1/ Stephen Colbert with comedic reporting on the "summit"......some Putin responses you may not have seen.....Colbert manages [just] to milk some laughs from this appalling and treasonous meeting....nine good minutes....
2/ Andrew Sullivan with two powerful stories....the first is how Trump has given Theresa May an opening to have a second Brexit vote, and the second is how our democracy is crumbling at a faster rate than you might imagine....
Can Brexit still be stopped? I gave up on that possibility a long time ago, but politics is fickle, and contemporary politics is full of shocks. And I’d say that the odds of pulling back from the brink, still low, measurably improved this past week. I know that sounds unlikely given the political chaos in London, and Donald Trump’s explosive intervention in the Sun tabloid last night, but bear with me. It’s precisely the chaos and the president that might offer hope.
In fact, last week was the first time I began, perhaps foolishly, to suspect some method in Theresa May’s blithering badness.
3/ We put this three minute Jimmy Kimmel piece in because it's funny, but it's also incredibly depressing.....until the very end! It's one of his street interviews, and they challenge passers by to name a country on a map, any country....
America’s ignorance of geography is off the charts in this “Jimmy Kimmel Live” segment from Thursday.
The host used President Donald Trump’s European trip to emphasize how it is everyone’s responsibility to have knowledge of the world. So the show conducted a test on the streets.
Passers-by were asked to point to a country ― any country ― on a map of the world.
They couldn’t do it, not even for the United States.
“Shouldn’t I be taught this in school?” asks one woman.
Another says she went to college ― “That’s the sad part.”
4/ Paul Krugman with an insightful column - the only thing Trump wants is to destroy our institutions because it will please the base....
So Donald Trump went to a NATO summit, insulted our allies, then made the absurd demand not just that they increase defense spending — which they should — but that they raise it to 4 percent of G.D.P., much higher than the bloated military spending in his own budget. He then claimed, falsely, to have won major concessions, and graciously declared that it is “presently unnecessary” to consider quitting the alliance.
Was there anything our allies could have done that would have mollified him? The answer, surely, is no. For Trump, disrupting NATO doesn’t seem to be a means to an end; it’s an end in itself.
Does all of this sound familiar?
5/ The Peter Strzok Congressional hearing last week was a circus.....and Stephen Colbert gives us some great comedic reporting on the proceedings....
On Thursday night, Stephen Colbert had some fun at the expense of congressional lawmakers over the marathon hearing of FBI Agent Peter Strzok.
What he referred to as a “parliamentary smackdown” and the “Thunder Dome” in the Capitol Dome, Colbert began explaining to his audience how Strzok’s anti-Trump tweets were being scrutinized by GOP lawmakers. He shared a sample including “God. Hillary should win 100,000,000-0,” “Trump is a f**king idiot,” and “WHAT THE F**K HAPPENED TO OUR COUNTRY?!?”
“I don’t know, but hopefully Robert Mueller will tell us soon,” Colbert responded
6/ Interesting article about why we are pretending everything is normal and that all of the outrageous things happening to our society aren't really important....we're playing dumb.....
Some things in life, my friends, are unpredictable. The weather. True love. The stock market. But some things are entirely, utterly, and almost boringly predictable, too. And strangely, those aren’t small things. Sometimes, they’re big things. One of the most predictable things of all is fascism, the classical sequence of a proto-fascist collapse.
Don’t believe me? Let’s think about. It goes something like this: economic stagnation, a falling middle class, a rising demagogue, who scapegoats and demonizes minorities, blaming the troubles of the many on the few and the different. Soon enough, something like this follows: paramilitaries are formed, parallel judiciaries, law enforcement, and citizenship are created, camps rise, apartheid laws begin, minorities are expropriated of savings, homes, and assets (which are redistributed to the pure of blood, because, remember, the economy is stagnant), forced exile, ghettoization, enslavement, and finally, extermination. The lying press! Enemies of the people! Vermin! Animals! We know how this goes, don’t we?
Where would you saw we are in that sequence of ruin?
7/ LMAO.....
8/ There is almost no discussion of the risks of having children in this world that is slowly collapsing, but this article is visceral because of the writing.....it's by a man with a daughter who is fearful for her future......excellent!
Raising My Child in a Doomed World
I cried two times when my daughter was born. First for joy, when after 27 hours of labor the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.
9/ "Our Cartoon President" is a new show on Showtime....this clip is very good....
The Stephen Colbert-produced Our Cartoon President returns for its second season this Sunday night on Showtime—with one hell of a lead-in from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? And we have the opening scene.
Before the real Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin sit down for their one-on-one summit in Helsinki next Tuesday, their cartoon counterparts come face-to-face in this exclusive clip that was completed late enough to work in a few jokes about Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump begins the meeting by trying to get Putin to sign a statement declaring them “best friends”—just as the real Trump once fantasized in a 2013 tweet. But before they get to that, Putin wants to “catch up” with some “state secrets.”
10/ Is there a medical or health product out there you can trust? Of course not....look at what happened with Johnson's Baby Powder, an iconic brand if there ever was one....
A St. Louis jury this week ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $4.69 billion, one of the largest amounts ever awarded in a product liability case, to 22 women and their families who say the company failed to warn people that its talcum-based baby powder contained dangerous levels of asbestos. The plaintiffs argued that years of daily use caused the women to develop ovarian cancer; six of them have died from the disease.
The decision is precarious, to be sure. The science linking baby powder to ovarian cancer is shaky at best. And judgments for several similar suits — against the same company, regarding the same product — have been overturned on appeal. But in this case, the plaintiffs marshaled reams of documents, going back decades, to show that at least some scientists within the company had expressed concern about asbestos contamination, only to be ignored by executives. (Asbestos is commonly found near talc mines, but it is supposed to be stripped from commercial products.)
The size of the award sends a message that should be heard by the whole drug and
medical device industry: Stop placing profits over safety.
11/ The band U2 with a Beck remix of their song "Love is Bigger"......the interesting thing about this is the Claymation video for the song.....
For the animated clip, U2 once again tapped the Israeli graffiti collective, Broken Fingaz Crew, who previously helmed their videos for “American Soul” and “Get Out of Your Own Way.” Their latest offering uses claymation to tell the story of a man who tries to leave his old life behind but finds it’s not so easy to outrun the past.
12/ More comedic reporting on Bill Shine, who joins the White House staff this week......
On Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert blasted former Fox News co-president Bill Shine and his wife Darla Shine for their various controversies as he recently entered the Trump administration as Deputy Chief of Staff of Communications.
Colbert began by slamming Mr. Shine for his 2017 resignation from Fox News for his inaction on the systemic sexual harassment that took place at the network.
“I’m sure that was a quick interview at the White House,” Colbert reacted. “‘Uh, it says here on your resume that you know Microsoft Excel and you enabled the sexual deviances of a dirty old meat bag. Okay… welcome aboard!'”
The Late Show host then shifted his attention to Shine’s wife Darla, who Mediaite reported had made racist tweets and used social media to push conspiracy theories.
“I am shocked those kind of tweets came from the wife of the president’s communications director and not from the president himself,” Colbert told the audience.
13/ Nothing political, just an interesting story from the Times......
Drought and Drone Reveal ‘Once-in-a-Lifetime’ Signs of Ancient Henge in Ireland
Todays video - very clever, very amusing and well done.....three minutes....
Todays golf joke....
A husband reluctantly agreed to play in the couples' alternate shot Tournament at his club.He teed off on the first hole, a par four, and blistered a drive 300 yards down the middle of the fairway. Upon reaching the ball, the husband said to his wife, "Just hit it toward the green, anywhere around there will be fine."The wife proceeded to shank the ball deep into the woods. Undaunted, the husband said "That's OK, Sweetheart" and spent the full five minutes looking for the ball. He found it just in time but in a horrible position. He played the shot of his life to get the ball within two feet of the hole. He told his wife to knock the ball in.His wife then proceeded to knock the ball off the green and into a bunker. Still maintaining composure, the husband summoned all of his skill and holed the shot from the bunker.He took the ball out of the hole and, while walking off the green, put his arm around his wife and calmly said, "Honey, that was a bogey five and that's OK, but I think we can do better on the next hole".To which she replied, "Listen asshole, don't bitch at me, Only 2 of those 5 shots were mine.”
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