1/ Frank Rich with some advice for Democrats - "just say no"
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 president’s SCOTUS pick, Paul Ryan’s support for Trump’s executive order on immigration, and Samantha Bee’s alternative White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Donald Trump has selected Neil Gorsuch, an originalist in the model of the late Justice Scalia, to fill Merrick Garland’s “stolen seat” on the Supreme Court. How should the Democrats respond to the nomination?
The Trump administration is still less than two weeks old, but based on what we’ve seen so far, the verdict is in: It has no respect for the Constitution, for the officials and institutions essential to a functioning democratic government, even for the most fundamental American freedoms granted to religious minorities and the press. The Trump White House has if anything declared war on American governance itself, all to facilitate “the birth of a new political order” guided by the ideas of Steve Bannon, until recently the proprietor of a white-nationalist fake-news organization, and Jeff Sessions, the attorney general–designate who has tried but not succeeded in covering up his past as a stalwart opponent of civil rights in Alabama. At a time like this, it is clearly incumbent upon Democrats in Washington to oppose, obstruct, or resist every presidential action they can.
2/ Bill Maher's opening with his assessment of Trump's second week in office.....a pretty good five minutes....
On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher praised audience members for “keeping your chin up”. In a blistering rant on the president’s questionable decisions his second week in office, he said the Trump administration still had no idea what it was doing, And, worst of all, Maher quipped, President Trump “made going to the airport shittier than it was!” with restrictions on travel that Trump’s Muslim immigration policy created. With constantly changing terms and misinformation coming out of the White House, Maher says he
No one has seen Melania since the inauguration, and Maher wondered where she was. “I’m not going to say we have a mad king with his queen locked in a tower, but it is called Trump Tower! She’s like the Slovenian Rapunzel – she has to let her hair down!” Other things Maher took issue with included Holocaust Remembrance Day, where the administration appeared to “forget” about the Jews – but as we learned from Trump’s team, indeed it was intentional, as they maintained that other people were killed during the war, too. Not to leave out people of color, Trump set up a day of listening with African-American leaders, and promptly spent the meeting talking about himself.
3/ Another executive order!
4/ One of the cruelest SNL Trump skits so far with Alec Baldwin on the phone with world leaders and Steve Bannon egging him on.....a painfully amusing five minutes.....
On tonight’s episode of Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin returned to portray President Donald J. Trump in a blistering cold open, skewering all the top stories that plagued the administration this week.
And for the role of costar in the sketch? “Send in Steve Bannon,” he says (the show took some creative liberties with how Bannon was portrayed, however).
Bannon encouraged Trump to pick up the phone and call a myriad of world leaders; after one such botched phone call with Malcolm Turnbull of Australia, POTUS asks Bannon how badly he messed it up.
“No, it was just according to plan!” replied the skeleton-faced Bannon.
Trump even phones German chancellor Angela Merkel at one point of the sketch (played by Kate McKinnon of course), who excitedly answers the phone with hope: “Barack Obama, I miss you.”
5/ Wonderful story from the Guardian giving the background to the possible US-Britian trade agreement that Theresa May and Trump discussed last week.....the dark money of US politics is spreading to the UK, and is cemented in place in Trump's cabinet and appointments......
This is real journalism folks.....
I
t took corporate America a while to warm to Donald Trump. Some of his positions, especially on trade, horrified business leaders. Many of them favoured Ted Cruz or Scott Walker. But once Trump had secured the nomination, the big money began to recognise an unprecedented opportunity.
Trump was prepared not only to promote the cause of corporations in government, but to turn government into a kind of corporation, staffed and run by executives and lobbyists. His incoherence was not a liability, but an opening: his agenda could be shaped. And the dark money network already developed by some American corporations was perfectly positioned to shape it. Dark money is the term used in the US for the funding of organisations involved in political advocacy that are not obliged to disclose where the money comes from. Few people would see a tobacco company as a credible source on public health, or a coal company as a neutral commentator on climate change. In order to advance their political interests, such companies must pay others to speak on their behalf.
6/ Melissa McCarthy plays Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary.....nails it, very amusing indeed.....a viral five minutes.....
Melissa McCarthy to the rescue.
Just minutes after Alec Baldwin returned to play the Commander in Chief himself, McCarthy surprised the audience at Saturday Night Live tonight to play a SCREAMING Sean Spicer, losing his mind on the members of the press corps. McCarthy played a wildly contentious version of the real life press secretary, going ape sh*t against the media through a series of screams and gyrations.
“And also I don’t talk so good!” McCarthy yells as Spicer after a brief introduction.
Naturally, Spicer quickly grows adversarial in the bit, shouting, “Apologize to me!” Then, quickly, he spouts off, “That apology is NOT accepted!”
“I’m here to swallow gum and take names,” he says, downing a wad of Cinnamon Orbit.
The whole sketch is a hilarious hodgepodge of Spicer flipping out on the media, complete with jabs at CNN and Glenn Thrush of The New York Times. McCarthy sells the bit throughout the sketch with a hilariously put-on impression and high-commitment physicality.
7/ Jonathan Chait in New York magazine with a story that clarifies what is going on with Trumpism....there are three philosophical strands in play, each with it's own agenda....
A good read.....
The chaos of Donald Trump’s opening weeks should not come as a total shock. The first president with no experience in government, surrounded by a chief of staff, a chief strategist, and a son-in-law who also lack any government experience and who seem to be competing ruthlessly with each other for power, is not a formula for quick success. The administration’s incompetence manifested itself most visibly in the rapid execution of a cruel, overbearing immigration restriction that provoked protests nationwide and even grumbling from some Republicans in Congress.
At another level, though, the travel ban might be seen, from the ideological perspective of the people who crafted it, not necessarily as a failure at all. Despite its ostensibly narrow scope, the operation was extraordinarily ambitious, designed to send a message to the world about who Americans are, who can become American, and, most especially, who cannot. The mayhem, inconvenience, and heartbreak it caused were in fact its very intent.
8/ Not often Bill Maher gets pissed but when he does, look out. Here he takes on liberals and political correctness.....an excellent five minute "New Rules", still with jokes.....
In tonight’s New Rules, Bill Maher hit liberals for being overly outraged about every little thing that may seem to be somewhat politically incorrect to them and allowing those issues to take up their attention while Republicans took over the government.
Highlighting a number of incidents involving celebrities apologizing for being too insensitive, Maher sarcastically asked, “Where do you think you are — some kind of melting pot?”
The comedian offered up a laundry list of sensible and fairly popular positions that Democrats endorse while still losing elections, stating that there could be a myriad of reasons for the dilemma, but one that can be quickly addressed.
9/ Steve Bannon, the power behind the throne [literally] in the Trump kingdom is a dangerous man.....good article from the Guardian....
That didn’t take long. From no-drama Obama to all-trauma Trump: the shift has been seismic, leaving millions in this country and abroad frightened and struggling to make sense of America’s new political landscape.
Some of the upheaval appears to be the consequence of incompetence, the predictable result of an under-qualified real estate mogul struggling to master the most powerful and demanding job on the planet.
But not so with the travel ban. In this case, upheaval was the intent – not to the degree we have seen; that clearly caught the administration off guard. But it was upheaval nonetheless.
As we now know, the drafting and rollout of the travel ban was largely the work of Steve Bannon, the president’s chief political strategist. It was Bannon who reportedly overruled the proposal to exempt green card holders from the ban. And it was Bannon who pushed the order through without consulting experts at the Department of Homeland Security or at the state department.
10/ A great Sam Bee segment onTrump.....a very good five minutes......
(Credit: TBS)
After educating her audience on President Donald Trump’s manic fixation with loyalty and betrayal, “Full Frontal” host Samantha Bee suggested that America will one day need a protest movement to defend the country. Bee said her lack of confidence in attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions was a factor in her despair.
“I am not so sure we can count on the DOJ to push back against Trump, which means it’s up to us. But bad news, as soon as you lace up your marching shoes, you made the enemies list too,” she said.
11/ Another video from Europe welcoming Trump....this one is from Germany, and it's a wickedly funny three minutes....
By now, we all know that under Donald Trump’s administration, the United States’s guiding principle is going to be “America first”—as the president stressed in his dystopian inauguration speech. The world got the message loud and clear—and now, European countries are beginning to counter with rallying cries of their own.
The trend began with a viral parody video from the Netherlands, courtesy of the news satire show Zondag met Lubach. The clip, a faux introduction to the Netherlands that mocks Trump by imitating the president’s signature verbiage—”We’ve got the best words. All the other languages failed”—has racked up more than 16 million views on YouTube since last week.
Now, several other countries have hopped on the bandwagon, all sarcastically clamoring to come in “second” to America’s interests
12/ I love these dance mash-ups.....see how many movies you can name, set to one of the goofiest songs ever.....the Bloodhound Gang with "Discovery Channel"....
13/ An interesting and insightful perspective on Trumpism from the Times......
DONALD Trump’s presidency has sent people searching for historical analogies. Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, calls him a modern incarnation of Andrew Jackson. Newt Gingrich compares him to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Liberals prefer authoritarian analogues, like Vladimir V. Putin or figureheads of the Axis powers.
Each comparison assumes that Mr. Trump is a political figure with a politician’s instincts and calculations.
But that is wrong. Mr. Trump is not just a president who is unusually obsessed with media. He is an aspiring media mogul who happens to be president. When Mr. Bannon told The New York Times that the media should “keep its mouth shut,” he was being disingenuous. Mr. Trump doesn’t want the media to keep its mouth shut. He wants to silence his critics, co-opt their distribution and broadcast the story of his stardom. After winning with the instincts of a media impresario, he will lead using the strategy of a media empire.
14/ Kristen Stewart and Vanessa Bayer with the latest Totino ad.....very funny and a little steamy too - three minutes.....
When it comes to SNL, the word "continuity" rarely comes up. Sure, there are plenty of recurring sketches, but there's usually a reset button in between occurrences. There's a familiarity that's bred from seeing the same characters/conceits multiple times, but they rarely build to anything over the long haul.
The Stefon/Seth Meyers Wedding sequence was one of the rare times in which the cumulative effect of the in-show interactions actually had a dramatic (albeit amusing) catharsis. Unbelievably, this sketch achieved the same effect. For the third year in a row, SNL did a sketch in which Vanessa Bayer's unappreciated wife made pizza rolls for her oblivious Hungry Guys. Yet this time around, in stepped Kristen Stewart's Sabine, who opens up Bayer's (intentionally) unnamed character to an entirely new world of self-discovery.
There are so many amazing things about this. On a purely visual level, the shift between how the two women experience this encounter versus the prosaic framing of the men enjoying the game mere feet away is spot on. Flat visuals give way to soft lighting, close-up camerawork, and legitimately erotic sensuality. On a narrative level, it almost feels as if SNL has been building up to this moment since the very first version of the pizza roll sketch. Yes, this is a show that invents everything each week from scratch, but this is such an organic development that it's easy to buy into the illusion of the long game. We all need to believe in something in this world, and I choose to believe that Vanessa Bayer was set upon this path back in 2015.
15/ It's pretty clear that if anything is going to defeat Trump it has to be protest, and peaceful protest. As the erudite Benjamin Studebaker points out the right wingers have more guns.....and they are itching to use them on liberals....
The Left Cannot Defeat the Right Through Violence and Suppression
by Benjamin Studebaker
In radical left wing circles, there’s this notion going around that the right can be intimidated into going away, through no-platforming and physical violence. “Bash the fash,” they say. “Make racists afraid again.” “Any time, any place, punch a Nazi in the face.” In the past I’ve argued that this kind of censorship turns right nationalists into martyrs and generates public sympathy for them. But today I want to make another, related point–the left is structurally physically weaker than the right and cannot prevail by force.
In most successful violent communist revolutions, the revolutionaries succeed because of massive defections by members of the military. During the Russian Revolution, Imperial troops refused to quell demonstrators and instead joined their ranks. From there on, ex-imperial soldiers played a pivotal role in both the February and October Revol
16/ A great movie - we just saw "Hidden Figures" in the theater, and we HIGHLY recommend you see it. Moving, wonderfully acted, patriotic [getting into space], a recent history lesson on how this country treated blacks and it also happens to be true. It's up for an Academy Award for best picture - we have seen quite a few of the nominees including LaLa Land and we think "Hidden Figures" should win!
This film will move you.....watch the very good trailer.....
Todays video - the 84 Lumber Super Bowl commercial that was censored by Fox and had to be cut short ....here it is in full.....get a hankie....
Todays marijuana joke.....
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Todays Heavenly joke.....
Three golfing partners died in a car wreck and went to heaven. Upon arrival they discover the most beautiful golf course they have ever seen. St. Peter tells them that they are all welcome to play the course, but he cautions them that there is only one rule: Don't hit the ducks during your first three months here.The men all have blank expressions, and finally one of them asks, "The ducks? "Yes", St. Peter replies, "There are thousands of ducks walking around the course, and if one gets hit, he quacks, then the one next to him quacks and soon they're all quacking to beat the band. It really breaks the tranquility, and If you hit one of the ducks, you'll be punished, Otherwise everything is yours to enjoy.”Upon entering the course, the men noted that there were indeed large numbers of ducks everywhere. Within fifteen minutes, one of the guys hit a duck. The duck quacks, the one next to it quacked and soon here was a deafening roar of duck quacks.St. Peter walked up with an extremely homely woman in tow and asks, "Who hit the duck?” The guy who had done it admitted, "I did.” St. Peter immediately pulled out a pair of handcuffs and cuffed the man's right hand to the homely woman's left hand. "I told you not to hit the ducks,", he said. Now you'll be handcuffed together for eternity.”The other two men were very cautious not to hit any ducks, but a couple of weeks later, one of them accidentally did. The quacks were as deafening as before, and within minutes St. Peter walked up with an even uglier woman. He cuffed the man's right hand to the homely woman's left hand. "I told you not to hit the ducks," he said; "Now you'll be handcuffed together for eternity.”The third man was extremely careful. Some days he wouldn't even play for fear of even nudging a duck. After three months, he still hadn't hit a duck. St. Peter walked up to the man at the end of the three months, and had with him a knock-out, gorgeous woman - the most beautiful woman the man had ever seen. St. Peter smiled at the man and then, without a word, handcuffed him to the beautiful woman and walked off.The man, knowing that he would be handcuffed to this woman for eternity, let out a contented sigh and said aloud, "I wonder what I did to deserve this?The woman responds, "I don't know about you, but I hit a duck."
Todays rude joke
David, I DO enjoy your blog! — Always good for a thought and a laugh. Thanks. — Frank Wood
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