1/ Frank Rich with his insightful take on this awful week for the idiot.....
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: Donald Trump’s shocking reaction to Charlottesville and the likely fallout from it, and whether Hope Hicks can succeed where Anthony Scaramucci failed in running the White House’s communications shop.
President Trump’s “both sides” press conference about Charlottesville has been perhaps the most shocking moment in an administration already suffering from many self-inflicted wounds. Will it be the most damaging to his presidency?
I guess we now have to officially retire “most shocking” and “most damaging” as modifiers for anything Donald Trump does, because he will always find a way to up the ante. My own theory remains that this administration’s downfall began with the firing of James Comey, an unabashed attempt to obstruct justice in the Russia investigation. (Remember when that seemed shocking?) His downfall will culminate only when the GOP, in existential extremis, realizes that its choices are to leap from the Titanic or go down with the ship.
I guess we now have to officially retire “most shocking” and “most damaging” as modifiers for anything Donald Trump does, because he will always find a way to up the ante. My own theory remains that this administration’s downfall began with the firing of James Comey, an unabashed attempt to obstruct justice in the Russia investigation. (Remember when that seemed shocking?) His downfall will culminate only when the GOP, in existential extremis, realizes that its choices are to leap from the Titanic or go down with the ship.
2/ Bill Maher on bipartisanship and politically correct free speech....one of his more serious ones but still with some great zingers, five minutes...
Bill Maher criticized bipartisanship, saying how sometimes the far left and the far right “come together to make a problem worse.”
He went after how both sides tackle obesity. with liberals crying about “fat-shaming” whenever someone mentions weight and conservatives call guidelines to eating healthier “social engineering.”
The Real Time host pivoted the conversation to the time when then-White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon joked about the reason why the then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer wasn’t on camera as much was because he “got fatter.”
“Okay, not the greatest joke ever but a joke,” Maher reacted. “Not to Chelsea Clinton it wasn’t.”
3/ The intelligent Andrew Sullivan on the weeks events.....he's not too optimistic, just read his first paragraph below.......
What is there to add to the acres of pixels deployed to understand this past week?
A few thoughts. This should change everything and will likely change nothing. It remains a fact that 67 percent of Republican voters back Trump’s disgusting response to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. That’s 34 percent of the country — which is only a little below where Trump’s current polling lies. Close to 80 percent of GOP voters approve of Trump’s presidency as a whole. Over the last week or so, in fact, Trump’s disapproval has dropped somewhat and his approval stabilized. Yes, it’s still dreadful by historical standards — but still enough to ensure that the loyal base will still intimidate the Republican elite into passivity.
We know now — even more indelibly — that no one can control Trump.
4/ HBO's VICE News segment we sent out Tuesday night as a special is featured in Salon and clips from the piece are actually in some late night comedy clips.....why? Because none of the mainstream news has anything comparable that shows these scum as they really are. The female reporter was both really brave, and extremely lucky....
5/ Frank Bruni's viral column in the Times.....depressingly insightful....
As the worst week in a cursed presidency wound down, I spotted more and more forecasts that Donald Trump would resign, including from Tony Schwartz, who wrote “The Art of the Deal” for Trump and presumably understands his tortured psyche.
They struck me not as wishful or fantastical.
They struck me as late.
Trump resigned the presidency already — if we regard the job as one of moral stewardship, if we assume that an iota of civic concern must joust with self-regard, if we expect a president’s interest in legislation to rise above vacuous theatrics, if we consider a certain baseline of diplomatic etiquette to be part of the equation.
By those measures, it’s arguable that Trump’s presidency never really began.
6/ Jim Jeffries the Australian comedian has a show on Comedy Central, and in this five minute clip he looks at the Confederate monuments issue.....quite good, and mildly amusing....
"The Jim Jefferies Show"(Credit: Comedy Central)
On Tuesday, comedian effim Jefferies, the host of the relatively new “The Jim Jefferies Show,” used his platform to discuss one of the key issues behind the events in Charlottesville last weekend: the preservation and idealization of Confederate iconography and the removal of Confederate monuments.
Visiting Georgia for the segment, Jefferies says “Before I came to America, all I knew about the South was what I saw in ‘Gone With the Wind.’ I fell asleep in the middle of the movie.”
Later, the comedian talks with Francys Johnson, the former Georgia president of the NAACP, about the misconceptions people — especially Confederate sympathizers — have of life in the South before the Civil War.
7/ Matt Taibbi on Steve Bannon's disastrously revealing interview and what it all means....this was written before he resigned Friday, but it's still a good look behind the machinations of the White House...
Steve Bannon (pictured January 31st) called the Charlottesville alt-right marchers "a collection of clowns" in an interview this week
The list of nitwits in the Trump administration is long. Betsy DeVos, in charge of education issues, seems capable of losing at tic-tac-toe. Ben Carson thought the great pyramids of Egypt were grain warehouses. Rick Perry, merely in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal, probably has post-it notes all over his office to remind him what things are: telephone, family photo, souvenir atomic-reactor paperweight, etc.
Lots of dunces, but chief strategist Steve Bannon, sadly, isn't one of them. The intellectual leader of the alt-right movement is no genius – nobody with his political views could be – but neither is he an idiot. He's one of the few people in that White House with even a primitive grasp of long-term strategy, which makes his impulsive-seeming decision to call The American Prospect this week curious.
8/ A wonderful Seth Meyers where he dissects the Trump remarks.....it's like having Trump on the gurney for 12 minutes of surgery, with some great jokes....
Seth Meyers did not hold back Wednesday night as he trashed President Donald Trumpfor defending white supremacists on Tuesday.
“After being pressured into reading a carefully scripted statement denouncing Nazis on Monday, President Trump has spent the rest of the week showing us who he really is,” Meyers said. “And this is exciting ― a lying racist.”
The “Late Night” host called Trump’s Tuesday press conference “clinically insane.”
And he responded to the president saying that there were “very fine people” who showed up in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee “innocently and legally.”
“No,” Meyers said. “There are no ‘fine people’ marching with Nazis and white supremacists. No one gets accidentally caught up in a white supremacist rally. It just doesn’t happen.”
9/ Howard Fineman on what Trump is really up to.....divide and conquer. What we thought was a disaster on Tuesday was deliberate, and part of Trump's strategy to survive....he's crazy, but he is also cunning.....
WASHINGTON — Let’s be clear about what President Donald Trump was up to Tuesday during his press conference in Trump Tower, and what his longer-range plan is for surviving, if not prospering, in the White House for at least four years.
Speaking publicly in the family fortress in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, he wasn’t trying to convince anyone of the facts. There could be no dispute about them if you saw, say, the Vice video of hideous neo-Nazis, KKK members, generic white supremacists and rancid anti-Semites in the streets carrying torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
No, the president was doing something else: trolling the media, deliberately goading reporters he knew were waiting for him in his echoing marble lobby. He basked in their urgent outrage and determined focus on Charlottesville. He had scripted himself as the alt-right’s Daniel in a “fake news” lion’s den of his own devising.
Was he upset by the resulting headline and denunciations from the likes of the former presidents Bush, father and son? Hardly. He had sought them. In fact, word on Wednesday was that Trump had been in a good, almost celebratory, mood Tuesday after the confrontation he’d created. He had unleashed himself, perhaps once and for all. He was in the fight, and the fight is all.
10/ Tina Fey on "Weekend Update" with a very funny segment......five gorging minutes [you'll see!]....
Tina Fey, a University of Virginia graduate, appeared on Weekend Update to talk about Charlottesville and how "sheet caking" is the best way to ignore white power groups.
"It's a beautiful school and I have nothing of fond memories of my time there," the former Saturday Night Live star said.
"So it broke my heart to see these evil forces descend on Charlottesville, and then our president, Donald John Trump – which I don't think people talk about enough what a stupid jackass name that is… – anyway Donnie John comes out and says that he condemns violence 'on many sides, on many sides.' I'm feeling sick, because I've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and I wasn't confused by it ... Nazis are always bad, I don't care what you say."
11/ Painting yourself into a corner....great cartoon from Mount Dora artist Taylor Jones...
12/ Jimmy Kimmel continues on the Trump train wreck.....
Jimmy Kimmel continued his attacks on President Trump since doubling down on his Charlottesville remarks at yesterday’s press conference.
Kimmel started off by reading some social media feedback from Trump supporters in reaction to his monologue that urged them to turn on Trump. He was called a “snowflake” and a “whining baby” and “mind numbing retardation.”
“I want to thank everyone for the feedback,” Kimmel reacted. “It just goes to show you — if you try and understand where people are coming from and talk to them like human beings, they will open up!”
Kimmel later mocked Trump for disbanding the manufacturing councilafter several CEOs had already resigned in reaction to Trump’s press conference by comparing it to “a kid who cancels his birthday party because only the clown showed up.”
“You can’t break up with me, I’m breaking up with you first!” he exclaimed.
Kimmel understood why people are upset with Trump because he handled a group of racists “with kid gloves.”
“Maybe he did it because kid gloves are the only gloves that fit on his tiny little hands,” Kimmel quipped.
13/ The talented Naomi Klein with a story that resonates - Trump has lifted many of his techniques of manipulation and media control from professional wrestling.....read this article, it's quite persuasive....
The colonization of network television by reality TV at the turn of the millennium happened at a speed that few could have predicted. In very short order, North Americans went from deriving entertainment from scripted shows with the same characters and dramas week after week, season after season, to watching seemingly unscripted shows on which the drama came from people’s willingness to eject one another from whatever simulation of reality happened to be on display. Tens of millions were glued to their TVs as participants were voted off the island on Survivor, removed from the mansion on The Bachelor — and, eventually, fired by Donald Trump on The Apprentice.
The timing made sense. The first season of Survivor — so wildly successful that it spawned an army of imitators — was in 2000. That was two decades after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher kicked the “free-market revolution,” with its veneration of greed, individualism, and competition as the governing principles of society, into high gear. It became possible to peddle as mass entertainment the spectacle of people turning on one another for a pot of gold.
The whole genre — the alliances, the backstabbing, the one person left standing — was always a kind of capitalist burlesque.
14/ Bill Maher with a mildly amusing two minute segment where he presents statues that will annoy the right wingers....
HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher used his show Friday night to chart out a (comedic) course forward in the heated debate over the removal of Confederate memorials across the country. Following the violence that was seen at a white supremacist rally Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, there’s been a renewed scrutiny on the lasting symbols of the Confederacy.
15/ Have an elderly parent to care for? Approaching Medicare and worried about the future?
Here are some books for you to think about getting.....good story from the Times...
Longevity is generally better than its alternative. But when the body or especially the mind wears out, caring for yourself or finding someone else to do it for you can impoverish you in short order.
We fail to plan for it at our peril. So when it seemed that Republicans in Washington were close to passing legislation that could fundamentally change Medicaid, I wrote five straigh
Todays video - one of the funniest ventriloquist routines I have ever seen - Nina Conti with her first posting on Youtube...
Todays golf jokes....
A guy has been very busy over the past 2 years putting his thoughts and ideas together in a book about Golf. He is very proud of the results and in order to market the publication, he is asking friends and family to be the first to own a copy. Here's the Table of Contents from the new book, "Winning Golf Strategies," which I believe gives the reader valuable playing tips and insider information that I've gained through my own years of experience in the game and observations of my golfing partners.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
- How to properly line up your Fourth putt.
Chapter 2
- How to hit a Nike from the rough when you hit a Titleist from the tee.
Chapter 3
- How to avoid the water when you lie 8 in a bunker.
Chapter 4
- How to get more distance off the Shank.
Chapter 5
- When to give the Ranger the finger.
Chapter 6
- Using your shadow on the Greens to confuse your opponent.
Chapter 7
- When to implement Handicap Management.
Chapter 8
- Proper excuses for drinking beer before 9 a.m.
Chapter 9
- How to urinate behind a 4" x 4" post .. Undetected.
Chapter 10
- How to rationalize a 6 hour round.
Chapter 11
- How to find that ball that everyone else saw go in the water.
Chapter 12
- Why your spouse doesn't care that you birdied the 5th.
Chapter 13
- How to let a Foursome play through your Twosome.
Chapter 14
- How to relax when you are hitting three off the Tee.
Chapter 15
- When to suggest major swing corrections to your opponent.
Chapter 16
- God and the meaning of The Birdie-To- Bogey Putt.
Chapter 17
- When to regrip your Ball Retriever.
Chapter 18
- Use a strong grip on the Hand Wedge and Weak Slip on the Foot Wedge.
Chapter 19
- Why male golfers will pay $5.00 a beer from the Cart Girl and give her a $3 tip, but will balk at a $3.50 Beer at the 19th Hole and stiff the Bartender.
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