1/ Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine with his weekly column, one of his best I have read so far. His portrait of Trump as a con man sounds eerily accurate....an excellent analysis of the disaster in chief.
The leaked tape recording of Michael Cohen and Donald Trump discussing how to handle the payoff to silence yet another extracurricular paramour, Karen McDougal, is more important, it seems to me, than has been generally acknowledged.
It’s only a shade under three minutes long. But unlike the Billy Bush tape, Trump is not performing or bragging or trying to charm someone he doesn’t know that well. He’s at work, with an intimate, trusted wingman, every single guard down. It really feels like the actual Trump, the man behind the curtain. And this Trump is quite clearly in charge. He’s not some addled 70-something, delegating large swathes of responsibility for day-to-day operations to underlings. He’s clearly aware of everything that’s going on:
2/ Trevor Noah praises Trump for his accomplishments......sort of! An amusing five minutes....
Trevor Noah flipped the script and heaped praise on President Donald Trump on Thursday’s broadcast of “The Daily Show.”
Well, in a way.
During the segment, Noah acknowledged that he’d “become a Trump hater” and been blinded by “how much good” the president was actually doing for the country. The comedian then noted how Trump had saved the farming industry, got trade relations with the European Union back on track and reunited the families of some migrant children who’d been separated at the U.S. border — all in the space of one week.
But then came the zinger:
3/ Wow - a wonderful article from the Daily Kos.....there is a kicker in it that will surprise you......
Here’s a stunning editorial from The New Yorker Magazine
…..a question has been haunting our national life. It is whether the Republic will live or die. The question has been asked in countless forms. May newspapers print whatever they wish to print, and the people read whatever they wish to read? May the people assemble without fear of injury or loss of life? Must senators and others always support the President in his difficult decisions? Are the people to be treated like children or like adults? To what extent does the government have the power to check up on what the people are doing? To what extent do the people have the right to check up on what the government is doing? How do we spend our money? When do we go to war? Who decides?[...]
On this occasion, as on many others in recent years, the President has flouted the law.
4/ Hmmmm.....
Look what happens when we cut down too many trees. Global warming is one thing, but see below and consider the practical consequences! We have to stop cutting down trees! This is getting really serious!
5/ Sam Bee on Watergate and Trump....seven very good minutes.....she's very funny!
6/ How does this bastard sleep at night......look at the picture - a portrait of an evil man....
A Trump appointee’s decision to personally review requests to release migrant children from jail-like “secure facilities” created a bureaucratic bottleneck that dramatically increased the amount of time kids spent locked up.
Office of Refugee Resettlement chief E. Scott Lloyd ― who first attracted national interest when a federal court slapped down his attempt to ban a teenage migrant who’d been raped from obtaining an abortion ― told subordinates last year that he’d have to personally sign off before any kids could be released from ORR’s secure facilities.
As a result, hundreds of kids spent extra time in the jail-like facilities, which have been associated with far more allegations of abuse and mistreatment than the shelters and homestays that hold most of the children in ORR custody
7/ Stephen Colbert explains Trump's trade war - almost comedic reporting.....most amusing with a couple of great zingers.....five minutes....
The host then moved on to Donald Trump, who on Thursday was in the midwest “attempting to reassure factory workers that his trade war isn’t actually hurting them”.
During his speech, Colbert explained, Trump mentioned the cameras in the press pool, adding, “this never happened to Obama”.
“Yeah, Obama was never photographed!” Colbert replied. “That’s why now he exists only in myth and legend.”
At another point in his remarks, Trump blasted the media’s treatment of his summit in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin. “They’re dying to see us make a little bit of a mistake,” said the president
8/ Interesting - Matt Taibbi on the war in Yemen, deemed a humanitarian disaster by the UN and why this war has received minimal coverage in the US media.....
Thursday, from Al Jazeera: “Yemen ‘on Brink of New Cholera Epidemic,’ Charity Warns.” The piece details how recent developments in the Yemeni civil war — specifically, the possible siege of the port city of Hodeidah — may cause a surge in cholera cases. There were over a million reported cases of cholera between the fall of 2016 and spring of 2018, the largest documented outbreak in modern times. The rate of infection had slowed, but observers now fear resurgence.
Since the conflict began, medical services have been devastated across the war-torn country, and children in particular have been affected, with as many as 400,000 at imminent risk of starvation. In April, U.N. General Secretary Antonio Guterres said that 8 million people in Yemen didn’t know where they were getting their next meal
If you want to be saddened to the point of nausea, look at these images, in which weeping mothers can be seen holding their malnourished babies and saying things like, “I’m losing my son and there’s nothing I can do about it!”
Yemen is a catastrophe on a scale similar to Syria, but coverage in the United States has been sporadic at best.
9/ John Oliver was off for the month, but put together a compilation of graphics that were never used on Last Week Tonight.....clever and amusing, three minutes....
“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” has been off the last few weeks, but that doesn’t mean the host of the HBO series has forgotten about us.
In a web-only video Sunday, Oliver presented the third volume of his “Lost Graphics” series, featuring images that were made for the show. but weren’t used for various reasons.
But some of the outtakes demand to be seen, like makeup being applied to fish, or a journalist squirrel named Edward R. Burrow, or a woman who just gave birth to a watermelon
10/ Did you know one of Betsy DeVos's yachts was set adrift? Thought not.....Stephen Colbert tells us about it. Four amusing minutes....
Betsy DeVos, a person whose genuine professional ineptitude would be almost endearing if she didn't control the future of every child in America, suffered a boating tragedy this week. Pranksters attacked the Education Secretary's $40 million yacht in one of the most polite forms of vandalism possible—simply untying it from the dock and liberating it, Free Willy-style, from its Amway overlords. Naturally, Stephen Colbert had a lot of fun with the story on the most recent episode of The Late Show.
“I’m not sure if setting a boat free counts as vandalism,” says Colbert. “That sounds like saying, ‘I got pretty crazy last night, I vandalized a balloon into the sky.’”
11/ Michelle Wolf gets better and better - here she does a mockumentary on the "True Crime" documentaries that are everywhere on Netflix etc....three clever minutes....
True crime documentaries have been around forever. But recent films in the genre, like “Making a Murderer” and “The Jinx,” have made the serial approach to the subject matter popular.
Now “The Break with Michelle Wolf” takes a look at the format with a spoof advertisement for a true crime documentary series titled “The Husband Did It.”
OK, sure the title gives it away. But the trailer for the fictional film nails the cliches that abound in the real documentaries.
12/ Thomas Frank with a commentary on our politics, and how the Democrats fail to inspire us....
The other day I noticed, with something of a shock, that Brett Kavanaugh, the supreme court nominee, is almost exactly the same age as me. I have always scoffed at those of my generation who cynically hitched their star to the conservative movement but now, as I take my leave from this space, it occurs to me that maybe they played the game right after all.
I started out in journalism in the orange-fingered sunset of the Reagan era. The rise of the right, I felt back then, was the most consequential development of my lifetime, and understanding it was where I came to focus my energies.
What came to fascinate me was the paradox of the thing.
13/ The wonderful Tom Tomorrow....
14/ A really insightful look at how to reform the Democratic party from Benjamin Studebaker.....go for the primaries!
There is a part of the left which believes the Democratic Party is beyond hope. They think it’s too corrupt, too beholden to rich people and corporations, and that it’s a waste of time and energy to try to change it. Even in articles which express support for running progressive and democratic socialist candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line, concessions are routinely made to this faction. Jacobin recently ran an interview with Seth Ackerman, in which Ackerman advises the left to run candidates as Democrats, provided those candidates are beholden to outside activist groups. But even this piece is far too pessimistic about the prospects for penetrating the Democratic Party. Right at the start, it begins with a left-wing shibboleth–that the Democratic Party has a “conservatising force field” which necessarily assimilates into the borg all efforts to change it. This is really wrong and it’s shockingly easy to show why.
15/ Very, very interesting article from Michael Tomasky.....this is definitely what he's up to, and maybe what's coming in the future with "the base".......
Sometimes, people ask me, “Can we recover from this?” I say yes, because President Trump won’t last forever. Whoever succeeds him will be normal. Maybe normal and very right wing, if we’re unlucky, but normal in the sense that he or she will have basic respect for democratic principles and won’t treat the presidency as if it were the Genovese family.
But lately I’ve been thinking. Okay, the person who succeeds Trump mighthave basic respect for democratic principles. But what if many millions of Americans—Republicans, to be more precise—don’t? What if Trump has created a monster that will outlive him and that no normal Republican can control?
16/ Fear motivates Republicans and it's infectious, so being a mother is getting more risky because everyone questions your parenting decisions.....it's tough and sometimes dangerous being a free range parent....
I was on my way home from dropping my kids off at preschool when a police officer called to ask if I was aware there was an outstanding warrant for my arrest.
“No, no,” I told him. “I didn’t know that.”
I needed to call my husband, but my fingers were shaking. I don’t remember if I was crying when he answered, only that he was saying he couldn’t understand me, that I needed to calm down, to tell him what had happened.
What happened began over a year before on a cool March day in 2011, at the end of a visit with my parents in Virginia. I needed to run an errand before our flight home to Chicago, and my son, then 4, didn’t want to get out of the car.
Todays lawyer jokes
HOW DO COURT REPORTERS KEEP STRAIGHT FACES????
These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down
and published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while the exchanges were taking place.
ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, 'Where am I, Cathy?'
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan!
______________________________
ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.
______________________________
ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth?
WITNESS: July 18th.
ATTORNEY: What year?
WITNESS: Every year.
______________________________
ATTORNEY: How old is your son, the one living with you?
WITNESS: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can't remember which.
ATTORNEY: How long has he lived with you?
WITNESS: Forty-five years.
______________________________
ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget..
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
______________________________
ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He's 20, much like your IQ.
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shitting me?
______________________________
ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Getting laid
______________________________
ATTORNEY: She had three children , right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
______________________________
ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death..
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male.
_
_
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Doctor , how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
______________________________
______________________________
ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral...
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 PM
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?
______________________________
______________________________
And last:
ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No..
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.
Todays golfer joke
A man and his wife walked into a dentist's office. The man said to the dentist, "Doc, I'm in one heck of a hurry. I have two buddies sitting out in my car waiting for us to go play golf, so forget about the anesthetic, I don't have time for the gums to get numb. I just want you to pull the tooth, and be done with it!We have a 10:00 AM tee time at the best golf course in town and it's 9:30 already... I don't have time to wait for the anesthetic to work!'
The dentist thought to himself, "My goodness, this is surely a very brave man asking to have his tooth pulled without using anything to kill the pain."So the dentist asks him, "Which tooth is it sir?"
The man turned to his wife and said, "Open your mouth honey, and show him.
