"A son of European immigrants who grew up in Brooklyn and never went to college, Mr. King began as a local radio interviewer and sportscaster in Florida in the 1950s and ’60s, rose to prominence..."

"... with an all-night coast-to-coast radio call-in show starting in 1978, and from 1985 to 2010 anchored CNN’s highest-rated, longest-running program, reaching millions across America and around the world. With the folksy personality of a Bensonhurst schmoozer, Mr. King interviewed an estimated 50,000 people of every imaginable persuasion and claim to fame — every president since Richard M. Nixon, world leaders, royalty, religious and business figures, crime and disaster victims, pundits, swindlers, 'experts' on U.F.O.s and paranormal phenomena, and untold hosts of idiosyncratic and insomniac telephone callers.... His personal life was the stuff of supermarket tabloids — married eight times to seven women; a chronic gambler who declared bankruptcy twice; arrested on a fraud charge that derailed his career for years; and a bundle of contradictions who never quite got over his own success but gushed, star-struck, over other celebrities, exclaiming, 'Great!' 'Terrific!' 'Gee whiz!' He made no claim to being a journalist... he rarely asked anyone, let alone a politician or policy maker, a tough or technical question, preferring gentle prods to get guests to say interesting things about themselves. To former President Nixon: 'When you drive by the Watergate, do you feel weird?' To former President Ronald Reagan: 'Is it, for you, frustrating to not remember something?' To Donald J. Trump, when he was still best known as a real estate mogul: 'Does it have to be buildings?' He bragged that he almost never prepared for an interview. If his guest was an author promoting a book, he did not read it but asked simply, 'What’s it about?' or 'Why did you write this?'"

From "Larry King, Breezy Interviewer of the Famous and Infamous, Dies at 87" (NYT).

"Though the Intercept story doesn’t confirm that the Larry King caller was indeed Reade’s mother, some biographical details do match up."

"The caller and Reade’s mother, who died in 2016, lived in San Luis Obispo County in August 1993, and Reade would have just left Biden’s office around the time of the call. Reade told the Intercept in previous interviews that her mother had called into the Larry King Show, though she couldn’t recall the date...."

From "New Evidence Suggests Tara Reade’s Mother Knew of Allegations in 1993" (New York Magazine).

Here's the Intercept article.

Video:

Tara Reade told me this is her mother's voice. https://t.co/7ymN6Pj55m

— Holly Otterbein (@hollyotterbein) April 24, 2020

After 19 denials, a Manson family killer, Leslie Van Houten, is approved for parole.

"I don’t let myself off the hook," she told the parole panel. "I don’t find parts in any of this that makes me feel the slightest bit good about myself."

Van Houten was 19 in 1969 when the crimes took place. She's now 66.

Before the panel, Van Houten recounted how she held Rosemary [La Bianca] down with a pillow and lamp cord as Charles “Tex” Watson, another Mason Family member, stabbed her. Then he passed the knife to her, and Van Houten proceeded to stab Rosemary 14 times, later using the blood of the slain La Biancas to write messages on the walls of their home. The word “WAR” was carved on Leno La Bianca’s stomach.

“I took one of the knives … and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady,” Van Houten testified in 1971, as the Los Angeles Times noted. At a parole hearing in 1991, Van Houten said of Manson: “I thought he was Jesus Christ.”

Van Houten, who grew up in a Los Angeles suburb, was a homecoming queen who fell in with the counterculture. Her parents divorced when she was 14, and her mother forced her to have an abortion when she got pregnant not long after. As Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi recounted in the true-crime classic “Helter Skelter,” a psychiatrist who interviewed Van Houten called her “a spoiled little princess” unable “to suffer frustration and delay of gratification” who once beat her adopted sister with a shoe.

Here's Leslie Van Houten in 1994, talking to Larry King — "Leslie, what were you doing?" — 25 years after the murders:

"The Indiana he knew as a kid was completely homophobic. Take my word for it."

Said Meade, upon hearing Letterman's "David Letterman's Top Ten Guys Indiana Governor Mike Pence Looks Like" routine, which begins: "This is not the Indiana I remember as a kid. I lived there for 27 years, and folks were folks, and that’s all there was to it. We all breathed the same air, we were all carbon-based life forms. We didn’t care."



Meade was born in Indiana in 1954 and lived there until 1971. "I don't remember anyone, ever, saying it's okay to be gay or that you should treat gay people the same as anyone else. The only thing I ever heard was disparaging or it was joked about and behind the joking was pretty thinly veiled fear. There were no 'out' gays." Meade called Letterman "delusional" and repeats something I said the other day: "Stop otherizing Indiana."

I'm going to defend Letterman a bit, even though I'm sure Meade is right about  Hoosiers and homosexuality in the 1950s. One thing is, Letterman makes no effort to understand what RFRA actually says and how it is likely to work in practice: "Honestly, I don't know what [Mike Pence] is talking about." He's operating at a higher level of abstraction, where Hoosiers are stereotypically friendly and nice to everybody. That's what he remembers, and that is the Hoosier brand. Ironically, Mike Pence — in his disastrous turn on ABC's "This Week" — relied on the same branding:

Hoosier -- come on. Hoosiers don't believe in discrimination. I mean the way I was raised, in a small town in Southern Indiana, is you're -- you're kind and caring and respectful to everyone. Anybody that's been in Indiana for five minutes knows that Hoosier hospitality is not a slogan, it's a reality. People tell me when I travel around the country, gosh, I went -- I went to your state and people are so nice....

Yeah, you're the nice people... unlike those people in other states. Well, I just have 2 things to say about that: 1. You're otherizing the people of the other states who have to be less nice for it to be noticeable that your people are so nice, 2. Niceness is a superficial quality, and it's a quality that makes it hard to tell whether the seemingly nice person thinks ill of you or not. Those stereotypical Hoosiers might hate your kind. How would you know?

By the way, has David Letterman ever said disparaging things about gay people on his show? All the jokes in there over the years, going back to the "Tonight" show appearances? I think it would be extraordinary if he didn't. Mocking gay people was, of course, absolutely the norm for Johnny Carson, who expected and got endless laughs over men who are — his words — "light in [their] loafers."

AND: The "Guys Indiana Governor Mike Pence Looks Like" routine isn't consistent with an ethic of friendly kindness and equality. You put up a picture of a man and then throw 10 shots at him for the way he looks. Letterman made a point of not even attempting to understand what Pence was talking about. Let's just make fun of how he looks. Letterman was teaching us that it's just fine to have a gut reaction to a person, to reject the stage in human relations where you see things from the other person's point of view, and to mock him for superficial reasons that have no substance at all.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula came up with 2 answers to my question "By the way, has David Letterman ever said disparaging things about gay people on his show?"

1. In 2011, Letterman joked about Rosie O'Donnell: "The woman she is marrying, her fiancée, was driving... and her car broke down. And guess what happened? Rosie pulls up right behind her in her tow truck." Rosie wondered what motivated him and added: "I don't remember making fun of you when you had sex with all your interns, Dave. I didn't do that. I didn't make fun of your rampant, throbbing heterosexuality, did I Dave?"

2. In 2008, Letterman had a Top 10 list of "things Jim Carrey will always say 'yes' to" including "A Fan Asking for a Hug, Unless He's a Dude" and then a shot Carrey taking a bath with Larry King and Letterman saying "Those guys are so gay!"

"There should be a packaged microwavable snack for women called Hot Handbags."

I said in the comments to the post about the lady named Joy who collects expensive handbags and doesn't know what to say to her "good friend" who "wears" "fake" — i.e., knockoff — bags. I was responding to rhhardin who said "Pockets would be simpler."

To flesh out your understanding, here's Jim Gaffingan, explaining Hot Pockets:



Googling "hot pockets," I came up with a Hollywood report from 3 days ago: "Kate Upton and Snoop Dogg's New Hot Pockets Video Arrives Fully Baked (Video)." Who knew "hot pockets" was something new and trendy? Ever stumble into some weird accidental fashionableness like that?

New ad includes Laura Bush, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney expressing support for same-sex marriage.

Laura Bush didn't approve of the use of this video clip (which comes from a 2010 interview with Larry King) and she's voiced her objection to it:



Who knows what she secretly thinks, but officially, she's saying you shouldn't have used me without asking. Of course, the group that made the ad — the Respect for Marriage Coalition — has the right to appropriate this clip and use it in their political message. Imagine how hard it would be to make political ads if you couldn't use clips like this. I suspect that secretly she's happy to influence opinion this way — especially as she's able to hold herself at some distance from politics. She clearly likes to seem modest and completely unpushy, as you can see in the longer clip from the Larry King show:



What a terrible shame that the Republican Party didn't accommodate itself to this idea at least 10 years ago. Really, it's a shame they didn't buy in even earlier, 18 years ago, when Andrew Sullivan's "Virtually Normal" came out. At the time, the left-liberals I knew were antagonistic to the institution of marriage and viewed Sullivan's contribution as an unwelcome conservative intrusion on the gay rights movement, which they saw as belonging within a left-wing ideology that transcended traditional institutions. Back in the 90s, I sat through serious, lawyerly presentations aimed at stopping the marriage equality proponents from changing the focus of the movement. There was a wonderful opportunity then for conservatives to embrace the issue, and they missed it.

The Republican Party saw the advantage elsewhere, and now they're stuck with the result.

UPDATE: The Respect for Marriage Coalition withdraws the ad.

Larry King, Bill Clinton, and the "zipper club."

A little embarrassment on Larry King's last show:

The guests [included] former president Bill Clinton, fit and felicitous as piped in from Arkansas. The encounter was hampered by annoying pauses and delays caused by a slothful satellite - and by a fleeting bit of embarrassment involving the term "zipper club."

King said that he and Clinton were both members of that fanciful aggregation, an unfortunate reference considering that, earlier, [Ryan] Seacrest had clumsily asked King whether the fly on his trousers had a zipper or buttons. A bit belatedly, King explained that the "zipper club" is for men who've had open-heart surgery. "I'm glad you clarified that," Clinton said, with a forgiving smile.

AND: Here's the whole darn show. The Bill Clinton stuff starts at 26:00.

Justice Breyer responds to pushback.

Or something.

(Whatever happened to refusing to comment on issues that might reach the Court in real cases? Or is that just get-through-the-Judiciary-Committee blather?)

ADDED: What scares me is the thought that, if Justice Breyer had heard cheers at the hint that he might protect the feelings of Muslims over the free speech of Rev. Jones, he would have gone the other way.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger says she's going to end her radio show and everyone seems to believe her.

But I don't! I accused Dr. Laura of doing a media stunt — saying the n-word over and over on the radio — to get attention, and — lo and behold! — she gets right onto the Larry King show. So far, so good, with this stunt.

Having made it to center stage, she makes a dramatic announcement:

“I want to regain my First Amendment rights,” she said. “I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.”

But she stressed that she was not retiring, only ending her show, and would continue to write books and appear at speaking engagements.

“I’m not quitting,” she told Larry King. “I feel energized actually — stronger and freer to say the things that I believe need to be said for people in this country.”...

Shortly after Dr. Schlessinger made her announcement, one of the groups that had called for advertisers to back away from her show, Media Matters for America, issued a statement applauding the outcome.

She's not quitting right away. That's a key clue. She's just "made a decision not to renew her contract when it expires at the end of the year." She's fighting back, lighting a fire under her supporters, betting — I think — that her audience will increase as a result of the new attention.

Media Matters may want to intimidate advertisers, and without advertisers her new contract negotiations would not have gone well. It's better to quit than to go down defeated.  But the controversy is also great leverage. If her ratings go up — and I bet they do — the advertisers will be there.

Think about it: Rush Limbaugh is still on the air, with plenty of advertisers. If the Media Matters strategy for destroying radio careers worked, he'd have been gone long ago. Yeah, the strategy sort of worked against Imus, but only temporarily, and it made him seem important and relevant (even as the "nappy-headed hos" incident was probably painful for him). 

So the time for end-of-the-year contract negotiations will come up for Dr. Laura, and we'll see what happens. I predict she'll be offered good money, and she'll announce a change of plans, along with heaps of self-praise for her bravery standing up for her First Amendment rights. Remember, she "feels energized," and she wants"to say what’s on [her] mind and in [her] heart," and she won't tolerate "some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent."

Stay tuned.

"I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people, but that's not the job I was hired to do."

"My job is to solve this problem and ultimately this isn't about me and how angry I am."

Barack Obama declines to put on a show of emotion for our edification.

But he did go on the Larry King show. What was the point of that except to massage our emotions? I guess it's a way to spend some time on camera without being pestered by any difficult questions. That way, we can gaze upon him and perhaps draw comfort from his flickering TV image, as we did in ages past. 

Laura Bush supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

2 questions about Larry King's 8th divorce.

1. When you're that old — he's 76 — and you have a mate who's more than a quarter of a century younger than you, shouldn't you look at the odds and hang onto her as someone who'll be on the hook to care for you as you decline into extreme old age and death — considering how difficult it will be to enlist someone new when that is the deal?

2. Larry King is only 76?!

"Larry, you're being inappropriate" — Carrie Prejean to Larry King.

"You're being extremely inappropriate."

The ghost of Michael Jackson.

Here's the video everyone's talking about:



Elvis-y, no?

For added eeriness, there is a Michael Jackson song "Ghost." Video here.

ADDED: Presumably, Neverland will become a tourist attraction, and Michael Jackson's ghost will be part of the allure.

"Prayers are energy and if everyone has them, their spirits will feel lighter because of it."

What Cher said about the dead, last night on "Larry King."

I sort of love the results of this Larry King/Ahmadinejad "blingee" contest.

But if I look at it for more than a few seconds, I get nauseated and on the verge of a seizure, so I don't know what to think of this new form of visual humor. Seriously, now, just thinking of looking at that page again makes me ill.

I love funny things, but is it worth it?

Obama gives a perfect answer — to Larry King — on the New Yorker cartoon.

Here.

"Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in 'Entourage' and it all falls into place."

David Brooks explains Barack Obama. Supposedly, there are 2 sides to Barack Obama — the familiar idealistic guy and the "the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes." Brooks gives a few examples, but the heart of the column is the turnaround on public financing:

Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue.... He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.

It's fine with me. I don't like the campaign finance scheme. And I like a practical politician who adjusts to changing circumstances. It's good news that he's not an ideologue. I don't think he's going to lose the people who fell in love with him as a vision of idealism. I think he's going to gain moderate people like me who want an effective, sensible leader.

ADDED: Here's the video of Obama justifying his decision and making it sound as though McCain is slimy for staying in the system. Here's FactCheck's analysis:

Obama: We face opponents who’ve become masters at gaming this broken system. John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.

To say that either the McCain campaign or the RNC are "fueled" by money from lobbyists and PACs is an overstatement, to say the least. Such funds make up less than 1.7 percent of McCain's presidential campaign receipts and 1.1 percent of the RNC's income.

McCain – As of the end of April, the McCain campaign had reported receiving $655,576 from lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That is less than seven-tenths of 1 percent of his total receipts of $96,654,783. His campaign also took in $960,990 from PACs, amounting to just under 1 percent of total receipts. The two sources combined make up less than 1.7 percent of his total.

RNC – The Republican National Committee has raised $143,298,225, of which only $135,000 has been come from lobbyists, according to the CRP. That's less than one-tenth of 1 percent. It also took in about 1 percent of its receipts from PACs, CRP said. Taken together, that's about 1.1 percent from PACs and lobbyists.

Goodbye to Tammy Faye.

She said goodbye to us two days ago on Larry King. Speaking about Jesus and Heaven, she looked shockingly wasted, and her makeup -- long the subject of jokes -- ought to have seemed even more absurd on this near-corpse, but it wasn't like that. It felt like a brilliant expression of love for life and defiance of death (even as she accepted death).

Part 1 of the show:



Part 2. Part 3.

The NYT obit:

Tammy Faye Messner, who as Tammy Faye Bakker helped her husband, Jim, build a multimillion-dollar evangelism empire and then saw it collapse in disgrace, has died. She was 65....

In an interview with CNN's Larry King... an emaciated Messner -- still using her trademark makeup -- said, "I believe when I leave this earth, because I love the Lord, I'm going straight to heaven." Asked if she had any regrets, Messner said: "I don't think about it, Larry, because it's a waste of good brain space."

If you have a hard time seeing why you should love Tammy Faye, just watch this movie.

"The first 4 minutes I was horrified. But then as she talked and giggled and was her sweet self..."

"... I don't know - the scary outer shell seemed to melt away and her beautiful spirit shone through and she was the same sweet Tammy Faye. What a strong lady!!!"

Did you watch Tammy Faye Messner on "Larry King" last night? Here are a few minutes of video, showing the woman, horribly ravaged by cancer, yet still dolled up in her classic style, speaking about how she loves us and hopes to see us all in Heaven.