1/ The wonderful Bill Moyers with a reality check on the Republicans - it's a summary of where we are with a political party that seems to want to destroy our democracy.....
From left, Fatima Berrahal and Educardo Burkhart, of West Palm Beach, listen to billionaire Donald Trump as he addresses a crowd at the 2011 Palm Beach County Tax Day Tea Party on April 16, 2011 at Sanborn Square in Boca Raton, Florida. (Photo by John W. Adkisson/Getty Images)
For reasons hard to fathom, the Republicans seem to have made up their minds: they will divide, degrade and secede from the Union.
They will do so with bullying, lies and manipulation, a willingness to say anything, no matter how daft or wrong. They will do so by spending unheard of sums to buy elections with the happy assistance of big business and wealthy patrons for whom the joys of gross income inequality are a comfortable fact of life. By gerrymandering and denying the vote to as many of the poor, the elderly, struggling low-paid workers, and people of color as they can. And by appealing to the basest impulses of human nature: anger, fear and bigotry.
Turn on your TV or computer, pick up a paper or magazine and you can see and hear them baying at the moon. Donald Trump is just the most outrageous and bigmouthed of the frothing wolf pack of deniers and truth benders. As our friend and colleague Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch writes, “There’s nothing, no matter how jingoistic or xenophobic, extreme or warlike that can’t be expressed in public and with pride by a Republican presidential candidate.”
2/ And after that, a little Christmas story to cheer you up.....amusing and "nice".....about 3 minutes....
It took a team of cashiers, 13 different hidden cameras and a whole lot ofChristmas spirit to pull off this epic holiday surprise!
Edeka, Germany’s largest supermarket chain, decided to surprise its shoppers with a seasonal treat. In an attempt to liven up the otherwise boring chore of grocery shopping, these cashiers opted to delight their patient shoppers with a choreographed orchestra that beeped the holiday classic, “Jingle Bells.”
3/ The excellent Matt Taibbi on how the Eric Garner [I can't breathe] killing still stings.....and how the Prosecutor made sure no cop would be held accountable....
It's been a year since a grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the Eric Garner killing.
A year ago Thursday, when a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict a police officer named Daniel Pantaleo in her father's homicide, Erica Garner cried, but wasn't surprised.
"A week before, a grand jury had decided not to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown," she says, referring to the case in Ferguson, Missouri. "So I wasn't really surprised. But it still hurt a lot."
Eric Garner, a 43 year-old father of four, was killed last July 17th. In a scene the whole world saw on video, he was choked to death in front of a parade of police who stood around while he pleaded for a breath of air 11 times. It was an episode so unambiguously senseless that even most white Americans, forced by cell phone technology to confront an ugly but ancient truth about their society, couldn't find a way to excuse it.
In the time since we've seen a numbing succession of police-abuse scandals, each seemingly more outraging than the next: Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Dajerria Becton (the little girl in the yellow bathing suit roughed up by police in McKinney, Texas), Sandra Bland, LaQuan McDonald.
On the surface, all of these incidents are about individual police officers committing seemingly unconnected acts of brutality. But the real evil in these cases often turns out later to live a flight up from the streets, in the offices of politicians, prosecutors and judges, people whose faces seldom appear on Internet videos.
4/ Kate McKinnon is turning out to be the new star of SNL.....here she is in an incredibly funny skit with Ryan Gosling on alien abduction.....five minutes....
An establishing shot of the Pentagon took us to a room where National Security Agency dudes Aidy Bryant and Bobby Moynihan are interviewing the three participants in “the first verified alien abduction.” Cecily Strong and Gosling are all lah-dee-dah groovin’ on the cosmic beauty of the mind-expanding, I’ve-seen-God-and-all-the-
nest, cigarette in hand, relating a series of experiences that were much more, let’s say tactile, than teleological. Her hosts were 40 gray guys “with big fat eyes, little mouths, they just stared while I peed in a steel bowl — I don’t think I was dealing with the top brass,” she said, to which Bryant responded, “And how did they instruct you to urinate — was that telepathically?” McKinnon: “Uh, no, no, I woke up and I had to pee like a camel,” etc. etc.
nest, cigarette in hand, relating a series of experiences that were much more, let’s say tactile, than teleological. Her hosts were 40 gray guys “with big fat eyes, little mouths, they just stared while I peed in a steel bowl — I don’t think I was dealing with the top brass,” she said, to which Bryant responded, “And how did they instruct you to urinate — was that telepathically?” McKinnon: “Uh, no, no, I woke up and I had to pee like a camel,” etc. etc.
Excellent column.....
Future historians — if there are any future historians — will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning of the kind of international action needed to avert catastrophe.
Then again, they might not; we may be doomed. And if we are, you know who will be responsible: the Republican Party.
O.K., I know the reaction of many readers: How partisan! How over the top! But what I said is, in fact, the obvious truth. And the inability of our news media, our pundits and our political establishment in general to face up to that truth is an important contributing factor to the danger we face.
6/ As a follow on the the Taibbi story, here is an investigation by the Guardian UK into the police force with the worst record of police killings in the country.....Kern County, California....
It's not a place to be if you're poor, or a minority or both.....
Seventy-five years after Kern County’s leaders banned The Grapes of Wrath from their schools and libraries, complaining that John Steinbeck’s new book portrayed their policemen as “divested of sympathy or human decency or understanding”, officer Aaron Stringer placed his hands on the body of James De La Rosa without permission.
De La Rosa had just been shot dead by police officers in Bakersfield, the biggest city in this central California county, after crashing his car when they tried to pull him over. He was unarmed. Now the 22-year-old oilfield worker lay on a gurney in the successor to the coroner’s office where Tom Joad’s granma awaited a pauper’s funeral in the 1939 novel.
Stringer, a senior Bakersfield officer whose plaudits for once saving a colleague in peril had been overshadowed by his arrest for a hit-and-run while driving under the influence of prescription drugs, reached under the bloodied white sheet and tickled De La Rosa’s toes. Then, a junior officer reported to commanders, he jerked the head to one side and joked about rigor mortis.
“I love playing with dead bodies,” said Stringer.
It was only the most remarkable act in recent times by a police officer in this rugged territory, where law enforcement officers have this year killed more people relative to the population than in any other American county recorded by The Counted, a Guardian investigation into the use of deadly force by police across the US in 2015.
7/ Something different - a collection of twenty horror stories of two sentences each......
Horror is one of the most difficult genres to write for, making great horror stories extremely rare to come by. Building tension and using jump genres is one of the most common tools used these days to create great horror stories. This can be achieved because writers and directors have the time in the medium, regardless of whether it is a television show, book or movie. What if you had to limit your entire horror story to only two sentences though? Could the desired result still be achieved? Here is a list of 20 horror stories that are only two sentences long, but are seriously scary.
8/ Trevor Noah with [at last] a tough look at the most unpleasant Presidential candidate.....five pretty good minutes.....
GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz is moving forward with an event at an Iowa shooting range -- just two days after a shooting spree in California left 14 dead and 21 injured.
"Fourteen people just lost their lives in a shooting, and Ted Cruz’s first thought is, 'Oh, that reminds me, gotta send out my invites to my gun party,’" Trevor Noah said on "The Daily Show" on Thursday night. "Yeah, that seems like something you’d only do if you were an asshole."
Noah said he's hardly alone in his opinion, and played clips of news stories that show both Republicans and Democrats who don't particularly care for the Texas senator.
"A lot of Republicans consider him the worst Cruz," Noah said. "And that includes the Poop Cruise."
But could that make him the unifying force the country is looking for?
"Maybe Ted Cruz is the leader that America needs. He’s the first person in recent memory who’s been able to unite people of both parties in their hatred of him," Noah said. "And maybe, just maybe for that reason, we might all grow to love him... but probably not."
9/ And in case you might consider Ted Cruz as a viable contender, read this column from Frank Bruni.....even his college roommate thinks he's a dick.....
You’re evaluating candidates for an open job in your company, and you come across one who makes a big impression.
He’s clearly brilliant — maybe smarter than any of the others. He’s a whirlwind of energy. And man oh man can he give a presentation. On any subject, he’s informed, inflamed, precise.
But then you talk with people who’ve worked with him at various stages of his career. They dislike him.
No, scratch that.
They loathe him.
They grant him all of the virtues that you’ve observed, but tell you that he’s the antithesis of a team player. His thirst for the spotlight is unquenchable. His arrogance is unalloyed. He actually takes pride in being abrasive, as if a person’s tally of detractors measures his fearlessness, not his obnoxiousness.
Do you hire this applicant?
No way.
And that’s why voters should be wary — very wary — of Ted Cruz.
10/ Samantha Bee from the Daily Show has a new series coming on TBS called "Full Frontal", and this is one of the most unusual promos for a TV show ever......about 2 minutes.....
The second ad with Jones’ narration, titled “The Wait Is Over,” makes use of the actor famous for voicing Star Wars villain Darth Vader — as well as the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens — to promote Full Frontal. And by “promote,” what I actually mean is “give the comedian a lightsaber-like sword so that she can inadvertently kill a bar filled with aliens.”
“Who puts bullets in a sword?” she asks amidst the carnage.
11/ Oh boy....I thought I was up to date on the fact that our civilization is toast in 25? 50? but definitely 100 years, but I had not heard of this problem.....if the oceans warm by 6 Centigrade, we will run out of air because the plankton will die off....
Note this is probably a 200 years from now issue......it'll just finish off the human race that's already been hammered.....
As representatives from 195 nations gather in Paris to hammer out a global agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions, a new study finds that the failure to do so could leave the world gasping for breath.
Marine plants such as phytoplankton are estimated to produce more than half the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the study, Sergei Petrovskii, an applied mathematics professor at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, calculated how unrestrained global warming could affect phytoplankton and thus the ocean’s ability to generate breathable air. He ran computer models that looked at what would happen to phytoplankton’s ability to photosynthesize at different temperatures.
If the world’s oceans warmed by 6 degrees Celsius—a realistic possibility if global emissions continue unabated—the tiny plants would halt oxygen production, according to the study, which was published Tuesday in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology.
By 2100, the earth at sea level could have atmospheric oxygen levels comparable to the top of Mount Everest today. “And as far as I know, people cannot normally stay on Everest without oxygen masks for more than a few minutes,” Petrovskii said.
The threat has been “mostly overlooked” by climate scientists, Petrovskii said, noting that such a global disaster would come with little notice.
12/ I swear we live in the stupidest state - following on the horrendous decision to possibly allow fracking in Florida thereby putting our aquifers at risk, our water 'management" are poised to allow another Niagara type bottling plant to drain the aquifer again.....for free....
Thanks to Lauren Ritchie in the Orlando Sentinel for exposing this Floriduh piece of corruption and incompetence....
You can't water your lawn when you want, but a new water-bottling operation is asking to pump millions of gallons for profit and probably will get an OK to do it.
The request is for more water than the controversial Niagara Bottling plant pumped when it first opened in Groveland. Are you surprised? You shouldn't be.
Florida's water-management districts can't say no to anyone. Despite a sloppy application, chances are high that Spring Water Resources of Ocala — doesn't the clever name sound like it's a group doing good? — will be getting permission to pump 181 million gallons a year.
The company's plan is to withdraw water from 10 acres just south of County Road 470 and east of U.S. Highway 301 in Sumter County. Some 144 tanker trucks a day would take the raw water to the Azure Bottling plant in Leesburg, owned by a Fruitland Park couple.
There, plans call for bottling the water and selling it to five retailers, including Niagara Bottling and Nestlé Water, according to a business plan filed with the Southwest Florida Water Management District.
The proposal is to drill a 10-inch well near Fern Spring, but don't worry — the application swears that tests show the pumping won't hurt the spring at all. Never mind that engineers at the water district have never even heard of the process the water company's consultant used to determine the spring is safe
Todays video - there are some advantages to living in Florida.....a collection of winter fails from the snowy bits.....
Todays senior joke
An older lady decided to give herself a big treat for her 70th birthday by staying overnight in a really nice hotel.When she checked out the next morning, the desk clerk handed her a bill for $250.00.She demanded to know why the charge was so high."I agree it's a nice hotel, but the rooms aren't worth $250.00 for just an overnight stay!I didn't even have breakfast."The clerk told her that $250.00 is the 'standard rate', and breakfast had been included had she wanted it.She insisted on speaking to the Manager.The Manager appeared and, forewarned by the desk clerk, announced:"This hotel has an Olympic-sized pool and a huge conference centre which are available for use.""But I didn't use them," she said.''Well, they are here, and you could have," explained the Manager.He went on to explain that she could also have seen one of the in-hotel shows for which they were so famous."We have the best entertainers from the world over performing here," the Manager said."But I didn't go to any of those shows," she said."Well, we have them, and you could have," the Manager replied.No matter what amenity the Manager mentioned, she replied, "But I didn't use it!" and the Manager countered with his standard response.After several minutes’ discussion, and with the Manager still unmoved, she decided to pay, wrote a check and gave it to him.The Manager was surprised when he looked at the check. "But madam, this check is for $50.00.""That's correct I charged you $200.00 for sleeping with me," she replied."But I didn't!" exclaimed the very surprised Manager."Well, too bad, I was here, and you could have."Don't mess with Senior Citizens
Todays sexist joke
*A bakery owner hires a young female shop assistant who liked to wear very
short skirts and thong panties.One day a young man enters the store,
glances at the shop assistant and at the loaves of bread behind the
counter. Noticing her short skirt and the location of the raisin bread, he
has a brilliant idea."I'd like some raisin bread please," the man says.The shop assistant nods and climbs up a ladder to reach the raisin bread
located on the very top shelf.The man standing almost directly beneath her
is provided with an excellent view, just as he thought.When she descends the ladder, he decides that he had better get two loaves.As the shop assistant retrieves the second loaf of bread, one of the other male
customers notices what's going on and requests his own loaf of raisin
bread.After many trips she is tired and irritated and begins to wonder,
"Why the unusual interest in the raisin bread?"Atop the ladder one more time, she looks down and glares at the men standing below.Then, she notices an elderly man standing amongst the crowd.Thinking that she can save herself another trip, she yells at the elderly man, "Is it raisin for
you too?""No," he stammers, "But it's quiverin' a little."*
Todays TV reporter jokes
1. Ted Walsh - Horse Racing Commentator –
'This is really a lovely horse. I once rode her mother.'
2. New Zealand Rugby Commentator –
'Andrew Mehrtens loves it when Daryl Gibson comes inside of him.'
3. Pat Glenn, weightlifting commentator –
'And this is Gregoriava from Bulgaria .. I saw her snatch this morning and it was amazing!'
4. Harry Carpenter at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race 1977 –
'Ah, isn't that nice.. The wife of the Cambridge President is kissing the Cox of the Oxford crew..'
5. US PGA Commentator –
'One of the reasons Arnie (Arnold Palmer) is playing so well is that, before each tee shot, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them ......... Oh my god !! What have I just said??'
6. Carenza Lewis about finding food in the Middle Ages on 'Time Team Live' said:
'You'd eat beaver if you could get it.'
7. A female news anchor who, the day after it was supposed to have snowed and didn't, turned to the weatherman and asked,
'So Bob, where's that eight inches you promised me last night?'
Not only did HE have to leave the set, but half the crew did too, because they were laughing so hard!
8. Steve Ryder covering the US Masters:
'Ballesteros felt much better today after a 69 yesterday.'
9. Clair Frisby talking about a jumbo hot dog on Look North said:
'There's nothing like a big hot sausage inside you on a cold night like this. '
10 Mike Hallett discussing missed snooker shots on Sky Sports:
'Stephen Hendry jumps on Steve Davis's misses every chance he gets.'
11. Michael Buerk on watching Philippa Forrester cuddle up to a male astronomer for warmth during BBC1's UK eclipse coverage remarked:
'They seem cold out there, they're rubbing each other and he's only come in his shorts.'
12. Ken Brown commentating on golfer Nick Faldo and his caddie Fanny Sunneson lining-up shots at the Scottish Open:
'Some weeks Nick likes to use Fanny, other weeks he prefers to do it by himself.'
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