1/ Frank Rich with his look at the current news......excellent as always....
This week - Trump and the Dems, Hillary's book and Steve Bannon....
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 deal with the Democrats, Hillary Clinton’s election postmortem, and Steve Bannon’s 60 Minutes interview.
After President Trump’s decision last week to accept the debt-ceiling deal pushed by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, shocked conservatives floated rumors that they’d target Paul Ryan’s Speakership to help their agenda, and the Times described Trump as “in many ways, the first independent” in the White House in more than a century. Is this the start of a broader opening for congressional Democrats?
Before this one brief shining moment of “bipartisanship” goes up in smoke, we must relish the sheer delight of watching Trump stiff Ryan and Mitch McConnell in favor of his new besties, “Chuck and Nancy.” It didn’t turn out well for the Vichy collaborators in World War II, and the same fate in one way or another will befall those Republican leaders who abandoned whatever principles they had once Trump occupied their party. History will be merciless to them, but how much fun to watch them reduced to thunderstruck supernumeraries in real time.
2/ Sam Bee with an amusing mini-doc on how to fight the right wingnuts....seven minutes...
Samantha Bee spoofed the opening sequence to the Showtime spy thriller “Homeland” on Wednesday to make a serious point about domestic terrorism.
The “Full Frontal” host channeled Carrie Mathison as she went “looking for a way to fight back” against white supremacy, which she described as America’s “hottest summer trend” for 2017.
During her mission, Bee met with former Homeland Security analyst Daryl Johnson, who said the threat of domestic terrorism was being vastly overlooked.
3/ Now this is interesting - Thomas Edsall in the Times with a fascinating article about polarization and the Republican Party under Trump - if you are just puzzled at what is going on in our politics and how Trumpies think, this is the story for you.....
In the Trump era, Republicans have been revising their views on right and wrong.
In 2011, the Public Religion Research Institute asked voters if
an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.
White evangelical Protestants were the least forgiving. Sixty-one percent said such a politician could not “behave ethically,” twice the 30 percent who felt that such a politician could manage it.
Every other religious group was less judgmental. Catholics, 49 no, 42, yes; white mainline Protestants: 44 percent no, 38 percent yes; the religiously unaffiliated, 26 no, 63 yes.
4/ Bill Maher was on great form this week - his first zinger-filled piece on Melania....four minutes....
Bill Maher imagined Friday night what Melania Trump might say should she take part in Us Weekly’s regular “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me” feature.
The first lady is actually appearing on the magazine’s front cover this coming week, so the “Real Time” host thought it was the perfect time to create the spoof article.
Maher unleashed some amusing one-liners ― including FLOTUS purportedly claiming that she had “no first language,” that she had “copied this list from Michelle Obama” and that she “once caught [Vice President] Mike Pence trying on my stilettos.”
5/ Irma and the future of Florida.....as we clean up the mess and the A/C kicks on again to save us from the 95 degree heat it may be time to read this warning story from the Scientific American....
Millions are without power in Florida after Irma—one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record—swept through the state this weekend before weakening to a tropical storm. It caused its fair share of damage, but Florida’s most ominous fears did not play out; extremely vulnerable eastern coastal areas, including Miami, were spared the worst.
But meteorologist and disaster risk expert Stephen Strader says the state is still in a very dangerous position, due to intense population growth and overdevelopment of its low-lying coastal zones. He predicts it is only a matter of time before another storm devastates the Sunshine State and some of its major cities. And he adds that it is not the only state facing this threat: Overdevelopment and expanding populations across the U.S. mean natural disasters now pose a greater risk to many other places, such as Houston and Oklahoma City.
Two views on Bernie's push for single payer -
6/ The first from Paul Krugman who is taking the Beltway line that it's politically impossible to do, and fix Obamacare instead.
On Wednesday Donald Trump demanded that Congress move quickly to enact his tax reform plan. But so far he has not, in fact, offered any such plan. Not only is there no detailed legislative proposal, his administration hasn’t even settled on the basic outlines of what it wants.
Meanwhile, 17 Senate Democrats — more than a third of the caucus — have signed on to Bernie Sanders’s call for expanding Medicare to cover the whole population. So far, however, Sanders hasn’t produced either an estimate of how much that would cost or a specific proposal about how to pay for it.
7/ The second from Matt Taibbi who sees hope in the fact that Democrats are running on a platform of what people want.....
"My critics will say that Trump, uncharacteristically, puts too much faith in bureaucracy; a single-payer plan would generate a gigantic agency to distribute funds to doctors. I'd point out that by creating one agency we do away with hundreds of smaller ones that are hard to monitor." —Donald Trump, The America We Deserve, 2000
Donald Trump sure has changed a lot. Back in 2000 he wrote a vociferous defense of single-payer health care in his otherwise odious book The America We Deserve.
But as president, Trump is fighting single-payer tooth and nail. In a tweet this week, he called it "a curse on the U.S. and its people."
He wasn't the only one. Much of the Beltway intelligentsia is recoiling in horror after Bernie Sanders introduced a new Medicare-for-all bill, an idea that has gone from zero to 16 sponsors in the Senate in the space of two years.
8/ Bill Maher "New Rules" where he calls for States Rights.....and does a pretty fair Alabama accent.....four minutes...
Late-night comedian Bill Maher capped off HBO’s “Real Time” on Friday night with a passionate message to the federal government: back off.
After he pointed out that California’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed a climate agreement with China to work on reducing emissions, Maher said that conservatives “can’t complain” when liberal states refuse orders from the federal government. They also “can’t complain when our local law enforcement refuses to cooperate with [President Donald] Trump’s deportation squad.”
He added that conservatives can’t complain when California cities threaten “to deny contracts to any firm that helps build the border wall.”
In reality, the late-night comedian explained, liberals are “just following in long and hallowed conservative tradition called states’ rights.”
9/ Thomas Frank looks at Hillary's book.....and is underwhelmed......read the last two paragraphs of this story - excellent!
How do you lose the presidency to a man like Donald Trump? He was the most unpopular presidential candidate of all time, compounding blunder with blunder and heaping gaffe upon gaffe. Keeping him from the Oval Office should have been the single-minded mission of the Democratic party. And it should have been easy for them.
Instead they lost, and now their 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton comes before us to account for this monumental failure, to tell us What Happened. Unfortunately, her new book is less an effort to explain than it is to explain away.
No real blame ever settles anywhere near Clinton’s person. And while she wrestles gamely with the larger historical question of why the party of the people has withered as inequality grows, she never offers a satisfying answer. Instead, most of the blame is directed outward, at familiar suspects like James Comey, the Russians and the media.
10/ Seth Meyers with "A Closer Look" at Trump's wobbling on DACA.....very funny, nine minutes....
Seth Meyers laid into Donald Trump for the major confusion that spiraled out of the White House after the president dined with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday.
Following the meal, the Democratic leaders said they had reached an agreement with Trump on protecting so-called Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. But Trump later denied that any agreement had been reached. There was additional confusion over whether the president and Democratic leaders had discussed a border security package that did not include Trump’s promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“So Trump initially promised that Mexico would pay for the wall,” Meyers said on Thursday. “Then he said Congress would pay for the wall. Then he said he would trade DACA to pay for the wall. And now he’s traded DACA and no one’s paying for the wall.”
He added, “Trump may be the worst negotiator since Daffy Duck.”
11/ This is one of those stories that make you wonder where this world is going - it's about the Russian News network - RT, and it's pretty scary.....
In the state courthouse building in western Berlin. Steltner, who has served for more than a dozen years as the spokesman for the Berlin state prosecutor, resembles a detective out of classic crime fiction: crisp suit, wavy gray hair and a gallows humor that comes with having seen it all. There was the 2009 case of the therapist who mistakenly killed two patients in an Ecstasy-infused session gone wrong. The Great Poker Heist of 2010, in which masked men stormed a celebrity-studded poker tournament with machetes and made off with a quarter-million dollars. The 2012 episode involving the Canadian porn star who killed and ate his boyfriend and then sent the leftovers home in the mail. Steltner embraced the oddball aspect of his job; he kept a picture of Elvis Presley on the wall of his office.
But even Steltner found the phone calls he received that morning confounding. They came from police officers from towns far outside Berlin, who reported that protests were erupting, seemingly out of nowhere, on their streets. “They are demonstrating — ‘Save our children,’ ‘No attacks from immigrants on our children’ and some things like that,” Steltner told me when I met him in Berlin recently.
The police were calling Steltner because this was ostensibly his office’s fault. The protesters were angry over the Berlin prosecutor’s supposed refusal to indict three Arab migrants who, they said, raped a 13-year-old girl from Berlin’s tight-knit Russian-German community.
Steltner, who would certainly have been informed if such a case had come up for prosecution, had heard nothing of it.
12/ Have you either heard of or tried this ice cream? Me neither.....
With a $20 ice cream maker and a hunger for a more healthful indulgence, Los Angeles lawyer Justin Woolverton concocted a dessert that quickly developed a cult-like following.
A few years later, his line of light ice cream, called Halo Top, has exploded into surprising market dominance. Halo Top recently bested stalwarts Ben & Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs for the top sales spot in its niche — grocery store ice cream pints.
“I thought, ‘This is really good. I'll bet others will like it, too,’” Woolverton said, recalling the trial-and-error breakthrough made in his kitchen.
Halo Top’s appeal is simple: a no-shame pint of low-sugar, high-protein ice cream with just 240 to 360 calories for the entire carton. Vanilla, at the low end, compares with 1,000 calories for a Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s pint.
13/ Nine old people dead after the A/C went out after Irma hit - this is the way things work in our corrupt State....
After Wilma, bills were pushed to ensure nursing homes had emergency AC. They were killed.
In the aftermath of 2005’s destructive Hurricane Wilma, Florida lawmakers approved laws to protect motorists at risk of getting stranded on the interstate, and residents of new high-rises who can’t climb stairs.
Proposed at the same time: a bill that would have required some nursing homes to have generators to protect frail elders from the ravages of heat and dehydration.
That bill died.
Cause of death: industry opposition and government miserliness.
14/ And this is how our disgusting piece of pond slime of a Governor reacts - to impose a hopelessly unrealistic requirement on all nursing homes to comply with in 90 days after the nursing home where the old people died contacted the Governor to try to get power to the home........
Gov. Rick Scott of Florida announced new rules on Saturday requiring nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in the state to have generators capable of maintaining comfortable temperatures for at least 96 hours in the event of a power loss.
The governor’s announcement came three days after eight residents of a nursing home in Hollywood, Fla., the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, died when the home lost power to its cooling system in the wake of Hurricane Irma.
The public outcry over the episode has intensified after the home said that its staff, or people calling on their behalf, had contacted the governor himself, as well as the power utility and several county and state agencies, to get the problem resolved, to little avail.
Todays video - a compilation of the two amazing "Born To Create Drama" 30 second clips [first], then a collection of International commercials, all amusing but a couple of which are really funny.....
Todays British joke
"Ya know" said the Scotsman, "I still prefer the pubs back home. In St Andrews there's a wonderful little bar called McTavish's. The landlord there goes out of his way for the locals, so much that when you buy 4 drinks he'll buy the 5th drink for you."
"Well", said the Englishman, "At my local, the Red Lion, the barman there will buy you your 3rd drink after you buy the first 2."
"Ahhhhh, that's nothing laddies", said the Irishman. "Back home in me own Killarney, there's Ryan's Bar. Now, the moment you set foot in the place they'll buy you a drink, then another, all the drinks you like. Then, when you've had enough drinks they'll take you upstairs and see that you get laid. All on the house!"
The Englishman & Scotsman immediately scorn the Irishman's claims. But he swears every word is true.
"Well," said the Englishman, "did this actually happen to you?"
"Not to me meself, personally, no," said the Irishman. "but it did happen to me sister."
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