1/ Our new President apparently spends his time watching TV News and tweeting, and the real work of the country is left to a powerful staff, led by Steve Bannon. So who is he, and what does he want?
This story from the Times gives us a clue of Bannon's vision......and it's scary....
President Trump presents a problem to those who look at politics in terms of systematic ideologies. He is either disinclined or unable to lay out his agenda in that way. So perhaps it was inevitable that Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who does have a gift for thinking systematically, would be so often invoked by Mr. Trump’s opponents.
2/ I know you Jimmy Kimmel's opening last week at the Oscars, but it's worth looking again as it's a great example of a master showman at work.....9 quite amusing minutes.....
MICHAEL BUCKNER/VARIETY/REX/SHUTTERSTO
The 2017 Oscars kicked off with some singing and dancing from Justin Timberlake (which is never a bad idea), and led to a full-fledged dance party in the audience. Then came Jimmy Kimmel‘s opening monologue, which, as expected, was very political.
“This broadcast is being watched live by millions of Americans and around the world in more than 225 countries that now hate us,” he began. Kimmel then talked about our divided country, and said he can’t help people unite. He then poked fun at Mel Gibson, saying that there’s “only one Braveheart in the audience, and he can’t unite us either.” But, he said, that we can “Make America Great Again” by trying to have constructive conversations with those we disagree with.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Kimmel bit without at least mentioning his ongoing “feud” with Matt Damon, calling him “a selfish person.”
He also mentioned President Donald Trump by name, thanking him, and asking, “Remember last year when people thought the Oscars were racist?”
3/ Frank Rich with his take on the week's news....insightful stuff....
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: President Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress.
A new president’s first address to a joint session of Congress is typically a chance to show how campaign promises will become a policy agenda, something that’s been notoriously tricky for the Trump administration so far. Did the speech leave things any clearer?
Not at all. It was the same old Trump swill served up in perfumed linguistic packaging and presented in a far fancier setting in an effort to retool his image after more than a month of bombast, chaos, and dysfunction in his White House. The litany of promises he recited are the same ones he’s made from the get-go — the repeal and replacement of Obamacare with better health care for everyone, a massive retooling of America’s infrastructure, an end to terrorism and the drug epidemic, tax cuts for everyone, a renaissance in coal mining, not to mention the Great Wall — with no explanation of how he will achieve any of them, what they will cost, who will pay, and what’s in any fine print (or even medium print).
4/ SNL's opener was Kate McKinnon as Jeff Sessions, aka Forrest Gump......a very funny four minutes....
NBC
SNL
returned to the small screen with a send up of embattled Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. In an extended parody of Forrest Gump, the role was once again reprised by Kate McKinnon.
“You meet so many nice people,” in the White House, McKinnon said to fellow SNL cast member Leslie Jones, while both sat on a bench. “Life is like a box of chocolates, sure are a lot of brown ones in there,” said McKinnon, hitting Sessions southern drawl with precision.
McKinnon waxed on with a rotating cast of SNL characters, in the process pillorying the slew of Russia related problems now swirling around the Attorney General.
“I never talk to any Russians ever, and that’s all I got to say about that.”
5/ We are a sucker here at DDD for stories that give us new insights into common ideas that vex us.....and one thing that gets to me is why conservatives belief's are impervious to facts. Nothing gets through the wall, and it just puzzles me....
So this article from the New Yorker was very interesting.....
WHY FACTS DON’T CHANGE OUR MINDS
New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.
As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.
6/ I'm not sure if Eric Trump is an idiot, but SNL sure thinks so.....a "Weekend Update" segment....a good four minutes....
"Eric" seems to think Dad is still calling all the shots.
”Saturday Night Live” cast members Mikey Day and Alex Moffat showed up again this week to play President Donald Trump’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. They attempted to address some of the ethics matters of the White House — and, ah, maturity issues.
“The Trump organization is entirely in our hands,” Donald Jr. insisted during the “Weekend Update” segment, citing the opening of new Trump projects in Vancouver and Dubai. The president is maintaining ownership of his businesses, raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns, but he’s insisted he has nothing to do with management, which he says he has turned over to his sons.
“Bottom line is, the only people making decisions regarding the Trump organization are Eric and myself,” Donald Jr. declared in the skit.
“And Dad,” Eric piped in.
“No, no, remember, Eric,” said his big brother. “Dad does not tell us what to do anymore.”
“Yeah he does,” Eric responded.
Then Donald Jr. offered Eric his phone.
7/ Stephen Colbert on the Trump speech.....a very amusing three minutes, and he includes a goodly news clip....
Yesterday, reports indicated that Donald Trump was so delighted that news commentators were observing that he read the previous night’s speech from his TelePrompTer without getting off-track that he chose to delay the announcement of his new and improved travel ban.
On CBS’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert expressed more than a little shock and concern that the President is so obsessed with news coverage of himself that it affects policy, but as someone who — like many — hated the original travel ban, which barred entry to America by anyone coming from seven different Muslim-majority countries, he saw the benefit of placating Trump immediately.
Watch above to see a sketch featuring “Jill Newslady” and “Jim Anchorton” of “Real News Tonight,” who praise the reality television star for “[talking] the good words from his man mouth” and “[doing] all of his speeching perfectly, making all legal citizens smile bigly.”
8/ It's becoming clear that the ICE [Immigration service] has been unleashed under Trump, and like bullies in uniforms that are turning nasty and brutal.....read this story about a white, 60ish female Australian author and how she was treated for two hours for daring to enter this country. Note this article has gone viral in Australia.....
Tip - be very polite to these guys....
The author Mem Fox in 2004. Earlier this month, she was interrogated at LAX, en route to a conference in Milwaukee.
I was pulled out of line in the immigration queue at Los Angeles airport as I came in to the USA. Not because I was Mem Fox the writer – nobody knew that – I was just a normal person like anybody else. They thought I was working in the States and that I had come in on the wrong visa.
I was receiving an honorarium for delivering an opening keynote at a literacy conference, and because my expenses were being paid, they said: “You need to answer further questions.” So I was taken into this holding room with about 20 other people and kept there for an hour and 40 minutes, and for 15 minutes I was interrogated.
The room was like a waiting room in a hospital but a bit more grim than that. There was a notice on the wall that was far too small, saying no cellphones allowed, and anybody who did use a cellphone had someone stand in front of them and yell: “Don’t use that phone!” Everything was yelled, and everything was public, and this was the most awful thing, I heard things happening in that room happening to other people that made me ashamed to be human.
9/ There's no such thing as climate change, according to our "leadership".....
A Bunch of Cities Are Sweating Through the Hottest February Day on Record
Unseasonably high temperatures continued to make February feel more like May on Friday, with new record highs seen across the Midwest and into the Northeast. All told there are more than 50 possible record highs today, CNN reports.
Some cities are already there. Boston hit 72 today, its highest February temperature since record keeping began. Albany got up to 73, the highest winter temperature of all time in the capital. Further south, Youngstown hit 74, Cincinnati reached 77, and Louisville got up to 81, all of which set February records.
10/ Bill Maher with his "New Rules"....a good one, about five minutes....
Bill Maher thinks it's high time that Democrats release the "liberal bad boys" on President Donald Trump in an effort to reign in his big ego.
Bill Maher concluded his show tonight by asking if Republicans can overlook President Trump‘s personal failings, Democrats should be able to rehabilitate the image of certain politicians on their side.
Maher pointed to three people in particular who he felt were good enough on the issues to bring back: Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and John Edwards.
11/ This is really interesting....an English sheep farmers view of American farming.......an excellent story from the NYT.....
MATTERDALE, England — I am a traditional small farmer in the North of England. I farm sheep in a mountainous landscape, the Lake District fells. It is a farming system that dates back as many as 4,500 years. A remarkable survival. My flock grazes a mountain alongside 10 other flocks, through an ancient communal grazing system that has somehow survived the last two centuries of change. Wordsworth called it a “perfect republic of shepherds.”
It’s not your efficient modern agribusiness. My farm struggles to make enough money for my family to live on, even with 900 sheep. The price of my lambs is governed by the supply of imported lamb from the other side of the world. So I have one foot in something ancient and the other foot in the 21st-century global economy.
12/ Little Marco is running from the voters......waaaaaaa......good story from Daniel Ruth in the Tampa bay Times....
There's a good reason why Sen. Marco Rubio has been harder to find than Amelia Earhart.
His feelings are hurt. Don't you feel just awful?
The Judge Crater of the Senate has been AWOL from his ungrateful constituents for quite a while. It seems the senator is annoyed that the legions of people demonstrating in front of his offices across the state — who are critical of repealing the Affordable Care Act, President Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban and a number of controversial Cabinet appointments — had the audacity to request a face-to-face meeting for Rubio to explain himself.
Rubio, R-Why Is Everybody Always Picking On Me?, has become more reclusive than Thomas Pynchon to avoid meeting with those icky members of the public, otherwise known as voters.
13/ This looks like a really good movie, directed by Jordan Peele of Key and Peele....."Get Out"....
Get Out (Credit: Universal Pictures)
Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated — and justifiably hyped — cinematic directorial debut “Get Out” would be terrific even if it didn’t happen to be so goddamn timely. But coming a mere month into a new administration that’s its own special nightmare, the film’s racial anxiety horror feels all the sharper and more eerily resonant.
Early on in “Get Out,” Chris, a talented young photographer (played by British actor Daniel Kaluuya) is getting ready to spend a weekend with the family of his beautiful girlfriend Rose (“Girls” co-star Allison Williams, doing a knowingly milk-drinking, “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack-listening white chick shtick). Packing his “cozy clothes,” he asks, “Do they know I’m black?” — a question she finds laughably outdated. Her dad, after all, would have voted for Obama three times if he could have. But even before they arrive at the house, Chris begins to comprehend that Rose’s lily-white suburb holds terrible secrets.
Did I mention this was a horror movie? Whew....the "Get Out" trailer....
14/ We had this movie in DDD two weeks ago, so just to show your scribe puts his money where his mouth is etc etc, we went and saw it at the Enzian - and "Toni Erdmann" is everything this story from Salon says it is.....incredibly funny in parts, but moving, touching and especially weird too.....it's definitely worth seeing if you have a chance....
It will be on Amazon [I assume to rent] on April 11th.....don't miss it!
What’s the one great movie in this year’s Oscar race? It has a hairy Bulgarian monster, and you haven’t seen it
I swear, I'm not trolling: The bizarre and hilarious "Toni Erdmann" is a comic odyssey through late capitalism.
Toni Erdmann (Credit: Sony Pictures)
All the movies nominated for Oscars this year were made before You Know Who became president of the United States, but in that curious cultural kismet that so often pertains, many of them seem to speak to the present moment. There’s no shortage of social relevance to be found among this year’s roster of nominees, starting with the fact that Oscar is #notsodoggonewhite this time around.
Toni Erdmann trailer.....
Todays video - the getaway shootout from my second favorite movie "Reservoir Dogs".....
Todays lawyer joke
A New York attorney representing a wealthy art collector called his client."I have some good news, and I have some bad news."The art collector replied, "I've had an awful day. Give me the good news first."The lawyer said, "Well, I met with your wife today, and she informed me that she just invested $5,000 in two pictures that she thinks will bring a minimum of $15 million to $20 million, and I think she could be right."Saul replied enthusiastically, "Well done! My wife is a brilliant businesswoman! You've just made my day. Now I know I can handle the bad news. What is it?"The lawyer replied, "The pictures are of you and your secretary."
Todays marrieds joke
One lazy Sunday morning the wife and I were quiet and thoughtful, sitting around the breakfast table
when I said to her unexpectedly, “When I die, I want you to sell all my stuff, immediately.”
“Now why would you want me to do something like that?” she asked.
“I figure a woman as fine as yourself would eventually remarry and I don’t want some other asshole using my stuff.”
She looked at me intently and said: “What makes you think I’d marry another asshole?”
Todays puns
DDD ...especially enjoyed the NYer piece on "Why Facts Don't Change my Mind." Definitely a scary piece. Also, confirmed what I thought was happening with the ICE police ... they have been unleashed ... just hope the press/media can keep enuf pressure on them by showing what's happening.
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