1/ Frank Rich on the very weird news of the week......
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Trump’s retreat on family separations, Michael Bloomberg’s $80 million gift to Democrats, and the emerging schisms at Fox.
After repeatedly saying that he could not single-handedly end family separation at the border, Donald Trump has signed an executive order that ends the practice, replacing it with indefinite detainment of parents and children together. Is this the first major retreat of his presidency?
It is a major retreat, but only a rhetorical retreat. When talking heads on CNN and MSNBC say Trump has caved, they have irrefutable evidence to back it up: a kaleidoscope of video clips of him and his White House cohort claiming that “only Congress” could end this humanitarian horror show when in truth it could have been ended by a presidential phone call.
2/ The "Daily Show" did a mashup on how North Korean State TV and Fox News covered the summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un......with horrific results. No wonder the 'base" is demented.....
A painfully amusing two minutes........
“The Daily Show” posted a mashup on Twitter Thursday that compared the coverage of President Donald Trump on Fox News to the state-controlled television in North Korea’s rhetoric on leader Kim Jong Un.
They are ... alarmingly similar.
3/ Matt Taibbi on how Republicans are handling the immigration scandal.....as you might imagine, not too well...
John McCain, in Arizona receiving treatment for brain cancer, tweeted about Donald Trump's barbarous immigration policy this week.
"The administration's current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded," the senator wrote.
Those comments bring to mind a commercial John McCain made eight years ago. At the time, he was facing a tough primary challengefrom Tea Party Republican J.D. Hayworth.
In the ad, McCain is seen walking along Arizona's southern border with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, in the shadow of an enormous fence. McCain starts tsk-tsking about the wave of crime pouring into his state.
In the ad, McCain is seen walking along Arizona's southern border with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, in the shadow of an enormous fence. McCain starts tsk-tsking about the wave of crime pouring into his state.
"Drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder?" McCain asks.
4/ John Oliver had some choice words for Chinese President Xi last week about censorship.....now Oliver's show is censored in China....the segment is informative as well as funny, 18 minutes....
On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” covering China and its President Xi Jinping, host John Oliver pointed out that Chinese internet users often liken Xi’s appearance to Winnie the Pooh.
Well, Xi is apparently very sensitive about this, and now the Chinese government has blocked Oliver and the show on the social media site Sina Weibo.
According to The Associated Press, attempts to post to Weibo with “John Oliver” or “Last Week Tonight” resulted in the message
“the content contains information that violates relevant laws and regulations.”
It’s unclear whether the move was specifically a result of the Winnie the Pooh dig. The episode covered a lot of criticism of Xi’s leadership, from imprisoning his political rivals to assigning citizens social credit scores, which punish people for not behaving in ways preferred by the state.
China is famous for censoring content that it finds objectionable, especially from foreign news and entertainment outlets. The “Last Week Tonight” segment on China has been viewed nearly 3.5 million times on YouTube.
5/ Did you realize last week they passed the bloated military budget of $716 billion, a $82 billion increase over last year?
Thought not......Matt Taibbi had some thoughts on what else we could do with this enormous sum.....
While the world continues to be transfixed over the gruesome imagescoming from the border, business went on as usual in Washington. Earlier this week, the Senate quietly passed the $716 billion "John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019."
The bill, which passed 85-10 in a massive show of bipartisan support, represents a considerable boost in defense spending across the board – roughly $82 billion just for next year.
The annual increase by itself is bigger than the annual defense budget of Russia ($61 billion) and the two-year jump of over $165 billion eclipses the entire defense budget of China ($150 billion).
The annual increase by itself is bigger than the annual defense budget of Russia ($61 billion) and the two-year jump of over $165 billion eclipses the entire defense budget of China ($150 billion).
The bill is a major win for Trump, who has made no secret about his desire to push through giant increases in military spending.
6/ Tom Tomorrow on your TV news....
7/ This writer Umair has an incredibly florid style, but makes a lot of passionate sense. This is an essay on how we live in an age of stupid, and lists how to cope with the idiocy all around us......note it's not about Trump - he's just a symptom of our disintegration.
Most interesting.....
I’d bet, these days, shortly after reading the headlines, you’ve thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: “Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.”
You’re not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite, dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.
And so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion thermonuclear bomb across the globe. Lightning bolts of foolishness shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it.
8/ Stephen Colbert with an amusing three minute riff on Melania's choice of jacket......
On Thursday night, Stephen Colbert went after First Lady Melania Trump for the jacket she wore on the way to visiting a detention center in Texas that was housing dozens of illegal immigrant children.
Colbert began by telling his audience that the Trump administration sent their “most high profile detainee” to the southern border and mocked the question she gave at a listening session “How can I help?”
“Ma’am, I know how you can help,” Colbert responded. “Unfortunately, it involves speaking to your husband, but desperate times call for desperate measures.”
9/ Interesting article from Esquire that says the balance of energy has changed with the Border children disaster.....we hope beyond hope he's right....
This Nation Is Beginning to Realize the Full Extent of What
It Did to Itself in November 2016
The country's head is clearing. The spell of the reality show presidency* is wearing off.
Optimism may be illusory, but it’s all we have at this point, so, when it stirs, anywhere, it’s worthy of nurture and support. Over the past week, ever since the administration*’s crimes against humanity along the southern borderwere revealed, there became an edge to the political opposition that has not been there through all the marches and the rhetoric that have attended this government since the president* was inaugurated. Up until now, all of the #Resistancehas contained a barely acknowledged undercurrent of futility. It was not that the opposition was empty. It was that it generally broke like a wave on a seawall when it collided with the immutable fact that the president*’s party controlled every lever of political power at the federal level, as well as a great number of them out in the states, too.
The week just passed has changed the calculations.
10/ A very good look at the direction we are going in, and how it's being done to us all by this charlatan we have as President....
Sometimes, we forget where we are. Momentary amnesia is the most charitable explanation for Donald Trump saluting North Korea's uniformed defense chief. In an uneasy moment of bonhomie during Trump's Singapore summit last week, General No Kwang-chol saluted the president, then extended his hand for a shake right as Trump raised his right hand to his brow. In the footage played on repeat by North Korean state media, Trump didn't look like a leader on the verge of one of the more fraught foreign-policy negotiations in decades. In this moment, he looked like a nervous fan.
11/ Prosecutors have a lot of power, but when they abuse it are almost never held accountable....
Glenn Kurtzrock in 2016.
A major scandal unfolding on Long Island over the last 13 months shows how the justice system all too often falls silent when the culprit is a prosecutor, and the victim is an ordinary citizen accused of a crime.
In May 2017, Glenn Kurtzrock, a homicide prosecutor in Suffolk County, N.Y., was caught red-handed concealing dozens of pages of material from Messiah Booker, a young man charged with first-degree murder who maintained he was innocent.
Mr. Booker was arrested and spent more than 18 months in jail awaiting trial before his defense lawyer discovered that Mr. Kurtzrock had altered hundreds of pages of police records to remove a wealth of exculpatory information. That included evidence pointing to another suspect he knew Mr. Booker’s lawyer had been investigating. The prosecutor had also removed the covers of two police notebooks to make it look like his altered versions of the documents were the originals.
After the defense attorney discovered the misconduct and alerted the court, the
district attorney promptly fired Mr. Kurtzrock and dismissed the murder charge a
gainst Mr. Booker in mid-trial
12/ Canada just legalised weed, and released anyone in prison on pot charges and expunged the records of convictions for pot possession nationwide. This is a big deal - Canada is a G-20 country and a "serious" nation internationally....
Mexico is considering doing the same, so this story is about what this could mean for us after the current regime is gone....
With Donald Trump subverting America's global standing – feuding with allies, palling around with dictators, snatching toddlers from migrant mothers – Justin Trudeau just may be the leader of the Free World. Starting this week, the prime minister's youthful, forward-looking Canada is now also the leader of the weed world.
By a nearly two-to-one margin on Tuesday, the Canadian Senate voted to legalize recreational marijuana. Canada has become the first member of the G-20 group of industrialized nations to end prohibition of pot – joining tiny global pioneer Uruguay. Canadians 18 years and older (19-plus in select provinces) will now be able to possess an ounce of weed in public and up to four plants at home. The nation's retail markets should be in operation by September; regulation of edibles will be sorted within the year.
This is a major political victory for Trudeau, who campaigned on the issue marijuana legalization
13/ Vice looks at the big banks and how they are almost certainly ripping you off....and how it's easier than you might think to change banks....
After a rough couple of years, Wells Fargo devised a simple strategy to make people forget it stole from unwitting customers: double-down on cheesy Americana. Back in May, the bank launched a TV spot, part of a campaign called "Re-Established," that conveyed a two-fold message. One was a history lesson about how the bank carried gold back East from California in the 1800s, complete with images of rugged cowboys. The other was an announcement that they'd pulled back from product sales goals and thereby alleviated perverse incentives to sign customers up for new accounts without their consent.
14/ An intelligent and informed look at The Villages and how it's affecting Florida politics in more ways than you might expect......most interesting. This should be required reading for anyone interested in our state's future......
Generation Pickleball: Welcome to Florida’s Political Tomorrowland
Republicans’ political future looks a lot like this vibrant, fast-growing, Trump-friendly retirement community outside of Orlando.
The Villages is America’s largest retirement community, a carefully planned, meticulously groomed dreamscape of gated subdivisions, wall-to-wall golf courses, adult-only pools and old-fashioned town squares. It’s advertised as “Florida’s friendliest hometown,” and it’s supposed to evoke a bygone era of traditional values when Americans knew their neighbors, respected their elders and followed the rules. It has the highest concentration of military veterans of any metropolitan area without a military base. It has strict regulations enforcing the uniformity of homes (no second stories, no bright colors, no modern flourishes) as well as the people living in them (no families with children, except to visit). And it is Trump country, a reliably Republican, vocally patriotic, almost entirely white enclave that gave the president nearly 70 percent of the vote.
https://www.politico.com/magaz
15/ In case you are ever tempted to watch Jurassic Park 3, watch this "Honest Trailer" instead.....amusing....
16/ An excellent story by the environmental writer Jeff Goodall on sea level rise in South Florida, and how this will affect the area financially. This line in the story is ironic:
"If Floridians start moving to Asheville and foreign investors start shifting their investments to Costa Rica, property values will fall'
The irony is we are writing this from Asheville!
Consider this a follow up of last weeks DDD story predicting 3 feet of sea level rise by 2046.....
Rising seas are not just an engineering problem; they are an existential risk to life as we know it in South Florida.
Even in the most modest scenarios, dealing with rising seas in the coming decades will be messy, complicated, and hugely expensive. Taxes will increase. Insurance rates will skyrocket. Lawsuits will proliferate. Salt water will corrode your car. Trees will die. New water-borne diseases will emerge. Biscayne Bay will go murky from the increased run-off and pollution. Racial and class tensions will arise over who gets protected from the flooding and who doesn’t.
So if you live in South Florida, you might ask yourself: Why stick around? And if you own a house or condo, you might think: Why not sell now, while there are plenty of buyers in the market and prices are high?
If you’re a city official in South Florida, this is your nightmare.
17/ A realistic look by the Miami Herald at Florida's probable Democratic nominee for Governor - Phillip Levine. He's not perfect, but he actually cares about people which is more than you can say about ANY Republican.....
He definitely has my vote....
Shortly after voters made him mayor of Miami Beach, Philip Levine gave his campaign strategist a garish poster with the strategist's comically smiling face mounted atop the rippled body of warrior Spartan King Leonidas.
Standing before a bloody battlefield, political consultant David Custin carried in his hands two severed heads. One belonged to a vanquished mayoral opponent, and the other to Levine’s predecessor, a 74-year-old woman.
It was supposed to be funny — a gag gift. But all jokes have a little truth to them, and Levine didn’t spend $2 million of his own money on his inaugural political campaign just to go-along-to-get-along at City Hall.
Instead, Levine stormed his way into City Hall five years ago pushing a big-picture agenda that several campaign insiders say was always intended to promote plans for higher office. He paradoxically slayed the political establishment with an assist from Bill Clinton, and steered Miami Beach's cumbersome government in directions that won international acclaim but at times also favored his political aspirations and financial assets.
In slogging his way to Democratic front-runner in the race for governor, Levine has campaigned heavily on his tenure as mayor. And everyone seems to agree: What Miami Beach got during four years of Levine is what Florida will get if he ends up winning four years as governor.
Todays redneck medical jokes....
Medical Term: Redneck Definition
Artery: The study of paintings
Bacteria: Back door to cafeteria
Barium: What doctors do when patients die
Benign: What you be, after you be eight
Caesarean Section: A neighborhood in Rome
Cat scan: Searching for Kitty
Cauterize: Made eye contact with her
Colic: A sheep dog
Coma: A punctuation mark
Dilate: To live long
Enema: Not a friend
Fester: Quicker than someone else
Fibula: A small lie
Impotent: Distinguished, well known
Labor Pain: Getting hurt at work
Medical Staff: A Doctor's cane
Morbid: A higher offer
Nitrates: Rates of Pay for Working at Night,normally more money than Days
Node: I knew it
Outpatient: A person who has fainted
Pelvis: Second cousin to Elvis
Post Operative: A letter carrier
Recovery Room: Place to do upholstery
Rectum: Nearly killed him
Secretion: Hiding something
Seizure: Roman Emperor
Tablet: A small table
Terminal Illness: Getting sick at the airport
Tumor: One plus one more
Urine: Opposite of you're out
Todays blond jokes
A young brunette goes into the doctor's office and says that her body hurts wherever she touches it".
Impossible," says the doctor. "Show me."
She takes her finger and pushes her elbow and screams in agony. She pushes her knee and screams, pushes her ankle and screams and so it goes on, everywhere she touches makes her scream.
The doctor says, "You're not really a brunette, are you?"
She says, "No, I'm really a blonde."
"I thought so," he says. "Your finger is broken."
A Blonde was down on her luck. In order to raise some money, she decided to kidnap a kid and hold him for ransom.
She went to the playground, grabbed a kid, took him behind a tree, and told him, "I`ve kidnapped you."
She then wrote a note saying, "I`ve kidnapped your kid. Tomorrow morning, put $10,000 in a paper bag and put it under the pecan tree next to the slide on the north side of the playground. Signed, Blonde."
The Blonde then taped the note to the kid`s shirt and sent him home to show it to his parents.
The next morning the blonde checked, and sure enough, a paper bag was sitting beneath the pecan tree.
The blonde opened the bag and found the $10,000 with a note that said, "How could you do this to a fellow Blonde?"
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