Number #1 and #3 are worth taking the time to watch.....
1/ If you have not seen this 60 Minutes segment on the opiod crisis and the DEA, it's worth your time. It shows one of the most blatant examples of corruption and almost criminal behavior by giant corporations, and how they own Congress and the political system.
Excellent journalism, and gripping.....about 25 minutes.....
Ex-DEA agent Joe Rannazzisi and 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker
CBS NEWS
In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed -- that according to Joe Rannazzisi, one of the most important whistleblowers ever interviewed by 60 Minutes. Rannazzisi ran the DEA's Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread -- aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.
Update: President Trump announced Tuesday that his nominee for drug czar, Rep. Tom Marino, has withdrawn his name from consideration for the position.
2/ Bill Maher with a powerful suggestion for this country - fight back against Russia.....five stirring minutes.....
On Friday night, Bill Maher urged the country to be a bit more aggressive towards Russia.
“If Russia is going to keep attacking America, then America really should fight back,” Maher began.
The Real Time host said while Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, “we stopped fighting the Cold War, but the Russians never did.”
He elaborated on Russia’s viral efforts during the 2016 election to “not take sides” but to “get us fighting about it” and to “create chaos.”
“Hillary Clinton spent over a billion dollars on the campaign and the Russians beat her with 150 grand because they were able to turn Facebook into ‘Fakebook,'” Maher elaborated. “Or a more apt name might be ‘Sh*t Starter,’ because that’s what they were doing. That’s what their meddling was meant to do: start sh*t. And boy was that easy to do, since Facebook is the place where thinking went to die.”
3/ Confused about the story on Niger [pronounced Kneeshare].... Rachel Maddow had a story Thursday night on the decisions and the circumstances leading up to four Green Berets dying, and the real reason why Trump won't comment on it. One of her best segments......which is why there have been attacks on the piece from paid trolls in the media.....
Watch it, and you decide if Maddow's impeccable research and logic is wrong. For me, it's great reporting.....
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow explained how President Trump's decision to include Chad on his travel ban may have endangered the lives of servicemembers in Niger, four of whom were recently killed under circumstances that have not been adequately explained.
By including Chad on the travel ban against the advice of foreign policy experts and multiple officials, U.S. soldiers lost Chadian ground support in Niger. Multiple terrorist groups, including ISIS and Boko Haram, are active in Niger. But Chad began to remove its soldiers immediately following Trump's travel ban.
"[T]hose Chadian troops were really doing something in Niger. They were protecting those villages in that whole region from ISIS militant groups being able to operate freely and be able to take more territory from there once again," Maddow explained. "And pulling those troops out had an immediate effect in emboldening those ISIS attacks.”
4/ John Oliver on Harvey Weinstein.....two vicious minutes from Oliver, who is a little pissed off.....
On Sunday night, John Oliver had a strong reaction to the ongoing Harvey Weinstein scandal and more specifically, the people around him who excused him.
He pointed to actress Angie Everhart‘s accusation that over a decade ago, Weinstein broke into her cabin on a yacht at the Venice Film Festival while she was sleeping and blocked the door while he masturbated. After the incident, she told numerous people and they all said ‘Oh that’s just Harvey.”
“What the f**k?!?” Oliver reacted. “So everyone know and they just went with it… He’s like a sex criminal version of the Kool-Aid Man.”
The Last Week Tonight host then called out Weinstein’s defenders like director Oliver Stone, who took heat for saying “It’s not easy what he’s going through,” and fashion designer Donna Karan, a friend of Weinstein’s who said the women “asked for it” because of what they wear.
5/ A surreal and super sad video - a Postman delivers mail in scorched Santa Rosa, Ca. One minute.....
6/ Ever heard of the comedian Kumail Nanjiani? Neither me, but his SNL monologue is hilarious.....five funny minutes....
Islamophobia is no joke, so it was amazing that actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani was able to wring some laughs from it during his “Saturday Night Live” monologue.
Nanjiani, a Pakistani Muslim, started by pointing to some viewers’ racist reactions to his recent movie, “The Big Sick,” which tells the story of how Nanjiani fell for his wife, writer Emily Gordon. After making fun of people who told him to “go back to India” (Nanjiani says he’s never been there), he noted that Islamophobia “is really having a moment right now.”
“Islamophobia is like ‘Will And Grace,’” he continued. “It was huge a while back, and then we thought it was gone and done. But now it’s back and bigger than ever.”
He also took the opportunity to emphasize that Muslims and Sikhs are not the same ― ultimately arguing that it shouldn’t be necessary to make a distinction in the first place.
“Sikhs get attacked all the time for being Muslim,” he said. “Spoiler alert: They’re not. But they’re brown and they were turbans, so people attack them for being Muslim.”
7/ Lucien Truscott in Salon with a really interesting article on the uncanny similarities between Nixon and Trump, with one major difference - Nixon was unravelling in private, Trump is doing it for all of us to see........very good, very insightful....
Has there ever been a more terrifying synergy in the life of a nation such as ours? First, in Las Vegas, we had a madman on the 32nd floor of a hotel firing automatic rifles indiscriminately into a crowd of innocent concertgoers across the street, killing at least 59, wounding more than 500. He left no clues. Nothing was found in the hotel room or inside his several houses that lets us know why he acted in such an insane way against his fellow American citizens. Aided and abetted by lax gun laws, both national and those of the state of Nevada, he was able to carry out his crazed, deadly rampage with impunity.
Now we have a madman in the White House who was reported to have threatened the whole fucking world by calling for 10 times the number of nuclear weapons we currently have, the occasion last summer at the Pentagon that led to his secretary of state calling him “a fucking moron.” Then he’s firing off tweets killing his fellow American citizens in Puerto Rico with ineffectual federal aid to the island and threatening to remove what little assistance there is, alleging, “ Electric and all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes. Congress to decide how much to spend . . . . We cannot keep FEMA, the Military and the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!”
8/ With Halloween coming this is a good one......telekenisis in a coffee shop.....two minutes of wow!
9/ SNL had a wonderful skit about Kellyanne Comway, called "Kellywise".....which you will understand if you see the movie "It".....three great minutes....
With Alex Moffat doing a fine Anderson Cooper (he even nails the Kewper pronunciation) and Kate McKinnon pulling double duty as Kellyanne Conway and Hillary Clinton, Saturday Night Live‘s multi-tasking parody of It easily topped the roster of sketches and digital shorts on last night’s Kumail Nanjiani-hosted episode
The premise had CNN’s Cooper miffed to hear that Conway will be making a return to his panel, then, wandering outside on a rainy night, comes face-to-sewer, It-style, with the demented Conway clown Kellywise.
“I’m not scared of anything,” Cooper says, only to flinch when Kellywise holds up a newspaper proclaiming a Trump re-election (and then another horror headline: “Anderson Cooper Fat Now”).
Soon enough, a possessed Hillary makes an appearance, along with Cecily Strong’s Rachel Maddow. And there will be blood.
10/ Andrew Sullivan with another good column on three topics in New York Magazine.....his first piece is excellent....
The trouble with reactionary politics is that it is fundamentally a feeling, an impulse, a reflex. It’s not a workable program. You can see that in the word itself: it’s a reaction, an emotional response to change. Sure, it can include valuable insights into past mistakes, but it can’t undo them, without massive disruption. As any Burkean conservative will tell you, the present is what you work with. “Home is where you start from,” in T.S. Eliot’s words. The reactionary, like the progressive, never fully grasps this, cannot see the connections that require that present actions are most effective when they build on what is, rather than what was, or, for the progressive, what could be.
I mention this as a way to see more clearly why the right in Britain and America is either unraveling quickly into chaos, or about to inflict probably irreparable damage on a massive scale to their respective countries. Brexit and Trump are the history of Thatcher and Reagan repeating as dangerous farce, a confident, intelligent conservatism reduced to nihilist, mindless reactions.
11/ Trump at a trucker rally.....SNL's cold open from last week.......Alec Baldwin does his thing again.....good, but not his best.....still worth five minutes of your time.....
After a one-week absence, Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump returned to Saturday Night Live with a cold open sketch where Trump distracts everyone at a rally on tax reform with rants about Mike Pence, Bob Corker and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
During the "Trucker Hat Rally," Trump continually brags at how great his tax reform plan is, but just as he's about to go into detail on the plan, he suddenly switches course to complain about things like anthem protests and being called a "moron" by Tillerson.
"We love America, don't we? That's why I had Mike Pence go to the Colts game on Sunday and when those players knelt during the anthem I told him to get the hell out of there," Trump said. "But don't worry, we're taking Mike's Colts tickets and donating them to Puerto Rico. They just have to fly themselves to Indiana and book their own hotel. Because at some point, they have to start doing things for themselves."
12/ Tom Tomorrow on gun rights.....
13/ Thom Hartmann the radio host with an essay on how the US is now an oligarchy......don't believe it? Read on......
Like an alcoholic family that won’t discuss alcoholism (proving Don Quixote’s warning never to mention rope in the home of a man who’s been hanged), far too many Americans are unwilling to acknowledge or even discuss the ongoing collapse of democracy in the United States.
President Jimmy Carter took it head on when he told me on my radio program that the Citizen’s United decision:
“[V]iolates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
This “complete subversion of our political system” grew, in large part, out of Richard Nixon’s 1972 appointment of Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court.
Todays video - Rodney Dangerfield on the Johnny Carson Show.....eight minutes of non-stop jokes.....some very funny....
Todays retiree joke
Todays 2nd retiree joke
One day a man decided to retire...
He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life, that is, until the ship sank.
He soon found himself on an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing, only bananas and coconuts.
After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the shore.
In disbelief, he asks, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?"
She replies, "I rowed over from the other side of the island where I landed when my cruise ship sank."
Amazing," he notes. "You were really lucky to have a row boat wash up with you."
"Oh, this thing?" explains the woman. " I made the boat out of some raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm tree branches, and the sides and stern came from an Eucalyptus tree."
"But, where did you get the tools?"
"Oh, that was no problem," replied the woman. " On the south side of the island, a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock is exposed. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into ductile iron and I used that to make tools and used the tools to make the hardware."
The guy is stunned.
"Let's row over to my place," she says "and I'll give you a tour." So, after a short time of rowing, she soon docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks to shore, he nearly falls off the boat.
Before him is a long stone walk leading to a cabin and tree house.
While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, "It's not much, but I call it home. Please sit down."
"Would you like a drink?"
"No! No thank you," the man blurts out, still dazed. "I can't take another drop of coconut juice."
"Oh, it's not coconut juice," winks the woman. "I have a still. How would you like a Tropical Spritz?"
Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they exchange their individual survival stories, the woman announces, " I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There's a razor in the bathroom cabinet upstairs."
No longer questioning anything, the man goes upstairs into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet is a razor made from a piece of tortoise bone. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside a swivel mechanism.
"This woman is amazing," he muses. "What's next?"
When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but some small flowers on tiny vines, each strategically positioned, she smelled faintly of gardenias. She then beckons for him to sit down next to her.
"Tell me," she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, "We've both been out here for many months. You must have been lonely. When was the last time you played around? She stares into his eyes.
He can't believe what he's hearing. "You mean..." he swallows excitedly as tears start to form in his eyes,
"You've built a Golf Course too?"
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