1/ As the debate ended Monday night, I imagined I heard this strange sound in the air, like every Democrat in the country exhaling loudly......but before Dems get too happy just remember it isn't over. There are tens of millions of angry and disillusioned Republicans still ready to vote for this idiot, and it's possible they are being undercounted the polls.
Get out to vote, and not for third party candidates either.....and read the last paragraph of this excellent Frank Rich column.......
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the first 2016 presidential debate.
Going into last night’s debate, polls showed Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump continuing to shrink. But a CNN/ORC instant poll right after the debate found that she’d won it by more than a two-to-one margin. Should her performance last night be enough to move the needle back? We’ll have to wait for polls a few days from now for the answer to that question. But let’s pause for one moment to savor how Clinton performed last night. My heart sank with her first answer, to a question about job creation: her usual diligent wonky A-student’s recitation of a list of prefab economic proposals that the brain instantly tunes out, that no one thinks will ever happen, and that have been promised by Democratic politicians in every presidential election since Carter and then Mondale were slaughtered by Ronald Reagan.
2/ Speaking of third party candidates, Gary Johnson is superficially reasonable, but once you have a look at the Libertarian platform you will realize you would be electing a Koch Brothers surrogate, who would want to abolish Medicare and public schools, among other things.....but he's attractive to millennials because of his position on pot.
But even if you can get over his crazy Libertarian agenda, have a look at the disaster that is Johnson as a person, chronicled with comic glee by Stephen Colbert.......seven VERY funny minutes.....
And by the way, I had not seen the park bench footage before......have you?
During his desk segment Thursday night, Late Show host Stephen Colbert seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself while ripping apart the candidacy of gaffe-prone Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate who has had a hard time in recent weeks.
Johnson followed up his well-documented “Aleppo moment” on September 8 on MSNBC’s Morning Joe with another instantly-viral moment this week during a Hardball appearance. When prompted, the former New Mexico governor was unable to name a foreign leader he admires, drawing a blank on the name of former Mexican president Vicente Fox.
Colbert went for the kill.
The late night host played some of Johnson’s best hits from his political career, including one moment that Johnson argued that for civilization to continue we will have to inhabit other planets.
3/ Paul Krugman with a column that I really hope is true.......his theory is the reason the Presidential race is close is the intense media dump on Hillary, making her unpopular in comparison to Trump, using false equivalence in the way they treat the orange banana.....
His comment on the debate is that it's the first time many Americans have seen the real Hillary Clinton without a media filter.....
Wonderful column......one of his best.....
Monday’s presidential debate was a blowout, surely the most one-sided confrontation in American political history. Hillary Clinton was knowledgeable, unflappable and — dare we say it? — likable. Donald Trump was ignorant, thin-skinned and boorish.
Yet on the eve of the debate, polls showed a close race. How was that possible?
After all, the candidates we saw Monday night were the same people they’ve been all along. Mrs. Clinton’s grace and even humor under pressure were fully apparent during last year’s Benghazi hearing. Mr. Trump’s whiny braggadocio has been obvious every time he opens his mouth without reading from a teleprompter.
So how could someone like Mr. Trump have been in striking position for the White House? (He may still be there, since we have yet to see what effect the debate had on the polls.)
Part of the answer is that a lot more Americans than we’d like to imagine are white nationalists at heart.
4/ OMG - Samantha Bee delayed her show to Wednesday so she could comment on the debate, and it's one of the most cutting five minutes she has done for a while.....wonderful and very very funny!
Samantha Bee is now angry — and so is her staff.
The “Full Frontal” host blasted Donald Trump Wednesday night for his Tuesday morning performance on “Fox & Friends” in which he said former Miss Universe Alicia Machado “gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem.”
“No, you had a stunningly beautiful Miss Universe winner, but you treated her like garbage,” Bee said. “Now you have a real problem. Not only with her, but with any woman who’s ever been called fat. Which is all of us. We’ve been dealing with you our whole life.”
Bee then showed a still of female “Full Frontal” cast members, none of whom seemed to agree with Trump’s comment.
5/ And if the unthinkable happens, and you move to Canada you will be leaving the rest of us with a Republican President, Senate, House and the Supreme Court. This article tells us what we can expect, even without the Trump madness of "law and order" enforcement squads roaming the streets.
In case you misunderstood that phrase from the debate, it's right wing code for keeping minorities in line.......
There is a sort of unstated belief in critical assessments of both presidential candidates that their more ambitious plans will be stymied by the same kind of congressional gridlock that has so regularly frustrated Barack Obama. With respect to Donald Trump, the big fear has been that he will simply ignore constitutional restraints on the presidency and govern like the kind of despot he so obviously admires.
If Trump is elected, Republicans are likely to maintain control of the Senate and will definitely control the House. You do not have to resort to banana-republic analogies to find a scenario in which large and damaging things happen very quickly, and through the old-school process of legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. So long as Republicans have 50 senators, an awful lot of the very large common ground shared by Trump and the GOP can be enacted via the filibuster-proof budget-reconciliation process, and even more can be enacted if (as is likely) Republicans more or less abolish the filibuster itself to reduce Democrats to an impotent backbench, like they are in the House.
6/ A 30 second video of the Northern Lights over Reykjavik, Iceland.....wonderful.....
Lights off. Lights on.
Reykjavik went dark Wednesday night, after the City Council switched off street lamps and encouraged residents to turn off their lights.
The goal: To get light pollution to a minimum in order to provide the best possible viewing conditions for a particularly intense display of the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights.
7/ Since I am sure not too many of our readers look at right wing media, you may have assumed everyone agreed Hillary trounced Trump in the debate.....but you don't live in right-wing-world.....
They are in complete denial.....
If you’re a Republican who has been clinging to the wan hope that Donald Trump might somehow, in his eighth decade on Earth, develop into a plausibly competent president of the United States, the first debate should have been your moment to abandon ship. Trump displayed the factual command of a small child, the emotional stability of a hormonal teen, and the stamina of an old man, staggering and losing the thread as the 90 minutes wore on. Instead, Republicans — without a single exception I have seen — have responded very differently. They have treated their candidate’s glaring unsuitability for high office as, at worst, a handful of discrete errors that in no way reflect on his character, and at best, the dastardly unfairness of the liberal media.
8/ As a break from the politics, watch this four minute film about "How Wolves Change Rivers" narrated by George Monblot, and how nature with a little intelligent help can sometimes heal itself.....a beautiful, moving piece.....
Truly excellent.......
On a quiet spring morning, a resounding “Slap!” reverberates through the air above a remote stream leading to Lake Yellowstone. Over much of the past century, it has been a rarely heard noise in the soundscape that is Yellowstone National Park, but today is growing more common-the sound of a beaver slapping its tail on the water as a warning to other beavers.
When the grey wolf was reintroduced into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 1995, there was only one beaver colony in the park, said Doug Smith, a wildlife biologist in charge of the Yellowstone Wolf Project.
Today, the park is home to nine beaver colonies, with the promise of more to come, as the reintroduction of wolves continues to astonish biologists with a ripple of direct and indirect consequences throughout the ecosystem.
A flourishing beaver population is just one of those consequences, said Smith.
9/ Stephen Colbert with a great segment on the polling Trump allies were quoting saying Trump won.....very amusing indeed...
“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday examined Donald Trump’s response to his first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton. Pundits overwhelmingly determined the Republican presidential nominee lost the debate, while Trump touted several online polls — 70 of which, it turns out, were manipulated by 4chan users — showing he’d won.
Trump bragged during a call-in interview to “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday about winning a CBS News post-debate poll that wasn’t run.
“What are the odds the one poll you win doesn’t exist,” Colbert said. “But, you know what, just because it doesn’t exist doesn’t mean he didn’t win it. He’s doing very well in Narnia. He got a firm endorsement from the Lollipop Guild.”
In the same “Fox & Friends” interview, Trump congratulated himself for not bringing up former President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
“I was going to hit her with her husband’s women, and I decided I shouldn’t do it,” Trump said. “I didn’t feel comfortable doing it with [the Clintons’ daughter] Chelsea in the room. I think Chelsea’s a fine young lady.”
“Yes, how gracious,” Colbert responded Tuesday night. “I’m sure Chelsea hasn’t even heard about that stuff yet. It makes me wonder . . . what else have [the Clintons] kept from their child? Has she heard about the tooth fairy or the Easter Bunny or Santa Clause having sex with her father?
10/ A brilliant story by a linguist, George Lakoff, on the power of Trump's name.....be patient, it's fascinating and explains a lot....
Thwimpie – A Spoiled Brat named Little Donnie Thwimp
A Voyage Into Sound Symbolism by George Lakoff
As strange as it may sound, the sound symbolism of a name has become an unnamed central issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. As a cognitive linguist, my job is to study the issue and, at the very least, to name it.
Perhaps the best-known discussion of naming occurs in Juliet’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Here is Juliet, proclaiming that all that divides her from Romeo are their family names.
11/ Music video - the Beatles with "Free As A Bird".....you're probably never seen it or have heard the song, but it's immediately identifiable with the Beatles' signature harmonies and flow......the song is dreamy, the video is surreal and definitely worth a look.....
If you like this, make time to see the movie 'Eight Days A Week", directed by Ron Howard, about the early life of the lads......it's a "wow"......we just saw it at the Enzian.....
"Free as a Bird" is a song originally composed and recorded in 1977 as a home demo by John Lennon. In 1995 a studio version of the recording, incorporating contributions from Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, was released as a single by The Beatles. It was released 25 years after the break-up of the band and 15 years after the death of Lennon.
The single was released as part of the promotion for The Beatles Anthology video documentary and the band's Anthology 1 compilation album. For the Anthology project, McCartney asked Lennon's widow Yoko Ono for unreleased material by Lennon to which the three remaining ex-Beatles could contribute. "Free as a Bird" was one of two such songs (along with "Real Love") for which McCartney, Harrison, and Starr contributed additional instrumentation, vocals, and arrangements. Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra, who had worked with Harrison on Harrison's album Cloud Nine and as part of the Traveling Wilburys, was asked to co-produce the record.
The music video for "Free as a Bird" was produced by Vincent Joliet and directed by Joe Pytka; from the point of view of a bird in flight, it depicts many references to Beatles songs, such as "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Penny Lane", "Paperback Writer", "A Day in the Life", "Eleanor Rigby", "Revolution", and "Helter Skelter". "Free as a Bird" won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal and was The Beatles' 34th Top 10 single in the United States.
12/ Bill Maher panel discussions are occasionally excellent, with intelligent and sensible points made. This is one of them, on police shootings......
A five minute segment, worth watching.....
“Real Time” host Bill Maher on Friday responded to recent fatal police shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
Maher called the female officer facing manslaughter charges after shooting unarmed black man, Terence Crutcher, in Tulsa last Friday, “a victim of bad police training.”
“Police do not train the way they should,” he said during a panel discussion with guests. “If you’re that nervous, you can’t do this job.”
“We don’t know whether he had a gun,” Maher said of Keith Lamont Scott, the victim of another fatal police shooting in Charlotte on Tuesday. “But even if he did, you don’t have to kill every time somebody does something that makes you nervous. We have to train our police to not be that guy who just empties the clip.”
13/ You have heard of the Wells Fargo scandal, from Elizabeth Warren emasculating John Stumpf to the Board of WF "fining" Stumpf $41 million....but read an excellent analysis of the Wells Fargo disaster with the reasons they did it, from James Kwak of the Baseline Scenario.
If Wells Fargo is your bank, you also need to read this and make a start disentangling yourself financially.....
One can only wonder what the bank’s public relations whizzes will think of for the 2016 version.
14/ The Hendricks Gin video......one of the strangest, most surreal ads everrrrrr.....30 seconds.....
15/ New Orleans is used to hot sticky heat, but this summer has broken all records.......and according to the Washington Post it is directly attributable to climate change.....
New Orleans has set an alarming record for warm overnight lows this year.
During one of the country’s hottest summers, New Orleans quietly set a mind-boggling record. On 43 nights, the temperature did not drop below 80 degrees in New Orleans, according to the Louisiana state climatologist.
It blows the previous record out of the water — 13 nights in 2010. It’s also incredible considering in an average summer, New Orleans has just 2.1 nights at or above 80 degrees.
This record should be getting much more attention than it has been.
16/ Politicians are always promising to create new jobs, in manufacturing and other high paying sectors, but the reality most of the factories and plant that have gone overseas aren't coming back, no matter who is in power. In addition there is another pressure on work for normal people - automation. Robots and intelligent machines are insidiously getting into our lives, and some jobs are being made redundant.
What to do - some say a guaranteed minimum wage might be a partial solution.....
Much of the anger and anxiety in the 2016 election is fueled by the sense that economic opportunity is slipping away for many Americans. This week, as part of NPR's collaborative project with member stations, A Nation Engaged, we're asking the question: What can be done to create economic opportunity for more Americans?
When we talk about the economy, we spend a lot of time talking about jobs — how to create more of them and how to replace the ones being lost. But what if we're entering an automated future where there won't be enough jobs for the people who need them? If this happens, how will people pay for food and shelter?
17/ Carl Hiaasen on the certified scumbag "Little Marco" Rubio......
This is the stretch of the political season when presidential nominees swoop into key states to appear at rallies with candidates running for other offices.
The big question facing top Republicans on the ballot is: Do I really want to be seen in public with Donald Trump?
Quinn_Hiaasen
It’s an especially queasy decision for two U.S. senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and John McCain of Arizona. Both have been scorned and humiliated by Trump, yet they continue to say they support him.
Here’s the dilemma: Rubio and McCain hate Trump’s guts, but they think they need his angry-white-voter base to get re-elected. The result is a self-debasing charade of “distancing” themselves from the racist real-estate developer without repudiating him.
“Little Marco,” as Trump christened him during the debates, stands by his assessment of Trump as “a con man,” but he says we should put him in the White House anyway.
That astonishing position reveals more about Rubio’s fitness for office than it does about Trump’s.
Todays video - another of our short horror movies......this one is "The Closet", and not for the faint of heart! You've been warned......
Todays medical joke
There is nothing worse than a Doctor's Receptionist who insists you tell her what is wrong with you in a room full of other patients.
I know most of us have experienced this, and I love the way this old guy handled it.
A 65-year-old man walked into a crowded waiting room and approached the desk.
The Receptionist said, 'Yes sir, what are you seeing the Doctor for today?'
'There's something wrong with my dick', he replied.
The receptionist became irritated and said, 'You shouldn't come into a crowded waiting room and say things like that. '
'Why not, you asked me what was wrong and I told you,' he said.
The Receptionist replied; 'Now you've caused some embarrassment in this room full of people. You should have said there is something wrong with your ear or something and discussed the problem further with the Doctor in private.'
The man replied, 'You shouldn't ask people questions in a roomful of strangers, if the answer could embarrass anyone".
The man walked out, waited several minutes, and then re-entered.
The Receptionist smiled smugly and asked, 'Yes??'
The Receptionist smiled smugly and asked, 'Yes??'
'There's something wrong with my ear,' he stated.
The Receptionist nodded approvingly and smiled, knowing he had taken her advice.. 'And what is wrong with your ear, Sir?'
The Receptionist nodded approvingly and smiled, knowing he had taken her advice.. 'And what is wrong with your ear, Sir?'
'I can't piss out of it,' he replied.
The waiting room erupted in laughter...
Mess with seniors, and you're going to lose.
Mess with seniors, and you're going to lose.
Todays blonde jokes.....
What can strike a blonde without her even knowing it? A thought
What do you do if a blonde throws a grenade at you? Pull the pin and throw it back.
What do you call a smart blonde? A golden retriever.
How do you make a blonde's eyes light up? Shine a flashlight in their ear.
What did the blonde say when she found out she was pregnant? "Are you sure it's mine?"
What do you call it when a blonde dies their hair brunette? Artificial intelligence.
How do you make a blonde laugh on Saturday? Tell her a joke on Wednesday!
Todays Trump jokes
Q: What’s the difference between God and Donald Trump?
A: God doesn’t think he’s Donald Trump.
A: God doesn’t think he’s Donald Trump.
Q: How’s Donald Trump going to get rid of all the Mexicans?
A: Juan by Juan
A: Juan by Juan
Q: What does Donald Trump tell Obama supporters he’s trying to win over?
A: Orange is the new black.
A: Orange is the new black.
Q: Wanna hear a racist joke?
A: Donald Trump
A: Donald Trump
Q: What happens when Donald Trump takes Viagra?
A: He grows taller.
A: He grows taller.
Q: Why does Trump wants to ban the sale of pre-shredded cheese?
A: He wants to make America grate again.
A: He wants to make America grate again.
Q: Why does Donald Trump secretly want to lose the election?
A: Because if he wins, he’ll have to move into a smaller house in a black neighborhood.
A: Because if he wins, he’ll have to move into a smaller house in a black neighborhood.
Q: What’s 18 inches long and hangs in front of an assh*le?
A: Donald Trump’s tie
A: Donald Trump’s tie
Q: Minorities have the race card, women have the gender card, homosexuals have the gay card, but what do discriminatory white men have?
A: The Trump card
A: The Trump card
Q: America is going to suffer if Donald Trump becomes president
A: You could say we’re going toupée for it.
A: You could say we’re going toupée for it.
Q: What do a thong and Donald Trump’s toupee have in common?
A: They both barely cover an assh*le.
A: They both barely cover an assh*le.
Q: Why did Donald Trump cancel his trip to Israel?
A: He realized they already have a wall and fear of Muslims.
A: He realized they already have a wall and fear of Muslims.
Q: So Donald Trump wants to be president and move into the white house. Why not?
A: It wouldn’t be the first time he pushed a black family out of their home.
A: It wouldn’t be the first time he pushed a black family out of their home.
