1/ Frank Rich on the weeks news.....excellent as always....
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is sworn in during a ceremony for the opening of the 116th Congress. Photo: Andrew Harrer/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, the border-wall standoff, Mitt Romney’s anti-Trump op-ed, and Elizabeth Warren’s run for the White House.
At the dawn of the new Congress, new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is adamant that Democrats will not budge on border-wall funding in the ongoing shutdown negotiations and, in early interviews, is not taking impeachment off the table. Will she have to offer something Trump can spin as a victory, or will their first standoff end with him folding on his demands?
Pelosi is the most seasoned and arguably the most impressive leader that the Democrats currently have, the party’s presidential aspirants included. When she talks about the wall being fundamentally immoral and un-American, as she did upon reassuming the Speakership this week, she is drawing a line she won’t cross.http://nymag.com/
2/ In case you had forgotten some of Trump's worst gaffes in 2018, here is a list for you....
Blunders, gaffes, and dubious behavior are an inexhaustible resource in the Trump administration.
3/ Great ad....a parody of one of the stupid drug commercials you see on TV, and the message is wonderful......one minute of wry
amusement and pay attention to the chyron blurbs....very amusing.
Note we have no original comedy this edition....all of our favourite comedians are off for the week!
4/ Umair with a most interesting story on our society - he says we are a poor rich country.....
Read this one, makes a lot of sense and explains much of what is happening and, indeed, what is about to happen.
Consider the following statistics. — about half of median income, which is $60k.
By themselves, of course, statistics say little. But together these facts speak volumes. The story they are beginning to tell is this.
America, it seems, is becoming something like the world’s first poor rich country. And that is the elephant in the room we aren’t quite grasping. After all, authoritarianism and extremism don’t arise in prosperous societies — but in troubled ones, which are growing impoverished, like America is today.What do I mean by all that?
Let’s begin with what I don’t mean. I don’t mean absolute poverty.
5/ Tom Tomorrow....on the environment....sorta.....
6/ Brazil's new President may be the reason humans on this planet are well and truly doomed....
An aerial view of Amazon rainforest deforestation, with trees being burned for farm management. Photo: Ricardo Funari/Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images
How much damage can one person do to the planet?
For that matter, how much can one do to help save it? Unless that person is Xi Jinping — the autocrat-for-life in charge of the world’s most populous country and its rapidly industrializing, state-capitalist economy — the answer is, usually, not very much. Even Donald Trump’s contribution to climate catastrophe is relatively modest: He’s pulled the United States out of the Paris accords and slashed environmental regulations, but, thanks to forces beyond his control, American emissions are nevertheless down since he’s been in office (making the U.S., which accounts for only fourteen percent of global emissions, the only major industrialized nation whose contributions to climate change are actually falling). The problem of global warming is just so big, and so diffuse, that the impact of any single actor, no matter how powerful, is relatively small. This is why global cooperation is so important, and why coordination is so difficult.
But Brazil’s newly elected president just might test the proposition that no individual matters all that much to the climate.
7/ Matt Taibbi on why voters should ignore the pundits and talking heads, and vote for who they want to be President
instead of the candidate with "electability"....Taibbi has a knack of ferreting out the BS in our politics....
Good article....
Bad news for anyone who had hopes of enjoying a few rancor-free months of 2019 before the presidential-election insanity begins. Not only is the race fully on, we’re already in our third or fourth toxic electoral narrative — the most recent involving that most infamous campaign cliché, “electability.”
The target was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) this week, but it’ll be a half-dozen other candidates by June, when (insanely) the Democrats will reportedly hold their first way-too-early primary debates.
The 2020 race unofficially began on December 12th, when former HUD Secretary Julian Castro announced the creation of an electoral exploratory committee (he supposedly is announcing formally this weekend). On Wednesday, the Atlantic ran a story suggesting Washington governor Jay Inslee was planning to add his name to what is expected to be a very long list of Democratic candidates.
8/ The very real consequences of Trump's war on the environment are beginning to show....an excellent interactive story from the Times on how real people are being damaged by corporations let loose from any responsibility to the environment....
In just two years, President Trump has unleashed a regulatory rollback, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, with little parallel in the past half-century. Mr. Trump enthusiastically promotes the changes as creating jobs, freeing business from the shackles of government and helping the economy grow.
The trade-offs, while often out of public view, are real — frighteningly so, for some people — imperiling progress in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink, and in some cases upending the very relationship with the environment around us.
Since Mr. Trump took office, his approach on the environment has been to neutralize the most rigorous Obama-era restrictions, nearly 80 of which have been blocked, delayed or targeted for repeal, according to an analysis of data by The New York Times.
With this running start, Mr. Trump is already on track to leave an indelible mark on the American landscape, even with a decline in some major pollutants from the ever-shrinking coal industry.
9/ One of the strangest things about Trump's base is the unswerving devotion he commands with evangelicals despite
his obnoxious personal behavior....so this story in the Times is especially interesting....
The month before the 2018 midterms, a thousand theaters screened “The Trump Prophecy,” a film that tells the story of Mark Taylor, a former firefighter who claims that God told him in 2011 that Donald Trump would be elected president.
At a critical moment in the film, just after the actor representing Mr. Taylor collapses in the flashing light of an epiphany, he picks up a Bible and turns to the 45th chapter of the book of Isaiah, which describes the anointment of King Cyrus by God. In the next scene, we hear Mr. Trump being interviewed on “The 700 Club,” a popular Christian television show.
As Lance Wallnau, an evangelical author and speaker who appears in the film, once said,
“I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” who will “restore the
crumbling walls that separate us from cultural collapse.”
10/ Had a discussion about Beto recently over the dinner table and how could he possibly have been beaten by the awful Ted Cruz....
which reminded me of this hysterical video from Bad Lip Reading.....a weird and very funny three minutes....
11/ The appeal of MSNBC is analyzed in this excellent story from Vanity Fair....they comment on why Rachel Maddow is so popular with news junkies [myself included], but also stresses the danger of the short-termism of the coverage. It's always "Breaking News", but the important stuff is always long term....
Well worth reading!
“If it bleeds it leads,” runs the old saying about local news. Family of five killed in crack-fueled home invasion on Long Island. Gang violence on the South Side. Of course, no one watches local news anymore—except, of course, the millions of people the right-wing, Trump-friendly Sinclair stations reach every day. Everyone—meaning everyone but the demographic undesirables watching local news—is watching cable news: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. A cable-network group head recently moaned to me that his demographically desirable female viewers had, en masse, ditched daytime viewing for MSNBC. As reality TV supplanted soap opera, so now cable news has supplanted reality TV. Thanks to the mix of pre-meditated and accidental outrage emanating hourly from the White House (leavened, albeit less so every day, by entertaining incompetence), cable news is where you go to tap into that need to watch stuff happen—in this case, watch our democracy implode in real time.https://www.vanityfair.
12/ A Kate McKinnon SNL piece you may not have seen....this one is with her character Ms. Rafferty and her
experience with ghosts....Liev Schreiber is the costar....
Breaking from the alien theme for the most recent installment, the group is interrogated by paranormal specialists after they had experiences to prove the existence of ghosts. As always, Ms. Rafferty got the short end of the stick — while Strong and Liev Schreiber’s characters helped deliver the final wishes of friendly ghosts to their loved ones, Ms. Rafferty had to fulfill the bizarre quest of a demon to “upper deck that bitch’s toilet” with a fresh deuce. When she visualizes to everyone what exactly that means in a bathroom setting, Schreiber can hardly contain his smiles.
13/ Fascinating essay from a cable repair lady who saw America as it really is....after all everyone needs internet, especially weirdos....
I can’t tell you about a specific day as a cable tech. I can’t tell you my first customer was a cat hoarder. I can tell you the details, sure. That I smeared Vicks on my lip to try to cover the stench of rugs and walls and upholstery soaked in cat piss. That I wore booties, not to protect the carpets from the mud on my boots but to keep the cat piss off my soles. I can tell you the problem with her cable service was that her cats chewed through the wiring. That I had to move a mummified cat behind the television to replace the jumper. That ammonia seeped into the polyester fibers of my itchy blue uniform, clung to the sweat in my hair. That the smell stuck to me through the next job.
14/ Big Ag is poisoning you.....all of the chemicals banned in the EU that our corrupt FDA allows here....which means
you need to buy organic, or even better from local farmers at your Farmers Market....
Q. What foods are banned in Europe that are not banned in the United States, and what are the implications of eating those foods?
A. The European Union prohibits or severely restricts many food additives that have been linked to cancer that are still used in American-made bread, cookies, soft drinks and other processed foods. Europe also bars the use of several drugs that are used in farm animals in the United States, and many European countries limit the cultivation and import of genetically modified foods.
“In some cases, food-processing companies will reformulate a food product for sale in Europe” but continue to sell the product with the additives in the United States, said Lisa Y. Lefferts, senior scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food safety advocacy organization.
15/ Music videos are an art form, so it's interesting that this one has a disconnect between the video, which is a story of a girl deciding to work a lobster boat,
and the song "Paspartou" by Parra for Cuva....love the song....
16/ A classic Floriduh story - Mount Dora's own State Representative Jennifer Sullivan is now chairing the House Education committee, in spite of no university degree and the fact that she was home schooled by her Tea Party mother so she has has zero experience of the school system.
Good article by Lauren Ritchie.....note she doesn't mention that Sullivan is also an anti-abortion loony....
Get ready for a fight. Florida’s public education system is at stake.
A chasm over education big enough to swallow a Volkswagen has opened in the Florida Legislature, and this year’s tussle over the more than $20 billion the state spends annually on schools promises to be particularly acrimonious.
And in one of the most powerful spots — chair of the Florida House’s Education Committee — is Central Florida’s own Tea Party darling, Jennifer Sullivan.
Sullivan, 27, a Mount Dora Republican whose district covers north Orange County and most of Lake, was home-schooled. She lived with her mom and worked as a tea room waitress and babysitter before she was elected.
17/ The top 20 movies of 2018 from HuffPo's film critic - some interesting choices, with a blurb on each one. Good article....
It wasn’t until June that the movie year really set sail.
You see, that’s when the trailer for “A Star Is Born” overtook the internet. By then, the Avengers had already turned to dust (or something), and “Black Panther” had claimed its still-guarded spot atop the annual box-office rankings. But when Bradley Cooper, the American sniper himself, told Lady Gaga, of all people, that he wanted to take another look at her, 2018 fell off the deep end.
The exchange became a meme ― what didn’t become a meme? ― and suddenly all of spring’s lackluster blockbusters (“A Wrinkle in Time,” “Ready Player One,” “Solo: A Star Wars Story”) felt like distant glimmers ready to be upstaged.
Todays Little Johnny joke
The teacher asked the class to use the word “fascinate” in a sentence.
Molly put up her hand and said, “My family went to my granddad's farm, and we all saw his pet sheep. It was fascinating."
The teacher said, “That was good, but I wanted you to use the word ‘fascinate,’ not 'fascinating'.”
Sally raised her hand. She said, “My family went to see Rock City and I was fascinated.”
The teacher said, “Well, that was good Sally, but I wanted you to use the word ‘fascinate’.”
Little Johnny raised his hand, but the teacher hesitated because she had been burned by Little Johnny before. She finally decided there was no way he
Molly put up her hand and said, “My family went to my granddad's farm, and we all saw his pet sheep. It was fascinating."
The teacher said, “That was good, but I wanted you to use the word ‘fascinate,’ not 'fascinating'.”
Sally raised her hand. She said, “My family went to see Rock City and I was fascinated.”
The teacher said, “Well, that was good Sally, but I wanted you to use the word ‘fascinate’.”
Little Johnny raised his hand, but the teacher hesitated because she had been burned by Little Johnny before. She finally decided there was no way he
could damage the word “fascinate,” so she called on him.
Johnny said, “My aunt Carolyn has a sweater with ten buttons, but her tits are so big she can only fasten eight!”
The teacher sat down and cried.
Johnny said, “My aunt Carolyn has a sweater with ten buttons, but her tits are so big she can only fasten eight!”
The teacher sat down and cried.
Todays puns....
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