Our Russian hysteria
Happy New Year. Let’s get a couple things out of the way first.
The Russians, even if reports from anonymous CIA officials are true, did
not hack our election. They hacked
emails-- ones of a non-government entity (the DNC) incidentally that revealed wrong-doing that we shouldn't be distracted from. The trail of media misinformation on this speaks to how easy it is for intelligence officials to find eager trumpeters from America’s Fourth Estate.
Second, there is
still no evidence that the Russians were behind the DNC leaks. President Obama could basically declassify anything he wanted to in justification for his punitive action against the Russian diplomatic community this week, and he has not. Evidence, incidentally, is not even the same thing as proof. The 13-page report issued by the Obama administration on Thursday that MSNBC, CNN, and Huffington Post present as evidence against Vladimir Putin’s government is only a list of details describing the phishing techniques used by the alleged attackers. No evidence of a link to the DNC case exists anywhere in the report. This report is, effectively, a tactic that serves the current president’s political need to take punitive action against Russia before he leaves office. One would look weak as hell to accuse a foreign government of such treacherous crimes, but then not do anything about it. A serious accusation demands serious consequences. It’s also a political tactic that suggests there have been other political tactics.
Julian Assange still says that the source of the emails WikiLeaks published--
his source-- was someone from within the U.S. intelligence community, and what motive would Assange have to jeopardize his perfect track record of accuracy and sourcing, and destroy the entire credibility of his enterprise? Do intel officials engage in such ploys of misdirection? Not only is the answer to that question yes, but they also have
gone so far as
inventing conspiracy theories with the aim of discrediting their critics as “crazy conspiracy theorists.” I’m telling you, there is nothing you can put past these fuckers. During the height of the Cold War, some of them conspired successfully to kill President John Kennedy and stage a coup of the American White House. Another group, with some overlap, broke into DNC headquarters in 1972. They have, time and time again, engaged in actions, direct and indirect, that were designed to spur regime changes in other countries as well. This includes many nations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, almost every country throughout Latin America and the continent of Africa, at one time or another. They conspired successfully to have Nelson Mandela, a man they perceived as a terrorist threat, arrested in the 1960s. They armed both the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in the 1980s. They arrogantly and clumsily created a fiction that became a breach that would be filled by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, toppling, through our military, the only semi-secular governments in the region.
And please know that our intelligence community
wanted war with Russia over Crimea, where our military backs
a group of Ukrainian neo-Nazis fighting for separatism from Putin’s control. While we should be teamed with Russia in the cause against terrorism, America's Democratic Party is, instead, a willing participant to the cause of re-starting the Cold War. As such, Clinton’s unexpected electoral defeat was a crushing defeat for that cause of escalation. Had she won a majority of electors on November 8th, we would be already looking at a massive build-up of U.S. military forces along the Ukrainian/Russian border.
The tip-off that this Russia angle has been trumped up is that the Clinton-supporting media has given almost no focus instead to the area of electoral malfeasance where there is not just smoke, but actual flames-- the failure to count votes from African-American-dominant precincts in Michigan and Ohio. Jill Stein has practically been begging for media attention to this voter suppression, but to no meaningful avail.
Perhaps releasing actual evidence of Russia's alleged electronic tampering would require the disclosure of the CIA’s similar covert actions at untoward influence aimed at other autonomous governments. Isn’t that we can now safely surmise happened at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy? If Castro had a hand in the death, and I’m actually in the camp that believes it was CIA and mafia operatives that were
anti-Castro, what other motive would there be to suppress from the American people the act of Castro’s involvement than that declassifying documents would lead to the facts of our own failed attempts on the life of the Cuban leader? In other words, the CIA covers up because
he got to us before we got to him.
This anti-Trump panic on the left has got to end. It is an immediate imperative for the operatives of the Democratic Party, those that conspired against the reforms of the Sanders campaign, and are still acting-- from the Oval Office on down-- to prevent Keith Ellison and a new band of reformers from gaining control of their broken party, to wake the fuck up, and stop the madness while the public relations damage is only moderate. You. Lost. You did it to yourself. You cheated. You disenfranchised your own base, you assumed that it would stay a secret because who was going to report on it-- the Washington Post? (Haha) And your misconduct and hubris were exposed for all to see.
As a growing majority of Americans look upon the Clinton cultists, they see, chiefly now, the absence of accountability. If they're on the right, they see hypocrites and sore losers, desperate to hang on to power. On the left, they see hypocrites and scoundrels, desperate to hang on to power. Working men and women see the leadership of a once-major political party still ignoring them. The detrimental effects of continuing to blame their loss on anybody but themselves, and to avoid taking a good long look at their own mismanagement and perverted values, are nearly incalculable.
As he continues to be belittled and have his legitimacy questioned, Trump will score electoral points with any even marginal success-- and he
will have his share of successes because he has, sometimes in spite of himself, managed to blow up the rotted core of both major political parties. We saw this with Obama as well. He galloped to an easy re-election in 2012 thanks in large part to the illogical attacks he was forced to endure. When will these party hacks-- on both sides-- learn their lesson about the whole of the American people? We each have our favorites, but we don’t want to believe that the president is illegitimate. That’s why the birther crap backfired so badly. And this is how the Republican wing of the Democratic Party will die-- not with a new openness towards reform, but drowning in their denials.
Here’s a better explanation of the Democrats’ historic defeat last month. A great big group of passionate Bernie Sanders activists, mostly 20- and 30-somethings, the type that Clinton should have been salivating to have attending her events, tried to stake their place within the party’s power structure and simultaneously serve as messengers to the DNC from the collective pulse of the people of the United States. They attempted an explanation to the Clinton monarchists that she should oppose the horrendous trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that even her
Republican opponent very publicly and correctly opposed. Hillary told audiences that she opposed it also, but Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, who stands as close to the Clintons as any politico not surnamed Wasserman-Schultz, went around telling every person with a microphone that the candidate was only publicly posturing and that she really would support the deal after Election Day. When McAuliffe’s supposition was exposed as fact by WikiLeaks, Hillary went as wobbly as she did that day she got hustled into a shuttle van on the streets of Manhattan.
They also told Hillary to get her tail to North Dakota and stand up against the Bakken Pipeline. She
didn't go because she
wasn't against it. The Clinton team didn’t listen to the impassioned shouts for radical change in the party's neo-liberal policies on imperialism and militarization, or to ix-nay the saber-rattling in Syria, or to come clean on her illegal attempts to shield her work emails from FOIA requests. They avoided rural voters as if they were infected with the Zika virus. The campaign staff did hardly anything at all to woo, let alone inspire, these Sanders loyalists. In one particularly dark episode, entertainer Sarah Silverman, acting as campaign surrogate, chastised and infantilized these activists in front of a convention television audience of millions. In retrospect, that was one of the moments it should have been apparent this shit was not going to end well.
We were in line for a Bernie Revolution, and instead they gave us a Trump Revolution. Clinton’s bank money was used to push people out of the way. Her SuperPAC brazenly and illegally coordinated with her campaign. WikiLeaks already revealed years ago that, as Secretary of State, Clinton employed diplomats as spies at the United Nations, spying even on the leaders of our allied countries-- do remember that this week when you read about Russian diplomats acting as secret agents in the U.S. That, combined with her electronic attempts to shield from public view her actions at the State Department, should have disqualified her as a candidate before the convention even commenced. It’s hard to know which offense is the worst-- the malfeasance, the attempts by her and her allies to shield it from us, or how badly they are at doing that.
Wanna have a retroactive laugh? Read
this Ruth Marcus article in the Washington Post from eleven months ago. "It's far from clear," to Marcus that Americans "are prepared to embark on (a revolution)." What a massive misreading of tea leaves. Apparently, all that's left to do a year later is to blame it all on Vladimir Putin.
Carrie Fisher 1956-2016
To say that the first
Star Wars trilogy was an obsession in my youth is a tremendous understatement. The action figures were nearly the only toys my brother and I had. And that fact alone would make me a Carrie Fisher fan-- what a talented, funny, gorgeous woman she was.
But in her most famous role, George Lucas' mythical universe acted as a sort of sexless universe. In my opinion, Carrie was much more of a magnetic physical presence in the years that followed. While
Star Wars dominated a certain period of my life, Nora Ephron's
When Harry Met Sally laid its own particular legacy on me-- in respect to romantic relationships-- when it came out in the year of my 14th birthday. Carrie had the best friend role to Meg Ryan's title character, but she created a sexy, indelible character, paired opposite the equally marvelous actor Bruno Kirby. All of a sudden, Princess Leia was grown, and she was
funny. And she could cut you off at the knees. "
Marie Fisher" kept a Rolodex of men she might potentially date, and you'll recall the reveal in the film that she only dog-ears the cards of men that have gotten married. Has there, before or since, been a better "best friend' in a romantic comedy than Carrie Fisher in that movie? I thought it was a colossal failure of Hollywood the last few years that nobody ever thought to pair Carrie again with her
Star Wars co-star Harrison Ford in the supporting role of parents, or the like, in another romantic comedy. People would have gone crazy for that.
"Marie" was the role I always imagined to be closest to the real Carrie, the sarcastic wit that survived the high-profile celebrity breakup of her parents, attended Beverly Hills High School and didn't bother to graduate, inspired the Paul Simon song "Hearts and Bones," guested so memorably on
30 Rock and lent her voice to
Family Guy, authored the hilarious, best-selling autobiographies/semi-autobiographies "Postcards from the Edge" and "Wishful Drinking," and wrote in the latter that she wished to die "drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra." I eventually came to believe that Princess Leia was obligated to renounce the monarchy system of Alderaan if she wished to become a true rebel hero, but I
loved Carrie Fisher. She was a true rebel hero.
Gilbert's gift
Award season arrives and I’m busy trying to stay culturally-relevant. Though I have not written at all about it, I've watched every episode of 29 different TV shows this year. With films, I wait for the DVD format in nearly every instance (
Loving was a recent exception), but I inevitably make it through the extensive list of movies I want to see, and then work again at seeking out the lost classics.
My obsession of late is the Gilbert Gottfried podcast, a once-or-twice-a-week internet release that serves the dual purpose of entertaining me and leading me back into a labyrinth of forgotten showbiz magic and near-magic-- the likes of Boris Karloff, Larry Storch, and Cesar Romero’s orange slices.
Gilbert's program is a charming portrait of a man and a moment, but that moment is long past. Co-hosted by comic writer Frank Santopadre, it is a show decidedly
out of the present, a celebration of the arcane and obscure in entertainment history. I dare say that Gilbert is the new, true champion of the young medium. The more celebrated podcast belongs to fellow comic Marc Maron. That program’s attempt at urbanity and its lesser obsession with Danny Thomas’ rumored sexual/scatological kinks (relative to that of the Gilbert show) certainly helped elevate it to its position as Slate’s “greatest podcast of all time” two years ago, and also to attract a current President of the United States to sit for an hour-long interview, but compared to Gilbert, Maron, to me, often seems ill-prepared for his interviews (and I could also do mostly without the pre-interview monologues on each episode).
To hear Maron recently express his unknowing surprise to Alan Alda that Alda’s father was a celebrated actor in his own right-- Gilbert would never err in such a way, enlightened a theory of mine that, during all those years Maron was wasting his free time high on coke during his stand-up career, Gilbert’s hours away from the stage were better spent in front of the TV in countless hotel rooms.
Gilbert’s show is also refreshingly free of self-promotion. To listen to Maron’s podcast is to get a constant reminder from the host of how badly the comic's career needed this break to have come along when it did, but with Gilbert, the whole thing just seems like gravy. He seems singularly interested in resurrecting the profiles of long-forgotten heroes, and he’s performing the additional service of getting many of these elderly entertainers-- Joe Franklin, Marty Allen, Dick Van Dyke, Larry Storch, Ken Berry, Julie Newmar, James Karen, Pat Cooper, Barbara Feldon, and Orson Bean, to name just a small number of many, to get their stories told before they go.
Gilbert Gottfried, that perplexing and controversial comic personality that was famously fired by each one of the entities--
Saturday Night Live, Donald Trump, and Aflac insurance, has finally found the perfect outlet for his talents-- some of which I didn’t even know he possessed. I think “Gilbert” is well on his way now to becoming one of those mononymous personalities, along the lines of Madonna or Beyonce.
The new leadoff hitter
It needs to be acknowledged in this space that the Cardinals have signed a five-year contract with a star African-American player. Except for a single-year with Jason Heyward in 2015, Dexter Fowler will be the team’s first “core” black player since 1999. The Cardinals have not had an African-American All-Star since 1997. (They had one every year from 1982 to 1997-- owing largely to Ozzie Smith, but eight others were All-Stars at least once during that stretch.)
The importance of this development has been written about now at
ESPN and
the Post-Dispatch, and it’s been discussed
here. On the large-trafficked sites (how I refer to the others), the topic always touches off reader comments from Cardinals fans along the lines of
Why does this matter? The Cardinals’ job is to get the best players, period. Thanks for bringing race into this for no reason, you liberal scum. What a blessing it must be to live in that color-blind world-- a privilege of whiteness, if you will. These comment threads have also, often, included accusations that a certain player of color-- Heyward, as an example, is “not a Cardinals-type player.” Those opinions are never elaborated on so I will only infer at their basis.
Let’s look at it only from a business standpoint then-- since the suggested tack is what’s best for the Cardinals. St. Louis is a majority-black city. Among MLB cities, this is true of only four others-- Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Cleveland. With the departure of the Rams to Los Angeles earlier this year, the city was left with only
two professional athletes that were African-American-- Cardinals’ outfielder Tommy Pham, whose father is black and his mother Vietnamese, and Ryan Reaves, a bruising right-winger for the NHL’s Blues from Winnipeg, Manitoba, the son of a former Canadian League football player from Arizona. (For a time in 2016, the Cardinals also employed veteran pitcher Jerome Williams.) This reality accentuated the culture gap that exists, but shouldn’t, between the team and the city. It may not seem, outwardly, like a problem until you have Ferguson protestors gathered outside the stadium targeting the highest-profile event in the city, as we had in 2015, and you have videos going viral of white Cardinals fans arguing with them on the street and tossing racial epithets. These fans are claiming an ownership of the team which they should not wholly possess, but the Cardinals organization is in the defenseless position of appearing to be almost entirely white in the backdrop of this scene. The same thing happened outside Rams games that year, but inside the dome, you had the contrasting image of five Rams pass catchers, all African-American, coming out of the tunnel with their hands in the air, taking the field in solidarity with the protestors-- an action unsanctioned by the team, I would add, but the uniform represents.
St. Louis is a city that has volatile race relations, a city that has endured more than its share of incidents involving police profiling, corruption, and violence, suburbs and neighborhoods scarred by housing covenants and historic inequities. Interstate 64 serves as a de facto dividing line between an overwhelmingly-black majority population in North County, and a large-majority white population to the south. Area municipalities, like Ferguson, are currently being targeted by the Department of Justice because of accusations of targeting of black motorists with fines reportedly designed to fill city coffers.
White and black populations too often seem to look upon the other through a veil of suspicion. But the Cardinals should be-- and were, during the era of the brewery ownership, a bridge. The intense stare of Bob Gibson from the pitcher’s mound out across nine different World Series games during the mid-1960s is an iconic visual in the annals of sports history. Before colored sets arrived and displayed bright red of his uniform, America saw the blackness of his skin through his heroic exploits. His teammates, Curt Flood, Bill White, and Lou Brock, were heroes for the entire city (as their white and Hispanic teammates were also). African-American-style baseball reached its apex in St. Louis and in the U.S. in the 1980s with fleet and daring teams that included Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, George Hendrick, Vince Coleman, Lonnie Smith, and Terry Pendleton. (Forgive the fact that I’ve listed these names before in similar posts, but it excites me to write them.)
I applaud the Cardinals’ ownership for recognizing a dissonance. A year ago, they failed in their efforts to re-sign Heyward, and to sign pitching ace David Price, but they made substantial offers to both players-- offers that, if accepted, would have been record-setting financial deals for the franchise. There’s a code that’s being spoken this winter, in a way. Chair Bill DeWitt III and GM John Mozeliak say they want “excitement” added to next year’s team, and
African-American consumers, as well as whites, know how that translates-- it's the opposite of complacency. The entire sport, in recent years, has de-emphasized the attributes that African-Americans have traditionally brought to the game. Base stealing, basic catching and throwing, and enthusiasm took a back seat to power, plodding, and the unwritten rules of “tradition,” yet simultaneously, we have continued to deal with a double-standard in which blacks that succeed in the sport always have their success attributed to genetic gifts, while their white counterparts are considered harder workers. The patron saint of white “scrappiness” in St. Louis, and possibly the entire sport, is David Eckstein, but I have watched damn near every Cardinal game for 20 years, and I don’t know what separated his level of effort from many others that are of color. I’ve never seen anybody work as hard on the field-- Eckstein included-- as either Tony Womack or Kolten Wong, but neither of those players ever acquired that label. Dexter Fowler manifests all of it-- his personality, his enthusiasm, his hustle, his intelligence. I’m thrilled that he took this assignment that also requires an understanding and appreciation of social issues.
Only 8% of MLB players are African-American, as of our most recent opening day. That’s down from a peak of 27% in 1975, down to almost the level it was during the era that immediately followed integration, but the number
has held steady since 2012. The signing of Fowler means that the Cardinals immediately look more like the city of St. Louis. The Cardinals have always been a regional team in a small city, but now with a world championship team only hours away in Chicago-- and can you believe this fact? The Cubs are the first World Championship team in the Cardinals division since the 1987 Mets-- a bandwagon packed with jumpers throughout the central part of the country may have just landed on Chicago’s North Side. It's time for the Cardinals to reinforce the appeal to their base-- the city residents. I go to the games. My wife is of African descent. She looks for black players. So do I. At Busch Stadium, you don’t even see black faces on the “cheer” squad. There have been precious few fans of color in the seats too. The only group of attendees that looks like the city is the concession workers-- and it’s been almost
65 years since the team integrated in the dugout. Fowler’s presence cannot hurt. He tweeted
a photo of his daughter (whose mother, Fowler’s wife, is Middle Eastern), wearing that bright red Cardinals hat and expressing her excitement for the family’s new destination (after the Champion Cubs made their unappreciative feelings for her daddy obviously known). That’s the same red hat you see African-Americans wearing all over the city.
It has a national importance when you are representing this particular city, one that is often maligned as decayed and dangerous. On BET’s reality series
Nellyville, set in St. Louis, a member of Cornell “Nelly” Haynes’ family is always dressed in St. Louis Cardinals fan gear. On OWN’s
Welcome to Sweetie Pie's," a reality show about a growing chain of soul food restaurants based in St. Louis, the cap is ubiquitous among the employees. When Michael Brown’s father is seen speaking to the news media, he is inevitably wearing a Cardinals hat. Like these others, he’s not telling the world that he loves baseball. He’s telling us where he’s from, and who his people are. Some MLB teams display the
team name on their cap. The Orioles of Baltimore display the bird of their moniker, the Angels of Los Angeles show the “A” with the halo, the Athletics of Oakland give us a yellow “A,” and the less said about the Cleveland Indians the better, but the Cardinals have never displayed a red bird on their cap. It’s always been the enmeshed letters STL, and now on the field, they’ve got a rainbow roster that holds deeper colors-- talent that is white (Adam Wainwright, Stephen Piscotty, Trevor Rosenthal, Matt Carpenter, Lance Lynn), African-American (Fowler), Dominican (Carlos Martinez, Jhonny Peralta, Alex Reyes), Cuban (Almedys Diaz), Puerto Rican (Yadier Molina), Venezuelan (Miguel Socolovich), Panamanian (Edmundo Sosa), South Korean (Seung Hwan Oh), African-American and Vietnamese (Pham), and Pacific Islander and Chinese (Wong).
Ozzie Smith called Dexter Fowler on the phone upon the announcement of the signing last week. “Not rocket science” is how Ozzie described to ESPN the supposition that more African-American players will lead to more African-American fans. Baseball has got to double-down on their push to get more. In recent years, the economic resources for player development have decisively moved to the Caribbean. The city of St. Louis produced the baseball talent of Ryan Howard, but he is now old enough to be moving into retirement. Football and basketball have ciphered off more young talent in the city than any other factor. Ezekiel Elliott, the man who will easily be named the NFL Rookie of the Year, and can make a case as league MVP as well, is a product of St. Louis’ John Burroughs High School. But football has not been kind to its players, as has been well publicized. Pursue a career in football, and the money you make has a good chance of going to waste on a life of crippling headaches and early dementia. The NFL doesn’t seem to think much of St. Louis, either. You say you aren't 6 feet, 7 inches tall? Then consider baseball and its guaranteed contracts, long tenures, a lifetime of robust physical and mental health-- as athletes should expect for their effort, and no archaic rules that force up-and-coming talent to develop their talent for free on the “plantation” of collegiate exploitation. There are going to be great-looking ladies surrounding every sport, but in baseball, some of them might even be on your team. Well, not currently, but that FOX series
Pitch is so damn realistic that it wouldn’t surprise me.
Ozzie didn’t go so far as to say, but the manager also needs to let Fowler be himself. Spontaneous celebrations need to be permitted, even encouraged, and they have been neither in the Cardinals clubhouse for a long time. The Cardinals have a core group in place, but Fowler instantly becomes part of it, and needs to be. It’s justified by the dollars he’ll be getting, the role he will have manning center field and batting lead-off, but also because of where he comes from and what he represents-- not just his race, but his track record. Forget where he got it and the hype surrounding it, he’s got
a ring, and now five years removed from their most-recent championship, that’s something only three other current Cardinals can boast. Make no mistake, Dexter Fowler is going to be filling a very big hole.
People's History of the Moeller Television Festival (15th year)
Per custom, here are some of the written comments submitted on index cards during the Moeller Television Festival. They are anonymous, sic'd, and without context.
We should have had cucumber soup on our menu.
Special thanks to Jamie- who came all the way from Chicago.
The Newhart Show is known as "Hombre to Hombre" in Spanish speaking countries. Probably.
I thought the fight would be about JoAnna's 80s sweaters.
I think we have just experienced an anti-climax.
I used to enjoy Tom Poston on the Steve Allen Show. Signed, Groucho
I just now learned that Larry Sanders and Garry Shandling are different people.
I never realized Darryl was so foxy.
I enjoyed the origin story of E.B. Farnum from Deadwood.
Stephanie remains my model for womanhood to this day.
Newhart Season 7 (of 8) out on DVD this Tuesday, December 13th.
We forgot to get jalapenos for the tacos- sorry gang
We should add a lard fight to next year's festival.
Did everyone remember to turn off their cell phones and pagers?
Ophelia talked in her sleep last night, said "No, don't eat that."
I enjoyed creator Larry Gelbart's work writing on the Sid Caesar "your show of shows" - Signed, Groucho
Whatever happened with the war?
Thank goodness the whole series turned out to be a dream.
Filmed in B/W= Serious MASH, Klinger in a dress= Funny MASH. I miss funny MASH
I always enjoyed Pierce's impression of me. Signed, Groucho
I remember when the controversy when this episode aired. Viewers were upset that the CBS censors let Radar say "Latrine" on television.
I liked Harry Morgan's work on Dragnet. Signed, Groucho
I feel like they took some of this from Duck Soup. Signed, Groucho
Rob liked the colleagues/college joke.
We do considerable drinking for sitting at home. We do not enough drinking for being at the TransAmerica Holiday Party.
There was a foreshadow of Buster's seal attack on the newscast in the background of one scene.
I only write a bunch of comments when I'm bored.
I forgot how much I love this show.
I don't know any of these people. Signed, Groucho
I don't find the police brutality jokes funny. Why can't Arrested Development take itself more serious like MASH?
Silly Michael! There's always money in the banana stand.
Maebe just portrayed Alexander Hamilton on Drunk History.
#Analrapist
I would give this show 6 stars- Good pick Alex. Signed Groucho
This show reminds me of the 70s show Soap, but with more disfunction
William McCready has 70s hair... 1870s hair
First TV Festival Field Trip- let's go down to the real CR Gazette offices
Did everyone see Radar in the Cherry Sisters audience?
Only festival episode ever scheduled before it aired.
Do you know Steve Dahl, Jamie? Are you Steve Dahl?
The White Sox haven't had that big of a crowd at a game since. Go Cubs. Signed, Groucho who roots for the Northsiders
The Moellers in the room are all sportin' tv tshirts. This feels official :)
The real Steve Dahl looks more like Patton Oswalt than Colin Hanks
The Cherry Sisters had to walk 50 miles to watch their episode of Drunk History on TV.
Jamie works at WLUP and Steve Dahl works in the building too-- That's why he picked this episode. Signed, Groucho
Funny story about Bob Odenkirk. I work in marketing and our ad agency pitched us an idea with Bob because some of them had worked with him before. It was to be based on his Better Call Saul character, so I supported it. Once it was agreed upon the idea the suits decided to keep the idea, but not use Bob Odenkirk because he was too expensive. LOL
Is there something creepy about Bob Odenkirk toasting "to teenagers"?
I wake up every morning to "You Should be Dancing" by the Bee Gees. It's invigorating.
Everyone should watch Jenny Slate's video "Marcel the Shell."
I saw the Cherry Sisters at the Hammerstein Theater. Absolutely terrible. Signed, Groucho
Chico fucked three of the five Cherry Sisters. Signed, Groucho
When she said "brushing the pig or whatever" it was more Iowa-bashing.
My next halloween costume will be "New York Hot Dog Man"
I wonder what the judge decided about the libel... They totally left us hanging.
Letterman used to use a Groucho line when he had civilian guests: "I'd love to keep talking with you all day, but now it's time to play our game."
Weird. I almost brought my ventriloquist dummy of talent agent Nicky Steward.
I'm more of a '56 DeSoto kind of guy.
White people. Nuff said.
Can you make juice out of rice like you can corn?
Go see your local DeSoto dealer and tell 'em Groucho sent you. Signed, Groucho
His theme song that plays is "Lydia the Tattooed Lady."
Regarding the audience's 1950's haircuts-- those are haircuts you could set your watch by!
Nicky finally got Groucho a youthful audience. Here we are enjoying him in 2016!
Great pick Groucho, but that DeSoto product placement is a little obvious.
I'm glad no one talked through the commercials.
Ever wonder where people like those contestants are now, or when they died? What would their families think that we're sitting here in Iowa watching it 60 years later?
Did Groucho ever utter the cigar line?
When buying a car, I always tell the salesman my height, and ask for a car that's "lower than I am."
After watching this, I have fully forgiven myself for being a dork in 1990.
An amazing special to get all those stars together to honor Lola Folana's last year in show business.
Everyone should hear Katya Moeller play "Summertime" on the violin.
"Mr. Bojangles" was a song originally written and performed by country artist Jerry Jeff Walker. For more info on Jerry Jeff, consult your public library.
Does sniffing a sharpie get you high? I was flying so high when Goldie Hawn was singing "True Colors."
I never knew Tony Danza was a triple threat. Actor, boxer, and dancer. Well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
Richard Pryor would have been able to read the teleprompter if he was wearing Ella Fitzgerald's glasses.
What brand VCR and VHS tape was used in the Moeller household? This tape quality is quite good for nearly 27 years old!
You need a TV Festival gift shop so I can buy a coffee mug that says "I made it thru Goldie Hawn's performance."
I would watch a 3 hour special honoring Gregory Peck, Dean Martin and Ella Fitzgerald's ginormous eyeglasses.
Dead celebrity count on this special: Dead 11, Still Living 17.
I know all these people. Signed, Groucho
It's hard to watch Whitney Houston and not wonder, "How high do you think she is?"
Whitney Houston looks like she's wearing a snuggie.
My vote for funniest performer of all time is a tie between Bob Hope and Bob Hope's cue card guy.
I keep getting the urge to clap.
The Sammy Davis appearance on Archie Bunker was aired at TV Fest 6.
Imagine how great Sammy Davis would have looked in skinny jeans.
Royce weighs more than Sammy did here.
I feel like Stevie Wonder was attempting one last save of Sammy.
Sammy inspired so many in so many ways. For some his dancing, for some his singing, his quick draw, for me it's this pinkie ring that will never again leave my finger.
Bill Cosby needed those glasses to make sure he was getting the dosage right backstage.
Anybody need me to sign a slip to get class credit?
Martin Freeman now. There are a surprising number of Fargo actors today. Including Aaron's t-shirt.
Ricky Gervais would be kicked out of tv festival for talking.
Stephen Merchant stalking photo
No photo
It's unbelievable how many American series took this "unseen documentarian" concept. Modern Family is still doing it.
This was so short.
All in the Family is also based on a British show, Til Death Do Us Part, but in the British version, Meathead is called Fish&Chips
Was this how the show ended? They never got out of the freezer?
Culturally-significant
Archie's chair is in the Smithsonian.
Archie just got nominated as the president's chief of staff.
Many of the elements are in the film- the female officer, the black witness, the lawyer with possible dementia, and the tape recorder.
Ophelia blues story
Open your eyes. Now you'll find your color blind Racial
The student who says he's Dutch is John Lithgow's son
French Stewart has disappeared.
Pizza upstairs
Donald Trump eats borscht and he likes it!
Man, you gotta watch these guys all the time. For a second, I thought the security state was going to let Hillary Clinton lose the election, but they still have a life. We now have “anonymous” sources from within the CIA stating what that agency purportedly believes to a friendly mouthpiece, the Washington Post. Without any accompanying evidence, this source, whose name and political allegiance we know not, alleges that the Russian Federation was not only behind the hack of the DNC and John Podesta emails, but that he or she knows that the motive of such was to have Donald Trump elected president.
Based on that Post article, which appeared on Friday, a group of ten electors in the Electoral College now want to see official intelligence before they cast their committed votes to Donald Trump in a week. In their open letter, the electors cited Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, preventing a “desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” Great choice! Hamilton is hotter right now than the Gilmore Girls revival! Hillary Clinton has also interrupted her physical and metaphorical walk in the woods to re-engage the electoral process. Her campaign manager, Podesta, whose hacked emails revealed that he believes Africans, Muslims, and “Gypsies” are “never-do-wells” that drain Western society, says he supports the electors’ efforts to seek more information. Julian Assange, whose hacktivists released the DNC and Podesta emails, claims that his source came from within the U.S. intelligence community.
Mike Morell, the former chief of the CIA and a man who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in the New York Times earlier this year, yesterday equated the prospect of a foreign government tampering with the U.S. election to the “political equivalent of 9/11.” While reminding everyone that still no evidence has been presented to us that Russia has indeed tampered with our election, Morell’s comparison is undeniably true in theory. He didn’t technically call it another 9/11, either, which would be a little tacky. He said it was the
political equivalent of 9/11, and yes, probably. On a related note, the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series is the
St. Louis Cardinals equivalent of 9/11.
Donald Trump is not playing nice with the surveillance state. He responded to this Washington Post ad placement by saying he won’t take intelligence briefings and he doesn’t need them. Yes, exactly. Of course, he
does need them, but I’m perversely glad that somebody in our Oval Office, or destined for it, has seen it important to remind our shadow government that they serve for the good of the people. I hope this isn’t one of those Kerry Washington
Scandal deals where the president tries to rein in the B613 super spy agency and, in retaliation, the president’s teenage son winds up getting whacked by the man that will eventually become the gay lover of the president’s chief of staff, a whack ordered by the father of the president's mistress. But there are parallels.
Russia’s meddling in our election (again, no evidence of this) is especially tragic because the United States has never put its hands on the election of any other country. Well, there was the CIA-manned assassination of Chile’s democratically-elected Socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973. To name some of a few more, there were several assassination attempts on the life of democratically-elected Hugo Chavez in Venezuela during the Bush II regime, and possibly hundreds of attempts on the life of Fidel Castro between 1959 and last month. Even under Senator Hillary Clinton and Clinton's state department, we had attempts to rig elections in the region claimed by
the Palestinian Authority, and an attempted coup in
Honduras. The CIA has even been involved in influencing domestic politics. It's been illegally spying on citizens since 1959, on student radicals, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, and of course a group of agents famously broke into the Watergate Hotel to steal Democratic Party campaign documents in 1972.
Democrats should be focusing their attention on why such a low percentage of working Americans supported their candidate at the ballot a month ago, but instead, they’ve latched onto this story. All of the people screaming in November for an explanation from FBI director James Comey on why he was re-opening an investigation into Clinton’s email scandal just before Election Day should now certainly fall in line behind a new drive to have President Obama declassify this hard evidence that supposedly links Russia and Vladimir Putin to the Clinton leaks-- and that also reveals the motivation. I’m an American that doesn’t trust organizations that keep secrets professionally and systematically, and I’m tired of this inference that I’m a Trump supporter and/or a Soviet agent if I say I want to see proof. And while Obama is opening items to the sunlight, a little reminder to him that it’s December 12th of his eighth and final year in office and we’re still waiting on pardons for Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. If we don’t get that evidence soon of the Kremlin’s tampering in our election, a patriot in the same vein of Manning or Snowden is liable to leak it instead.
MTF XV-- The Program
Moeller TV Festival 15 came off hitch-less on Saturday. Here's the annual publication of the greetings from the festival program....
I've written sixteen of these festival greetings. No wonder I've been staring at a white screen all afternoon. I turn on the television—maybe the world's truest source of spiritual and creative inspiration—for ideas, and it's nothing but news, cooking shows, a few animated kids’ programs, dull movies, and duller sitcoms that have never made the cut at a Moeller Television Festival.
I've been procrastinating so much, doing everything but write this. I raked some leaves today and folded laundry. I've written all my comment box cards for the next five festivals. I washed dishes. I wrote a murder-mystery movie script about a television festival held at the White House, where the murderer hides the knife in a comment box and flees from the Lincoln Bedroom through a trapdoor into the secret Taft Pantry (he weighed 400 pounds, folks). I couldn't come up with an ending, not knowing which member of the president's transition team to make not the murderer. I checked emails, then Facebook. You know those political articles that your friends share? I was so bored I even read some of them—even those pretentious "open letters" that people write and then, oddly, publish.
I called Christopher (or Chris, as I knew him when we were growing up—I found out he was Christopher when we got our diplomas), but he didn't answer. Couldn't even leave him a message. He told me last week his answering machine chewed up the cassette tape. Have you ever Googled "writing TV Festival greetings"? Besides providing links to copycat festivals in Edinburgh and Monte Carlo, there's nothing. I even called some of my ex-students from when I taught a community college television festival class, hoping for maybe some “the student is now the teacher” inspiration, but that didn't get anywhere. Turns out that a few of my former students had enlisted in the army and were busy this time of year fighting the war on Christmas. And you know how young people are these days. Half the kids told me they don't even watch TV anymore, favoring gaming instead, and the other half had gotten pretty good jobs, mostly as professional protestors.
So I won't even write an introduction, just a few words instead from the heart. I hope you enjoy this year's festival, all the food and drink, the cramped quarters, and the lap-sitting. The Sammy Davis Jr. thing is really cool and unique, and the All in the Family and M*A*S*H episodes are knockouts. Welcome, and know we love you now and for all time.
Aaron Moeller
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To this day, Katie Holmes won’t return my calls.
Over a period of several months, about nine years ago, she and I were quite close. Katie and Tom would come over to the house and the four of us would play gin rummy nearly until our fingers bled. We would pop some popcorn, and for background entertainment, Tom would bring along a DVD of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The card playing action would pause every time Mickey Rooney came on the screen during that picture. Tom would just laugh himself sick over Rooney’s character “Mr. Yunioshi,” a hilarious depiction of what Asian men were like in the 1960s. Tom would jump up and down on Anne’s slip covers and offer his own characterization of Yunioshi, and before any playing could resume, the rest of us were expected to coax him “back to being Tom” with our laughter and our applause.
Then came the nasty break-up of our little couples club. Anne is one of the Latter-Day Saints, as you know from the emails, and we had the Cruises stop over with their little Suri so that we could baptize the girl into the faith. I guess it’s easier to baptize non-Mormons during their life, rather than after. Posthumously baptizing the Holocaust victims, for example, was a logistical nightmare for the church, even with numbers tattooed on their arms. “Better to give with warm hands than with cold,” Anne says.
A small complication arose,however. Anne didn’t think it important to tell Tom and Katie about our sectarian motivation prior to their arrival. Tom has no sooner stepped into the foyer when he sees the prayer pajamas and he comes completely unglued, nearly stepping out of his lifts in a grasp for my jugular. I’m like, “Ease up, Goose. Just think of it as a kind of supplemental insurance policy on her immortality.” (I don’t know if you know anything about Scientology, but the closest thing I can think to compare it to is 4-H.) Now there is literally steam coming out of Tom’s ears. Am I using that word right? “Literally?” It’s literally coming out of his ears. They dart for the door and peel out of the driveway and back down Mulholland just as Will and Jada are arriving, confused to the gills, naturally.
Fast forward to 2013. The Cruise/Holmeses have divorced, the cleaning crew at Gold Base is all atwitter about some new tenderfoot on Tom’s arm, Katie is back under the sway of Rome, Suri is an Operating Thetan on the fourth level—the entire universe being slowly revealed to her, and I’m getting E-meter-audited as if I was carrying Xenu’s love child. I make tax-exempt contributions up the butt, yet they just won’t cut me a break—and I’m not even a member of the church. Meanwhile, I haven’t landed a legitimate part in all in this time, except for my one-week appearance, and early elimination, from the reality competition series Undercover Congressman. On principle, I refuse to audition for roles—that’s an exercise in debasement I left behind in the ‘90s—but I also refuse to be industry-blackballed by a two-faced midget that, after all this time, still refuses to come out of the closet… as a Trump/Pence voter. That’s why I’ve decided to write the book (from which these passages are excerpted), and to do the exclusive television interview with Wendy Williams during one of her “Hot Topics” segments.
Anne and I have since divorced as well. I now find myself talking to a psychiatrist three days out of the week, and during the other four, sitting in auditing sessions where I’m renouncing psychotherapy as a barbaric affront to the Galactic Confederacy. Xenu help me if either of these advisers ever finds out about the other.
Jesus Christ, 15 years of this shit,
Chris Moeller
Engaging
It’s amusing how so many liberals in the Democratic Party will chastise a person for choosing not to vote, but now they say that they’re going to refuse “dialogue” with Donald Trump and his supporters.
Let me lay a different perspective on this for you, as a way of explaining why this infuriates me. The dangers that many of you see, as previously unprecedented, in a “President Trump”-- the authoritarianism, the endangerment of lives through bad public policy, the empowerment of violence, the normalization of the military and security state, the tolerance of gangster economics-- they are the same dangers those of us in the Green Party have been seeing in the Democratic Party for years. So when you’re saying you won’t even engage these people, you need to ditch the fit, and come in off the ledge. Neither the Green Party nor the Democratic Party can now legitimately claim to be a “national” party, but at least the Greens have experience at not being one.
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Jill Stein makes me feel about an inch taller than I really am. She’s still in there fighting-- successfully, I'll add-- for recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and she’s not doing it to “flip the vote,” or for personal or partisan reasons. She’s doing it to make sure that all votes cast were counted, and that we have the oversight and integrity of our elections that many Americans falsely assume we have. The American people are demanding fair elections, as evidenced by the financial contributions she's getting, yet one major party is panic-stricken over the idea of a recount, and the other can’t be bothered. Again, your vote matters not one hoot to those two parties if there’s even a hint that the media might misreport the motive.
Stein was also the only presidential candidate on the general election ballot, and the first candidate, period, to show up in North Dakota on behalf of the brave men and women of Standing Rock, and now the Army Corps of Engineers has ordered that the Indian land be protected and the Dakota Access pipeline re-directed-- hopefully into oblivion. That’s the shit we do in the Green Party in between casting our wasted votes. Stein has handled herself admirably post-election, as she did during her campaign, and I think she’s twice the woman Hillary Clinton is or ever was.
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Bring on Joe Biden in 2020! That's what we need-- fresh blood.
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Interesting dynamics
here that deserve news coverage.
