1/ This two minute clip from Bill Maher is powerful stuff - he's not joking for once.....
1/ Bill Maher opened his show tonight by warning that pretty much everyone is and should be terrified by the prospect of Donald Trump winning.
Maher said, “It’s not f##king funny. There is a slow-moving right-wing coup going on. Media, do your f##king job! Report on it!”
He went off on the FBI for injecting itself into the election, while admitting it’s not “surprising that guys in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover would have issues with women”
2/ This election is going down to the wire....polls tightening, dirty tricks by Republicans in swing states, and even the FBI is part of the plot to defeat Hillary. As Frank Rich says, let's hope.....
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: a suddenly very close presidential race, Comey’s decision, and CNN’s firing of Donna Brazile.
Less than a week before Election Day, polls are tightening, leaving some Clinton supporters to fear that what once looked like a landslide is still an open race. Could this be a late turning point, or is it just turbulence from a campaign season that always feels like the next scandal is always around the corner? Polls were tightening even before the James Comey intervention. That was inevitable. Even as some GOP apologists pretend otherwise, Trump is not some outlier but does represent the views of most Republicans in the Obama era. So now they are reverting to form and casting ballots for him,following the august example of such leaders as Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. That said, polls have consistently shown Clinton ahead, nationally and in most battleground states, and most of them still do, even if by smaller margins. Yet that’s scant solace for Clinton supporters. Almost every prediction about the 2016 election cycle has been wrong.
3/ Dozens of celebrities made this "Get Out And Vote" two minute video for millennials......amusing, and VERY salty language....
In this amusing but alarming musical number, famed songstress Rachel Bloom joins a star-studded crew to pen a parody of “We Are The World” as a last-ditch attempt to remind American voters of just what exactly is at stake in this election, pleading with the American people to please, please not vote for Donald Trump.
Joined by such star-studded names like Zach Reino, Jack Dolgen, Moby, Mayim Bialik, Adam Scott, Adam Pally, Melissa Rauch, Jane Lynch, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Bloom has a simple statement for everyone: “Holy Sh*t, Get Out And Vote.”
“I can’t believe I’ve had to stoop so low. But an orange talking STD has driven me to this recording studio! And now Moby is on the drums while Elizabeth Banks plays bass. So we can try to convince the USA not to shoot itself in the face.”
4/ Republicans are already threatening to paralyze a Clinton Presidency....and Seth Meyers takes "A Closer Look" at these threats.....eight excellent minutes....
Seth Meyers accused the Republican Party of hypocrisy last night as he argued that they are working ahead of time to make sure that a Hillary Clinton presidency is de-legitimized at all costs.
As he turned towards Donald Trump‘s most recent statements, Meyers noted how the mogul and his supporters have done everything they could to suggest that Clinton is an absolute criminal who would create a constitutional crisis if she wins. The Late Night host said that anti-Clinton rhetoric has become “increasingly unhinged” and threateningrecently, and that GOPers have threatened to impeach, and investigateher the moment she steps inside the Oval Office.
5/ This article is titled "America and the Abyss" by Andrew Sullivan, a conservative author and frequent visitor to Bill Maher's show.....this story is very insightful, and he cuts through all the BS in this election with a glimpse of the reality of a Trump win, and it's not pretty.......
We try to find intelligent comment folks, and this story is excellent....
The most frustrating aspect of the last 12 months has been the notion that we have been in a normal, if truly ugly, election cycle, with one extremely colorful and unpredictable figure leading the Republican Party in an otherwise conventional political struggle over policy. It has been clear for months now, it seems to me, that this is a delusion. A far more accurate account of the past year is that an openly proto-fascist cult leader has emerged to forge a popular movement that has taken over one of the major political parties, eroded central norms of democratic life, undermined American democratic institutions, and now stands on the brink of seizing power in Washington. I made this argument at length in April, when Donald Trump was on the brink of securing the nomination. Everything that has happened since has only made my fears more pressing.
6/ Bill Maher with his "New Rules" segment.....dumping on evangelical Christians.....a fairly good 5 minutes....
Bill Maher ended his show tonight by thanking Donald Trump for the “one good thing he did”: exposing Evangelicals as “shameless hypocrites.”
And for an outspoken atheist like Maher, it was good that “Republicans didn’t play the Jesus card this time around” because of who they nominated.
“Trump has nothing in common with Jesus!” Maher cried. “Jesus healed the blind, Trump mocks the handicapped. Jesus turned the other cheek, Trump grabs your pussy. Jesus turned water into wine, Trump just whines.”
7/ Paul Krugman with an insightful column on how the BS Comey email story got made into fodder for the right wing, and how this puts the corporate media on defensive....over and over again.....
And the crazies media pressure is relentless, and it works....
The cryptic letter James Comey, the F.B.I. director, sent to Congress on Friday looked bizarre at the time — seeming to hint at a major new Clinton scandal, but offering no substance. Given what we know now, however, it was worse than bizarre, it was outrageous. Mr. Comey apparently had no evidence suggesting any wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton; he violated longstanding rules about commenting on politically sensitive investigations close to an election; and he did so despite being warned by other officialsthat he was doing something terribly wrong.
So what happened? We may never know the full story, but the best guess is that Mr. Comey, like many others — media organizations, would-be nonpartisan advocacy groups, and more — let himself be bullied by the usual suspects. Working the refs — screaming about bias and unfair treatment, no matter how favorable the treatment actually is — has been a consistent, long-term political strategy on the right. And the reason it keeps happening is because it so often works.
8/ Is Trump illiterate? Samantha Bee makes a good case for believing it.....eight wonderful minutes......we love her....
Samantha Bee used last night’s Full Frontal to show Donald Trumpjust how easy it is to make up a conspiracy theory about a person.
Throughout the election, Trump has repeatedly flirted with unprovenor fringe politic
“After seeing how easy and fun it is to take random scraps of evidence and spin them into ridiculous conspiracy theories, we decided to try it ourselves,” said Bee. “We have evidence, so much evidence, the best evidence.”
9/ Matt Taibbi is furious with the elites' magazine "The Economist" for an article they just ran.....you will be too, after you have read this story....
"Most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing," says a recent editorial in 'The Economist
As we reach the close of an election season marked by anger toward the unaccountable rich, The Economist has chimed in with a defense of the beleaguered white-collar criminal.
An editorial called "Jail bait" is the latest in a line of salvoes against what the magazine imagines is a wave of politically driven regulatory actions against corporate executives.
The piece makes many of the usual Wall Street arguments: locking up executives wouldn't do any good, populist passions are ignorant, etc. But this is the crucial passage:
"Most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing—long chains of command that send (often half-understood) instructions, or corporate cultures that encourage individuals to take risky actions. The authorities have rightly adjusted to this reality by increasingly prosecuting companies rather than going after individual miscreants."
10/ John Oliver is officially disgusted with this election.....four pretty good minutes.....
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver is really, really tired of 2016.
He would like to be able to talk about all sorts of things on his show, from Austria’s election to Spain’s new government. Instead, the latest developments in the 2016 presidential campaign have forced him to talk about Anthony Weiner’s sexting and Hillary Clinton’s emails.
"Bacardi should really consider switching their slogan to ‘Bacardi: because there might be more fucking Clinton emails,’" Oliver quipped.
On Friday, the FBI announced that while investigating whether Weiner sexted with an underage girl, it had uncovered emails that are potentially pertinent to Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
11/ Thomas Frank on something the media isn't talking about at all - the WikiLeaks emails.....no drastic revelations, just an insight into the elites' mindset and how things REALLY work.....
The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
12/ "Church lady" [Dana Garvey] returned to SNL last night, and it was a very amusing four minutes.....
On Saturday Night Live this weekend, legendary sketch comedian and SNL alum Dana Carvey returned to 30 Rock as one of his most well-known characters: The Church Lady.
Carvey’s turn as the holier-than-thou Church Lady returned to Weekend Update to give her opinion about the state of the 2016 race, slamming host Colin Jost in the process. “You’re staying up making jokes about Anthony’s weiner!” she alleged.
And of course, no appearance by Church Lady is complete without her signature, “Well isn’t that special,” which was worked into the bit with a special election twist.
13/ Fareed Zacharia interviews Bill Maher.....no jokes, but a lot of savvy political insight. About 15 minutes of intelligent discussion, and boy do we need more of that.......
HBO host Bill Maher on CNN
In an appearance on CNN with host Fareed Zakaria, Real Time host Bill Maher turned serious and expressed real concern over what Donald Trump and his rabid supporters will do should he lose the election.
During the interview with the CNN host, Maher was asked about Trump’s ramped-up rhetoric in the past few days that the election is “rigged,”with Maher saying the GOP presidential nominee is lighting the fuse of a powder keg that could blow up post-election.
Asked what he thought Trump would do should he not win, Maher was succinct: “Not good things.”
“I worry about that,” he explained. “He’s got his knuckle-draggers all riled up about the fact that this is a rigged election.”
Trump true believers who find nothing he says or does deplorable essentially makes them a cult of personality, he continued.
“He’s got an army. Whats he gonna do with that army?… I think he’s gonna be the Che Guevara of deplorables,” the HBO host explained. “I think he’s gonna be a revolutionary out there. He’s gonna be a martyr to this loss and I don’t know what they’re prepared to do. They’re already talking about things like Second Amendment solutions.”
14/ Did you know there is a ballot initiative in California to reign in Big Pharma? Of course not, because most of us live in Floriduh, but also because the corporate media aren't covering this story because they make a huge chunk of their advertising revenues from drug commercials, so they don't want this initiative to pass.
The bill is simple - all insurance programs in CA will be charged the same price for drugs as the Veterans Administration, which unlike Medicare negotiates drug prices with Big Pharma.....
Needless to say they are spending huge sums to defeat this measure...
(Photo: ep_jhu)
Enormous public frustration with the skyrocketing prices of essential medicines in the US has not yet led to any meaningful reform. But a historic initiative on the November ballot in California, championed by health care and consumer advocates and fiercely opposed by multinational drug corporations, may finally rein in Big Pharma.
It is hard to overstate the level of dysfunction in the US medicines system. The headline-producing greed of "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli was just the most dramatic example of a pharmaceutical industry whose patent monopolies grant it immunity from market forces while its political clout shields it from government regulation. Taking full advantage of taxpayer-funded research, drug corporations make record profits, even by Fortune 500 standards, and pay their CEOs as much as $180 million a year. Those corporations spend far more on incessant marketing to consumers and physicians than they do on research -- part of the reason they have largely failed to develop new medicines that address the most deadly illnesses and disease
15/ Ever heard of Tove Lo? Thought not, but this Swedish singer's electrifying music video from a couple of years ago has made her a hot property.....the video "Habits - Stay High" is most unusual.....amazing photography.....
ppTove Lo's latest is 'Lady Wood'
16/ Nothing too heavy or political, but a really interesting essay by an expat American who returns to the US after a long stay abroad as a foreign correspondent.....he travels all over the country, and writes how much different everything is.....
I heard it often, traveling around Europe as a journalist. I even heard it from an immigration officer at Gatwick Airport outside London, who teased me as he looked at my passport. I was an American abroad, which meant being held accountable for the strange and fevered state of my homeland, which meant facing some version of the question “What is going on in the United States?” Sometimes the query had an air of schadenfreude, but just as often there was a hint of real concern. The rest of the world already seemed to be going off the rails. It couldn’t afford to have America follow.
I didn’t really know how to respond. I hadn’t lived in the United States since 2003, when The New York Times moved me to Beijing as a foreign correspondent, along with my wife and two kids. We assumed we would move back home soon enough, but it never happened. We lived for six years in China, where our third child was born, followed by four years in New Delhi, where my beat was South Asia. By the time we settled in Rome in 2013, we had drifted into the category of American expatriates. When we saw our countrymen around the city — big, friendly tourists, a bit loud — my kids referred to them as “the Americans.”
We weren’t completely cut off. Most summers, we visited family and friends in the States; the kids streamed the American shows; my wife listened to “Morning Edition.” I worked for an American company, for American bosses, and I wrote articles trying to explain the world to a mostly American audience. All of this created the gentle illusion that we were still truly connected to home. Yet as the years passed, I realized that I had lost touch, that the country I left was no longer the same.
17/ Most interesting article from a "Progressive Christian" website.....not sure what a Progressive Christian is, but the author makes a lot of sense. His point is that 30% plus of the country is living in a fantasy world.....
The Disinherited: There is a reason that the white American underclass is so out of step with the rest of America: if you live in a pretend world for long enough you snap
(Photo YouTube)
There is a reason that the white American underclass is so out of step with the rest of America: if you live in a pretend world for long enough you snap. The white Trump-loving underclass is uneducated. But lack of university education isn’t their problem. Their problem is that they live in a fantasy world.
That world was concocted by two implacable enemies of fact-based truth: evangelical Christianity and right wing mythology.
And when I use the words white underclass I’m not talking about wealth or poverty. Delusion is a state of mind, not an economic bracket. You can be a billionaire who went to Harvard and still be a member of the delusional white underclass. I give you two words as proof: Peter Thiel. (Thiel is an evangelical Trump backer with an education that apparently passed his brain by.)
18/ Movie Review - "Doctor Strange".....looks quite surreal, and a great review in the Times.....
Tilda Swinton, left, and Benedict Cumberbatch in “Doctor Strange,” the latest Marvel superhero movie. It was directed by Scott Derrickson.
Most Marvel movies open like Robert Downey Jr.’s stand-up routine in “Iron Man” before it goes south. They deliver quips and silky come-hither nonsense, only to end up like a big green monster stuck on rewind: “Hulk smash!” again and again, ad infinitum. In between start and finish, there are moments of levity and discovery in the machined product, but too often you can’t see the movie for Marvel’s action plan. Its latest, the giddily enjoyable “Doctor Strange,” is part of Marvel’s strategy for world domination, yet it’s also so visually transfixing, so beautiful and nimble that you may even briefly forget the brand.
"Doctor Strange" trailer......wow to the FX.....
Todays video - one of the funniest clips from this year was Will Ferrell on the Colbert Show, which aired just after the Super Bowl 2016.....eight minutes of deadpan humor.....wonderful!
Todays Irish joke
The rain was pouring down. And there standing in front of a big puddle outside the pub,
was an old Irishman, drenched, holding a stick, with a piece of string dangling in the water.
A passer-by stopped and asked,
"What are you doing?"
"Fishing" replied the old man.
Feeling sorry for the old man, the gent says,
"Come in out of the rain and have a drink with me."
In the warmth of the pub, as they sip their whiskies,
the gentleman cannot resist asking, "So how many have you caught today?"
"You're the eighth" says the old man.
A short Irish joke
Paddy said, 'I'm gonna do dat when I win de lottery'.
'What's dat ?', says his mate.'Send me lawn away to be cut', says Paddy.Todays Southern jokesFlorida“A Florida senior citizen drove his brand new Corvette convertible out of the dealership. Taking off down the road, he pushed it to 80 mph, enjoying the wind blowing through what little hair he had left. "Amazing,” he thought as he flew down I-95, pushing the pedal even more.Looking in his rear view mirror, he saw a Florida State Trooper, blue lights flashing and siren blaring. He floored it to 100 mph, then 110, then 120. Suddenly he thought, “What am I doing? I’m too old for this!” and pulled over to await the trooper’s arrival.Pulling in behind him, the trooper got out of his vehicle and walked up to the Corvette. He looked at his watch, then said, “Sir, my shift ends in 30 minutes. Today is Friday. If you can give me a new reason for speeding – a reason I’ve never before heard – I’ll let you go..”The old gentleman paused then said, “Three years ago, my wife ran off with a Florida State Trooper. I thought you were bringing her back.”“Have a good day, Sir,” replied the trooper.GeorgiaThe owner of a golf course in Georgia was confused about paying an invoice, so he decided to ask his secretary for some mathematical help.He called her into his office and said, “Y’all graduated from theUniversity of Georgia and I need some help. If I wuz to give yew$20,000, minus 14%, how much would you take off?”The secretary thought a moment, and then replied, “Everthang but my earrings.”LouisianaA senior citizen in Louisiana was overheard saying, “When the end of the world comes, I hope to be in Louisiana.”When asked why, he replied, “I’d rather be in Louisiana ‘cause everythang happens in Louisiana 20 years later than in the rest of the world.”MississippiThe young man from Mississippi came running into the store and said to his buddy, “Bubba, somebody just stole your pickup truck from the parking lot!”Bubba replied, “Did y’all see who it was?”The young man answered, “I couldn’t tell, but I got the license number.”North CarolinaA man in North Carolina had a flat tire, pulled off on the side of the road, and proceeded to put a bouquet of flowers in front of the car and one behind it. Then he got back in the car to wait.A passerby studied the scene as he drove by, and was so curious he turned around and went back. He asked the fellow what the problem was.The man replied, “I got a flat tahr.”The passerby asked, “But what’s with the flowers?”The man responded, “When you break down they tell you to put flaresin the front and flares in the back. I never did understand it neither.”TennesseeA Tennessee State trooper pulled over a pickup on I-65. The trooper asked, “Got any ID?”The driver replied, “Bout whut?”TexasThe Sheriff pulled up next to the guy unloading garbage out of hispick-up into the ditch. The Sheriff asked, “Why are you dumpinggarbage in the ditch? Don’t you see that sign right over your head.”“Yep,” he replied. “That’s why I’m dumpin’ it here, ‘cause it says:‘Fine For Dumping Garbage.’”
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