1/ If you are thinking Trump's voters will change their minds about him as scandal after scandal unfolds forget it - it's not going to happen.....conservatives will not, will not ever admit they were wrong......
Excellent article from Amanda Marcotte.....
What’s it going to take to get Donald Trump’s supporters to see the light? It’s a question on the minds of not only liberals but also anyone who still cherishes our democracy, and it grows more intense as evidence piles up of corruption and even suspicions of criminal activity by members of the Trump administration. Indeed, waiting and watching for signs of buyer’s remorse among Trump supporters has become a minor cottage industry within the mainstream media, with reporters and TV anchors displaying an almost pornographic interest in watching the mental hoops that Trump voters will go through so as to stand by their man.
“Trump voters want jobs. Not noise about Russia,” reads a May 16 headline from CNN. A June 7 Vox headline notes that Trump voters are “disappointed” but “still voting Republican.” After the congressional hearing with former FBI Director James Comey, CNN held an on-air focus group of Trump voters and correspondent Gary Tuchman could barely contain his surprise at how they had not budged one bit from believing Trump was a good guy.
When will these people see? Those of us who are not in the cult of Trump keep tuning in to find out. How many times does he have to admit to obstructing justice in public? How many angry, incoherent tweets about the investigation before his guilty-acting behavior gets to them? How long do we have to wait for Trump’s biggest fans to call their friends and apologize for their votes?
Well, folks are going to have to keep on waiting because the answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between “a long, long time from now” and more likely “never.”
2/ Andrew Sullivan with his weekly column for New York Magazine......his first piece nails what is really happening with Trump and the Republicans - everything President Obama did is being undone or dismantled - everything....
I was mulling, as one does, over this presidency, and something crystallized in my head that I had not quite grasped before. Its policies are best described as simply perverse. The new Senate health-care bill is just the latest shining example. As Peter Suderman explains, it certainly isn’t based on any serious conservative ideas about reforming health care; it has no vision of how it wants health care to be organized; the loss of health care for the working poor will be most intense in Republican districts; and, just as important, a huge amount of it is simply kicked into the future — and could easily be forestalled or nullified by future Congresses and presidents. For good measure, by ending many of the taxes in the bill that make it work, and by removing the individual mandate, it risks sending the insurance markets into a deeper crisis.
3/ Seth Meyers with a great 11 minute riff on Trumpcare and the secretive process in the Senate......insightful comedy....you will laugh, and learn something....
(Credit: Late Night With Seth Myers/YouTube)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
As Senate Republicans rush to sign a deeply unpopular health care bill into law, “President Trump seems to be feeling a little emboldened,” observed “Late Night” host Seth Meyers on Thursday.
Hours after a summary of the GOP Senate’s new health bill was released, Trump held a campaign-style rally in Cedar Rapids Iowa, which quickly devolved into an “epic” “venting session.”
But just as Trump “was about to repeat his infamous claim that he’s done more in office than any president in history . . . he caught himself. Sort of,” noted Meyers.
4/ John Oliver with his comedic reporting on the coal industry and Trump's promises to save jobs.....an excellent and informative 19 minutes....
In the piece he mentions a possible lawsuit from Murray Energy.....yup, he's now being sued for libel by the old man.....
President Donald Trump has spent a lot of time talking about the ways in which he will help the long decline of the coal industry.
On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver discussed how Trump’s rhetoric about bring back coal mining jobs is not only dishonest, but that he may not even understand what a miner actually does.
“He may very well think it’s running up to things he wants and yelling, ‘mine!’,”Oliver joked.
Despite EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt touting an astronomical number number of jobs having been created since Trump took office, Oliver pointed out that the president has actually created roughly 1,300 coal jobs. But the industry as whole only employs about 76,000 and Oliver pointed out that retail store JC Penney, despite being on the verge of bankruptcy, employs 114,000 alone. However, as Oliver noted, coal mines “are central to the community” in areas in which they are concentrated.
5/ Good story from Tessa Stuart on the real reason Ossof lost in Georgia......apart from being a wishy washy centrist Democrat that is....the Republicans tied him to Nancy Pelosi in attack ads, and she is toxic to the Republican base.
It's time for the Democrats to get new faces including the consultants and so called experts who advise the Dems, who keep losing.....
There's an old Election-Day adage, "Republicans, pray for rain"; inclement weather, the thinking goes, depresses turnout and helps the GOP candidate.
So in a contest where the last polls showed the candidates separated by the very slimmest of margins – a razor-thin one tenth of one percentage point – you could forgive Democrats for wanting to blame Jon Ossoff's bitter, 3.8-point loss in Georgia's sixth congressional district Tuesday on bad weather; the region got more than a month's worth of rain in a single afternoon, most of it confined to the bluest quadrants of the heavily red district.
Unfortunately for those Democrats, says Brad Gomez, associate professor of political science at Florida State University and the co-author of a 2007 study on the weather's impact on presidential elections, they can't explain away Ossoff's loss so easily.
6/ Stephen Colbert with his six minute opener, mainly about Sean Spicer....most amusing.
Stephen Colbert practically begged White House press secretary Sean Spicer to remain in his role Tuesday night, fearing that President Trump’s spokesman may leave and take all the funny material him.
The host of CBS’s “The Late Show” read a headline from earlier this week that claimed Spicer’s days as the press secretary are coming to an end.
“What? When?” Colbert asked. “Sean, I have so many questions. If you go, who would not answer them?”
Colbert noted that the daily press briefings in the White House have undergone some changes in recent weeks.
“At yesterday’s press briefing, not only did Spicer not allow cameras, he also prohibited audio recordings,” Colbert informed his audience. “That’s a big change from his usual press briefing, where only information is prohibited.”
7/ Philandro Castile - there has been a lot of stories about this killing.....but watch these videos and make up your own mind.....and note you will be seeing exactly what the jury saw....
A jury just acquitted this police offer who shot Philandro Castile seven times....this is the police dashcam video showing the whole incident, with audio from a mike the cop was wearing.....listen to what he's saying and screaming.........
I couldn't watch more than three or four minutes of this....
On Friday, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was found not guilty of manslaughter and other charges relating to the fatal shooting of Philando Castile in a Minneapolis suburb in July 2016. Days after the verdict, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension made public files related to the case. Among them is the police dash-cam video that captures the traffic stop and the fatal exchange between Castile, who is black, and Yanez.
This is the FB Live video from Castile's girlfriend Diamond Reynolds who was in the car with her four year old, taken right after the shots were fired. You can connect this video to the dash cam video.....note the first thing the arriving officers do is get her out of the car and cuff her.....
ST. PAUL — Last summer, only seconds after watching a Minnesota police officer shoot her boyfriend during a traffic stop, Diamond Reynolds pulled out her phone and started recording.
Shaken but steady, Ms. Reynolds told viewers on Facebook Live all that she had seen. As her camera rolled, she told the police officer, whose gun was still pointed into the car, that her boyfriend had meant no harm and had been trying to cooperate. And she checked on her 4-year-old daughter, who had watched the shooting from her booster seat in the back of the Oldsmobile.
Within hours, millions had watched her video, and the death of Ms. Reynolds’s boyfriend, Philando Castile, was international news.
This week, the officer, Jeronimo Yanez, is on trial for second-degree manslaughter, and Ms. Reynolds, 27, is back in the spotlight.
This is a two minute video of Reynolds cuffed in a police car with her four year old....
In the aftermath of Officer Jeronimo Yanez‘s acquittal after fatally shooting Philando Castile, new material related to the case continues to be released.
Just this morning, Tony Webster, an independent journalist and researcher from Minnesota, provided video obtained via a FOIA request of Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, in the back of a squad car with her four-year-old daughter in the immediate moments after Castile was gunned down.
The video is harrowing, hard to watch, and contains strong language. Reynolds can be heard screaming, at whichh point her four-year-old daughter Dae’Anne then rises to the occasion to console her grieving mother, saying, “Please don’t scream because I don’t want you to get shooted … I can keep you safe … I wish this town was safer.”
And Trevor Noah sums it up.....excellent commentary from Noah, with no jokes....starts at the 4 minute mark....
But there was nothing funny about the Philando Castile verdict, and Noah didn’t try to go for laughs. “How does a black person not get shot in America?” Noah asked. “The bar is always moving. The goal post is always shifting. There’s a different thing to explain why the person got shot. Oh, the person was wearing a hoodie. Oh, the person was running away from the police. Oh, no, the person was going toward the police. Oh, no, the person was running around at night ... But at some point you realize there’s no real answer.”
Noah delivered this part of his monologue in a calm but somber tone— a tone that we have seen before from him. It’s the same one he’s employed each time he’s covered an unjust act of police violence on a black life. It’s the same tone he used when talking about Terrence Crutcher, the Chicago police, and Alton Sterling. He doesn’t scream at the camera, sigh with exhausted frustration, or repeatedly jam his pen into his desk as his predecessor might have. Noah is composed, measured, and restrained. It’s emotionally affecting television, and it somehow still manages to effectively convey frustration
8/ Tom Tomorrow with another great cartoon....
9/ Paul Krugman on Republicans and their drive to cut taxes on the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.......
Zombies have long ruled the Republican Party. The good news is that they may finally be losing their grip — although they may still return and resume eating conservative brains. The bad news is that even if zombies are in retreat, vampires are taking their place.
What are these zombies of which I speak? Among wonks, the term refers to policy ideas that should have been abandoned long ago in the face of evidence and experience, but just keep shambling along.
The right’s zombie-in-chief is the insistence that low taxes on the rich are the key to prosperity
10/ Time for an "Honest Trailer".....this one for "Aliens".....amusing and incredibly sarcastic.....
11/ Screwing the poor - this is the latest wrinkle on how the big boys are exploiting the poorest Americans.....sell them a junk car, and harass them for debt forever...
More than a decade after Yvette Harris’s 1997 Mitsubishi was repossessed, she is still paying off her car loan.
She has no choice. Her auto lender took her to court and won the right to seize a portion of her income to cover her debt. The lender has so far been able to garnish $4,133 from her paychecks — a drain that at one point forced Ms. Harris, a single mother who lives in the Bronx, to go on public assistance to support her two sons.
“How am I still paying for a car I don’t have?” she asked.
For millions of Americans like Ms. Harris who have shaky credit and had to turn to subprime auto loans with high interest rates and hefty fees to buy a car, there is no getting out.
12/ A Florida story - the Times with an investigation into the Sheriff of St. Johns County David B. Shoar......and how he covered up a murder.....
A long but fascinating story from the Times that is all too typical of justice in the South....
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Rusty Rodgers did not fit everyone’s image of a law enforcement officer, particularly in deeply conservative northeast Florida. One police chief, well ensconced in the local power structure, expressed irritation over what he called the officer’s “Jimmy Buffett look” — long hair, beard, loafers and no socks.
No one, however, questioned Agent Rodgers’s tenacity as an investigator.
Working for the Jacksonville sheriff, he doggedly pursued a rapist who preyed on poor women and prostitutes. “They deserve justice just as much as someone who lives on the Southside,” he told the local paper, referring to the wealthier part of town. The rapist got 45 years.
Later, Agent Rodgers joined the state’s elite investigative unit, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where he quickly earned agent-of-the-year honors — and a meeting with the governor — for helping dismantle a terrorist financing network that stretched from Florida to the Middle East. For the governor, he made a concession: He cut his hair.
Then, in January 2011, came the call that would upend his life.
13/ "The Room" directed by Tommy Wiseau is allegedly the worst movie ever made......below is a five minute appreciation of the awfulness of this film from Tom Bissell.....It's only on Netflix as a DVD....
"The Citizen Kane of bad movies" (Entertainment Weekly); "a bad – shockingly bad – romantic tragedy" (Time Out New York); "prompts most of its viewers to ask for their money back – before even 30 minutes have passed" (Variety). Most film-makers have nightmares about reviews like these, but they've worked wonders for The Room, a movie whose transcendent awfulness has made it a cult phenomenon and an audience-participation fixture along the lines of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It's difficult to make any sort of movie, good or bad, but to make a movie that's so bad it's good you need vision, drive, luck and obsessive vanity. Fortuitously, The Room's writer/producer/director/star Tommy Wiseau appears to possess all of these qualities, combined with a total lack of acting talent.
A mix of Tennessee Williams, Ed Wood and R Kelly's Trapped In the Closet, The Room is a simple story of a guy whose fiancee is cheating on him with his best friend, but devastating plot points such as cancer, drugs and pregnancy are thrown in – then completely forgotten about. Characters disappear halfway through the film, the softcore sex scenes are excruciating, and the San Franscisco setting (it was actually shot in Los Angeles) is alluded to by amateurish back projection and repeated shots of the Golden Gate Bridge.
And elevating the whole affair to high-trash status is Wiseau himself, with his slurry Schwarzeneggerian accent and resemblance to a gym-pumped Christopher Walken in a wig. "It's like your favourite nightmare," says comedy writer and Room convert Robert Popper. "It's horrible to watch the whole time. You know how if you watch The Godfather, every scene is a masterpiece? It's the same with The Room: every scene is perfectly bad."
Todays video - haven't had one of these for a while - a fail collection from TwisterNederland.....idiots from around the world hurting themselves.....
Todays robot joke
A father bought a robot that slaps people when they lie. He decided to test it out at dinner.He asked his son what he did that afternoon.
The son replied, "I did some schoolwork."The robot slapped the son.
The son said, "Ok, Ok. I was at a friend's house watching a movie."The dad asked, "Really? What movie did you watch?"
The son said, "Toy Story."The robot slapped the son.
The son said, "Ok, Ok, we were watching porn."The dad said, "What? At your age I didn't even know what porn was."The robot slapped the father.
Chuckling, the mom laughed and said, "Well, he certainly is your son." The robot slapped the mother.The robot is now for sale.
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