1/ Matt Taibbi with an in depth look at Trump's two months, and how he is working us over - the media, Congress and we the voters.....this is Taibbi at his best and smartest.
A must read....
It's like the campaign never ended. It's the same all-Trump, all-the-time madness, only exponentially worse.
Morning, February 24th, National Harbor, Maryland, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Chin up, eyes asquint, Donald Trump floats to the lectern on a sea of applause and adulation. The building is shaking, and as fans howl his name – Trump! Trump! Trump! – he looks pleased and satisfied, like a Roman emperor who has just moved his bowels.
"Great to be back at CPAC," he says. "The place I have really ..."
The thought flies into the air and vanishes. Last year at this time, Trump was bailing on a CPAC invite because a rat's nest of National Review types was threatening a walkout to protest him. There was talk of 300 conservatives planning a simultaneous march to the toilet if the formerly pro-choice New Yorker was allowed onstage.
Whether Trump remembers this now, or just loses his train of thought, he goes silent.
"We love you!" a young woman screams, filling the void.
"I love this place!" Trump exclaims, sunnily now.
Can't wait!
2/ Behind the bright shiny objects of Trumpcare crashing, insane tweets and the Russia scandal getting serious the Republicans are doing serious damage to our lives.....like this....
Rachel Maddow says it best - don't focus on what they say, focus on what they do....
How the Republicans Sold Your Privacy to Internet Providers
On Tuesday afternoon, while most people were focused on the latest news from the House Intelligence Committee, the House quietly voted to undo rules that keep internet service providers — the companies like Comcast, Verizon and Charter that you pay for online access — from selling your personal information.
The Senate already approved the bill, on a party-line vote, last week, which means that in the coming days President Trump will be able to sign legislation that will strike a significant blow against online privacy protection.
The bill not only gives cable companies and wireless providers free rein to do what they like with your browsing history, shopping habits, your location and other information gleaned from your online activity, but it would also prevent the Federal Communications Commission from ever again establishing similar consumer privacy protections.
3/ Stephen Colbert on form.....good to see him back, and here he roasts Jared Kushner [Trump's son-in-law].....a very good seven minutes...
On The Late Show Monday, host Stephen Colbert roasted presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. The low-key Trump advisor took an unflattering turn into the national spotlight Monday when news broke that he would face questions over his ties to Russia from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Washington is a mess right now, but that’s going to end soon,” said Colbert. “Jared Kushner will oversee broad efforts to overhaul the federal government.”
Colbert was referring to Kushner’s recent appointment to lead the newly created White House “Office of American Innovation.”
“Vague,” said Colbert. “But still better than the original title, the Bureau of Obvious Nepotism.”
4/ The best column Maureen Dowd of the Times has done for years.....a wow....
WASHINGTON — Dear Donald,
We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt.
You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician?
Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician.
After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator.
I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning.
And you, Donald, are getting a reputation as a sucker. And worse, a sucker who is a tool of the D.C. establishment.
Fun picture....
5/ Seth Meyers on Trump flunky and head of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes.....a good 11 minutes of comedic reporting.....
“Late Night” host Seth Meyers has some harsh words for Devin Nunes, the California Republican who’s been the face of a bizarre news cycle about Trump’s wiretapping claims. But now that Meyers mentioned it, a film about this “bumbling congressman turned spy” would actually seem pretty interesting.
“Nunes has been running around D.C. like he’s James Bond just find out where Trump had dinner,” Meyers quipped, pointing to Nunes’ shady behavior — like jumping out of a car in order to jump into an Uber on the night he allegedly visited the White House — as proof that “this whole thing is starting to turn into an episode of ‘Dateline.'”
Where there’s Nunes, though, there’s President Donald Trump. And every day, a new relationship between the Trump administration and a Russian source is coming to life.
“It would just be easier to talk about people at the White House who didn’t meet with shady Russians,” Meyers noted. “For example, here’s Mike, the White House groundskeeper. And before that, he was — let’s see — head groundskeeper at the Kremlin. Son of a bitch!”
6/ If you are reading DDD you almost certainly don't watch Fox News, and if you accidentally tune in to it you probably can't stand to watch more than a few minutes....so read this story from the Times on 18 hours of Fox, and how it's viewers see a different world than reality....
Fascinating story.....
“I know maybe the president is watching.”
So said Brian Kilmeade, co-host of “Fox and Friends,” on Thursday morning’s show. It was no mere boast, since President Trump has publicly stated his affection for the show and for Fox News, the channel on which it airs. If Mr. Trump was indeed tuning in, he was far from alone. Fox News has been the most watched cable news network for 15 years, but depending on the hour, the news narrative it presents to its large and loyal conservative audience can sharply diverge from what consumers of other media outlets may be seeing.
We watched Fox News from 6 a.m. until midnight on Thursday to see how its coverage varied from that of its rivals on a day when cable news was dominated by the health care debate in Congress, the terrorist attack in London and the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election.
One notable way Fox News stood apart from its competition, as it has been known to do for years, was in the stories it chose to highlight and the tone — in some of its opinion shows, unapologetically supportive of Mr. Trump and his agenda — with which it covered them.
7/ We are now seeing Republicans out in the open on how they feel about the poor, which is they hate them.....this story from Salon tries to explain why....
Paul Ryan (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite/Salon)
Republican Paul Ryan, like most other members of the U.S. Congress, is a millionaire.
Christa Patton is 68 years old. She is frail and no longer able to leave her home. She lives on a fixed income. Patton told Van Jones on a recent episode of his CNN show“The Messy Truth” that she would not be able to eat without the Meals on Wheels program.
Paul Ryan is the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. By his own account, in college he used to hang out with his friends and drink beer while sharing his dreams of cutting Medicaid. When Ryan was 15 years old, his father died from an alcoholism related heart attack. Ryan and his family then received his father’s Social Security survivor’s benefits. Ryan used that money to attend college. This was not the only money that Paul Ryan received from the federal government. His family built its wealth from receiving government contracts.
Like his idol Ayn Rand (who argued against the very idea of government and the commons yet received Social Security and Medicare), Paul Ryan has combined meanness, cruelty and callousness toward the weak and the vulnerable with gross and unapologetic hypocrisy.
Republicans like Ryan — along with the millionaires and billionaires who comprise Donald Trump’s Cabinet and inner circle — literally want to take food, shelter and health care away from poor people like Christa Patton. Today’s Republicans view these Americans as useless eaters to be disposed of by means both passive and active.
8/ Bill Maher had a great opener last week....pithy and always funny.....
VIA HBO
Maher warned in his Real Time opener last night that we have officially begun the dangerous slide “into a banana republic,” because Ivanka Trump as found a way to have a west wing office in the White House, have access to classified information, and not be paid a salary “because she’s a woman”, Maher quipped. Then he finished with a joke, stating that at least the nuclear codes would be carried in an Ivanka Trump handbag.
Maher noted this week’s GOP failure to repeal and replace Obamacare was a big loss for President Donald Trump, who tried to put every resource he had behind making the replacement plan pass, and failed. Maher also joked that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be unhappy with Trump. “You know how Putin feels about failure,” said Maher.
9/ The Internet went crazy at the picture below, a room full of white males deciding on women's health care, but what if it was deliberate? What if this was exactly the message they wanted to send to the base? Creepy story....
During the great Republican health care debacle, President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence met with the far-right congressional Freedom Caucus to discuss, among other things, stripping out requirements for insurance companies to cover maternity, newborn and pregnancy care. After the meeting, Mr. Pence tweeted a photo of two dozen men sitting around a table. Kellyanne Conway was reportedly in the room, but in the picture the vice president circulated, there was not a woman in sight.
For liberals, the photo seemed like an inadvertent insight into the current Republican psyche: Powerful men plotting to leave vulnerable women up a creek, so ensconced in their misogynistic world they don’t even notice the bad optics (not to mention the irony of the “pro-life” party making it harder for women to afford to have babies). Political analysts treated the photo as a gaffe, the kind of rookie mistake we’re used to seeing from the Trump White House.
I’m not so sure.
10/ The wonderful Samantha Bee on Trump's budget......five great minutes....
Samantha Bee explained President Donald Trump’s proposed budget on Wednesday, with the help of a penis metaphor.
After laying out just some of the various cuts that the Trump administration is planning to implement, the “Full Frontal” host noted how defense spending was actually going to increase under the plans.
“This kind of sounds like when an insecure guy tries to make his penis look bigger by shaving down everything else around it,” said Bee.
To further emphasize the metaphor, Bee pointed to White House budget director Mick Mulvaney’s labeling of the proposals as a “hard power budget” as even more proof.
11/ Do you believe doctors who seem to be on commission from Big Pharma to push pills into you? A great example is acid reflux and heartburn.....read this, and throw those pills away before they do some permanent damage....
Many Americans would rather take a drug than change their habits to control a persistent ailment. Yet, every medication has side effects, some of which can be worse than the disease they are meant to treat. Drugs considered safe when first marketed can turn out to have hazards, both bothersome and severe, that become apparent only after millions of people take them for a long enough time.
Such is the case with a popular class of drugs called proton pump inhibitors, or P.P.I.s, now used by more than 15 million Americans and many more people worldwide to counter an increasingly common ailment: acid reflux, which many people refer to as heartburn or indigestion.
12/ We had a story last week on the Hungarian Nazi Sebastian Gorka, Trump's National Security Adviser......here he gets the Sam Bee treatment.....seven minutes....
Samantha Bee reminded the “Full Frontal” audience Wednesday night that President Trump pledged to hire the best people in his administration.
Look no further than Dr. Sebastian Gorka, “one of those best people,” Bee joked to lead off a piece on the shady national security adviser.
A former blogger at Breitbart, Gorka joined the administration as an Islamic terrorism expert. But scholars who have read his doctoral dissertation and have not come away impressed. The editor of International Studies Quarterly wrote:
I would not characterize it as a work of scholarship. I am confident that it would not earn him a doctorate at any reputable academic department in the United States. Indeed, it would be unacceptable as an undergraduate thesis for the Department of Government or the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. My guess is that Gorka wanted to call himself “Doctor,” and his PhD-granting institution was happy to oblige.
Bee, who read parts of Gorka’s thesis, suggested that he might be exaggerating his pedigree.
This is a real picture! Somewhere.....
13/ This is a Floriduh story that is truly an example of why our state is the joke of the country.....read how teachers bonuses are calculated.....great column from Scott Maxwell in the Orlando Sentinel....
With 40 percent of teachers leaving Florida’s public schools within five years after starting, Florida has a problem.
Tallahassee politicians know this. They also know they created these problems with policies that are top-down, bureaucratic and generally bone-headed. So they’re now scrambling to fix things.
One bill would tinker with the state’s flawed teacher-bonus program. Another would tinker with the state’s flawed testing regulations. The changes are minor. The general goal seems to be upgrading Florida’s education mandates from truly dreadful to just plain bad.
This would actually be a good aspirational motto for our Legislature — Florida 2017: Less dreadful than before.
In many cases, the new bills address serious problems with insignificant solutions. Take the plan to improve Florida’s nationally ridiculed teacher-bonus program, for example. Right now bonuses are based, in part, on test scores teachers posted back when they were students ... even if those scores are 30 years old.
14/ Fargo 3 is coming April 19th on FX.....yippee! The first two seasons of Fargo were incredibly good TV, and if you haven't seen them, put them on your list. Especially Season 2, with Billy Bob Thornton....
The first trailer for season 3 of Fargo revealed all of the key players (Carrie Coon, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, David Thewlis, Ewan McGregor x 2) and their key situations, while remaining relatively vague about what those situations, indeed, are. FX just released a second trailer whose length doubles the first; it doesn’t spoil much (and thus also doesn’t reveal much else plot-wise), but it does fill in some of the characters.
What we know: One Ewan McGregor is a long-haired balding parole officer who has a rivalry with his non-balding curly-haired also-Ewan-McGregor brother, who’s a shining success story — at least in the Minnesota parking lot industry, of which he’s been deemed king. Said king, Emmit Stussy, is currently doing business (seemingly not so much voluntarily) with a frightening-teethed capitalist played by David Thewlis — looking very much like someone you wouldn’t want to do business with unless you didn’t fear being eviscerated in a Fargo-y fashion. Ray Stussy, the balding McGregor, is romantically involved with Nikki Swango, a parolee with a penchant for gambling, which results in petty theft and then results in a brutal murder — but since this is Fargo, perhaps there will be more of those. Gloria Burgle, a police chief played by Carrie Coon, looks to remain on the outskirts of these plot lines, but her job will likely lead her to the center of it all.
Here's the trailer for Fargo Season 3.....
Todays video - Google has launched a self driving bicycle.....yes, you read that right - a 2 minute promo....
Todays counseling joke....
After 35 years of marriage, a husband and wife came for counseling. When asked what the problem was, the wife went into a tirade listing every problem they had ever had in the years they had been married.
On and on and on: neglect, lack of intimacy, emptiness, loneliness, feeling unloved and unlovable, an entire laundry list of unmet needs she had endured.
Finally, after allowing this for a sufficient length of time, the therapist got up, walked around the desk and after asking the wife to stand, he embraced and kissed her long and passionately as her husband watched - with a raised eyebrow. The woman shut up and quietly sat down in a daze.
The therapist turned to the husband and said, "This is what your wife needs at least 3 times a week. Can you do this?"
"Well, I can drop her off here on Mondays and Wednesdays, ..............But I fish on Fridays.
Todays military joke
U.S. Marine Colonel was about to start the morning briefing to his staff.While waiting for the coffee machine to finish brewing, the colonel decided to pose a question to all assembled.He explained that his wife had been a bit frisky the night before and he failed to get his usual amount of sound sleep.He posed the question of just how much of sex was "work" and how much of it was "pleasure?"A Major chimed in with 75%-25% in favor of work.A Captain said it was 50%-50%.A Lieutenant responded with 25%-75% in favor of pleasure, depending upon his state of inebriation at the time.There being no consensus, the colonel turned to the Private First Class who was in charge of making the coffee and asked for his opinion?Without any hesitation, the young Private First Class responded,"Sir, it has to be 100% pleasure.The colonel was surprised and as you might guess, asked why."Well, sir, if there was any work involved, the officers would have me doing it for them."The room fell silent.God Bless the enlisted man.
Todays medical joke
I recently picked a new primary care doctor. After two visits and exhaustive lab tests, doctor said for my age, 75,
I was in good physical condition.
I couldn't resist asking, 'Do you think I'll live to be 80?'
'Do you smoke tobacco, or drink beer, wine or hard liquor?'
'Oh no,' I replied. 'I'm not doing drugs, either!'
'Do you eat red meats, steaks & barbecued ribs?'
'I said, 'Not much. My former doctor said that all red meat is very unhealthy!'
'Do you spend a lot of time in the sun, like playing golf, boating, sailing, hiking, or bicycling?'
'No, I don't,' I said.
'Do you gamble, drive fast cars, or have a lot of sex?'
'No,' I said.
He looked at me and said, 'Then why do you even give a shit?'
Todays wry joke.....
