1/ Frank Rich on the week's news....titled "Trump Is Starting To Panic!"
Rich is probably right, but it makes Trump even more dangerous....
Feeling the pressure. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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 tantrums, the Times’ revelations about Facebook, and the First Lady’s campaign to get a West Wing staffer fired.
Since the Democrats made gains in last week’s election — and, in some places, may continue to make more still — Donald Trump has retreated into what the Los Angeles Times calls “a cocoon of bitterness and resentment,” canceling travel plans, lashing out at allies and adversaries, meddling in the remaining undecided races and, apparently, sitting for hours of meetings with his personal lawyers. Should we take his tantrums as an early indicator of additional bad news?
I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending.
2/ David Wallace-Wells on the California fires, and how the traditional rainy season is now the fire season.....the devastation has just started and the future isn't looking too good. His story is on more of the underlying reasons why the fires will be worse and happen more often...
Embers fall from burning palms and the sun is obscured by smoke as flames from the Woolsey Fire close in on a house on November 9, 2018 in Malibu, California. About 75,000 homes have been evacuated in Los Angeles and Ventura counties due to two ongoing fires in the region. Photo: David McNew/Getty Images
November always marked the beginning of rainy season in California. Now it is fire season.
Last November, the Thomas Fire in Southern California grew 50,000 acres in a single day, eventually burning 440 square miles and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate. It was not an outlier. Five of the worst 20 wildfires in California history hit the state in the fall of 2017, a year in which more than 9,000 separate ones broke out. All told, they burnt through more than a million acres, or nearly 2,000 square miles. This summer, there were just 6,000 fires, but more land was burnt — more than 1.5 million acres, the smoke visible by satellite and blanketing half the country. And then came this year’s November fires, just as fire season was supposed to be ending
3/ Bill Maher with some excellent advice about Thanksgiving....."don't talk politics!" Five minutes of amusing commentary...
HBO’s Bill Maher thinks we should just stop talking politics with each other.
“Let’s stop talking politics to each other,” Maher said during his final show of the season. “Everyone these days says the way to bridge our frightful partisan divide is to talk to each other…It never works.”
Then after pointing out that talking politics used to be considered impolite, he gave this advice for bridging the partisan divide: “Shut the f*ck up.”
4/ Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone on the California fires with more emphasis on the politics.....but with the same conclusion as #2, we're screwed....
“Paradise is gone,” resident Sue Brown told the Los Angeles Times after witnessing the devastation from the Camp fire, which is now the largest fire in California history. Brown said she and her husband had planned to spend the rest of their lives in Paradise, a city of about 27,000 in the Sierra Nevada foothills about two hours north of San Francisco. But now the entire town is in ashes. The Camp fire has burned more than 110,000 acres and consumed 6,713 structures. Twenty-nine people have died. And it’s still burning. Southern California is also ablaze. In the hills around Malibu, the Woolsey fire has consumed 83,000 acres and forced more than a quarter-million people to evacuatee.
5/ And in a sign of the future, a story on how the ultra-rich hired private firefighters to protect their gated subdivision.... it will be the same for food, security and water etc. when things start to fall apart - the wealthy will be fine, the rest of us not so much....
Wildfires don’t burn evenly. There are several factors that determine how a fire spreads across a landscape: wind direction, humidity levels, the moisture content of vegetation, and, as it turns out, wealth.
Over the past five days, the Woolsey fire has turned around 100,000 acres of Ventura and Los Angeles counties into a smoldering hellscape. Photos of Malibu, a coastal city that lay in the fire’s path, show palm trees and multimillion-dollar mansions going up in flames. The fast-moving fire, driven by Southern California’s relentless Santa Ana winds, proved to be a major challenge for firefighters who were unable to control much of the blaze.
There was, however, one neighborhood that was saved. If you drive about 10 miles north of Malibu and head east on Highway 101, you’ll hit the city of Hidden Hills, a gated community that’s home to many famous celebrities, including hip-hop artist Kanye West and his wife, reality television star Kim Kardashian.
6/ Stephen Colbert with four minutes on Trump's insecurity.....very good....
“It is the first day of snow here in the Northeast, but did it stop these people? No! Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night — these people are like the Postal Service — In that Donald Trump wishes both of them didn’t exist.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, saluting his audience at the top of “The Late Show”
7/ It's not enough to know what is happening, we also need to know why and this story from the Times on monopolies explains a lot about our economics and indeed our politics....
In the aftermath of the Second World War, an urgent question presented itself: How can we prevent the rise of fascism from happening again? If over the years that question became one of mostly historical interest, it has again become pressing, with the growing success of populist, nationalist and even neofascist movements all around the world.
Common answers to the question stress the importance of a free press, the rule of law, stable government, robust civic institutions and common decency. But as undoubtedly important as these factors are, we too often overlook something else: the threat to democracy posed by monopoly and excessive corporate concentration — what the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis called the “curse of bigness.”
8/ John Oliver looks at Trump's swamp.....16 comedic reporting minutes....informative and funny....
President Donald Trump‘s “draining the swamp” campaign slogan hasn’t proven to have much behind it, given he stocks his administration with billionaires, lobbyists, family members and various other D.C. insiders. Many of those have left the administration in disgrace following scandals, à la Scott Pruitt.
John Oliver tackled Trump’s swamp on Last Week Tonight Sunday, running through the various creatures that have stocked his administration.
9/ Wow - an article by David Roth on the disintegrating mind of Trump.....written in a very interesting style, he makes you feel you are inside Trump's crumbling psyche.....
President Donald Trump often stands near a helicopter on the White House’s South Lawn while reporters shout questions at him. Certain elements of this ritual are the same every time. The wheedling honk of Trump’s voice and the uneasy tilt of his standing-on-a-hoverboard-for-
It’s worthless, of course.
10/ Tom Tomorrow with "The Unbelievable Trump".........
11/ On the assumption that most of the readers of DDD are mature and have a comfortable middle class lifestyle, none of us have any idea of what it's like to be young in America in an economy that is rigged against working people. Read this story - it's heartbreaking, and will open your eyes to what our government and specifically Republicans have done to 60% of our people....
Coming Up Short: Thirty-four percent of stay-at-home moms are living in poverty, more than double the number in 1970. “I wear shoes with holes in them, I’ve sold my dead grandmother’s jewelry, I’ve donated plasma, says Allyson. “I’ve gone without deodorant for a week, without tampons. When you have no income, those things become expensive.
Allyson Costello stared at the two lines on her pregnancy test and knew — immediately and beyond a shadow of a doubt — that she would get an abortion. She was 21 years old. She was on the pill, taking it religiously every morning. And it had been only a few months since she’d received a Facebook message from Andy, the first boyfriend she’d ever had, back in middle school, but now virtually a stranger. She learned that he was currently living way out in the country somewhere in Kentucky, that it was beautiful there, but also lonely. She had just gone through a breakup herself and could relate to the loneliness. They started writing, then they started talking. Eventually, he asked if she would fly up from Florida to visit.
12/ One of the funniest characters the wonderful Kate McKinnon plays on SNL is the low rent abductee by aliens.....in this one she is taken by ghosts....
Very amusing indeed, five minutes including some LOL "on the floor" moments....
13/ A Paul Krugman column about Senate America vs Real America....of course he's right in his observations, but if the Dems are ever going to win they need a different message.....
Everyone is delivering post-mortems on Tuesday’s elections, so for what it’s worth, here’s mine: Despite some bitter disappointments and lost ground in the Senate, Democrats won a huge victory. They broke the Republican monopoly on federal power, and that’s a very big deal for an administration that has engaged in blatant corruption and abuse of power, in the belief that an impenetrable red wall would always protect it from accountability. They also made major gains at the state level, which will have a big impact on future elections.
But given this overall success, how do we explain those Senate losses?
14/ The always insightful Benjamin Studebaker on how the Democrats should campaign in 2020....forget the identity politics, go for unity.....
Really interesting and makes a lot of sense...
The Midwest is increasingly the critical region in American politics. It is the only region in which large numbers of states flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016, and in the 2018 Midterms the Midwest was once again the site of many of the most interesting results. For me, this region includes Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. I don’t include agricultural red states like the Dakotas or Missouri, which have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1996.
Despite their shift toward Trump in 2016, many of these Midwestern states demonstrated a willingness to support Democrats in 2018.
15/ Jimmy Kimmel with the Halloween candy prank.....an amusing four minutes, and some charming kids....
Jimmy Kimmel once again ruins Halloween for thousands of trick-or-treaters in the eighth annual installment of the late-night host’s “I Told My Kids I Ate All Their Halloween Candy.”
“Once again, you really answered the call,” Kimmel told his viewers. “We got over a thousand videos, we went through all of them, we narrowed it down to the best of the best and now it’s time to find out just how easy it is to take candy from babies.”
We followed was a four-minute montage of crying children, some of whom lashed out physically at their candy-stealing parents, while others were more understanding to their parents’ post-Halloween binge. “I’m telling you: Candy is not that special,” one kid tells his mom.
16/ SNL's "Unity" song, about everyone united about the small things we all hate.....a clever and fun three minutes....
“We don’t agree on the big things, and that’s how it’s going to be.” This seemingly “Fight Song”-inspired ditty is “We Are The World,” if the world hated the word “moist” (because who doesn’t) and children who come back from semesters abroad with fake accents. You could argue that focusing on negativity isn’t really unifying, but I’d counter that literally no one likes a pilot that interrupts the in-flight movie with wind speed updates. “Unity Song” acknowledges we are not all the same, but have far more in common than we currently choose to remember.
17/ The best TV of 2018, according to New York Magazine.....
Photo: HBO/Netflix/BBC America/FX
This list has been updated to include October releases.
The fall TV season has officially arrived, and here are Vulture’s picks for the best TV shows of 2018 so far. We’ve continually updated this list from January to October on a monthly basis, both as a service to readers and also to help us keep our TV clutter properly organized.
Todays music video - "Alchemy" by Above and Beyond featuring Zoe Johnston.....one of the most heartbreaking videos ever.....lovely song too....
Todays Old Lady joke
An elderly lady was invited to an old friend's home for dinner one
evening.
evening.
She was impressed by the way her lady friend preceded every
request to her husband with endearing terms such as: Honey, My Love,
Darling, Sweetheart, etc. The couple had been married almost 70 years
and, clearly, they were still very much in love.
request to her husband with endearing terms such as: Honey, My Love,
Darling, Sweetheart, etc. The couple had been married almost 70 years
and, clearly, they were still very much in love.
While the husband was in the living room, her lady friend leaned over to her hostess to say,
'I think it's wonderful that, after all these years, you still call
your husband all those loving names.'
your husband all those loving names.'
The elderly lady hung her head, 'I have to tell you the truth,' she said, 'his name slipped my
mind about 10 years ago, and I'm scared to death to ask the cranky old
asshole what his name is.
mind about 10 years ago, and I'm scared to death to ask the cranky old
asshole what his name is.
Todays biker joke
A duded-up city rider walks into a seedy tavern in Sturgis, South Dakota.He sits at the bar and notices a grizzled old biker with his arms folded,
staring blankly at a full bowl of chili.After fifteen minutes of just sitting there staring at it, the newby
rider bravely asks the old biker, 'If you ain't gonna eat that, mind
if I do?'
The old veteran of a thousand rides slowly turns his head toward the
young pup and says, 'Nah, you go ahead.' ...
Eagerly, the guy wearing the shiny new leather fashions reaches over
and slides the bowl into his place and starts spooning it in with
delight. He gets nearly down to the bottom of the bowl and notices a
dead mouse in the chilli. The sight was very shocking and he
immediately barfed up the chili back into the bowl.
The old biker quietly says, 'Yep, that's as far as I got, too.
Todays senior joke
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