Sorry about the multiple stories about a certain real estate developer, but there's nothing else in the news. Make sure you read #1 though....excellent.....
1/ If ever you readers of DDD should be given essential reading, with a test at the end, it's this long but insightful article by Andrew Sullivan on where our so called democracy is now. He goes into how we have got to this terrifying place, the dysfunction of our political system and why Trump as Presidential nominee was not just possible, but inevitable.
One of the best stories I have read for a while.....
Highly recommended.....
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.
And so, as I chitchatted over cocktails at a Washington office Christmas party in December, and saw, looming above our heads, the pulsating, angry televised face of Donald Trump on Fox News, I couldn’t help but feel a little nausea permeate my stomach.
2/ After you read that, some light relief....three of the cast of SNL were abducted by aliens, and this was their debriefing.....four most amusing minutes.....
Ryan Gosling took his first shot at hosting SNL, and the blond bombshell (gender-neutral term, this is the 21st century!) lost his composure more than he usually loses his shirt.
Throughout the show, Gosling couldn’t help but break character and laugh uncontrollably at the antics of the SNL regulars, always seemingly doing his best to hold in a giggle or smile even during his more “serious” moments. And nowhere was Gosling’s tendency toward stifling a persistent chortle more apparent than in the “Close Encounter” sketch with Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Bobby Moynihan and Aidy Bryant.
The “game” of the sketch (to use the parlance of the improv and sketch comedy folk) centered around McKinnon, Strong and Gosling being interviewed by Pentagon officials about their respective alien abductions. And while Strong and Gosling’s encounters were of grand beauty and spiritual significance (“That [alien] being touched my head, and I felt every emotion in its purest form.”), McKinnon’s well… not so much.
3/ Frank Rich on the news earlier in the week.....
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Trump closes in on the GOP nomination, Kasich and Cruz's dysfunctional alliance, and how North Carolina's bathroom law is factoring into the presidential race.
After last night's sweep, Donald Trump surpassed Mitt Romney's 2012 popular-vote total and is, by some calculations, "two key states" from securing the nomination. What kind of changes should we expect once his main target becomes Hillary Clinton?
You can forget about those “two key states.” The fat lady has sung in harmony with the presumptive attorney general, Chris Christie. The Trump-versus-Clinton game is on for November. As for what kind of changes we can expect from Trump, I guess we’re to believe he’ll act more “presidential” (as he keeps putting it). But of course he won’t. His last much-remarked-upon attempt at that, in which he unexpectedly referred to Ted Cruz as “Senator Cruz,” didn’t last a week before he reverted to “Lyin’ Ted.” The shelf life of today’s “presidential” Trump stunt, a foreign-policy speech in Washington presumably delivered from a teleprompter, won’t last much past the moment he hops back on Twitter at Trump Tower tonight.
You can forget about those “two key states.” The fat lady has sung in harmony with the presumptive attorney general, Chris Christie. The Trump-versus-Clinton game is on for November. As for what kind of changes we can expect from Trump, I guess we’re to believe he’ll act more “presidential” (as he keeps putting it). But of course he won’t. His last much-remarked-upon attempt at that, in which he unexpectedly referred to Ted Cruz as “Senator Cruz,” didn’t last a week before he reverted to “Lyin’ Ted.” The shelf life of today’s “presidential” Trump stunt, a foreign-policy speech in Washington presumably delivered from a teleprompter, won’t last much past the moment he hops back on Twitter at Trump Tower tonight.
4/ Interesting story about President Obama's final White House Correspondents dinner......a chance for him to really say what he thinks....in humor......
Read the story, then watch the address.....yes it's 33 minutes, but it's pretty good, especially the crowd reactions.....
We're not joking, just joking, we are joking, just joking, we're not joking.
The White House Correspondents' Dinner has become a strange event. It is, ostensibly, an evening when the president and the press can come together to share a few lighthearted laughs. But it's evolved into a recital of brutal truths — albeit one neither side ever really admits happened.
The joke of President Barack Obama's performance on Saturday was that he wasn't joking. Everyone just had to pretend he was. This was true from the beginning of his remarks, when he walked to the podium to Anna Kendrick's cover of "Cups" (chorus: "you're gonna miss me when I'm gone").
"You can’t say it, but you know it is true," he told the crowd, grinning. The implication was clear: My approval ratings are going up. Unemployment dipped below 5 percent this year. My financial reforms are working, and tens of millions of people have gotten coverage through Obamacare. And the Republicans are about to nominate Donald freakin' Trump. You don't know how lucky you had it with me.
5/ Here is the President in 2011 at the same dinner roasting Trump about the birth certificate nonsense.....five amusing minutes....
6/ Seth Meyers is doing some spot on comedic reporting, just like John Oliver. This is an eight minute summary of where Trump came from.....
Donald Trump is now the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and on Wednesday’s Late Night, Seth Meyers took “A Closer Look” at how we got here. His discovery? Trump is exactly what Republicans have wanted for years—possibly about seven years, since a certain non-white president moved into the White House.
“This should be a serious moment of introspection for Republicans,” Seth says in the clip above. “How did they get to the point where they’re handing their nomination to a race-baiting, xenophobic, serial liar who peddles conspiracy theories and thinks the National Enquirer is a real newspaper. The answer: This is no accident. This is not a fluke. The Republican Party is the party of Donald Trump — and has been for years.”
Seth shows a 2009 clip of a woman challenging Obama’s birth certificate, saying “I don’t want this flag to change! I want my country back!” Seth points out, “First of all, even if the president was a secret Muslim, he was never going to change the flag. That’s like a surefire way to blow his secret.”
The big problem was that Donald trump fanned the flames of these conspiracy theories, gaining support from Republicans, but GOP leaders did nothing to stop the rumors. John Boehner said, “it wasn’t my job to tell them what to think.”
7/ Thomas Edsall in the Times with a really interesting column on how this country is separating into classes, between the top 20% that is doing reasonably well and the rest of the lower income groups.....the bad news is that this isolation has produced the anger that is fueling Trump's rise to the top of the Republican party....
For years now, people have been talking about the insulated world of the top 1 percent of Americans, but the top 20 percent of the income distribution is also steadily separating itself — by geography and by education as well as by income.
This self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is changing the American social order and the American political system, creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.
8/ Amy Schumer with a funny skit, a shopping channel for guns.....it's almost legal too.....four minutes.....
The supposed ease with which any old person in America can buy a gun has been brought up time and time again. When President Barack Obama announced his executive actions on gun control, they were said to be a direct challenge to the so-called “gun show loophole,” which is a way for buyers to get guns from unlicensed sellers without undergoing a background check.
Big-time gun control advocate Amy Schumer recently performed a skit on her show that took aim at the “loophole.” Called “Welcome to the Gun Show,” Schumer’s skit had her cast as the eager hostess of a home shopping network who was ready and willing to sell guns to someone who admitted to having violent felonies.
9/ Bill Maher isn't just a comedian - he's very funny but with a serious side too......
This is an interview with Variety on politics and life in general, showing Maher's common sense.....
HBO
In an interview with Variety, Bill Maher talks about some of the issues sacred to the right and the left and 2016, and why voters weary of zealous political correctness fell for Donald Trump.
A petition for President Obama to appear on “Real Time With Bill Maher” elicited more than 320,000 signatures. Why do you think the White House has yet to commit?
Bill Maher: That is something that you would have to ask them. I don’t know. That is what we are trying to find out. But I have great hopes that before his term ends, he will come by here.
Bill Maher: That is something that you would have to ask them. I don’t know. That is what we are trying to find out. But I have great hopes that before his term ends, he will come by here.
What would you like to ask him?
BM: Gosh, so many things but I haven’t really thought about it. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. If I started thinking about that, I would jinx it.
10/ And here is a "New Rules", on how Trump is just a big baby.....he's the perfect woman of the 50's.....
A very good five minutes.....Maher really gets into this one....
You know all those stereotypes about “hysterical” women who don’t know anything in the 1950s? Well, pretty much every anti-woman stereotype back then sounds a lot like Donald Trump today, as Bill Maher pointed out tonight…
Maher had some serious questions about Trump’s manhood, saying, “If Trump was a man, he’d stop whining like a little bitch.”
He recalled that time “Lady Trump” sued him over a joke, “because he’s a whiny little bitch.”
11/ Great story from the Times on how you can end up taking multiple medications you don't need.....especially if you are old, but even if you aren't but don't do your own research....
Dr. Caleb Alexander knows how easily older people can fall into so-called polypharmacy. Perhaps a patient, like most seniors, sees several specialists who write or renew prescriptions.
“A cardiologist puts someone on good, evidence-based medications for his heart,” said Dr. Alexander, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness. “An endocrinologist does the same for his bones.”
And let’s say the patient, like many older adults, also uses an over-the-counter reflux drug and takes a daily aspirin or a zinc supplement and fish oil capsules.
“Pretty soon, you have an 82-year-old man who’s on 14 medications,” Dr. Alexander said, barely exaggerating.
Geriatricians and researchers have warned for years about the potential hazards of polypharmacy, usually defined as taking five or more drugs concurrently. Yet it continues to rise in all age groups, reaching disturbingly high levels among older adults.
12/ What a delicious moment.....our steaming pile of wolverine shit Governor being put in his place......one minute video....
Ironic because apparently Trump has Rick Scott on the shortlist for VP......Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the same ticket....
Just call it an enlightening 22 seconds of silence in the Capitol.
In a second attempt at hiring a state insurance commissioner, the Cabinet listened to four candidates speak for a little more than an hour on Tuesday.
When the interviews were wrapped up, Gov. Rick Scott took a few moments to thank all of the candidates, and then immediately launched into a prepared statement that nominated Jeffrey Bragg for the post.
"Is there a second?" Scott asked the other three Cabinet members.
1, 2, 3 …
Scott turns to his left to look at Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, who, like the governor, has to affirm the selection of a new insurance boss. Atwater, avoiding eye contact, looks straight ahead.
13/ But wait, there's more. Our disgusting heap of snail vomit of a Governor went to California to tell their businesses Florida's minimum wage is actually the minimum, so move your company to the Sunshine State.
Needless to say this didn't go down well with the Governor of California, who wrote this letter to Scott.....
WILFREDO LEE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
After Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), pictured, criticized California’s minimum wage hike, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) hit back with a dig at the Florida governor’s lack of leadership on climate change.
14/ A movie you won't see reviewed or mentioned by the corporate media, but it sounds really interesting....."High Rise".....
Elisabeth Moss and Tom Hiddleston in "High-Rise" (Credit: StudioCanal)
J.G. Ballard, the late British author who falls partway between science fiction and the postmodern literary avant-garde, was in the deepest sense a man of the 20th century. He spent much of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp in China (where his father had worked as a banker), an experience of isolation and desolation that shaped his best-selling autobiographical novel “Empire of the Sun,” which Steven Spielberg made into a movie starring the young Christian Bale. Indeed, it shaped everything Ballard wrote, and his overarching sense that the built environments of the modern age — our buildings, cars, highways and cities — both reflected and reinforced a profound psychic disorder. He didn’t need to write stories about life on other planets because Earth, as he famously put it, was the alien planet.
Ballard was not much interested in the political and economic questions that dominated so much of the 20th century, or at least not overtly. Politics, in the usual sense of that term, makes almost no appearance in his novels and stories, which often take place in barren or chaotic locales where the state seems to have disappeared or become irrelevant. In British director Ben Wheatley’s mesmerizing and hallucinatory new film adaptation of Ballard’s 1975 dystopian novel “High-Rise,” someone observes that the police don’t even bother showing up when a man falls to his death from the 39th floor.
"High Rise" trailer......the concept of this movie reminded me a little of "Snowpiercer", which was an amazing movie.....
Todays video - a wonderful clip from the West Wing, when the President talks with the [fictional] Dr. Laura.....a powerful four minutes....
The atmosphere was electric. The president of the United States was about to address a gathering of radio talk show hosts in the White House. As the president entered the hall, they all stood and applauded. All, that is, except one — a woman with strikingly blond hair, wearing a bright green suit. At first, her presence rattled the president. He lost his train of thought several times before he finally spoke directly to the sitting talk show host.
Todays aviation joke
The two sat sipping in silence.A little while later, a young man sat down on the other side of the old pilot and asked:"Are you a real pilot?"He replied, 'I always thought I was, but I just found out I'm a lesbian.'
Todays sex jokes
"There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal in women. Chief among these is the Bentley."
"It isn't premarital sex if you have no intention of getting married."
George Burns
"Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake a whole relationship."
Sharon Stone
"Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps."
Tiger Woods
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."
Jack Nicholson
"Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is."
Barbara Bush (Former US First Lady)
"Ah, yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet."
Robin Williams
"According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other women.
They say that women are too judgmental, where, of course, men are just grateful."
Robert De Niro
"There's a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men are having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause severe swelling. So what's the problem?"
Dustin Hoffman
"There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men think, 'I know what I'm doing. Just show me somebody naked !"
Jerry Seinfeld
"See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis and only enough blood to run one at a time."
Robin Williams
"It's been so long since I've had sex, I've forgotten who ties up whom."
Joan Rivers
Sex is one of the most wholesome, beautiful and natural experiences money can buy.
Steve Martin
You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman. Stuff you pay good money for later in life.
Elmo Phillips
"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
Oscar Wilde
"It isn't premarital sex if you have no intention of getting married."
George Burns
"Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake a whole relationship."
Sharon Stone
"Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps."
Tiger Woods
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."
Jack Nicholson
"Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is."
Barbara Bush (Former US First Lady)
"Ah, yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet."
Robin Williams
"According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other women.
They say that women are too judgmental, where, of course, men are just grateful."
Robert De Niro
"There's a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men are having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause severe swelling. So what's the problem?"
Dustin Hoffman
"There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men think, 'I know what I'm doing. Just show me somebody naked !"
Jerry Seinfeld
"See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis and only enough blood to run one at a time."
Robin Williams
"It's been so long since I've had sex, I've forgotten who ties up whom."
Joan Rivers
Sex is one of the most wholesome, beautiful and natural experiences money can buy.
Steve Martin
You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman. Stuff you pay good money for later in life.
Elmo Phillips
"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
Oscar Wilde
Todays Pope joke
The Pope was very ill, and nobody could cure him. The Cardinals called in an old physician recommended to them.
After an hour long examination, he comes up with a solution.
"I've got some good news and some bad news.
The bad news: The Pope has a rare testicular disorder.
The good news: He can be cured.....with sex.
"The Cardinals, not happy with the cure, explain the situation to Pope.
"I'll agree to it," says the Pope, "but under four conditions."
The Cardinals were shocked." What are the four conditions?" asks one.
"First, the girl must be blind, so she cannot see with whom she is having sex.
Second, she must be deaf, so she cannot hear with whom she is having sex.
And third, she must be dumb, so if she somehow figures out with whom she is having sex, she can tell no one."
After a long pause, a Cardinal asks, "And the fourth condition:"
"Big Tits"!!!
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