If you're as bewildered as I am about the differences between all the proposals by Democratic candidates for  president about healthcare, this week's Al Franken podcast may be for you.  The guest is Andy Slavitt -- who fixed the HealthCare.Gov website mess and then headed up Medicare and Medicaid in the Obama Administration.  He  returns for a second visit to discuss the health care proposals of those Democratic candidates.

As the site notes, "Al and Andy agree that it’s important for every contender to lay out their plans to get to universal coverage, but exhort them not to squander the enormous advantage we have over Trump and Republicans on an issue of such importance to every American."

A listening note:  I always enjoy Franken's opening few minutes before the guest, where he talks more randomly about topics in the news.  And he has a good story here about dealing with Ted Cruz over semi-automatic weapons.  And the opening part of his conversation with Slavitt is interesting, as well, where they address how unnecessary and why so much of the distinctions the Democratic candidates were making about their healthcare proposals during the debate, since they all basically agree with one another what's needed (like arguing which color is better, sky blue or royal blue), as opposed to Trump and the GOP who are trying to eliminate universal healthcare.  But if you want to get more directly to the conversation about what the distinctions actually are, you can jump to the 20-minute mark.

This is a performance by Patti LuPone of the song "Everything's Coming Up Roses" from a revival of Gypsy, at the 2008 Tony Awards.  I like it for two reasons.

The first is that it's a terrific, vibrant performance -- indeed LuPone won the Tony Award that year for Best Actress in a Musical.  And the second, mainly, is a reason I've mentioned here in the past, and used a clip of the movie version with Rosalind Russell as evidence.  This live, stage version confirms that.

I suspect that most people think of the song, "Everything"s Coming Up Roses" -- written by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim -- as an uplifting anthem of unbridled optimism and succeeding against all odds.  In fact, in the show, it's actually about manic self-delusion.

At this point in the musical, the star of the little, ragtag group's failing act, June -- who is Mama Rose's youngest daughter -- has just run off with one of the act's dancers and gotten married.  Since that appears to put an end to the act, Rose's oldest daughter Louise is actually overjoyed, as is Herbie, the group's manager and Mama Rose's boyfriend.  After all, Louise knows that she herself has no talent and is unhappy on the road and just wants to have a normal life and a stable home.  Herbie knows that the act has been getting continually less-successful and once they give it up, he and Rose can settle down and get married.  But to the obsessive, driven Mama Rose, living her life through her children with a deep, desperate, personal need for stardom, she instead blocks out reality and decides she will rebuild the act, and that it will be better than ever.  As she sings the song, it's not to inspire the others -- in fact, you can seem them horrified at her madness -- Louise (played here by Laura Benanti, who most earlier this year starred as 'Eliza Doolittle' in the revival of My Fair Lady) and Herbie (played by Boyd Gaines) hold one another tight in despair and almost self-preservation, watching helpless as Rose ignores them and sings only to herself.

This is not an uplifting anthem of plucky can-do spirit.  This is how it goes --

I've decided to have another Trump-Free morning.  And also catch up on another of my "The Writers Workbench" columns. 

This one considers a technology called "mesh networking," but don't worry it's something that's very basic and might be of use to a lot of people.  It's very similar to what a lot of people call signal boosting though works a little different -- and in this particular case, really wonderfully. 

If your home is set-up in a way that you have a difficult time getting a good, clear, strong Wi-Fi signal throughout the place and have some dead spots, then this is for you.  Google Wi-Fi is a mesh networking product that is surprisingly extremely easy to set up (among other things, its app walks you through it step-by step) and even better, works wonderfully well.

As always, rather than reformat the original article, here it is all ready at its home on the WGA website. 

I came across this video the other day, and it's definitely offbeat, but quite amusing, I think.  ​It's offbeat because at the heart of it is Chris Elliott on the Late Late Show with David Letterman.  (This is not his late night program that was opposite Jay Leno, but when he had his show on NBC after Johnny Carson.)

Just saying "Chris Elliot with David Letterman" should give a sense of weird enough, which is fine by me since I love his humor.  But it's also offbeat because of the topic and how that relates to what came later.  I don't want to give all of it away, but will just say that at the heart of it is Jay Leno.  Yes, that should be clear from the image and graphic below, but it swirls in many different directions from that.

Though this is one 9-minute video, it's actually several related segments from different shows edited together.  The first segment may not seem to be part of it, but it all comes around in the end.

Yesterday, in a delusion of grandeur overwhelming by his own outlandish standard, Trump not only retweeted a truly-demented and deeply anti-Semitic note sent to him by some random, albeit unhinged member of the populace that, among other things, called Trump the "King of Israel" and being loved like the "second coming of God." -- after which Trump himself, talking to the press outside the White House, referred to himself as "the Chosen One."

No, really.  This is all true.  No doubt you saw it on the news -- not in The Onion or Psychology Today -- since it was pretty hard to ignore.

The thing is, if Trump was actually The Chosen One, you'd think that God would at least have let him get more popular votes that Hillary Clinton.

In case anyone was wondering, no, this is not normal.

How "not normal"?  Forget for the moment that Trump has his finger on nukes...as well as your life -- if he was merely your next-door neighbor and thought he was The Chosen One and said people considered him the King of Israel and Second Coming of God, would you let your children simply talk to him??

(Fun Fact: much as Trump and his correspondent want to believe otherwise, and want you to believe it, as well, Jews, perhaps most-especially those in Israel, don't actually believe in the "Second Coming of God."  They're just fine with His first appearance, thank you very much.).

And this on the day when it made the news that the U.S. budget deficit hit one trillion dollars.  NBC News sent out a tweet that referenced the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office explaining this deficit was substantially "more than previously expected due to legislative packages passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump,"  In truth, it was only not "previously expected" by the blind and feverish acolytes who think Trump is The Chosen One.  Most others sentient Americans not only expected it, but were certain and said so at the time.  But hey, perhaps he can turn a deficit into a surplus.  Unfortunately, the rest of the country is unable to walk on water and is slowly sinking in it.

And further, it was the day after Trump said that the 79% of Jews who voted Democratic were "disloyal."  Because, hey, when you're a virulent anti-Semite, why wouldn't you say that?  And this.

By the way, the two retweets that Trump sent were far-more insane that the very little I quoted above.  I just don't have it in me to re-post them both in full.  Nor do I have it in me to debate those who have been trying to point out that re-tweeting someone calling you "The King of Israel" and the "second coming of God" and thanking the person isn't the same as claiming it yourself -- especially when "you" did call yourself later "The Chosen One."  I'm perfectly fine with Trump's supplicants twisting themselves into a knot in order to prove he's not totally insane, merely a pscyhoneurotic who wants everyone else to believe that what was said in his retweets were true.  Although explaining away that "The Chosen One" is a little more difficult.  I have no doubt that they'll bring out the Golden Oldie, "He was just joking.".

Remember: "maga" in Nigerian means "victim of fraud."

Hey, the good news in all this is that by Trump's new standards, he wouldn't be allowed to buy a gun.  So, he's just limited to nuclear weapons.

And not a word of horror from Republicans.  Meaning we must repeat -- this is not about Trump, we know who he is.  (And no, I don't mean "King of Israel," "The second coming of God" and "The Chosen One.")  This is about the elected officials of the Republican Party who enable him and are complicit.

And in honor of it all, we present a musical interlude.  "King Herod's Song" from Jesus Chris Superstar.  Follow the bouncing loon.
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You have to trust me on this one.  This actually, really, truly is an "adorable animal video."  I've left the seemingly-gruesome comment in by the person posting it because it makes the actually adorable animal video all the funnier in proper perspective.

Trust me.  Really.