1/ Berne Sanders has Wall Street rattled....this week the great vampire squid called him "dangerous". Matt Taibbi has the tale, in a satirical way......
On CNBC this week, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein expressed dismay that Bernie Sanders has no interest in "compromising" with Wall Street.
Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Executive Cephalopod of Goldman Sachs, issued a warning about the Bernie Sanders campaign this week.
"This has the potential to be a dangerous moment," he said on CNBC's Squawk Box.
The Lloyd was peeved that Sanders, whom he's never met, singled him out in a debate last week. "Another kid from Brooklyn, how about that," he lamented.
He ranted about how frightening it is that a candidate like Sanders, who seems to have no interest in "compromising" with Wall Street, could become so popular.
"Could you imagine," he asked, "if the Jeffersons and Hamiltons came in with a total pledge and commitment to never compromise with the other side?"
The slobbering Squawk Box hosts went on to propose firing all the academics in the country, because clearly it is their fault that so many young people are willing to support a socialist.
2/ There were two Bernie appearances on SNL this week - the first was real, with Bernie having a cameo with Larry David in a seafaring skit, and then a full video about the Bernie campaign with Bernie being played brilliantly by David......
The first with them both was three minutes and the Larry David spoof was five minutes.....
Both wonderful!
The buzz built all week. And rumors that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David would appear on Saturday Night Live — together — were finally confirmed just before the weekend.
But if you started watching SNL looking to #FeelTheBern, you might have had a moment of worry, at least at first. The Vermont senator did not appear in the show's cold open. He did not come on stage during David's monologue. He didn't even appear in a pre-taped sketch all about him, called "Bern Your Enthusiasm," where David, playing Sanders, loses the Iowa caucuses by annoying just enough voters in the way only Larry David (or Bernie Sanders, or Larry David — we're confused) can. It was smart, and with a cameo by a coughing, no-hand-wiping Leslie Jones, it touched on Sanders' lingering inability to attract widespread support from black voters.
The Republican Debate Thursday......it was more awful than usual.....but here are two moments to remember.
3/ The clown car derailing, when Carson missed his cue, confusion ensues.... two minute video.....
In what we can only hope was a sign of what’s to come, the ABC GOP debate kicked off with the most bizarre candidate walk-out any of us will likely ever see. Ben Carson appeared to refuse to go on stage, the moderators literally forgot about John Kasich, and both Carson and Trump had to eventually be begged before finally shuffling out from the shadows. This candidate clusterfuck alone almost makes the entire, terrible election worth it.
4/ MarcoBot got stuck......one wonderful minute, when this slimy little weasels' campaign may have tanked....
Senator Marco Rubio let his inner “boy in the bubble” show at Saturday night’s Republican presidential debate, tripping and falling right into Chris Christie‘s criticism that Rubio is too scripted, and unable to think on his feet. Within minutes, Rubio used the same exact line about dispelling “this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” with slight variations, four times.
5/ Samantha Bee has a new show "Full Frontal" Monday nights on TBS.....rave reviews from Salon and Rolling Stone for her sketch comedy.....but here is a first - she sends a reporter to New Hampshire to seek Jeb!, but done as if filmed by Werner Herzog.....clever and amusing....six minutes.
The pinnacle, I think, was “Full Frontal”’s very first field segment. It’s not a field segment led by Bee; she’s not even narrating it. It’s instead a Werner Herzog-ian journey into the wilds of New Hampshire, to encounter the strange and mysterious creature known as Jeb Bush who stands on the last legs of his campaign. “JEB?” the title for the short film asks. The subtitle reads, cheekily, “EIN FILM FüR FULL FRONTAL.” And then the German-accented narrator shows us the snowy landscape of wooded New Hampshire, which includes both mountains, rivers, and a rather desolate-looking Ocean State Job Lot in a run-down strip mall (a shoutout to New Englanders if I ever saw one).
The narrator—who, in the most Herzog-esque twist, is never identified or named—rambles through the landscape of New Hampshire’s savage political climate to uncover the mystery of “Jeb with an exclamation point,” who is “getting his ass kicked” by “an oddly tinted compilation of psychiatric symptoms” (that would be Donald Trump) and “a man who seems like he would lecture a starving kitten on personal responsibility, and then deport that kitten, and his family” (Senator Ted Cruz). The crew finds two Jeb Bush supporters to interview, and asks them which beverage they’d compare Bush to. Maybe they were expecting an answer along the lines of a beer, or a cocktail, or a whiskey sour. Instead the young man responds “milk,” which leads the segment to switch to a ultra-zoomed in, ultra-messy, slowed-down long shot of a man drinking milk, making each gulp of it look like one step in a Sisyphean quest.
The segment’s view of Bush is surprisingly sympathetic, giving him the glossy treatment of a high-end documentary. The narrator is “confused” about his lack of appeal, approaching the puzzle of the other Bush son with a stylized, cautious stalk that brings the viewer both to Jeb Bush’s frankly desperate remarks in public forums and the angry, dismissive kiss-offs from young Trump supporters. They shout out the window, “Donald Trump, baby!” and the narrator thoughtfully echoes it—“Donald.. Trump… baby”—with so much faux intellectualism that you can hear the audience in the studio break out into incredulous laughter, just on that delivery. Immediately afterwards, the “documentarian” interviews a Jeb! Supporter who believes that the media’s obsession with soundbytes are why Trump is so popular—and immediately cuts him off in order to make him a soundbyte. The crew goes on to explore an “abandoned” Bush campaign office, interview a Huffington Post journalist—explaining painstakingly that the Huffington Post is “almost like a journalistic organization”—to ask what he sees when he looks into Jeb Bush’s eyes. The pause as the reporter struggles for words just drags on and on, into a montage of snowy forests.
6/ The intelligent guys at the Baseline Scenario look at what Trump actually says rather than his sound bites, and conclude he's just another conservative like Jeb! and the others.....not a Populist, nothing revolutionary, just another extreme Republican....
Donald Trump Is Running as a Conservative Republican
This guest post was written by Lawrence Glickman, Professor of History at Cornell University (and a friend from long ago when we were both graduate students at Berkeley).
As the summer of Trump turned into a phenomenon for all seasons, the Donald’s typical stump speech has grown into a bloated piece of performance art, lasting about one hour. A lot of that time is filled with bluster about how well he is doing in the polls, about how The Art of the Deal is his favorite, I mean second favorite book, after the Bible. And usually there are several more comments along the lines of, “by the way did I mention I’m doing well on the polls.”
In his speech in Des Moines on February 1, the evening of the Iowa caucus, Trump had to radically distill his campaign pitch into a two minute appeal. Presumably the pithiness forced him to highlight the most important parts of his campaign message. So what did he say? What can his candidacy be boiled down to? It turns out that for all the talk about Trump’s “populism” and his embrace of unorthodox positions, he offered talking points would have been familiar at a Rubio, Cruz, or for that matter, Jeb! rally.
7/ Bill Maher with a decent "New Rules" covering a range of subjects, not his best, but not a bad six minutes.....
8/ Although it was written a few years ago, I found this article fascinating because it explains, simply and clearly, how our elites have planned to destroy the middle class in America.
Teaching People to Hate Their Own Govt. Is at the Core of the Project to Destroy the Middle Class
How would you teach the middle class to hate their own government using a strategy that takes into consideration the political climate of the United States of thirty years ago?
Teaching the middle class to hate their government was an essential part of the plan to implement Corporate Feudalism. A middle class cannot exist without a strong government. This is because only a government has the power to stand up to the giant corporations of today’s world, or the powerful individuals and private armies of earlier times. It is the government that enforces the laws to protect the middle class from those who would like to become their economic rulers. That is why prior to the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the middle class all economies were run according to some version of the feudal system. If you want to put an end to the middle class and replace it with a feudal republic, you would need to change people’s perception of their government.
9/ I haven't heard this difficult song sung better than this - Lady Gaga with "The Star Spangled Banner", opening Super Bowl 50......
Watch it again!
10/ We'll see who wins in New Hampshire, but last weeks Democratic debate was riveting and interesting, and Seth Meyers found the humor in the clash.....a pretty good six minutes.....
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton’s fight in the last two debates over who can claim the banner of the progressive became the topic of Seth Meyers’ “Closer Look” segment on Friday’s “Late Night.”
The host talked about the Twitter war that broke out between the two candidates and their supporters over a comment Clinton made years ago about being a centrist. The fight was so insane that Sanders supporters were even banned from Tinder because they were using it to campaign. “Tender is the last place you want to hear, ‘Feel the Bern,'” Meyers joked.
11/ Cartoonist Brian McFadden on the climate deniers in Congress......good one.....
12/ Wall Street is afraid of Bernie....this is a serious story, actually better than Taibbi....
Wall Street Declares War on Bernie Sanders
By William K. Black
Wall Street billionaires are freaking out about the chance that Bernie Sanders could be elected President. Stephen Schwarzman, one of the wealthiest and most odious people in the world, told the Wall Street Journal that one of the three principal causes of the recent global financial trauma was “the market’s” fear that Sanders may be elected President. Schwarzman is infamous for ranting that President Obama’s proposals to end the “carried interest” tax scam that allows private equity billionaires like Schwarzman to pay lower income tax rates than their secretaries was “like when Hitler invaded Poland.”
Schwarzman and Pete Peterson co-founded the private equity firm Blackstone. Peterson leads the effort to destroy the safety net in America. His greatest dream is to privatize Social Security so that Wall Street could increase its revenues by tens of billions of dollars. Blackstone is a major owner of Sea World, and it was in this sphere that Schwarzman went beyond his delusional rants about Hitler and became vile. When an Orca killed its trainer, Schwarzman lied and blamed the death on the trainer, claiming that Sea World “had one safety lapse — interestingly, with a situation where the person involved violated all the safety rules that we had.”
Schwarzman’s claim that the global financial markets are tanking because of Bernie’s increasing support is delusional, but it is revealing that he used the most recent market nightmare as an excuse to attack Bernie. The Wall Street plutocrats, with good reason, fear Bernie – not Hillary
13/ And a book to watch out for from Thomas Frank...... he wrote "What's The matter With Kansas", but this one looks even better.....
LISTEN, LIBERAL!
The subject of my new book is the Democratic Party’s failure over the last few decades to do anything really meaningful about income inequality.
Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages go nowhere, and the free-trade deals keep coming.
The standard explanation for the Democrats’ failure are the rise of the right, which is supposed to be in league with the devil, and the way money-in-politics works its ugly will. I has described both of these in previous books. But as explanations for the Democrats’ failure they are ultimately inadequate, as is the favorite pundit theory that our Federal government is simply incapable of making big, sweeping turns
14/ Our TV is full of cop shows and police procedurals, and of course the good guys always win, so it was really interesting to read this account of how a real life affluent family is challenging the police's conclusions about this double murder.....
Not political, not earthshaking or important, just a good read.....
t was still dark, a half-hour until sunrise, when the fire trucks and police vehicles came wailing down country roads in central New Jersey and stopped in front of 49 Meadow Run Drive in Skillman, north of Princeton. The two-story, four-bedroom house sat on a one-acre lot in a 1970s-era subdivision that defines a kind of rustic suburbia. The back of the property was wooded, and there were still several farms nearby, some with fairly large herds of cattle.
Smoke billowed from a window on the second floor. Firefighters did not have to bust down the front door to get inside, because it was unlocked, as were several other entrances to the house. The dense smoke slowed them as they climbed the stairs to the second floor, but once inside the burning master bedroom, they extinguished the flames quickly. The fire had been confined to this one room, even though it was fed by an accelerant — gasoline, poured on the floor from a container that had been carried up from the garage. Two bodies lay on the floor, face up.
At roughly 6:45 that morning, Mark Sheridan was awakened by a call from his twin brother, Matt, telling him that their parents’ house was on fire. Their father, John Sheridan Jr., was a confidant to governors, a former state transportation commissioner and currently the chief executive of a hospital in Camden. Mark, one of four brothers, had followed his father’s path: He was counsel to the New Jersey Republican Party. That weekend, however, he was trying to leave his work behind. He and his wife, Jennifer, were staying at a boutique hotel on the Upper East Side, celebrating their 12th wedding anniversary.
15/ Good TV coming in 2016......a Rolling Stone preview.....
(Illustration by Ryan Casey)
Another year, another round of Peak TV overload: 2016 is promising to be another bountiful 12 months for those bleary-eyed viewers who attempt to keep up with every hot new show and follow every twist and turn of their returning favorites. (Don't even get us started about binging on the back catalogs of critically praised must-see TV: Yes, we'll definitely catch up with the stellar second season of BoJack Horseman this year. Scout's honor.) We've already had a few noteworthy series drop over the last month, from the long-awaited return of The X-Files to the genuinely offbeat Zach Galifiankis sad-clown sitcom Baskets to Showtime's mondo sudsy Wall Street soap Billions. And there's more on the way. Much, much more.
Todays video - "I Should Have Killed You When I Had the Chance".....a supercut.....
Life is full of regrets. And amid the mountainous accumulation of those regrets, the biggest one is not killing your nemesis when you had the chance.
Well, that's what the movies tell us anyway.
YouTube user Jukka-Pekka Bohm has compiled a four-minute, 22-second supercut of movie characters reciting the line, "I should have killed you when I had the chance," in films from Star Trek to Run All Night to Ella Enchanted.
Hearing the line over and over and over again — sometimes with a little extra flourish or panache, depending on the character or actor saying it — is a hilarious reminder of how many of our favorite movies are full of people who have no business being alive.
Todays medical joke
I went to the doctor for my yearly physical and the nurse started with the basics.
He asked my how much I weighed. "185 pounds," I answered.
She asked me to step on the scales. It turns out I weigh 215 pounds.
She asked me, "How tall are you?" I told her, " I'm 6 feet even."
She then measured me. I topped out at 5 feet 9 inches.
She then measured my blood pressure. "It's very high," she said.
"Of course it is," I yelled. "When I came in here I was tall and thin. Now, I'm short
and fat."
She put me on Prozac.
What a bitch!
Another medical joke
Professor Higgins at the University of Sydney was giving a lecture on 'Involuntary Muscle Contraction' to the first year medical students.
This was not an exciting subject and the professor decided to lighten up the mood.
He pointed to a young woman in the front row and asked, 'Do you know what your asshole is doing while you're having an orgasm?'
She replied, 'Probably golfing with his buddies.’
Todays "Old" jokes
Now, I think you're supposed to share this with 5 or 6, maybe 10 others.
Oh heck, send it to all your friends, if you can remember who they are.
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