Year: 2014

I had a decimal place wrong in the “Four(ty Thousand) Dead Americans“ post that went out by email Friday.

The estimate is that, pre-Obamacare, not a dozen (as I initially posted) but TEN dozen American lives were lost each day for lack of access to affordable health insurance.

Republicans proudly fought to prevent — and then repeal — Obamacare, but to their dismay, Obamacare seems to be working.  So — as Friday’s link to the Massachusetts experience shows — at least some of those tens of dozens a day will not die.

Having lost the fight to keep us all from having access to affordable health care (at the expense of affluent investors asked to share 3.8%  more of their dividends and capital gains, though still not as much as they were paying under Ronald Reagan), now the Republican goals are to keep from extending Medicaid in as many states as they can . . . to keep from giving the working poor a minimum wage raise . . . and to make certain we don’t put the unemployed to work repairing our crumbling infrastructure.

Oh!  And to get to the bottom of the Benghazi talking points.

Because — like the Clintons’ failed $30,000 investment in a Whitewater land deal (thirty thousand dollars!) and Al Gore’s fundraising calls from a government-owned telephone line (calls that cost three cents a minute!) and Barack Obama’s birth certificate (Fox News is still not persuaded!)  — that’s what truly matters.

As the New Yorker‘s Andy Borowitz headlined it Friday:  Poll: Millions of Americans Who Need Jobs Want Congress to Get to Bottom of This Benghazi Thing First.

#

Not everyone sees it my way.

Steve N.: “Loyalty can be blinding.  Unfortunately, yours is keeping you from seeing the troubles with the current administration.  If not for Fox, the station that you and so many liberals bash, we wouldn’t be finding out some of the stuff that is just now coming out.  And finally other news outlets are getting on board.  It’s too bad it took so long for them to do actual news reporting.  Up to now many of our so called ‘news’ outlets have been cheerleaders for the Democrat party.  Well, let’s hope that we get more reporting and less cheerleading.”

☞ Remarkable how differently bright people of good will can see the world.  Like the 70% of those who voted to reelect Bush who believed Iraq had a hand in attacking us on 9/11.  Simply not true, but don’t tell them.

Steve N. offers just one example of “stuff that’s just  now coming out thanks to Fox” — an MSNBC clip on the Beghazi talking points and the continued allegation that, in the early days after Benghazi, the administration tried to spin the tragedy away from terrorism.

Yet, if you watch that clip, offered to show how awful this administration really is . . . (never mind that the stock market and corporate profits are at record highs; the deficit has been cut two thirds and the housing market stabilized; GM is alive and Bin Laden is dead; 320 million of us no longer have to worry about losing health care coverage because we have. or might develop, a pre-existing condition; we’ve ended two wars and avoided two more even as Syria appears to be 92% done disposing of its chemical weapons) . . . I don’t think you’ll see anyone joining the Fox News bandwagon.

In fact, the suggestion is made that — far from spinning things to start a disastrous war, as the prior administration did so successfully (where, asks reader Noah Stern, is Darrell Issa’s outrage over that?) — one goal of the Benghazi talking points may have been to tamp down a possible explosion of conflict in a volatile region.

Remember that moment in the second presidential debate where Mitt Romney had his triumphant Benghazi “gotcha” moment over this?  And then Candy Crowley (and the transcript) noted that Mitt actually had it wrong?  This strikes me as similar.  People are trying so hard to find proof, in the Benghazi talking points, that this Kenyan (except he was born in Hawaii), Muslim (except he’s not), Marxist (tagged by some “Republican lite”) who pals around with terrorists (except that, no, actually, he kills them) is doing a rotten job.

Even “60 Minutes” got Benghazi badly wrong and had to apologize.

And Fox?  Fox would be comical if it hadn’t done such damage stoking the flames of science-denying, government-bashing resentment and frustration.

I know Steve N. to be well-motivated and at least somewhat open-minded.  I remain hopeful that he — and that uncle of yours — will come around yet.

They will all be welcome, whether as Democrats, Independents, or moderate Republicans.

But this far-right stuff that’s come to control the Republican Party and paralyze Congress?  Shutting down the government rather than pay the bills it itself racked up?  Filibustering a rise in the minimum wage?  Blocking a vote on universal background checks that 90% of the people — and 74% of NRA members! — favor?  Refusing a vote on the immigration bill the Senate has passed and the President is eager to sign?

I take your time addressing Steve N.’s email not, obviously, because there’s anything unique about it, but for just the opposite reason: so many people think this way, because they watch Fox News.

They might want someone from Harvard or Yale performing their brain surgery or defending them in a lawsuit. But they sure wouldn’t want some elitist running the country.  It’s all about Joe the Plumber and Cliven Bundy (a hero to Fox until he got “the Negro” part of it).

And the Koch brothers are laughing all the way to the bank.

BOREF

This press release suggests that serious people continue to take our effort seriously.  Granted, it’s taking forever — WheelTug grandparent Borealis is, if nothing else, the perfect stock for those who plan to live forever.  But who knows?  Television took more than 20 years to commercialize, too, but it caught on.  WheelTug might, too.

THE INTERNET

How could anything with John Hodgman and Al Franken not be amusing? This video explains “net neutrality” in a way that might resonate with those of us who did not get it in the past.  A good weekend “watch.”

FOUR(TY THOUSAND) DEAD AMERICANS

As the Republicans launch their fifth Congressional investigation into Benghazi and the talking points attendant thereto . . . with Lindsay Graham and the others constantly talking about four dead Americans as though they would do anything to save American lives (short of upping the appropriation for diplomatic security which might have saved those) . . . it should be noted that in fighting so hard to prevent, and then voting 52 times to repeal, access to affordable health care, they were ignoring forty thousand dead Americans — per year.  Roughly ten dozen a day, whom a 2009 study estimated were perishing for lack of health insurance coverage.

Now comes this study crediting Romneycare — which basically IS Obamacare — with saving about 300 lives a year in Massachusetts alone.  Three hundred whom Mitt and the Republican Party now regret having given access to health care.

It is bizarre.  It is unChristian.  And it is simply incorrect to assert that they do want everyone to have access to health care — just in some better way — because when they controlled the White House and both branches of Congress from 2000-2006, they proposed nothing.  Except for Mitt, in Massachusetts, whose conservative Heritage Foundation approach they now all decry.

Is it possible that when Republicans say something with enormous certitude, in lockstep, dripping with ridicule . . . they could be wrong?

In 1993, President Clinton’s first budget got not a single Republican vote in the House or the Senate.  Not one.  Because — said Republican House whip Dick Armey — “The impact on job creation is going to be devastating.”  (More than 11 million jobs were created in each of bill Clinton’s two terms — nearly 23 million in all, more than six times as many as under all three Bush terms combined.)  And because — said former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich — “The tax increase will…lead to a recession…and will actually increase the deficit.”  (There was no recession and the long rise in our Debt as a share of GDP begun by Ronald Reagan in 1981 was finally reversed.  Until, that is, the Republicans regained control.)

Said former Republican Senate Finance Committee Chair Bob Packwood:  “I will make you this bet. I am willing to risk the mortgage on it…the deficit will be up; unemployment will be up; in my judgment, inflation will be up.”  (Wrong, wrong, and wrong.)

Said Republican Senate Banking Committee Chair Phil Gramm: “The deficit four years from today will be higher than it is today, not lower.” (Nope.)

The only one who got it right — at least partially — was former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.  “Republicans,” he said, “would take America in a different direction.”  (And so they did, once Clinton left office and they regained control.  Job creation stagnated even as taxes for the rich were slashed and deficits went back up through the roof.)

So do you know what?  Their absolute certainty that Obamacare will destroy America (or that something  in the drafting of the initial talking points on Benghazi  was worth convening five Congressional committees to investigate) — all this may be no more valid than was their unanimous vocal certainty over the 1993 budget.

Republicans may want 320 million Americans to have to start worrying about pre-existing conditions again, but most Americans would probably rather not.  Republicans may long for the days when health insurance policies included lifetime caps on benefits, but most Americans probably don’t.  Republicans may hate that the Koch brothers, and the rest of us fortunate enough to have lots of investment income, have to share an extra 3.8% of it to fund preventive care and to close the prescription drug doughnut hole and to provide subsidies for those who can’t afford full fare — but most Americans — while they respect and applaud the talents and contributions of the wealthy — probably don’t.  Especially when they are told that these new higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains are still lower than they were when Ronald Reagan left office.

Republicans may be certain Obamacare will fail, just as they were certain Clinton’s budget would doom the economy.  But Obamacare is succeeding, just as Clinton’s budget did.  And it may wind up saving tens of thousands of American lives a year, even as it restrains the growth in health care costs, and that’s not nothing.

Here are links to the NYC Department of Education most recent evaluations for those Success Academy public schools in operation long enough to have been tested:  Harlem 1 (96.5% minority, rated: A); Harlem 2 (97.2% minority, rated: A); Harlem 3 (95.3% minority, rated A); Harlem 4 (92.8% minority, rated A); Harlem 5 (95.7% minority, rated A); Bronx 1 (95.7% minority, rated A); Bronx 2 (97.5% minority, rated A).

At their core, what these reports represent are at-risk youngsters receiving a foundation of skills and self-confidence that will lead to productive lives, breaking the cycle of poverty and despair that too often begets hopelessness, teen pregnancy, dependency, crime and incarceration.

So it’s a big deal, I think, to be encouraged — and poached from wherever its methods can prove helpful to other public schools.

As mentioned earlier in the week, those methods are offered for $20.23 in Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School.  A DVD of 21 revealing video clips comes bundled with the book.  As I said Monday: just look at the faces!

BOREALIS

You think you’re ready for this show to get on the road.  In Biblical terms, we are now closing in on the halfway mark of my ancestors’ wandering in the desert.  Right?  Forty years?  We’re now at fifteen.  And — as back then — there is no assurance we’ll ever get anywhere. Still, our lottery ticket is worthy of note.  Witness this squib in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

Ultra Electronics Holdings PLC . . . announces that it has acquired ICE Corporation Inc (“ICE”) based in Manhattan, Kansas for an initial cash consideration of $8.6m. Ultra has acquired ICE from private investors, which includes the original founder. All of the management team will stay with the business. ICE designs, develops, manufactures and supports aerospace products including, motor control electronics, electrothermal ice protection controllers, pneumatic valve controls and engine control interface units. ICE customers include Parker Hannifin Corporation, Cessna Aircraft Company and Meggitt. The acquisition of ICE will be financed using Ultra’s existing facilities and will be fully earnings accretive in 2015. Additional payments of up to $3m will be made subject to certification of the new WheelTug electric taxi system for which ICE provides essential parts.  ICE, which has 50 employees, will continue to operate from its existing facilities as a bolt-in acquisition to Ultra’s Controls business within Ultra’s Aircraft & Vehicle Systems Division. Rakesh Sharma, Chief Executive of Ultra, commented: “I am pleased that we have been able to bring ICE into the Group as a part of Controls. This acquisition further extends Ultra’s capabilities in the aerospace sector and will support planned growth in the US market.”

Away BOREF and its partners toil, as inch by inch they — maybe — get someplace.

SUCCESS – PART 3

Stephen:  “The Success Academy story is wonderful to read, but critics claim cherry-picking of students, high attrition rates of students and teachers.”

☞ They do.  That link, for one, claims that Success Academy schools kick out 50% of their students, to be left only with the better ones.  And faults them for highlighting the results of just one of their 22 schools.

But Success points out that the one school they highlighted was the one school the mayor proposed to close — so it made sense to focus on it.  And Success says it absolutely does not kick out students (with rare disciplinary exceptions) — retaining over 90%, versus 80% for traditional public schools.  In the subset of “special needs” kids, they claim over 88 percent retention vs less than 80% for the traditional public schools.

Another criticism: that the highlighted school did not have “the best 5th grade in the state.”  Success says it did, because 96% of its students passed the New York State math test (got a 3 or 4, which were the passing grades).  This is the metric the state uses.  Its critic used a metric of her own that weights the 3’s and 4’s separately — on which basis some other schools did better.

“Overall,” says one Success Academy enthusiast, “our schools had 83% of students pass in math versus 8% for our co-located schools (where the kids would go otherwise) and 58% in English, also versus 8 percent.”  Why is that bad?

Murdoch Matthew:  “Sorry to see you backing the money people in promoting the misnamed Success Charter Schools.  With their million-dollar advertising campaign, the excessive salaries, and the hedge-fund profits, seems to me that Success is about taking public money intended for schools and diverting it into private pockets.  See this Moyers report, which references this Department of Education report (‘A new report released today reveals that fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money.’)  There are good charter schools — they are operated to educate, not to produce profit for investors.”

☞ Fraudulent charters should be shut immediately, with their perpetrators indicted.  Obviously.  And the numerous well-intended but not particularly successful charters deserve no disproportionate share of resources, if kept open at all.

But the terrific ones producing amazing results?  In the case of the 22 Success Academy schools, they are non-profit and have not been getting more from the city per pupil than the traditional public schools.  Some wealthy folks are involved — it’s true — but as donors, giving millions to help set launch the schools and cover their losses as they grow to scale.  (New enterprises of any kind require time to reach break even.)  These donors have no ownership stake and will never see a dime back, let alone a profit.  Kind of like 19th Century steel baron Andrew Carnegie, who built 2,509 public libraries.

Good, not bad.

Fred Campbell:  “Wow, a Republican could have written your column yesterday.  I’ve never heard a national Democrat espouse such support for charter schools because they are so vehemently opposed by the teachers’ unions.”

☞ Lots of Democrats support charters — President Bill Clinton, for example, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Perhaps you missed President Obama’s 2013 National Charter Schools Proclamation last year.  In part:

America’s success in the 21st century depends on what we do today to reignite the true engine of our economic growth: a thriving middle class. Achieving that vision means making sure our education system provides ladders of opportunity for our sons and daughters. . . . Charter schools play an important role in meeting that obligation. These learning laboratories give educators the chance to try new models and methods that can encourage excellence in the classroom and prepare more of our children for college and careers. In return for this flexibility, we should expect high standards and accountability, and make tough decisions to close charter schools that are underperforming and not improving. But where charter schools demonstrate success and exceed expectations, we should share what they learn with other public schools and replicate those that produce dramatic results. Many charter schools choose to locate in communities with few high-quality educational options, making them an important partner in widening the circle of opportunity for students who need it most. . . . I commend our Nation’s charter schools, teachers, and administrators, and I call on States and communities to support charter schools and the students they serve.

The truth is, I had missed that proclamation, too — and didn’t even know, when I wrote yesterday’s post, that we are smack dab in the middle of this year’s National Charter School Week!  As proclaimed by the President again last Friday.

John Leeds:  “Success??  Not surprised but disappointed you use numbers speciously to support your argument.  It makes a HUGE difference which 20% of the parents are not applying.  About 90% of the problems of a school are caused by 10% of the student population.  And I know that from direct experience.  And although I teach in the suburbs, I know teachers that switched into inner-city NYC public schools from the suburbs and they say the same.  As for the cost per pupil?  The cost per pupil is dependent on two main costs — upkeep of the building and teacher salary.  The charters get the building for free and so the cost per pupil is zero.  The public schools have to include the building expenses in the cost per pupil.  Charter schools in NYC are notorious for hiring young teachers and burning them out before they leave for a different career.  There are few if any career teachers who will be higher on the salary scale and the younger teachers don’t have to pace themselves because they tend to leave in 1-3 years.  Did you ever watch the Jon Stewart videos — here and here — with Arne Duncan?  While you were quoting test stats, it would have been fair and balanced of you to link to those so people understand just what standardized testing means in public education.”

☞ Well, I did watch the Jon Stewart clips.  I thought it was a good discussion.

I’m no expert, but it seems to me that if we’ve found a way to do a great job for 80% of disadvantaged inner city kids, and at less than we’re spending per pupil city-wide, who cares what the building maintenance costs?  It will be returned to the taxpayers 100-fold over the child’s adult lifetime in higher tax revenue and lower safety-net and correctional-system expenditures.  And the cycle of poverty will be broken, so the benefits extend more than one lifetime.  (It’s also just the right thing to do morally.)

As for the 20% of Harlem parents who didn’t enter the Success Academy lottery, note, first, that, if I remember this right, half of them entered  some charter-school lottery (i.e., 90% entered one or more).  And it’s just possible not all the 10% who failed to enter a lottery were horrible parents with learning-disabled children.  Some may have had their kids in parochial school . . . or may have been horrible parents whose kids were nonetheless fully able to learn).

And I’d ask you this:  if we could get 80% or 90% (or 95%?) of all disadvantaged kids successfully educated for about what we currently spend to get terrible results, would that be bad?

We’d still have the huge challenge of the other 5% or 10% — and should do all we can to meet that challenge.  But doing a great job for 80% or 90% or 95% of the kids should surely count for something.

If we can find a formula that really works, or really works for some kids, we should apply it, at least for those kids.  Who cares what it costs?

Not all charter schools deserve support — especially when they cherry pick the best students, leaving the public school system to do the heavy lifting.  But those that take all comers — and succeed?  It is a joyful thing — just as are the many traditional public schools that do really well.

In Harlem, something like 90% of all the parents join charter school lotteries, hoping their kids will get in.  Fully 80% join the lottery specifically for the Success Academy charters.  So I guess you could say there’s a little self-selection going on — the parents who fail to enter the lotteries may not be the most engaged parents in the neighborhood — but everyone is welcome to apply and 80% do.  From there on, selection is random.

But the results sure are not.

Success Academy has grown since 2006 from a single school to 22 schools enrolling 6,700 scholars — 100% of whom passed the 2013 state science exam.  Their schools rank in the top 1% of all New York schools in math, with 82% of scholars passing the 2013 state exam.  “Success Academy Bronx 2,” as it’s known, ranked #3 out of 3,528 New York State schools in math, scoring as the top non-selective school in the state (i.e., among schools that take all comers).  Fifth graders from “Success Academy Harlem 4” ranked #1 out of 2,254 schools in New York State in math.

And one of the Success schools’ debate teams, I’m told, beat the Dalton debate team.  Dalton (tuition: $40,000 or so) is one of the finest private schools in New York.  Alumni include Gloria Vanderbilt’s son Anderson Cooper and legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn’s son, Wallace.

So the metrics are great.  But forget that — just look at the faces!  Ninety-seconds guaranteed to brighten your day.

Charters are controversial because there is the important concern that they not drain resources from the rest of our public schools. (Charters are public schools, too, but with more autonomy.)  But Success Academy has been getting only 80% as much per pupil as the city average, so that concern wouldn’t seem to apply.  If you can do a great job for thousands of randomly selected kids for just 80% as much as is spent on kids citywide, how can that be bad?

(For now, millions in supplemental start-up funds have come from wealthy donors.  But once Success Academy gets up to scale, with enough schools and students to spread the fixed administrative costs adequately, the public money it receives should suffice.   Until then — hurrah for the generous donors.)

And this isn’t like Coca Cola, that guards it’s secret formula.  Success Academy is a not-for-profit that says it would love nothing more than to have everyone steal its formula (or whatever parts others may find useful).  It’s all here: Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School.  Or a chunk of it, anyway.

Consider the comment of an Amazon reviewer who gave the book just two stars out of five (emphasis added):

Some of the strategies here are wonderful and easy to implement. For example, getting parents to sign a “contract” that they will participate in their kids’ education in certain ways. Some of the strategies here are excellent and somewhat more difficult to implement. For example, setting high expectations for academic achievement. What precisely is this and how is it measured? Big questions! Or having a commitment to continuing teacher education. What parts of this education are necessary and what part of this education are overly bureaucratic, time-wasting, and one-size-fits-all? Also big questions. And this book does attempt to grapple with these sorts of issues in an intelligent manner.

But. This book is distasteful in that it advocates for a specific “brand” of education by disparaging public education in general. It does so with a wide brush and in a tone which I can only call snotty. I’m all for storming the battlements against corruption and complacency. However, while I believe in the core concepts put forward by these educators, I feel that this book is weakened by its brazen promotion of the the sort of charter school that is being sold by The Success Charter Network. This weakens this book’s authority and cheapens some of the educational concepts it endorses.

Let’s assume that’s right.  (I haven’t read it.)  No one likes snotty.  Maybe the tone could be improved for a second edition.  But is that the part that really matters?  Or is it the “excellent strategies” that matter?

Wherever you come out on this, you will love the faces and the energy and the bright futures of those itty-bitty Harlem scholars.

AOL / YAHOO

Those who get this column emailed to their AOL or Yahoo accounts each morning may have noticed it recently stopped coming.  I think we’ve fixed that.  Here are the ones you missed:   Two Ends of the Spectrum, Keystone, Hannity v Stewart, Magic, Survived By His Wife, Charles Dickens: Twitter Pioneer.

DAKOTA 38

This is a film about the Dakota nation.  It resonates on so many levels.  Watch the first few minutes.  You may find yourself watching the whole thing.

FRUCTOSE IS POISON

We Americans each eat, on average, 141 pounds of sugar each year.  It is not good for us.  If you didn’t get a chance the last time I posted it, watch the first few minutes of this.  You may find yourself watching the whole thing.

Have a great weekend.

[Housekeeping:  For those of you who get this by email each morning, you may have noticed it stopped coming.  Apparently, AOL and Yahoo are blocking emails sent from an AOL or Yahoo email address by another service on the sender’s behalf (i.e., MailChimp sending my column from myvastfortune@aol.com).  I think we may have fixed it.  We’ll see.  But for me-mail, myvastfortune@aol.com is still the one to use.]

CISG

Suggested here at $5.40 in December, it ran up past $9 for a few minutes but dropped back as low as $6.22 yesterday.  If you missed it the first time, this might be a second chance to get in — with money you can truly afford to lose.  My friend continues to think it’s worth two or three times this price.  I bought a bit more yesterday.

YOU

I have the best readers.  I know a lot of your names by now, but often have no clue who you are — until something sparks an exchange.  Like this one from Jim Burt yesterday.  (Who?)

Jim Burt:  “Thanks for the promo for Bryan Cranston’s ‘LBJ.’  Setting aside Vietnam, which certainly had a formative experience on my own life, LBJ was one of the five greatest presidents in American history.  He certainly leaves ‘Ronaldus Magnus’ in the dust.  I also have a personal reason for liking him:  He is the only US President who ever invited me to the White House, gave me a medal, and shook my hand.  I’ve been waiting for his successors to do that, but for some reason, they haven’t.”

Not being entirely brain dead, I wrote back that his email gave new urgency to the phrase, “Do tell.”

He replied:

“Aw, shucks.  T’ain’t nuthin’.  Truly.  I was a 1968 Presidential Scholar, one of 121 newly minted high school graduates selected for the honor that year.  The medal was a Jacques Lipchitz bronze about 4” in diameter with a profile of LBJ on one side and a figure of Prometheus on the other, bringing fire down from heaven.  I joke that this was for perfect attendance at Sunday School, good grades on spelling tests, etc., but that joke is close to the truth.  On the other hand, I believe I was the only Presidential Scholar of my year who had a) been blackballed from the high school National Honor Society and b) was later commissioned in the Army and sent to fly helicopters looking for bad guys.  I was not the only one of my year to have maxed the SAT or pulled down straight As.  The blackballing?  I guess I didn’t fit in.  So, I’m sorry for the big letdown after tantalizing you, Andrew.  I know my original message was pregnant with an untold war story, but it wasn’t a war story that got me to LBJ’s White House.  And my other war stories are pretty ordinary.”

So I had to dig deeper into the blackballing.  “Why didn’t you fit in?” I asked.  “Seems as though you must have done something pretty awful to be a Presidential Scholar but not make the high school honor society.”

He replied:

“The blackballing may have been done by my chemistry teacher, who felt slighted when I wouldn’t let him park illegally (it was my student service job).  He couldn’t push my chemistry grade down, so he got revenge in another way.  It’s also possible I was blackballed for treating my school’s few black students with respect.  This was Memphis, Tennessee, and Central High School, long considered the best in that part of the South, was desegregated in the fall of 1966 with a handful of carefully chosen, cream of the crop students from the segregated black high schools.  My parents were both working class (but self-educated and intelligent) people from the South and they had never taught me racism.  Just one of the good things about them.  Actually, they’re the ones with the good story:  Both were in the Army in WWII, meeting while stationed at Will Rogers Field, Oklahoma City, and carried on a correspondence after my father shipped out to the Pacific, returning after the war to marry her.”

Jim was perplexed when I asked whether I could share this with you and suggested, instead, that if I were looking for something amusing to share I should consider this:

Jim Burt:  “Charles Dickens was a Twitter pioneer.  He could compose an entire 700-page novel with fewer than 140 characters.  Not many fewer, though.  As far as I know, that’s original with me.”

ALL THE WAY

Run, do not walk, to see this when next in New York.  Bryan Cranston is AMAZING as LBJ.

SURVIVED BY HIS WIFE

Politically incorrect, even back in 1987, as he acknowledges, it conveniently ignores that men tend to marry younger women — and remarry even younger women — but c’mon: it’s funny.  And give the guy a break: he’s dead.  (Survived by his wife.)  (Thanks, yet again, Mel.)  Six minutes.

WATCH IT AND WEEP

So women are too emotional to shoulder responsibility?  Don’t miss Jon Stewart’s devastating take on this or its second segment.  So funny — complete with clips of John Boehner, Daryl Issa, and Mitch McConnell all blubbering.

Britain lost its colonies, but it sure has talent.  This guy (who’s Canadian, but still) is . . .

a . . .

MAYYYYY . . .

zing.

Watch!

(Thanks, Mel.)