1/ John Oliver has returned from break, and his first show is excellent - even though it's long [23 minutes] you need to watch it.....
John Oliver kicked off his fourth season on HBO on Sunday night with 25 minutes of predictable outrage that built to five spectacular minutes of brashly original guerrilla warfare.
In the first “Last Week Tonight” since President Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Oliver devoted his main segment — which is to say, most of the half-hour show — to dissecting what had transpired since he ended his previous season just days after the election.
“Normally we like to focus this portion of the show on complex, depressing policy issues,” he said. But for the first episode back from hiatus, he wanted to zero in on something bigger: reality itself.
2/ Matt Taibbi with one of his really insightful articles on "the end of facts".....a great read....
The order floated down from the lunatic's castle late on a Friday. No more visas of any kind from seven countries, Donald Trump decreed, and mayhem replaced a weekend.
Thunderstruck customs officials scrambled to make sense of the surprise order; planes landed and innocent travelers were detained; the Internet exploded; protesters stormed airports everywhere; the acting attorney general refused to go along and was fired like a contestant on one of Trump's shows; it was Keystone Kops meets Pinochet.
And then there were the lies. If there is one thing the first few weeks of the Trump administration have proved, it's that keeping track of what we used to call "objective fact" is now a fool's errand.
Did the visa ban affect green-card holders? On a case-by-case basis, the administration said. The following day, a senior official said the ban "doesn't affect them." Reporters then asked if that was different from what was said at first.
The answer, "No," constituted a seemingly impossible third response to a simple question. The Trump administration is breaking new metaphysical ground in the mechanics of untruth.
3/ One of the best segments Samantha Bee has ever done.....'Sanctuary Cities" is laugh out loud funny, with biting humor.....a wonderful seven minutes.....
Photo Credit: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee/YouTubeNow that President Trump has aimed his fury at sanctuary cities, questions regarding the merit of these cities, and the fate of the undocumented that live in them, have abound. Samantha Bee attempted to answer these questions Wednesday night.
“What are sanctuary cities? Are they where artists and the LGBTQ community seek sanctuary from the red states they were born? Or are they magical urban nature sanctuaries where endangered animals live like people? Yes they are,” Bee joked. “They are also places where undocumented people do not have to live like animals.”
The “Full Frontal” host recognized the threat President Trump poses to so-called sanctuary cities, municipalities where the policy is to not prosecute undocumented immigrants for violating federal immigration laws, thereby ensuring that all residents have access to the city’s services, regardless of immigration status. Last month, Trump threatened to deprive sanctuary cities of federal funding if they do no comply with his new immigration policy. Bee pointed out this was kind of absurd, given that America’s sanctuary cities make up most of the country’s GDP.
4/ So we are three plus weeks in to the Trump era, and from all of the disastrous publicity you have been seeing and reading you would think the Trumpies would be starting to have second thoughts, wouldn't you?
You would be wrong, because Trumpies are seeing completely different news - Fox and right wing radio are presenting a glowing picture of Trump on a rampage, making America great again.....
Test this with one of your conservative friends.....
(Credit: AP/Richard Shiro/Getty/Stephanie Keith/Photo montage by Salon)
Last week, PPP released a poll showing that 51 percent of voters who support President Trump’s attempted Muslim ban believe the Bowling Green massacre, a figment of Kellyanne Conway’s insufferably vivid imagination, is one of the reasons why it’s necessary. This is incontrovertible proof that the disinformation campaign being orchestrated by the Trump White House, along with its allies on Fox News and talk radio, is working. The message of the resistance hasn’t broken through Trump’s wall of mendacity. We’ll circle back to this.
Throughout the 2016 campaign, it became abundantly clear that Trump was being judged using a different set of rules than anyone else who had previously run for president. “Unfair” barely begins to describe how Hillary Clinton’s pair of alleged scandals — the email server and, of course, Benghazi — were collectively major drags on her candidacy, even though she was cleared of all wrongdoing by multiple Republican-led investigations. Meanwhile, there was Trump’s string of blurts, gaffes and scandals — each individual instance, especially the ongoing bombshell about Russian collusion to hijack the election, wouldn’t have simply destroyed any other presidential campaign, it would’ve annihilated the very existence of any non-Trump candidate.
He’s still getting away with it.
5/ Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer again in the SNL opener that has gone viral......a very funny six minutes...
Melissa McCarthy returned as Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, on “Saturday Night Live.”
“I would like to announce that I’m calm now!” screamed Melissa McCarthy tonight when she returned to Saturday Night Live to portray press secretary Sean Spicer for the second consecutive week, this time showing up in the cold open.
The popularity of McCarthy’s first appearance as the contentious Spicer last week led many to wonder if she would return.
“You’re testing me big guy!” McCarthy (as Spicer) said tonight once again to Bobby Moynihan‘s rendition of Glenn Thrush of The New York Times. “Don’t F with me, Glenn!”
Just like last week’s sketch, the SNL version of Spicer dug into his big boxes of props as a means of communicating with the dishonest media, who McCarthy shouts out as being “dumb babies.” One of the recurring bits in the cold open played on the real-life Spicer’s controversy surrounding his insistence that the city of Atlanta has been a hotbed of radical Islamism.
6/ A classic piece about Trump by Garrison Keillor in the Washington Post...."If Only He Had A Soul".....
President Trump smiles while being introduced at the National Prayer Breakfast. (Win Mcnamee/Bloomberg)
The Constitution does not allow 13-year-olds to become president, and after last week we can see why.
The Boy President proudly holding his latest executive order up for the cameras, to show that he knows right-side-up from upside-down. Bringing his Supreme Court nominee onstage. (“So was that a surprise? Was it?”) Cutting short a call with the prime minister of Australia. His homage to Frederick Douglass (“someone who’s done an amazing job”) for Black History Month. Twittering about the “so-called judge” who stopped the Muslim travel ban. Pictured in full smirk at the National Prayer Breakfast, preening, bloviating (“In towns all across our land, it’s plain to see what we easily forget — so easily we forget this — that the quality of our lives is not defined by our material success, but by our spiritual success.”) on a scale of bloviation equal to Warren G. Harding and the great gasbags of the 19th century.
7/ A two minute segment of a live town hall on CNN with Bill Maher.....he answers a Trump question....
In a preview of tonight’s Messy Truth town hall featuring comedian Bill Maher, CNN aired a short clip of Maher tangling with a Donald Trump supporter, who wanted to know why Maher and those in “Hollywood” weren’t cutting the president “some slack.”
Confronted by the Trump voter over the fact that POTUS has only been in office three weeks and his belief that Maher should “give him a break,” the Real Time host responded with disbelief.
“Give him a break?” Maher mockingly asked the supporter. “Do you read the news?”
8/ Our Secretary Of Education Betsy DeVos is worse than you think - here is an enlightening story on what the DeVos's have done to Western Michigan where they are the local billionaires....
Grand Rapids, Michigan, the locus of DeVos family power. /Doug Chayka
The headquarters of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty occupies an entire block of prime real estate in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. This past January, the imposing think tank—named for the Tory aristocrat who warned that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”—featured a nativity display behind one of its plate glass windows. Here, at the heart of a typical Midwestern commercial district, was a perfect set piece for the Acton Institute’s far from intuitively straightforward mission: overseeing the seamless integration of Judeo-Christian truths with free market principles. But as I pondered the ironies and contradictions beckoning in the crèche installation, it started snowing with a vengeance.
9/ Seth Meyers with "A Closer Look" at where the Democrats are in this age of Trump.....if you're a Dem, you need to spend seven minutes and see this....
In the less than three weeks since Donald Trump became the President of the United States, the new administration’s agenda has repeatedly felt unstoppable with successful confirmation hearings, contentious executive orders, potential violations of federal law and ongoing unchecked conflicts of interest.
For liberal Americans still not over having to say goodbye to President Barack Obama, this has been a lot to process.
Channeling this frustration, Seth Meyers spent part of his most recent “Late Night” taking establishment Democrats to task for the recent setbacks. His “A Closer Look” segment began with the question on many minds at the moment ― “Where are the Democrats?”
Throughout the segment, Meyers supported the movements of support behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), while making a case that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been ineffective.
Meyers concluded in the segment, “Look, Democrats, you have millions of fired-up protestors demanding that you stand up to Trump ― more of you should be on board with Warren. I mean, isn’t there anyone out there willing to stand up and fight?”
The best joke? “Democrats, you’re the Pussycat Dolls of Capitol Hill. It’s been awhile since you’ve had a hit.”
10/ We normally hesitate to put in blog posts with sensational accusations like this one, that Trump's business debts to Deutsche Bank were in reality Russian money laundering investments in his companies......but it appears to be real news, not fake.....read it, it's shocking.....
Donald Trump’s debt problem is two fold. The first is a money problem: he’s so deeply in debt to various banks around the world that the billions he’s been documented owing to these banks may well exceed the value of his assets — which would mean he’s broke. The second is a perception problem: his financial debt to Russia, combined with allegations that Russia is blackmailing him, and his oddly pro-Russia political policies, create a perception problem. Now it turns out these two problems may be the same thing.
One of the institutions Donald Trump is deeply in debt to is a German bank known as Deutsche Bank.
Fact check 1 - Deutsche Bank is his largest creditor.....
Fact check 2 - And Deutsche Bank was laundering money for Russian mobsters, and was just fined $630 million .....
But guess who is in charge of the investigations into this serious scandal - the new Attorney General and Trump's buddy, Jeff Sessions....
That will be an early big test of the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Justice Department also has an ongoing probe of foreign exchange manipulation by several banks, including Deutsche Bank.
11/ An out of the ordinary SNL skit on Kellyanne Conway channeling "Fatal Attraction"......three interesting minutes.....
SNL‘s Beck Bennett reprised a cable news role from this season on tonight’s episode: CNN’s Jake Tapper, who gets an unexpected visit from Kellyanne Conway in the form of a Fatal Attractionparody.
“I just want to be a part of the news, Jake,” she says after she breaks into Jake Tapper’s home when the CNN anchor refuses to book Conway due to her credibility issues. “What was I supposed to do?” she said after forcing herself onto the State Of The Union host.
“You’re sick, Kellyanne!” Tapper says in desperate defense. He offers other CNN programming opportunities for her to appear on.
“Fareed Zakaria?! I have an office in the White House!” she says before asking if she is deserving of the same pity bookings that Kayleigh McEnany gets.
An exhausted Tapper finally says, “You’re a monster!” before falling backwards out of a window in the dark and twisted sketch.
12/ Some one found a picture of Trump in a bathrobe - needless to say the internet went ballistic....some of the best....
And after the image resurfaced alongside several others this week, Reddit users were quick to adapt it.
Via an almighty Photoshop battle, they’ve reimagined Trump in a hip-hop music video, in the reflection of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s sunglasses and on a fabric conditioner bottle.
Here are some of the best posts we’ve seen so far:
13/ Samantha Bee sent reporter Amy Hoggart to Scotland to see how the Scots feel about Trump - it's a very amusing seven minutes....
Note - salty language....
Last year, one man flew a Mexican flag near President Trump's golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, but Scottish opponents of POTUS were plentiful before the 2016 presidential election, as Full Frontal's Samantha Bee and Amy Hoggart pointed out Wednesday night.
"Most of us have no experience with creative, sustained protests," the show host said. "So we sent Amy Hoggart to get a few tips from some folks who have been resisting oppressors ever since the Roman empire."
In the NSFW clip, Hoggart traveled to Scotland, a place she said Trump received a "storybook ending" after building his controversial golf development.
On her adventure, she chatted with many who were against Trump's actions. She met Michael Forbes, a farmer who refused to sell his land adjacent to the course and put a sign on the
14/ Trump's cabinet picks, from disastrously bad to tolerable....from New York Magazine..........
As the Senate moves to vote on the confirmation of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Education, our politics writers sat down to discuss whether she is the least qualified of all his nominees and appointees, and if others of that cohort present larger threats to the country. Below, our writers’ picks for worst, second worst, and third worst (and, in one case, a grudging top-three least-bad list).
http://nymag.com/daily/intelli
15/ Millennials are changing the food industry.....for the better....here's how.
Image by David Goehring/Flickr.
If you're ever in the mood for a laugh, throw "millennials," "brands," and "marketing" into the ol' Google and give the internet a peruse.
At any given moment, marketing executives around the world are being paid gazillions of dollars to figure out the mystery behind what millennials buy and why we buy it. With the tactical precision of the three blind mice, advertisers invent absurd strategies to capture our attention, launching campaigns that they think are lit af but fall miserably short of the goal.
Especially in the food industry, marketers act like millennial behavior is totally uninterpretable. (Remember when they tried to say we don't eat cereal because we're lazy? That's why I opt for a fresh egg omelette every morning instead — way easier.)
Millennials are older now and starting to make up more of the world's annual spending, so whether they like it or not, brands are having to take our preferences more seriously.
16/ This is interesting....the Russians have hacked slot machines in multiple casinos and there is no defense to their intrusion.....wow.....
IN EARLY JUNE 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how much they’ll earn over the long haul—say, 7.129 cents for every dollar played. But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major jackpots, an aberration known in industry parlance as a negative hold. Since code isn’t prone to sudden fits of madness, the only plausible explanation was that someone was cheating.
Casino security pulled up the surveillance tapes and eventually spotted the culprit, a black-haired man in his thirties who wore a Polo zip-up and carried a square brown purse.
Todays video - the creative geniuses at "Bad Lip Reading" with their "NFL 2017"......a very funny three minutes, and it's probably actually what they are thinking, but maybe not saying!
Todays guy joke
There is a medical distinction between Guts and Balls. We've heardcolleagues referring to people with Guts, or with Balls. Do they, however,know the difference between them?
Here's the official distinction; straight from the British Medical Journal:Volume 323; page 295.
GUTS - Is arriving home late, after a night out with the lads, being met byyour wife with a broom, and having the Guts to ask: "Are you still cleaning,or are you flying somewhere? "
BALLS - Is coming home late after a night out with the lads, smelling ofperfume and beer, lipstick on your collar, slapping your wife on the buttand having the Balls to say: "You're next, Chubby"
I trust this clears up any confusion.
Medically speaking, there is no difference in the outcome; both are fatal.
Here's the official distinction; straight from the British Medical Journal:Volume 323; page 295.
GUTS - Is arriving home late, after a night out with the lads, being met byyour wife with a broom, and having the Guts to ask: "Are you still cleaning,or are you flying somewhere? "
BALLS - Is coming home late after a night out with the lads, smelling ofperfume and beer, lipstick on your collar, slapping your wife on the buttand having the Balls to say: "You're next, Chubby"
I trust this clears up any confusion.
Medically speaking, there is no difference in the outcome; both are fatal.
Todays golf joke
Wife - "Where the hell have you been? You said you'd be done with golf
by noon!"
Husband - “I'm so sorry, Honey, but you probably don't want to hear
the reason."
Wife - "I want the truth, and I want it NOW"
Husband - “Fine. We finished in less than 4 hours, quick beer in the
Clubhouse; I hopped in the car, and would have been here at 12 on the button.
On the way home, I spotted a girl half our age struggling with a flat
tire. I changed it in a jiffy, and next she's offering me money.
Of course, I refuse it - then she tells me she was headed to the bar at
the Sheraton - and begs me to stop so she can buy me a beer.She's such a sweetie, I
said yes. Before you know it, one beer turned to three or four and I guess we were
looking pretty good to each other.
Then she tells me she has a room at the Sheraton less than 50 steps
from our table. She suggested we get some privacy while pulling me by the hand.
Now I'm in her room, clothes are flying, the talking stopped and we
proceeded to have sex in every way imaginable. It must have gone on for hours,because before I know it the clock says 5:30. I jumped up, threw my clothes on,ran to the car, and here I am. There. You wanted the truth, you got it."
Wife - "Cut the Bullshit. You played 36 holes, didn't you?
Todays blond joke
Regis: “Barbara, you’ve done very well so far – $500,000 and one lifeline left — phone a friend.The next question will give you the top prize of One Million dollars if you get it right … but if you get it wrong you will drop back to $32,000 — are you ready?”
Barbara: “Sure, I’ll have a go!”
Regis: “Which of the following birds does not build it’s own nest? Is it... A-Robin B-Sparrow C-Cuckoo D-Thrush Remember Barbara its worth 1 Million dollars.”
“I think I know who it..but I’m not 100%… No, I haven’t got a clue. I’d like to phone a friend Regis, just to be sure.
Regis: “Yes, who, Barbara, do you want to phone?
Barbara: “I’ll phone my friend Maggie back home in Birmingham.” (ringing)
Maggie (also a blonde): “Hello…”
Regis: “Hello Maggie, its Regis here from Who Wants to be a Millionaire-I have Barbara here and she is doing really well on $500,000, but needs your help to be a Million. The next voice you hear will be Barbara’s and she’ll read you the question. There are 4 possible answers and 1 correct answer and you have 30 seconds to answer — fire away Barbara.”
Barbara: “Maggie, which of the following birds does not build it’s own nest? Is it: A-Robin B-Sparrow C-Cuckoo D-Thrush”
Maggie: “Oh Gees, Barbara that’s simple…..It’s a Cuckoo.”
Barbara: “You think?”
Maggie: “I’m sure.” Barbara: ”
Thanks Maggie.” (hangs up)
Regis: “Well, do you want to stick on $500,000 or play on for the Million, Barbara?”
Barbara: “I want to play, I’ll go with C-Cuckoo”
Regis: “Is that your final answer?”
Barbara: “It is.”
Regis: “Are you confident?”
Barbara: “Yes fairly, Maggie’s a sound bet.”
Regis: “Barbara…..you had $500,000 and you said C-Cuckoo …you’re right! – You have just won ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Here is your check. You have been a great contestant and a real gambler. Audience please put your hands together for Barbara.” (clapping)
That night Barbara calls round to Maggie and brings her down to a local bar for a celebration drink and, as they are sipping their Champagne, Barbara turns to Maggie and asks “Tell me Maggie, How in God’s name did you know that it was the Cuckoo that does not build its own nest?
Maggie: “Listen Barbara, everybody knows that a Cuckoo lives in a clock.
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