1/ The mega money behind the Trump win in November was from two billionaires, Robert and Rebekah Mercer who also bankroll Breitbart. A profile of this dangerous duo from HuffPo.....
Chilling - they are fanatics, with unlimited money to spend.
Last December, about a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rebekah Mercer arrived at Stephen Bannon’s office in Trump Tower, wearing a cape over a fur-trimmed dress and her distinctive diamond-studded glasses. Tall and imposing, Rebekah, known to close friends as Bekah, is the 43-year-old daughter of the reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer. If Trump was an unexpected victor, the Mercers were unexpected kingmakers. More established names in Republican politics, such as the Kochs and Paul Singer, had sat out the general election. But the Mercers had committed millions of dollars to a campaign that often seemed beyond salvaging.
That support partly explains how Rebekah secured a spot on the executive committee of the Trump transition team. She was the only megadonor to frequent Bannon’s sanctum, a characteristically bare-bones space containing little more than a whiteboard, a refrigerator and a conference table.
Rebekah Mercer is rarely photographed. However, occasionally she can be found in the background of news photos, uncredited in the captions. Here she is arriving at Trump Tower on December 8, with Nick Ayers and Kellyanne Conway.DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
2/ Good Bill Maher opening monologue.....he's on form for this one....7 minutes....
Bill Maher
On this week’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the feisty host came out of the gate with Saint Patrick’s Day humor, lambasting the Trump administration for all of the health, environment and human services budget cuts it recently announced. “The White House celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day by slashing everything that’s green in the budget,” said Maher.
“They’ve taken all the money from scientist and teachers and human rights workers, Meals on Wheels, Muppets, and given it to the people that really need it — the defense contractors,” Maher joked. President Trump has reiterated his campaign promise to reissue jobs to struggling, broke coal miners. On this note, Maher said the coal miners might have their promised jobs back, but find rather abruptly that they had lost other essential services.
“That’s what passes for good news in this administration — ‘You’re going back down in that toxic hole…’ and then as they’re lowering them in, ‘… and we’re going to take away your health care!’”
3/ Democrats are out of power completely in Washington, and in almost 2/3 of the states....but the Dem elites seem to be deaf to the rise of populism and new ideas....great story from the Guardian....
A new Fox News poll out this week shows Sanders has a +28 net favorability rating among the US population, dwarfing all other elected politicians on both ends of the political spectrum. And he’s even more popular among the vaunted “independents”, where he is at a mind boggling +41.
This poll is not just an aberration. Look at this Huffington Post chart that has tracked Sanders’ favorability rating over time, ever since he gained national prominence in 2015 when he started running for the Democratic nomination. The more people got to know him, they more they liked him – the exact opposite of what his critics said would happen when he was running against Clinton.
One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now. Yet instead of embracing his message, the establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don’t have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swaths of the country.
4/ And in case you think the story above was an outlier, read this excellent column from Thomas Edsall in the Times.....
Reader, guess when this paragraph was written:
Liberalism has turned away from the common people and become institutionalized into an establishment. Its spokesmen are driven around in limousines and supported by rich foundations, the television networks and publishing houses, the knowledge industry, the billion‐dollar universities and the urban consulting firms which profiteer from poverty. Liberalism is dominant only in the Northeast, which is always the last bastion of a dying order of privilege. The Northeast resists the populist surge of our day just as it fought the revolution of Jefferson, Jackson, Bryan and Roosevelt.
These words appeared in The New York Times Magazine in May, 1970. The quote comes from Kevin Phillips, the originator of Richard Nixon’s election-winning Southern strategy.
In fact, the problems that plagued the Democratic Party 50 years ago continue to do so.
The 2016 election and its aftermath have produced turmoil on the right while once again forcing into public view worrisome long-term trends in the Democratic electorate.
5/ Doonesbury's pretty conservative....
Doonesbury
6/ And I think Doonesbury means this guy.....a nasty piece of work.....
Top Trump Adviser Faces Calls For Resignation After Reports Of Ties To Nazi-Aligned Group
Sebastian Gorka proudly wears a medal from a Hungarian group that collaborated with Nazis during World War II.
LOBELOG
A top counterterrorism adviser to President Donald Trump faces growing calls to resign after a series of news reports alleging he has ties to a far-right Hungarian group with historical links to the Nazi party.
Sebastian Gorka was photographed during the January inaugural ball wearing a medal that foreign policy news site LobeLog later identified as a symbol of membership in the Hungarian Order of Heroes. The group, known as Vitézi Rend in Hungarian, collaborated with the Nazi government during World War II, according to the State Department. Members of the group are ineligible for American visas.
7/ Samantha Bee with six minutes on the Trump "Deep State" paranoia....
Samantha Bee dissected the myth of a "deep state" shadow network sabotaging President Trump from inside the U.S. government on Full Frontal.
The "deep state" is a term borrowed from autocratic governments in Egypt and Turkey, which use it to describe a network of perceived enemies. For Trump, Bee said, the "deep state" is a cohort of Obama-era holdovers strewn about the government and intelligence agencies who have been purposely leaking information to undermine the President, when really they're just terrified career bureaucrats.
"Think of them as passengers on a bus that's now being driven by a feral, paranoid monkey," Bee cracked. "They're not trying to kick him out of the driver's seat – they know we chose the monkey to be the bus driver because Hillary Clinton used e-mail and was a woman, and they respect that. They're just trying to turn the wheel slightly while the monkey is masturbating so we don't run over a cliff."
8/ A very interesting story that explains some of the anger on the Christian right / Trumpies.....America is becoming more secular, and they don't like it....
Love this picture!
(Credit: Getty/Mark Wallheiser)
Despite all the posturing by conservatives about how their movement represents “real” America and liberal political attitudes are restricted mainly to the “coastal elite,” new research from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that, at least in political terms, most Americans are secular in their orientation. While many Americans may still hold conservative personal beliefs, when it comes to the issue of church-state separation, large majorities are rejecting efforts by the religious right to use the power of the state to impose conservative Christian values on others.
In fact, the polling data shows there’s really only one group of Americans that rejects a secular society: white evangelical Christians. And this study is just further evidence that a lot of the political polarization in our country is the direct result of white evangelical Christians realizing that they no longer are the dominant majority and lashing out angrily in an effort to regain the levels of influence they used to enjoy.
9/ Very good Seth Meyers segment on Trumpcare....some great zingers and comedic reporting....about 10 minutes....
"Late Night with Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers dedicated Monday's edition of his "A Closer Look" segment to the tactics employed by President Donald Trump and other Republicans in defense of his embattled healthcare plan.
"One thing that has become clear over the past week is that lying is such a central feature of the Trump administration that many in DC just take it for granted," the host said on Monday's episode of NBC's "Late Night," "but there's one issue where Trump's lies could have very real consequences for millions of people and that's health care."
10/ An article from the Times I find difficult to believe.....it's by a guy giving up living in California, and moving back to Ohio....HUH?
OK - he makes some good points, including the reasons some of the flyover states seem to be so stupid - it's that everyone with a good IQ goes through school, college then leaves for the big cities or the East / West coast....
COLUMBUS, Ohio — In recent months, I’ve frequently found myself in places hit hard by manufacturing job losses, speaking to people affected in various ways. Sometimes, the conversation turns to the conflict people feel between the love of their home and the desire to leave in search of better work.
It’s a conflict I know well: I left my home state, Ohio, for the Marine Corps when I was 19. And while I’ve returned home for months or even years at a time, job opportunities often pull me away.
Experts have warned for years now that our rates of geographic mobility have fallen to troubling lows. Given that some areas have unemployment rates around 2 percent and others many times that, this lack of movement may mean joblessness for those who could otherwise work.
11/ Tom Tomorrow nails it again.....
Hmmm.....the economic power of men is declining, which may explain the slow building anger in the heartland....another thinking person's column from Thomas Edsall in the Times....
At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.
In 2016, 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were male and so were 348 of the Forbes 400. Of the 260 people on the Forbes list described as “self-made,” 250 were men. Wealth — and the ability to generate more wealth — must still be considered a reliable proxy for power.
But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduat
Since 2000, wage inequality has grown more among men than among women, as the accompanying chart from the Economic Policy Instituteshows.
13/ A classic Stephen Colbert open where he goes after Kellyanne Conway for her attempts to wash Trump's bugging accusations....a most amusing nine minutes....
Mr. Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert tore into President Donald Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway on Monday for suggesting that microwaves could turn into cameras that spy on people.
Conway made the claim on Sunday during an interview with the Bergen County Record as she attempted to defend Trump’s baseless allegation that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower before the 2016 presidential election.
14/ Really good story on Rachel Maddow, how she has become much more popular and why....
We are recording our TV news now - Vice News at 7.30 on HBO, and Rachel's A block at 9pm.
Vice News is really, really good national and international news [1/2 hour].....and Rachel has a new philosophy - don't focus on what they say, focus on what they do....if you record her show you can tune out the annoying commercials, and there are a lot of them.
BRAVO VIA GETTY IMAGES
The question of how to cover Donald Trump has confounded many people working in the media industry since his election. There are so many areas of the president’s administration that warrant dissection that his near-daily onslaught of morning tweets started to prove something of a distraction from the potentially larger issues at hand.
So Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” made a decision: tune them out.
“We developed sort of an informal, internal mantra … which is that we basically cover [the Trump administration] as if they are a silent movie,” Maddow told TheWrap earlier this month. “I stopped covering the Twitter feed and we started covering only what they do rather than what they say.”
15/ If you sometimes despair about the future because we have become such a stupid country, it's reinforced by stories like this.....the fossil fuel industry and their Republican friends have declared [tax] war on electric cars....amazing....
When Georgia repealed its generous $5,000 tax credit on electric vehiclesin July 2015, and instead slapped a $200 registration fee on electric cars, sales quickly tumbled.
In the month before the repeal, nearly 1,300 electric vehicles were sold in the state. By August, those sales had all but evaporated — to just 97 cars.
It was a hint of what would come.
Today, the economic incentives that have helped electric vehicles gain a toehold in America are under attack, state by state. In some states, there is a move to repeal tax credits for battery-powered vehicles or to let them expire. And in at least nine states, including liberal-leaning ones like Illinois and conservative-leaning ones like Indiana, lawmakers have introduced bills that would levy new fees on those who own electric cars.
16/ Florida is about to cut food stamps again.....proud of your Republican lawmakers? This is cruel, vicious class warfare targeting the poor, kids, old and sick. And these bastards call themselves Christians....
TALLAHASSEE — In a partisan clash, a key House committee voted Wednesday to deny food stamps to an estimated 229,000 Floridians, most of them children, and including seniors, veterans and people with disabilities.
The panel's chairman, Rep. Carlos Trujillo, R-Miami, said the bill is needed to reduce food stamp fraud by verifying applicants' eligibility. To make his case, he described seeing people in grocery stores in Miami with "a Mercedes key chain and their SNAP card," a reference to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides nutrition assistance to millions of individuals and families with low incomes.
Todays video - the Spanish version of "Born To Create Drama".....
Todays blond joke
Todays golf joke
David Feherty does a stand up show that is quite spectacular. It's all about his life in golf, the drinking and lots of stories about life on the tour. Here's one of his stories:It was back in the 70's and a soon-to-be prominent golfer Ray Floyd, was playing at Augusta for his first Masters. Back then the players could not bring their own caddies but had to use one of the locals. Floyd told the caddy master he wanted a big fellow who could handle his bag, but who also would keep quiet, no advice needed.The caddy who was assigned Floyd said, "Hello Mr. Floyd."Floyd said "Hello." And followed that with, "That's the last I want to hear from you unless I ask you a question."Everything went well until the 10th hole when Floyd pushed his drive into the right trees on the par 4. After surveying the scene he said out loud, "I'm going to hit a low fade out through that opening to carry and land mid green and then roll over the crest down near the hole."Surprisingly he pulled it off exactly and turned to his caddy and said, "How's that?"The caddy spoke for the first time and said, "That wasn't your ball."
Todays great cartoons
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