1/ Matt Taibbi on why Trump's foreign policy is as awful as it is......he's just continuing business as usual, with some madness thrown in....
The United States helped create the pre-condition for Trump by continually spreading the idea that it's OK to ally ourselves with leaders who abuse their subjects
Max Boot, the noted Washington Post columnist, and "Jeane Kilpatrick senior fellow for National Security Studies" at the Council for Foreign Relations, thinks Donald Trump is betraying American values by meeting with Kim Jong-Un.
Such a meeting, Boot says, would mean "giving the worst human-rights abuser on the planet what he most wants: international legitimacy."
Let's unpack that one for a minute. We're worried now about giving human rights abusers legitimacy?
Such a meeting, Boot says, would mean "giving the worst human-rights abuser on the planet what he most wants: international legitimacy."
Let's unpack that one for a minute. We're worried now about giving human rights abusers legitimacy?
The idea that we don't legitimize human-rights abusers is a laugh-out-loud joke everywhere outside America. You could fill a book chapter with the history of the friendly relations between American presidents and just the foreign dictators who are credibly reported to have eaten other human beings.
2/ Seth Meyers on the Tillerson firing.....an amusing two minutes....
On Tuesday night, Seth Meyers had some fun at the expense of outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Meyers began by poking fun at the way Tillerson reportedly found out that he was fired, which was by tweet from President Trump.
“Even when you get fired from a Domino’s, the manager takes you to that crappy little office and tells you to your face,” Meyers said. “Tweets are for finding out which band is in town or which airline was mean toChristine Teigen.”
3/ Brexit - Benjamin Studebaker with three possible scenarios of what might happen with the UK and the EU.....the article presupposes some knowledge of UK politics, but it's very interesting nonetheless....
3 Brexit Futures: Stories from Next Year
by Benjamin Studebaker
In Spring 2019, the UK is meant to leave the EU. Prime Minister Theresa May soldiers on, but many think she can’t get the job done. Former Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair gave ruthless speeches again May, and EU’s lead Brexit negotiator accused May of being “vague” and “not credible”. Major–a member of May’s own party–was especially vicious:
It all has me thinking about what comes next. How might these Brexit negotiations conclude? Three possibilities stick out to me.
4/ If you have ever seen "This Is Us", the hit TV show you will appreciate this two minute parody titled "This Is U.S." with Sterling Brown ......very funny....
“Saturday Night Live” couldn’t wait to do a “This Is Us” parody with guest host Sterling K. Brown, who plays grown triplet brother Randall Pearson on the hit NBC series.
“SNL’s” version is a sad, twisted mix of three folks in a series called “This Is U.S.” It’s the “real-life drama happening in our government every day,” says the spoof ad for the program. It’s like the other series “without the good parts.”
Brown plays Ben Carson, wailing, “All of it is wrong.” Then there’s a mortified Sarah Huckabee Sanders (played by Aidy Bryant), who denies a story about porn-star sex as she stares at Post-it notes on her lectern reading: “Stop lying,” and: “Seriously, what are you doing?”
The third figure is played by Pete Davidson, drinking from a bottle of booze, on the phone, saying: “United Arab Emirates? Hey, this is Jared Kushner. Is there any way I could borrow like $800 million dollars?”
5/ Betsy DeVos went on "60 Minutes" for an interview with Lesley Stahl, and it was a train wreck......there's a choice of the whole interview or a 1 1/2 minute clip for your viewing pleasure in the article....
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had an interview on 60 Minutesthat aired Sunday night, and faced a brutal grilling from Lesley Stahlabout the work her department does.
And stunningly, DeVos failed to answer basic questions about school performance, as CBS News’ Stahl — who called her “one of the most hated members of the Trump cabinet” — pressed her on taking funding away from public schools.
After Devos made an argument for “school choice,” pointing to Florida as a state where public schools have improved as a result, Stahl grilled her home state of Michigan.
6/ The wonderful Tom Tomorrow.....
7/ A very funny three minutes where Seth Meyers asked a black and gay writer to finish jokes he can't tell.....good one....
Some punchlines are best avoided by straight white guys. So “Late Night” host Seth Meyers got writer Amber Ruffin, who is black, and writer Jenny Hagel, who’s gay, to finish the jokes for him on Thursday. They covered everything from segregation, to women’s hockey at the Winter Olympics, to the death of Billy Graham.
At the end of the “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” bit, the two writers goaded Meyers into making his own full crack about International Women’s Day. Wait, Seth, don’t do it, don’t do it ... Oh, Seth.
8/ This is fascinating - for two months a Times reporter saw no digital or TV news at all, and only read the newspaper.....
I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through.
But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.
There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims— possibly amplified by propaganda bots — that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn’t see the claim circulated by many news outlets (including The New York Times) as well as by Senator Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which wasn’t true.
Instead, the day after the shooting, a friendly person I’ve never met dropped off three newspapers at my front door. That morning, I spent maybe 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting and a million other things the newspapers had to tell me.
9/ Bill Maher with a rather passionate "New Rules"....on the 2nd amendment. Five pretty good minutes...
Bill Maher last night said the fact that religion is becoming less of a third rail in politics means Democrats should try to make guns less of a third rail too.
He said President Trump has “ruined the phrase ‘thoughts and prayers’ forever” and that “America’s finally getting it––prayer doesn’t work, ’cause if it did, every drug test would come back clean and there’d be no need for the morning-after pill.”
Maher said he used to be one of the only people who was broaching this taboo years ago, but now it’s a more mainstream thing.
10/ Andrew Sullivan with three essays....most interesting and quite insightful.....he is a very good writer.
Earlier this week, I went to a lecture given by Steven Pinker on his latest book, Enlightenment Now. I’m a huge and longtime fan of Pinker’s, and his book The Blank Slate was, for me, a revelation. He’s become a deep and important critic of the visceral hostility to nature and science now so sadly prevalent on the left and right, a defender of reason and the Enlightenment against the “social justice” movements on campus, and his new book is a near-relentless defense of modernity. I sat there for an hour slowly being buried in a fast-accumulating snowdrift of irrefutable statistics showing human progress: the decline of violence and war, the rise and rise of democracy, the astonishing gains against poverty of the last couple of decades, the rise of tolerance and erosion of cruelty, lengthening lifespans, revolutions in health, huge increases in safety, and on and on. It was one emphatic graph after another that bludgeoned my current depression into a kind of forced rational cheeriness.
11/ A very good SNL Weekend Update, with the weeks news and finishing with the Trump brothers.....a funny seven minutes.....
Saturday Night Live recapped a busy week at the White House as Weekend Update tackled Donald Trump's potential North Korea summit, the latest Stormy Daniels developments and Gary Cohn's resignation.
"In a stunning turn of events, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has agreed to meet in May with Donald Trump or whoever's president in May," co-anchor Colin Jost said. "Trump would be the first sitting president to meet with the leader of North Korea, and it's also going to be the first time both translators begin each sentence with 'Okay, so what I think he said was.'"
Michael Che added, "Experts warn that the talks between Trump and Kim Jong-un could be risky, because duh. Best-case scenario, they'll realize they're both crazy and become best friends like that movie Step Brothers. But more than likely, Donald Trump is gonna realize he's just Twitter crazy, and Kim Jong-un is crazy crazy, and there's a big ol' difference. One guy trolled Oprah online, and the other murdered his uncle with a cannon."
12/ Interesting story from the Times on why most of us have been screwed out of our pensions......401K's are passive, but pension funds are active and pressure corporations in ways that annoy the elites.....so if you still have a pension, look out!
No issue in America today better illustrates the divergent interests of working Americans and the 1 percent than pension reform. Substantial empirical evidence shows that America’s favored retirement vehicle — the 401(k), recently renounced by its own inventors — is grossly inadequate and will leave tens of millions of Americans with insufficient retirement assets. And yet states and cities are busy converting traditional pensions into these failing 401(k)s or equivalents, to the great benefit of money managers and the finance class.
Advocates of pension “reform” — which really means cutting or eliminating traditional pension funds — will tell you that such funds are a big drain on state and local budgets, since, as defined-benefit programs, they are obligated to pay workers a defined amount in their retirement. But that’s largely a question of political priorities; underfunded pensions are the result of, well, decades of underfunding pensions. The real reason for the attack on pensions goes deeper, and exposes the great and growing rift between America’s economic elite and everyone else.
13/ Jordan Klepper's show is underrated, so here's a clip that might get you watching - he plays a right wing nut job defending his hero Trump, and in this one he "defends" Jared....very good sarcastic humour....
14/ Bastards....this is heartbreaking.....and I don't believe the ICE story at all.....
Border Patrol officials in Southern California are defending their actions after a dramatic video of agents arresting an undocumented mother as her daughters watched on went viral this week.
The video, filmed last Saturday, shows agents pulling 36-year-old Perla Morales-Luna away from her crying daughters on a street corner in National City, California. The agents drive off quickly after placing Morales-Luna in the backseat of a Border Patrol vehicle, and her daughters appear to be left on the street confused.
Judith Castro-Rangel, who identifies herself as a teacher of one of Morales-Luna’s daughters, posted the video on Thursday to Facebook, where it has been viewed more than 10 million times.
The violent and insensitive nature of the arrest has outraged human rights and immigration activists.
15/ A new way to beat the lines at airports with a free App.....this is in addition to Global Entry....
More automated systems at the nation's airports are making it easier for travelers to beat the lines.
Moving through the airport is becoming increasingly high-tech and, for many frequent fliers, faster. The percentage of air travelers who used automated methods (like Global Entry kiosks) during the international arrivals process soared to more than 50 percent in fiscal year 2017, up from about 3 percent in fiscal year 2013, according to United States Customs and Border Protection. And that number is expected to rise.
In February, the Transportation Security Administration expanded its expedited screening program, T.S.A. PreCheck, to Air France, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Philippine Airlines and World Atlantic, bringing the number of airlines participating in the program to close to 50 across some 200 airports. The Global Entry program — where members scan their fingerprints and passports at kiosks instead of waiting in immigration lines — is also growing, and making it easier to join with enrollment at 11 international airports in November (including Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and Denver International Airport), with more to come.
Yet Customs and Border Protection has increasingly been pushing beyond fingerprint biometrics, testing facial recognition exit technology (not without concerns from privacy rights groups) last year at eight United States airports
Todays Canadian joke
This Toronto guy kills a deer and takes it home to cook for dinner.
Both he and da wife decide that they won't tell the kids what kind of
meat it is, but will give them a clue and let them guess.
The kids were eager to know what the meat was on their plates, so they
begged their dad for a clue.
The dad said, "Well, it's what mummy calls me sometimes, eh."
The little girl screams to her brother, "Don't eat it!
It's an asshole!
Todays redneck joke
A redneck with a bucket full of live fish, was approached recently by a game warden in Texas as he started to drive his boat away from a lake.
The game warden asked the man, "May I see your fishing license please?"
"Naw, sir," replied the redneck. "I don't need none of them there papers. These here are my pet fish."
"Pet fish!?!?"
"Yep. Once a week, I bring these here fish o'mine down to the lake and let 'em swim 'round for a while. Then when I whistle, they swim right back into my net and I take 'em home."
"What a line of baloney....you're under arrest."
The redneck said, "It's the truth, Mr. Gov'ment man. I'll show ya!
We do this all the time!!"
We do this all the time!!"
"WE do, now, do WE?" smirked the warden. "PROVE it!"
The redneck released the fish into the lake and stood and waited. After a few minutes, the warden said,
"Well?"
"Well, WHUT?" said the redneck.
The warden asked, "When are you going to call em back?"
"Call who back?"
"The FISH," replied the warden!
"Whut fish?" asked the redneck.
MORAL OF THE STORY:
We may not be as smart as some city slickers, but we ain't as dumb as some government employees.
MORAL OF THE STORY:
We may not be as smart as some city slickers, but we ain't as dumb as some government employees.
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