Kevin Drum has real good advice for anyone who's worried that there's still a chance of Trump winning a second term. His chances will never be zero but if you want to be reassured that it's a slim chance, just look at the way he's acting. He sure doesn't think he has a good shot at it.

I guess this falls under the category of "Jobs It Hadn't Dawned On Me That Somebody Has." But someone has to drive the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile around. In fact, at least six people do because there are six Weinermobiles.

Someday I hope to see one of them involved in one of those live televised chases as it's relentlessly pursued at high speeds by a Mustard Truck that does a P.I.T. maneuver and rolls it into a van full of sauerkraut.

Here is the story of one Weinermobile driver. And here's the page on which you can find out when a Weinermobile is wandering your way…or even request one for a special event.

One of the "foolers" on this week's Penn & Teller Fool Us is Garrett Thomas, who is in my opinion one of the three-or-so best magicians working today. And I'm talking here of magicians who excel as magicians, as opposed to those you love to watch because their delivery, timing, patter, style and/or personality are delightful. There are plenty of guys who are a joy to watch not so much because of the magic but because of how entertaining they are, even doing a trick you've seen a jillion-and-a-half times.

I've seen and spoken with Garrett at the Magic Castle and watched as he's fooled not only non-magician guests but some of the best magicians I know. He invents all his tricks and some of them have stumped Penn & Teller in the past when performed by others without (apparently) Garrett's consent. He told me a year or three ago that he was not inclined to go on the show himself so I was surprised (and pleased) to see that he finally did.

Penn & Teller are not fooled as often as viewers of this program might think. Often, they — and by "they," I mean mostly Teller — can think of five different ways a feat could be done but the rules of the show don't allow them to guess all five ways. So they say they think it was done by Method A or B and it was really C or D so the performer gets a trophy. But this time, I think they really were baffled. So was I, just as you will be…

Not only have I not decided whether or not to watch the big Thursday Night Debate, I've almost been thinking of predicting it'll be called off because Trump is exhausted, Trump is demanding changes in the format, Trump is accusing Biden of cheating, etc. Something I haven't seen in any article about the debate is whether the candidates have to pass COVID-19 tests before it.

That was in the rules for the first one but Trump arrived late and managed to not take the test. One might assume that in light of what then happened, the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates would absolutely insist on it this time. But one might assume all sorts of things, especially in this time in our history, which do not happen.

Kristen Welker, a White House correspondent for NBC News, will serve as moderator. I think instead, it would liven things up if they brought in Frank Welker and had him ask each question in the voice of a different cartoon character.

Ms. Welker will have a button with which she can mute either debater's microphone if said debater interrupts the other too often. If Trump just stands there yelling his interruptions sans mike, I would hope — but do not expect — that Mr. Biden would turn to him and say, "You know, if you conducted yourself like a normal person does in a debate, they wouldn't have had to install those buttons." I do expect that Trump will insist that the buttons are there to rig the proceedings against him and that he was muted whenever he was about to score a devastating, election-upsetting point.

Here's one second from every Looney Tune and Merrie Melody made by the Warner Brothers cartoon studio. This is more fun than you might expect…

[UPDATE: I should have realized these are just Looney Tunes.]

Wow. Trump's current argument seems to be that we have to stop Joe Biden from becoming president because Joe Biden would listen to scientists and medical authorities. And we can't have that.

I dunno if there's any truth in the shitpile of allegations against Hunter Biden that Rudy Giuliani is now peddling — the one Fox News refused to disseminate because they thought it had credibility problems. But I doubt that anyone anywhere really thinks the Trump family is squeaky clean with regard to financial dealing. Nor can I see anyone who thinks that Donald Trump has been a terrible president looking at these charges and saying, "Gee, maybe America does need four more years of Donald Trump."

If someone tries to tell you there are no allegations of financial impropriety against the Trumps, show them this list.

A day or three ago, actress Kirstie Alley from Cheers came out on Twitter as a staunch Trump supporter. Our pal Ken Levine, who wrote many of the words she uttered on that series, has responded.

Nothing has disgusted me more about the Trump mob than the chanting of "Lock her up!" As Amanda Marcotte notes in this article…

That chant was a Trump-rally greatest hit in 2016, aimed at Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on the fallacious grounds that she had supposedly committed some crime for which she was escaping justice. (As usual, this was pure projection from Trump, who knew at the time he was a tax fraud and serial sexual assailant, whereas decades of effort to turn up some kind of malfeasance to pin on Clinton have resulted in bupkis.) This time, even that thin pretense was dropped, as the chant was aimed at Michigan's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who hasn't been accused, even falsely or facetiously, of committing any crimes.

Whitmer's only "crime" is being a woman — and a conventionally attractive woman, at that — who Trump can't control. Trump has spent months publicly lashing out at Whitmer, who, like most Democratic governors, rejected Trump's demands that she ignore public health recommendations to slow the coronavirus spread. Instead, Whitmer instituted restrictions that have likely saved tens of thousands of lives. Trump and his loyal followers haven't let go of this, and keep obsessing over what he clearly sees an unforgivable act of female defiance.

I don't think it's wholly misogyny. Trump wants to lock up Obama and Biden and probably anyone who does not worship him. If I told him you're not a supporter, he'd probably want to see you behind bars because, to him, that's a crime. But certainly he and a lot of his associates are really bugged by strong women like Whitmer, Hillary, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Kamala Harris. I wonder if he's fantasized about having one of his foes hauled off in handcuffs. based on charges he'll divulge after the ballots are all in.

Here are two segments from 60 Minutes — one which aired tonight, one done for the web. In these, Dr. Jon LaPook who is a medical correspondent for CBS talks with Dr. Anthony Fauci about you-know-what. Dr. Fauci is so misquoted (sometimes deliberately) and at times suppressed that it ain't a bad idea to hear from the man himself.

Over the last few decades, I've found myself embroiled in a number of arguments — some of them, potentially life-threatening — over whether one should trust mainstream doctors about everything or about nothing. It has always seemed obvious to me that both extremes were very, very wrong and yet many people do not seem willing to find a middle ground.

Me, I allot my trust on a sliding scale. Someone who has a medical degree and has practiced for years gets most of it but not all of it. Someone who has never studied medicine but has read a lot of websites gets a pretty small hunk of it…but neither group gets 100% or 0%. My present physician is very good as are the specialists to whom he sometimes refers me…and even then, I check what they tell me with him. My answer to questions like "When will you stop isolating?" and "Will you take a vaccine?" is "I'll wait until my doctor advises me and if I have any doubt, I'll err on the side of caution."

Yes, I've had friends who listened to doctors and are now dead. I've also had friends who refused to listen to doctors and are now dead. In some cases, it's not clear if the doctors or lack thereof led to the outcomes.

Anyway, here's Doc Fauci. I find him interesting, though I'll be more interested in any books or interviews from him after this thing is over and he no longer has to walk a strict non-political line to retain his position and standing…

I haven't updated the meter in quite a while and it may be off by one or two. Counting has been a little tricky because a couple of folks I know came off the list. They were offensively pro-Trump for a while and then they saw the light. Alas, their spots were taken by a few acquaintances who were non-offensively pro-Trump but as the chances of a second term have declined, they've doubled or even tripled-down on how he's the savior of America, hand-picked by God Almighty to rule us forever. And in some cases, gotten as rude as he is.

I suspect few if any of the friends I've lost understand that what came between us was not that they supported Donald Trump but that they got nasty and rude and insulting about it. This is mostly a personal matter, not a political one. I may even have to have a little chart of friends I've lost because they've gotten hysterical with anti-Trump positions.

So now it's all in the final weeks. I refer you to Nate Silver's article, "8 Tips To Stay Sane In The Final 15 Days Of The Campaign." Remember that all news coverage is ClickBait in some way or other and that nothing will get you to click like a headline that claims some sudden development may decide the election or has thrown all you know into doubt.

Remain calm. It's going to be a Roller Coaster not just until Election Day but perhaps for weeks after. This is normal. We need to remind each other of that since it's becoming harder and harder to even remember what "normal" is.

Matt Shuham tells us "Here's Where The President Got His Latest Dumb Anti-Mask Talking Point."

Bob Elisberg — who blogs over here and is a good refuge when you crave anti-Trump posts and I'm not doin' em — sent me a link to this video and told me to just watch it. I give it to you with the same advice…

You might remember this from May of 2019. A crazy woman stole a motorhome and led police on a wild, destructive chase out in the San Fernando Valley. She had two dogs with her and…well, it was one of the weirdest things I ever saw.

Usually, we never hear what becomes of these people after they're arrested but here's the other end of the story: She was just sentenced to nearly nine years in state prison…

The 54-year-old Santa Clarita woman was immediately sentenced following her guilty plea Thursday to two counts each of hit-and-run driving resulting in serious injury to another person, animal cruelty and driving under the influence of a drug causing injury, along with one count each of fleeing a pursuing peace officer's motor vehicle causing serious bodily injury and assault with a deadly weapon causing great bodily injury.

I don't know if nine years is a fair sentence but I sure don't think it's too harsh.

In 1959, Hugh Hefner — publisher of the then-up-and-coming magazine Playboy — hosted a syndicated TV series from Chicago called Playboy's Penthouse. It ran for two seasons and was followed in 1969 by two seasons of Playboy After Dark, which was basically the same show except in color and produced in Los Angeles. On both shows, the premise was that you were invited to one of the famous, celebrity-filled parties at Hef's mansion and got to mingle, watch his more famous guests perform and listen in on conversations and interviews.

I had a few brief experiences with Hef's real parties — the ones at his home, not in a TV studio — and I quickly learned a few things about them. One was that everyone present felt really privileged to be there and that you had to keep saying that, especially if you at all interacted with Hef.  The biggest thing about being at a party at the Playboy Mansion was that you were at a party at the Playboy Mansion.  You felt special because of that…and often that was the only real reason to go.

I also learned that to be invited, you had to fall into one of three categories…

1. You had to be really famous or…
2. You had to be really gorgeous or…
3. You had to be a crony of Hef's whom he'd granted the special privilege of being there so you could hit on folks in Category 1 for Show Biz connections and/or Category 2 for Love Connections.

I did not fit into any of these three categories, which is probably why I did not remain on the guest list for long.  Actually, I got booted off and one of these days, I'll tell the story here of how I managed that.  By then though, I'd learned that I didn't fit in there.

I had mixed feelings about Hef's TV parties. He was an awkward host — much nicer and funnier in person than he was on the show. He had on some of the best comedians then working but they were performing for Hef's TV Party Guests — paid extras who laughed like paid extras, phonier than any prerecorded laugh track ever. You can almost feel them being directed when to laugh (often in the wrong places) and for how long.

But what intrigued me was that in the midst of all that fakery, you often got performances by artists who were rarely if ever seen on television and a lot of stimulating conversation. Here's an excerpt from this review of the video I'm introducing here…

As few people under 60 will be aware of the two politically progressive talk-and-music syndicated shows Hef produced and hosted at the beginning and end of the 1960s, Brigitte Berman's documentary will be a bit of an eye-opener, primarily due to the shows' then-unheard-of racial mix and political talk but also as a curious cultural artifact of the Swinging Sixties.

Much of what Hefner pushed in the sixties is outta-date and outgrown and much of what was on those shows now stands as camp, especially when the tuxedo-clad on-screen guests groove to songs from Woodstock. But as the review notes, "Barry Melton of Country Joe and the Fish recalls having had a booking on The Ed Sullivan Show yanked due to fear the band would perform their trademark anti-Vietnam war song 'I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag,' which was exactly what Hefner wanted them to sing."

That kind of thing alone makes Hef's two series worthy of attention…and therefore, the documentary well worth watching. You can watch it below. Thanks to ace publicist Jeff Abraham for telling me its producers had put it online…

So I just saw this headline…

More people watched Biden on ABC than Trump on NBC, MSNBC and CNBC

…and I thought, "Oh, that's gotta hurt." No doubt if the positions were reversed, Trump would claim that as an indicator that the polls were wrong; that more people love him than love Joseph R. Biden. Which, of course, it would not be just as the real news isn't proof Biden's gonna win. It's a measure of what people were watching, not how registered voters are voting.

I actually thought Trump would do better than Biden for a simple reason: His interviews are more volatile and more colorful…and a lot of Americans are waiting for him to go so full-goose-bozo in front of a camera that even Rudy Giuliani won't be able to defend it as normal. We're expecting Trump to turn into that dictator in the Woody Allen film Bananas who decrees that underwear must be worn on the outside and that all children under sixteen years old are now sixteen years old.

I caught a little of each — not a lot but enough to see Trump was sweating and wanting to strangle Savannah Guthrie for asking hardball questions and calling him out on answers that would have made Sean Hannity wet himself. Over at Biden's Town Hall, he was giving real answers, speaking mostly of policy. It may not have been Good Television but I think it was Good Campaigning. I thought this dodge by Trump would have hurt him with undecided voters if there were any…

Guthrie grilled Trump about a retweet he posted on Wednesday evening of a conspiracy theory promoted by a QAnon account. The tweet accused Biden of pulling strings to take out the group of Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden — a theory refuted by the fact that every Navy SEAL involved in the bin Laden raid is in fact still alive.

Instead of even trying to defend himself, Trump suggested to Guthrie that because he read it on the internet it might be true, describing the conspiracy theory as "an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I'll put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don't take a position."

It's obviously reckless and irresponsible for the president to amplify incendiary conspiracy theories that are clearly false, not to mention defend QAnon, which he did during the same town hall. And in one of the more memorable moments of the evening, Guthrie hit back, admonishing Trump, "You're the president. You're not someone's crazy uncle who can retweet whatever."

That was a quote from this article and if you read the whole thing, you'll see how this morning, Trump retweeted a story he spotted on the web that said…

In a last-ditch effort to stop negative stories about Joe Biden and his family from spreading, Twitter shut down its entire social network Thursday.

You're smart enough to know it wasn't true. It was from a website that clearly labels its stories as satire. Why wasn't Donald Trump that smart?

I'm not sure when exactly this was released but the AARP magazine has a long article by David Hochman on the confusing mess of Stan Lee's last few years on this planet. It's one of those He Said/She Said/He Said/He Said/They Said/She Said/Somebody Said stories where it's hard to figure out which version of reality to trust so you wind up trusting none of them.

I have no insights to offer about the events covered in the article. The last dozen-or-so times I saw him, he was deliriously happy to be either signing his autograph for big bucks or posing for photos with famous people and being treated as one himself. I am not suggesting this was his constant state. It's just what I saw on those occasions. I'm so glad I wasn't around for the other stuff.

Some of you are really going to thank me for this. May before last, Comedy Central debuted a new series starring Jordan Klepper called simply Klepper. And you can just imagine how many meetings it took to come up with that.

They'd canceled his previous series, The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, which I enjoyed but did not consider a great loss. I thought Mr. Klepper was brilliant on The Daily Show, especially in the Jon Stewart years when it was tough to stand out from the herd of brilliant correspondents. But on The Opposition, he tried to do to Alex Jones what Stephen Colbert had done to Bill O'Reilly and the difference wasn't different enough to make it a different show.

So they gave him Klepper and after eight episodes, they took away Klepper. I thought every one of the eight was real good and that he broke new ground as a correspondent who not only reported on social injustices but actually got involved in fighting them. For one of the stories, he even got arrested and in others, he probably put even more of himself on the line. Throughout all eight, he managed to not only be funny but also, given the gravity of some of the topics, appropriately funny.

Klepper came and went with very little notice but I saw all eight…and have been watching them again. Comedy Central has put them all on YouTube…for how long, I do not know. Below, you can watch Episode 1 and here's a link to the entire run. See if you don't enjoy them as much as I did and still do…