1/. Trump's Puerto Rico performance reminds us of the madness of King George, and Heather Digby Parton in Salon thought so too.....
Trump’s Puerto Rico spectacle: Ruler deigns to visit stricken peasants
He came. He saw. He mangled the facts and threw Bounty paper towels to the crowd. “There was a lot of love”
For some reason, watching President Trump's visit to Puerto Rico on Tuesday brought to mind the scene in Charles Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities" in which the Marquis St. Evrémonde runs over a child with his carriage and without remorse or compassion declares, “It is extraordinary to me that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children!" He throws a coin at the grieving father and another into the crowd, and as he moves on, one of the peasants on the street throws a coin back in the carriage, at which point the Marquis turns in anger and threatens to "exterminate" them all. The peasants hang their heads and say not a word, knowing what power the man has to destroy them.
Donald Trump didn't throw coins into the crowd in Puerto Rico, but he did throw Bounty paper towels.
2/. If you didn't see an emotional Jimmy Kimmel talk about Las Vegas you should......it's a wonderful 9 minutes delivered from the heart. It's a sad thing when the only person making sense about this monstrous event is a late night comedian....
Jimmy Kimmel barely held back his tears on Monday night as he spoke about his hometown of Las Vegas, where a gunman killed at least 50 people and left more than 500 injured on Sunday night.
His voice cracking at times, Kimmel turned his monologue into a plea for what he called “common sense” gun control laws and named those politicians who were standing in the way.
President Donald Trump, Kimmel noted, said he was praying for those killed in the attack.
“You know in February he also signed a bill that made it easier for people with severe mental illness to buy guns legally. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a number of other lawmakers who won’t do anything about this because the NRA has their balls in a money clip also sent their thoughts and their prayers today ― which is good. They should be praying. They should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country.”
Kimmel also shared images of the senators who voted against a bill last year to close a legal loophole that allows people to buy a gun without a background check in some situations.
3/. Paul Krugman nails it - the Republican tax plan is an outright con.....
Last week the Trump administration and its congressional allies working on tax reform achieved something remarkable. They released a tax plan — or, actually, a vague sketch of a plan — that manages both to add trillions to the deficit and to raise taxes on a large fraction of the population. That takes talent.
But like the G.O.P.’s terrible, no good, very bad health plans, this tax debacle was years in the making. On taxes, as with health, leading Republicans have been lying for years. And now the fraud has caught up with the fraudsters.
4/. John Oliver with an excellent comedic journalistic look at forensic science, you know - like CSI....
On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver examined the often misunderstood topic of forensic science.Shows like “CSI” and “Law & Order” might give the impression that forensic scientists can click away on a keyboard, generate an elaborate animated 3D model instantly and conclusively determine whether or not a suspect “matches” the evidence.
But, as Oliver explains, many of the techniques we think of as reliable, such as bite mark analysis or hair sample comparison, are actually fundamentally flawed.
5/. The Times' new columnist Michelle Goldberg with a column that might open your eyes...... as country we have drifted along for eight months, but we really need a properly functioning executive branch.....especially this week. And it isn't there....
In the frustrated anguish of Puerto Rico, we can see the real-world consequences of Donald Trump’s flagrant incompetence.
A little more than eight months ago, the United States inaugurated one of its worst people as president, a nasty showbiz huckster whose own staffers speak of him as if he were a malevolent toddler. Yet the country has held up pretty well, considering.
Yes, there were emboldened Nazis marching in the streets, and crucial intelligence on the Islamic State casually passed to the Russians. Striving young immigrants who’d been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program have seen their lives upended and trans people have been barred from enlisting in the military.
Yet most of the institutions of American governance continued to function.
6/. Seth Meyers on Trump and the Republicans cruelty to Puerto Rico, children and 99% of Americans [tax cuts for the 1%]......a very good 11 minutes.....
Seth Meyers unloaded on President Donald Trump for his response to the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico following the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria.
“Every week, it seems like we’ve seen Donald Trump at his worst, and every week he finds a way to sink lower. Now, with his response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, we are witnessing once again the very real consequences of electing a lazy, ignorant racist as president,” Meyers said at the start of Monday’s Closer Look segment on Late Night With Seth Meyers.
Citing tweets from Trump about the disaster in Puerto Rico, Meyers blasted Trump as “dumb” and “lazy” and took issue with his attacks against the San Juan Mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz.
7/. Thomas Friedman with a good column [for a change!]....
If Only Stephen Paddock Were a Muslim
If only Stephen Paddock had been a Muslim … If only he had shouted “Allahu akbar” before he opened fire on all those concertgoers in Las Vegas … If only he had been a member of ISIS … If only we had a picture of him posing with a Quran in one hand and his semiautomatic rifle in another …
If all of that had happened, no one would be telling us not to dishonor the victims and “politicize” Paddock’s mass murder by talking about preventive remedies.
No, no, no. Then we know what we’d be doing. We’d be scheduling immediate hearings in Congress about the worst domestic terrorism event since 9/11. Then Donald Trump would be tweeting every hour “I told you so,” as he does minutes after every terror attack in Europe, precisely to immediately politicize them. Then there would be immediate calls for a commission of inquiry to see what new laws we need to put in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Then we’d be “weighing all options” against the country of origin.
But what happens when the country of origin is us?
8/. Trevor Noah on the response to the shooting on Fox News......as Noah says Fox's coverage was weird because Paddock didn't fit any of their narratives......an amusing nine minutes [not so funny if you are a Fox viewer]....
Trevor Noah could not resist lampooning Fox News host Sean Hannity’s response to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“According to Sean Hannity, what really stops a bad guy with a gun is a Sean Hannity with a gun,” Noah said on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Daily Show.”
Noah played a clip of the conservative pundit opining on his own abilities as he discussed the shooting in Las Vegas that left at least 58 people dead and more than 500 people injured. Hannity revealed how he would confront a mass shooter who was in a crowd and had just run out of bullets.
9/. So true.....
10/. Remember the hysterical SNL skit "Alien Abduction" with Kate McKinnon and Ryan Gosling?
SNL did a follow up last week, and it's as good if not better than the original.....five LOL minutes....
I'm not a gambling man, but I do wish I could have bet on "Saturday Night Live absolutely revisiting the alien abduction sketch during this episode" and stashed away some sweet cash for my retirement. While I did expect a variation on this sketch, I didn't expect an actual sequel. What felt like a naked gimmick actually turned into a smart move, using the audience's intense familiarity with the first iteration to fuel some amazing comedic callbacks.
While usually just a vehicle for Kate McKinnon to steal the entire show, this sketch wisely gave Gosling and Cecily Strong some material as well, particularly around the timey-wimey nature of his NSA hat. But make no mistake: This was the first part of McKinnon's next Emmy reel. Ms. Rafferty might be her most popular original character at this point, and the visual of her re-enacting what the aliens did using Gosling's posterior as a stand-in is one of the funniest things the show's done this calendar year. Having Gosling face away from the camera didn't hide the fact that he was nearly in tears from laughter.
11/ John Oliver slams Trump for being Trump during the Puerto Rico crisis.....three amusing minutes...
On Sunday, HBO host John Oliver directed his ire toward President Trump for his ignorant and vacuous take on the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
“How are you even trying to take a victory lap right now?” the "Last Week Tonight" host asked incredulously. “The only way he could have saved that statement was to say, ‘And don’t forget, I just kind of ramble, I know nothing, I talk because silence sounds weird.'"
Oliver described the president's Twitter attacks on the people of Puerto Rico and the mayor of San Juan as "depressingly predictable."
The host compared the president to a "parrot who's memorized some human sounds."
12/. Above and Beyond with Zoe Johnston - "My Own Hymn".....a lovely song and an unusual video.....
13/. A four minute video from Vox explaining why Puerto Rico will be without power for months.....very informative, and you won't see anything this clear on mainstream media....
In the wake of hurricanes Maria and Irma, 95 percent of Puerto Rico’s electric grid is down. A public health crisis is underway, and the 3.4 million US citizens living on the island need federal assistance. But the road to recovery is long, due in part to the unique relationship the territory has to the mainland.
Puerto Rico’s economy was once based on investments from US firms that enjoyed privileged tax status. In 1993, Congress voted to end those tax breaks. When they expired in 2006, the Puerto Rican economy stopped growing and began suffering from a recession.
At that time, Puerto Ricans began to leave the island for the US mainland. This created even more downward pressure on the economy — fewer people meant lower tax revenues for government. Funding for the maintenance of public utilities dwindled. And the devastation caused by the hurricanes in 2017 had a severe impact on the electrical grid because the public utilities were already in disrepair.
14/. The chaos President - Alec Baldwin's return last week as the idiot on SNL......
Saturday Night Live returned for Season 43 with a cold open sketch that saw Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump eagerly creating chaos.
"It might seem like what's coming out of my mouth is B-A-N-A-N-A-S, but it's all part of the plan. The more chaos I cause, the less people can focus. They're all getting so tired," Trump said. "So let's keep the chaos coming and shake things up around here."
Todays philosophical jokes
"Right is right even when no one is doing it, and wrong is wrong even when everyone is doing it" (St. Augustine)
· * I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.
· * Gardening Rule: When weeding, the best way to make sure you are
removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
· * The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.
· * There are two kinds of pedestrians: the quick and the dead.
· * Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
· * Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
· * Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.
· * In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
· * How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
· * If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a song about him?
· * If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
· * Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him on a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?
· * Does pushing the elevator button more than once make it arrive faster?
· * Gardening Rule: When weeding, the best way to make sure you are
removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
· * The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.
· * There are two kinds of pedestrians: the quick and the dead.
· * Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
· * Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
· * Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.
· * In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
· * How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
· * If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a song about him?
· * If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
· * Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him on a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?
· * Does pushing the elevator button more than once make it arrive faster?
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
Todays golfers joke
I found a stray parrot on my deck this morning.
All he can say is, "Good morning, you old fart. You suck at golf."
Is he yours?
Todays romantic joke
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