actor as he proved in most everything he did, including a couple of the Police Academy movies.  I met him once in the NBC commissary.  It was crowded and a friend of mine and I were wandering around with our trays full of alleged lunch, looking for a table with two empty seats.  There were two at a table Chuck McCann was sharing with Art and Chuck waved us over and did the introductions.  I do not remember a thing that was said other than that Mr. Metrano seemed like a real nice guy and he was pleased that I thought he was funny.

He would have been funny in a lot more TV shows and movies had he not taken an awful fall off a ladder one day and fractured his first, second and seventh vertebrae.  What an awful thing to happen to such a friendly, funny man.  What an awful thing to happen to anybody.

You can read a good obit of him here and I was especially interested in one thing that was mentioned in it…

Managed by Wally Amos of Famous Amos cookie fame, Metrano and a friend, future Mel Brooks collaborator Rudy De Luca, were hired as writer-performers on a variety show starring Al Lohman and Roger Barkley that played on California stations after the local 11 o'clock news on Sunday nights. (Also working on the program: Craig T. Nelson, John Amos, McLean Stevenson and Barry Levinson.)

I remember that series. It was called different things in the TV Guide listings but on-air, they referred to it as The Lohman & Barkley. No "show." Just "The Lohman and Barkley." It was not on Sunday nights after the news, at least in Los Angeles. It was on Saturday nights at 11:30 after the news and it bumped the previous occupant of that time slot — The Saturday Tonight Show featuring Johnny Carson reruns — to Sunday nights. They had Ed McMahon record a new into renaming it The Sunday Tonight Show.

It was a brilliant, hilarious, "break all the rules" show that my friends and I loved…about as close to Monty Python as I've seen any American series come. Or at least, that's how I remember it. I am not ruling out the possibility that if I saw them today, I'd have a different opinion…but I can't see them today because those shows seem to have disappeared off the face of this planet.

It was very funny and also important. While it did not bring in the proper revenues to allow it to continue, something about the reaction to it seems to have led NBC to decide that in lieu of Johnny's reruns, the network should be programming a comedy show there and to make sure affiliates couldn't bump it to Sunday, they'd do it live and put "Saturday Night" in its name.

If anyone ever comes across any tapes of The Lohman & Barkley, I'd love to see if it's even close to as good as I remember. It seems to be where Art Metrano got his big break.

And getting back to the (now, sadly) late Mr. Metrano, there is much more to his story. He told a lot of it to my buddy Kliph Nesteroff in an interview. Here's a link to Part One and here's a link to Part Two. Like I said…a funny man.

My buddy Bob Bergen is the voice of Porky Pig and sometimes other Looney Tunes Royalty, as well as oodles of characters and creatures of a non-Warners variety. He's also one of the most respected teachers of voiceover skills and watchdogs for the interests of voice actors. No one knows more about the field than Bob. No one works harder to maintain the integrity of the profession and to watch out for those who would exploit both well-established pros and wanna-be-established newcomers.

The other day, he posted this piece to Facebook and I think it's spot-on and important. I don't usually post the writings of others on this blog but I decided this was worthy of an exception and I got Bob's O.K. to share it with you. But let me first give you a bit of background…

Any "glamour" profession — the kind folks dream of getting into some day — attracts way more wanna-bes than there could be "be"s. Way more people want to be professional baseball players than could ever achieve that and it isn't just that some people are better at it than others. There's also simple math. Under the rules of Major League Baseball, the Dodgers can only have 40 players signed at any given time and only 25 on the active roster. If 300 men dream of becoming Dodgers, 260 ain't going to get contracts, no matter what.

Like I said: simple math. (And I suspect the actual number is way more than 300…)

And just as certain as that is that there will be plenty of people and businesses that see an opportunity to make money in various ways off the mob and its dreams. These days, a record number of kids (and they aren't all kids) want to have a career like Bob's. That means there's a record number of enterprising folks offering services to that record number of kids who aren't all kids. And as is inevitable, they are not all beneficial or benevolent. There are some excellent teachers out there (Bob is one) and some terrible ones who might as well be holding aspiring voice actors upside-down by the ankles and shaking them to see how much money will fall out of their pockets.

V123, which Bob mentions, is an online service where you join and pay a fee — the top tier of membership is close to $5000 a year — and you get access to postings from people and companies seeking voiceover performers for various jobs. You can then record auditions and submit them and I have no idea what the success rate is. Perhaps the math works for some members. There are other such services…what Bob calls "pay to play."

All I can say is that the voiceover specialists who would use such a service are probably (a) dreaming of getting the kinds of jobs that would never be cast this way and (b) dreaming of having the kinds of careers currently being enjoyed by voiceover artists who don't get hired this way.

And Backstage and Drama-Logue, which Bob also mentions, are/were weekly newspapers for the up-and-coming actor, purchased mainly for their listings of auditions. And now, I'll shut up and turn the blog/floor over to Mr. Bergen…

So, I'm reading online that V123 has partnered with Backstage. It is no secret I am not a fan of the Pay to Play V.O. industry. (and please refrain from defending it on this thread, cuz I'm not interested in having that conversation here….trust me, I know it is here to stay)

When I was first pursuing professional acting, Backstage in NY was the heartbeat of the theater industry. Major theater stars had agents to get them into Broadway and off Broadway auditions. But for the majority pursuing, they relied on Backstage for open calls, where they would line up on sidewalks waiting for hours in their audition attire for their moment of opportunity, their backpack or duffle bag filled with their server attire for their survival job(s) both before and after the audition.

I'm often asked if I have any regrets in my career. Not many. But the scenario mentioned above is the big one. I know many think this actor lifestyle sounds like hell, especially for today's P2P v.o. actor. And many pursuing v.o. today do not have "actor" in their blood. They have "make money" in their hearts, which perpetuated the growth of P2P v.o. But I so wish I had lived this east coast life of an actor, if even for a short period.

When I began pursuing voiceover in Los Angeles, we had a magazine called Drama-Logue. If you know that name, you are of a certain age. As large as Los Angeles is, Drama-Logue had a small town feel. It posted indie and college film auditions, articles on marketing and career advice, etc. L.A. has never been a big money making theater town. Drama-Logue posted Equity waiver auditions. These shows did not pay. But they were a great opportunity to work on craft and invite agents and CDs to showcase your work. My career got a lot of value from performing in waiver shows. And, I produced my one man show under the Equity Waiver agreement.

Drama-Logue also advertised coaches and workshops. This is how I found my first v.o. workshop when I was 14. I saw a copy of this paper on our neighborhood newsstand next to Variety and Hollywood Reporter. I knew nothing about this paper but I took a risk and found a workshop. Back then, there weren't many v.o. workshops out there but all were great. All of em! And I studied with em all! (OK, some were better than others. But all brought value that I use and share to this day.) My parents paid for my classes, which were $10 a week. They had a rule. I had to keep a C average in school and they would keep paying for my v.o. classes. I just got lucky that these classes had integrity and were professional.

When I started teaching my own v.o. workshop, I went to the Drama-Logue office in Hollywood to purchase ad space. The office was a bustling room of wall to wall desks. Think Lou Grant newsroom. Phones ringing off the hook, and lots of cigarette smoke. The ad staffer was this weathered lady (probably in her early 40s) with a voice like Harvey Fierstein. I was there with checkbook in hand to buy my ad. But before I could, she sat me down and drilled me. She wanted to know where I had trained, my body of work, and my workshop curriculum. For all intents and purposes, she vetted me.

She made me nervous. But even early in my career, I had a bit of chutzpah and asked her, "So…does everyone have to pass an interview process to give you money to advertise?" She looked over the top of her chained-around-the neck glasses, puffed her cigarette, and on a smoke-filled exhale said, "Our readers trust this paper. I won't approve any advertising unless I feel they are legit!"

Fortunately, I passed inspection. Oh — and the paper had terms/claims that were not permitted in ads: "Get discovered!" "Make Money!" "Double Your Income/Bookings," etc. These are claims I have never made and never will. I cannot guarantee my own success. No way I can do this for others.

A few years later, Backstage purchased Drama-Logue and launched Backstage West in L.A. It lost that small town feel of Drama-Logue. By this time, the internet had launched and I stopped needing to advertise my workshop in the trades.

So now it seems V123 has partnered with Backstage. In all honesty, it feels like an organic progression. Not a good one, IMO, just a sign of the times. Gone are the days of a Drama-Logue type of quality control. Some today might think of my vetting experience as discrimination. I didn't then and I do not now. I appreciated that this paper did not want to endorse anyone they didn't believe in. They would have rather not taken my money than promote a lesser-than-honest coach to acting wannabes.

This kind of quality control and integrity is long gone. Today's world of online v.o. is a homogenized pile of confusion where the selling point is to make money, not strive for excellence. Those who are excellent stand a better chance of working, but there are no guarantees for anyone. Some great actors cannot catch a break and there are mediocre actors living in Beverly Hills.

The internet is more vast but it does not provide the quality control that was Drama-Logue. Sometimes bigger is not better.

As we near the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams reminds us of how much that people recall from that day did not actually happen. Obviously, there is much that has been almost willfully distorted or misremembered by folks seeking to mold it to bolster their political agendas. But that aside, there are a lot of memories that are just wrong.

If you're going to wallow in 9/11 again this week — and I'll remind you it is by no means mandatory — I have a suggestion. Thanks to the Internet and its hoarders, there are hundreds of places where you can download or just watch the news coverage from that day. Here's one of many. Pick out a channel and watch its broadcast from just before the reports of the first plane hitting the North Tower until you've had enough. That was how most of us experienced it that morning…staring at the screen.

I did this a few years ago. I have a friend who was too young to understand what was happening that day. She was asking me questions about it…what it was like to see it all unfold…and I told her what I could and said, "You know, you can watch it pretty much the same way I did."

Years ago, I downloaded five or six hours each of CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN that morning. They're stored on my harddisk and I'm not sure why because it's not like that material could ever be difficult to find online. But we arbitrarily picked the ABC coverage, much of which was anchored by Peter Jennings, and we watched it together — no pausing, no fast-forwarding. It felt like stepping into a time machine and it was chilling and gut-wrenching. There were even moments when I had that "what's going to happen next?" sensation even though I already knew.

I'm not necessarily recommending you do this. It can be a bit tummy-churning and depressing. But if you feel that you should devote some time this week to remembering 9/11, this might he preferable to a documentary. Documentaries about tragedies that were extensively covered on the news often turn into documentaries on how the news was covered that day instead of what happened that day.

And I don't think I'll be able to watch anything on 9/11 without marveling at how Rudy Giuliani went from being the most heroic figure in the country to his current position somewhere between Derek Chauvin and Mike Richards.