1/ Remember when the media and pundits lined up behind the disastrous decision to invade Iraq back in 2003? It's happening again says Matt Taibbi, but much more dangerously.....
President Trump has threatened military action against Syria, leaving the world on edge
So here we are, on the brink. Here’s Donald Trump’s tough-ass tweet about how he’s about to mix it up with both Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin:
The fate of humanity now rests in the hands of this Twitter-obsessed dingbat executive and his new national security adviser, John Bolton – one of the most deranged people to have ever served in the United States government, a man who makes Jeane Kirkpatrick look like Florence Nightingale.
2/ Seth Meyers on Trump's "pee tape"....a very good 11 minutes.....he's on form in this one....
Former FBI Director James Comey’s claim that President Donald Trump wanted him to look into the alleged “pee tape” to prove it’s not real can only mean one thing.
“Oh, my God. It’s real! It has to be,” Seth Meyers said on Thursday, adding:
“Why would you ask the FBI director to investigate a pee tape if you knew for a fact that a pee tape definitely didn’t exist? It’s like me saying, ‘Can you make sure there isn’t a tape of me in 1994 doing ‘Thunder Road’ at karaoke and then barfing and then slipping on the barf and farting?’”
3/ Thomas Frank in the Guardian with a great article.....
President Trump last week resumed his campaign of critical tweets about the online retailer Amazon, which he accuses of paying too little in taxes and of getting too good a deal from the United States Postal Service, which delivers many of its packages. Along the way he also asserted that the company used the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, to lobby for Amazon’s interests. The price of Amazon shares fell on the news.
In threatening a single business because of some personal quarrel with its CEO – apparently in order to squeeze friendlier coverage out of a newspaper that the CEO happens to own – Donald Trump has clearly violated the basic rules of democratic government. But it is also important to remember that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Amazon has been the subject of critical reporting for a number of years; anyone who reads the Guardian or the New York Times knows about the company’s alarming labour practices and its imperial economic ambitions.
Yet some critics of the president took his tweets as a signal to rally round Amazonand its chief executive.
4/ Alec Baldwin as Trump in the SNL cold open......it's a press conference with some Baltic politicians, and it probably went like this in real life....
Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump returned to Saturday Night Live with a cold open sketch that turned a mundane presidential press conference with Baltic leaders into a soapbox for subjects like Stormy Daniels, the trade war with China, Amazon and Roseanne.
"Today we've got leaders from the Baltic states, we've got Estonia, Lithuania and I want to say Stankonia," the president said. "Let's make this quick because I have a lot of trade wars to escalate, okay? That's why I just announced tariffs on Chinese products including fireworks and finger traps. We've also expelled the infamous Chinese billionaire P.F. Chang."
After struggling to stay on script, and accidentally congratulating Vladimir Putin on the Russian president's reelection, the Baltic leaders begin to speak, allowing Trump to recede into his own thoughts.
5/ Fox News mashup of hosts and guests talking directly to Trump....this is scary folks....
A mashup video made by Media Matters puts a spotlight on the hosts and guests on Fox News who advise President Donald Trump directly through the network.
The clip features people advising Trump to do things like ignore The New York Times, call Attorney General Jeff Sessions and not talk to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano seemingly makes the most appearances within the 2:37-minute clip, imploring Trump to do this and that. Napolitano was reportedly embroiled in controversy just last year for making entirely baseless claims about former President Barack Obama, saying that Obama asked British intelligence officials in 2016 to spy on Trump.
6/ John Oliver on the worst cabinet member of all time, Scott Pruitt....six excellent minutes....
John Oliver took on EPA Chief Scott Pruitt’s growing scandals on Last Week Tonight, from his pricey office upgrades to full security on trips to Disneyland, pay raises to staffers, and curiously cheap rental deal.
“This is a pretty sudden fall from grace for Pruitt, who’s been a conservative favorite for his aggressively pro-industry stance,” Oliver said, pointing out that Pruitt’s disdain for the agency he runs isn’t much of a secret, as his LinkedIn page still describes him as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”
Oliver went on to play clips from Pruitt’s disastrous interview with Fox News’s Ed Henry, in which he faced a brutal grilling over his $50 per night condo rental from a lobbyist.
“First, that is clearly not the Fox News tone that Pruitt was expecting,” Oliver said. “That is the face of a man who thought he was walking into an Applebees, and ended up in an apple full of bees.”
7/ SNL with a Nike ad that looks real....and amusing.....2 minutes....
Nike Women’s Ad
Just watching certain exercise commercials can be exhausting. If they don’t depict someone using a complicated piece of home gym equipment as the single item in a room large than most houses, they depict people exercising at the level of an Olympic athlete. This parody celebrates those that favor the Couch Panini over a 10k run, and succeeds at doing so.
Part of this sketch’s success comes from its production values: We take it for granted now that SNL can turn these commercials around with this quality under incredible production duress for granted, but this looks visually identical to the commercials it’s mocking. (A good litmus test: If you turn off the volume, it feels like a genuine ad that took months to produce.)
While Heidi Gardner and Melissa Villaseñor play it straight, Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon have far too much fun using leggings as napkins, playing dead for their Fitbits, and experiencing post-nap exhaustion. It probably won’t be the sketch that comes to mind when anyone looks back on this week’s episode (we’re about to get to that), but will almost certainly get a lot of mileage being shared on social media.
8/ Andrew Sullivan with his weekly column, and it's Sullivan at his best - the first story is about Hungary, and it's portends for our future - the second is how politically correct is out of control, and the third is congratulating the Simpsons.....intellectually stimulating treading....
So now we know how you do it.
I mean how you turn a prosperous 21st-century liberal democracy into an illiberal one, and then into a de facto dictatorship. There are no tanks; no mass arrests of opposition politicians; no coups; no direct assaults on the rule of law; and no new totalizing ideology. There is, in fact, no moment where you can definitively say that the liberal democracy has ceased to exist. But in Hungary, an upstanding member of the European Union, liberal democracy is now dead, pining for the fjords, nailed to the perch, an unmistakably ex-democracy.
Last weekend’s reelection of Viktor Orbán, with a supermajority of his own party in parliament, was a watershed.
9/ The wonderful Tom Tomorrow.....
10/ John Oliver with one of his excellent comedic reporting pieces on fake abortion centers..... a great 19 minutes...
John Oliver took on the issue of abortion on Sunday night, exposing the tactics of pseudo-health care organizations known as crisis pregnancy centers.
These centers can often seem like a resource for women considering or in need of abortions, but many are just fronts for anti-abortion activists who use deceptive tactics to persuade women to remain pregnant. Some of these clinics even receive taxpayer funding.
Crisis pregnancy centers manage to “stop just short of the line” where they would be regulated as legitimate health care providers, which allows them to get away with what Oliver called “emotional manipulation,” “coercive” behavior and outright “bullshit.”
After exposing the groups on Sunday’s broadcast of “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver then announced that he was going to run his own tax-exempt crisis pregnancy center.
11/ SNL's "Black Jeopardy" with Chadwick Boseman [star of the Black Panther].....funny, six minutes, and yes you are allowed to laugh!
So when I finished watching this sketch and instantly thought it was the best “Black Jeopardy” sketch ever, I knew I was probably jumping to conclusions. But damnit, it sure FELT like it was.
In the cold light of day, does that sentiment hold true? Well, comedy is subjective, but pound for pound, this is almost certainly funnier than the iteration that used to sit atop my personal rankings: the Tom Hanks Season 42 edition. The Hanks installment blew the doors off what this sketch could be, and still stands at one of the five sketches I’ve rewatched the most from this decade of SNL. The way that Hanks’ version dealt with the sociopolitical climate of America still makes that a crucial snapshot into this moment in history.
Still, Boseman’s version featured seven minutes of jokes that continuously worked.
Time for some health articles,and both of these relate to your diet......
12/ This story says if you drink diet soda and eat badly as well, you are setting up your gut microbes for infections....
There are lots of reasons to avoid processed foods. They’re often packed with sugar, fat and salt, and they tend to lack certain nutrients critical to health, like fiber. And now, new research suggests that some of the additives that extend the shelf life and improve the texture of these foods may have unintended side effects — not on our bodies directly, but on the human microbiome, the trillions of bacteria living in our guts.
These substances may selectively feed the more dangerous members of our microbial communities, causing illness and even death.
Consider the rise in deadly cases of clostridium difficile, or C. diff, a terrible infection of the gut. The bacterium tends to strike just after you’ve taken antibiotics to treat something else. Those antibiotics kill your native microbes, allowing C. diff to move in. Nearly half a million people develop the infection yearly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and around 29,000 die, sometimes after long bouts of painful, bloody diarrhea. By one estimate, deaths linked to C. diff increased fivefoldbetween 1999 and 2007.
13/ The second is that if you eat properly you do not need additional vitamins, including multivites.....
Let's repeat that - you do not need to take vitamins....
When she was a young physician, Dr. Martha Gulati noticed that many of her mentors were prescribing vitamin E and folic acid to patients. Preliminary studies in the early 1990s had linked both supplements to a lower risk of heart disease.
She urged her father to pop the pills as well: “Dad, you should be on these vitamins, because every cardiologist is taking them or putting their patients on [them],” recalled Dr. Gulati, now chief of cardiology for the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix.
But just a few years later, she found herself reversing course, after rigorous clinical trials found neither vitamin E nor folic acid supplements did anything to protect the heart. Even worse, studies linked high-dose vitamin E to a higher risk of heart failure, prostate cancer and death from any cause.
Dr. Gulati told her father he “might want to stop taking” the vitamins.
More than half of Americans take vitamin supplements, including 68 percent of those age 65 and older, according to a 2013 Gallup poll.
14/ SNL's Game Of Life, DACA edition......painfully amusing.....2 minutes...
“SNL” created the worst board game ever, and it’s based on the U.S. immigration system.
In the April 7 episode, hosted by Chadwick Boseman, “Saturday Night Live” debuted a parody commercial for “The Game of Life: DACA Edition” that has some players randomly finding themselves battling confusing bureaucracy to avoid getting deported. While other players go to law school or have twins in the game and have to deal with it, players stuck in the version about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, have to dodge deportation and struggle to pay legal bills.
Melissa Villaseñor played a woman stuck on the DACA path, which included navigating the obstacles of becoming a legal citizen and avoiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents looking to send her “back to Honduras.”
15/ Too much good TV to choose from? The Times has selected 8 Netflix shows that are worth watching.....
If it seems as though each time you log into Netflix there are a dozen new original series on offer, it might be because that’s essentially what’s happening. According to Variety, the company’s chief financial officer, David Wells, announced in February that Netflix was aiming to host around 700 original shows worldwide by the end of 2018. In the United States, some of these are shows produced by Netflix, and some are foreign shows for which Netflix has purchased the rights. Either way, it’s more television than any one person can consume.
In order to help you prioritize your queue, we’ll periodically sift through the latest original programming on Netflix and let you know which shows we think are worth watching. This inaugural roundup features crime thrillers, teen comedies, food shows and one of the craziest documentary series in recent memory.
Todays video - this kid is amazing....."Issy the small magician" even has Simon Cowell astonished....
Todays collection of zingers
I¹m not saying let's go kill all the stupid people. I'm
just saying let's remove all the warning labels and let
the problem work itself out.
just saying let's remove all the warning labels and let
the problem work itself out.
I changed my car horn to gunshot sounds. People move out ofthe way much faster now.--------
You can tell a lot about a woman's mood just looking at her
hands. If they are holding a gun, she's probably angry.------
Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers. Now
they drink like their fathers.----
You know that tingly little feeling you get when you really like
someone? That's common sense leaving your body.-----
I don't like making plans for the day because then the
word "premeditated" get's thrown around in the courtroom.-----
I didn't make it to the gym today. That makes five years in a row-----
I decided to change calling the bathroom the John and renamed it the Jim.I
feel so much better saying I went to the Jim this morning----
Dear paranoid people who check behind shower
curtains for murderers; if you find one, what's your plan?
hands. If they are holding a gun, she's probably angry.------
Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers. Now
they drink like their fathers.----
You know that tingly little feeling you get when you really like
someone? That's common sense leaving your body.-----
I don't like making plans for the day because then the
word "premeditated" get's thrown around in the courtroom.-----
I didn't make it to the gym today. That makes five years in a row-----
I decided to change calling the bathroom the John and renamed it the Jim.I
feel so much better saying I went to the Jim this morning----
Dear paranoid people who check behind shower
curtains for murderers; if you find one, what's your plan?
Todays sexist joke
A man walks into a cocktail lounge and approaches
an attractive woman sitting by herself and asks,
"May I buy you a cocktail?"
"No thank you," she replies, "alcohol is bad for my legs."
"Sorry to hear that. Do they swell?"
"No, they spread.""Sorry to hear that. Do they swell?"
Todays British jokes
THESE ARE ACTUAL COMPLAINTS RECEIVED BY "THOMAS COOK VACATIONS" FROM DISSATISFIED CUSTOMERS:
1. "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."
2. "It's lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallarta to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time -- this should be banned."
3. "On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food."
4. "We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price."
5. "The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room."
6. "We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow."
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