1/. A smart political strategist explains the Republican Presidential primary......
In happier times. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
It’s still very early in the Republican primary. Only three candidates have officially declared that they’re running, and Donald Trump’scentral (and probably only) rival, Ron DeSantis, is biding his time before he jumps in. Yet polls at this stage tend to be quite predictive, and the contours of the race are coming into view. The central question looming over the proceedings: Can anyone stop the ex-president, who only recently seemed eminently stoppable?
2/. Love this story - DeSantis screwed by Mickey Mouse......
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, talks to reporters on Monday. Photograph: Matias J Ocner/APA dispute between the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Disney over control of the company’s Florida theme park district hinges on a clause referencing King Charles III and his descendants.
The row began after DeSantis in March 2022 passed a “don’t say gay” law banning classroom teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The law was highly controversial, with LGBTQ+ activists saying it was discriminatory. Joe Biden denounced it as “hateful”
3/. Screw the Libtards....Tom Tomorrow....
4/. The title of this piece is chilling.....in Tennessee, how sick does a woman need
to be to get a medical abortion?
On 14 May 2022, hundreds gathered in Nashville, Tennessee, to protest a ‘trigger law’ that would outlaw abortion on 25 August. Photograph: Seth Herald/AFP/Getty ImMonths after the implementation of the most stringent abortion ban in the country, conservative lawmakers in Tennessee have publicly acknowledged that the state’s ban poses grave risks to the lives of women.
Now a political debate over how to change the law is centered on questions that would have been considered unthinkable before last June’s reversal of Roe v Wade: like how close to death a woman must be before a doctor may legally treat her if it means terminating her pregnancy, and whether women should be forced to carry embryos with fatal anomalies to term.
5/. Did you know Tucker Carlson has a face coach? Two amusing minutes.....
6/. The Democratic party elites just don't get it......the #1 election winning issue in the
country is Abortion, and it's a proven winner. But do we hear anything? Nope......
Same with another winner - legalising weed...
The question,” New York representative Shirley Chisholm declared in 1969, “is not: can we justify abortions, but can we justify compulsory pregnancy?”
The first Black woman elected to the United States Congress, Chisholm had recently been named the first honorary co-president of NARAL. She was both frank and morally assured in the remarks she delivered to the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population, asking pointedly, “What is more immoral, granting an abortion or forcing a young girl … to assume the responsibilities of an adult while she is still a child?”
7/. Jordan Klepper at last week's Indictment protest....not very many to interview there....
8/. British society is collapsing under the relentless pressure of austerity and the Brexit disaster...and read this horrifying
story of what happens if you're disabled? There used to be a world class safety net in the UK......
This isn't from Umair - it's the Guardian....
‘It’s a lot of caring for £69 a week’ … Mike in his kitchen. Photograph: Joel GoodmanIn his Buckinghamshire front room, Mike is working out how many meals he has to skip this week to make sure his wife can afford to eat.
Sandra, 38, has bipolar disorder, on top of multiple physical health problems, and has long been too sick to work. Mike – himself slowly recovering from agoraphobia – is needed at home as her full-time carer. A large turntable setup fills one side of the room. “I was a DJ in another life,” Mike, 40, explains wistfully.
9/. Bob Lefsetz on mass shootings and how paralysed we are as a society.....
How did we turn into a can’t do nation?
Or to put it another way, if Democrats suddenly embraced gun ownership would Republicans renounce it?
I don’t own a gun and never would. Primarily for two reasons: 1. I’d end up shooting a friend or relative knocking on the door or prowling around the house in the dark, innocently. 2. I’d probably shoot myself. My hold on reality is very thin. I think about this back pain I had…I remember telling everybody if there was a gun in the house, I’d probably shoot myself. Thank god there was not.
10/. Amanda Marcotte in Salon explains how the Trumpies love mass shootings, because anything that
generates fear and despair is good for Republicans....
Fascinating, and persuasive premise.....
Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee was blunter than some of his fellow Republicans, who mostly ran away from reporters or offered bland "thoughts and prayers" in response to Monday's school shooting in Nashville that left three kids, three school employees and the shooter dead. But Burchett, a hardline Trumpist who voted in support of Donald Trump's attempted coup in 2021, was certainly on message with what the Republican Party is telling America: Abandon all hope.
11/. One of the more amusing feuds in entertainment is between Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon......
Ben Afflek is their friend, and he tries to hook the two back up, with very funny results......start at the 7 1/2 minute mark....
12/. Andrew Sullivan, an intelligent conservative, on how language changes our perception of
actions......an example - "enhanced interrogation " = torture.....
The relationship between language and politics — how each can inform or derange the other — was never better explored than in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, and his essay, “Politics and the English Language.” After reading these in my early teens, political writing became a vocational challenge of sorts to me. How to say things as clearly and honestly as Orwell? How to “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about,” as he deftly put it?
13/. Did you know the maternal mortality rate is 10 times higher here vs Australia?
Thought not....
‘2021 was the third consecutive year that the rate rose – and the trend is only going in one direction.’ Photograph: Tina Fineberg/APAmerica is in a maternal health crisis. According to new CDC datareleased this week, the rate of maternal mortality – defined as deaths during pregnancy or within 42 days of giving birth – rose by 40% in 2021. At a rate of 33 deaths for every 100,000 live births, 1,205 women died of maternal causes that year. That rate was more than twice as high for Black women, whose maternal mortality rate was 70 deaths for every 100,000 live births. The latest federal compilation of data from reviews of maternal deaths suggests that 84% were preventable.
14/. Bob Lefsetz with an entertaining rant about how the right wing always chooses the agenda.....Democrats don't fight back enough....
And the right defines the debate once again.
I’ve got to ask you, when was the last time the Democrats put the fear of God into the heart of the Republicans? Not in DECADES!
So let me get this straight. A student breaks a window in high school, they’re called to the principal’s office and the kid tells the official he’d better not be punished, because if they are, all the bullies and ne’er-do-wells are going to break every window in the building. AND MORE!
Or the teenager gets in trouble, and when his parents say they’re going to ground them, or take away their phone, the child says to think about it, because… I’m not exactly sure what. Run away from home? Kids are running BACK home these days. The idea of hitting the road with your thumb out and your wallet empty? NO WAY!
15/. It's getting worse and more dangerous to be a mother these days....or indeed a
woman in her child bearing years...
Poppy seeds do not contain opium themselves, but can ‘become contaminated with opiates contained in the milky latex of the seed pod covering them’. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/ShutterstockFew people would ever expect that the simple act of eating a poppy seed bagel could lead to the investigation of young mothers and their newborn babies over suspected opiate use, but that is exactly what two women in New Jersey say happened to them.
The pair of new mothers are alleging the hospitals in which they gave birth violated their rights after performing drug tests on them without their consent.
The drug tests came back positive and led them to be reported for possible neglect or abuse just days after giving birth.
16/. Reminder - the police in Uvalde Texas now say the reason they didn't go after the shooter was the fact he
had an AR15 and they were scared.....seriously!
A relevant toon....
17/. This is a strange country, but Utah is one of the weirder states......now a parent is using the loony bill that passed about books to hit back.....
Frustrated by the books being removed from school libraries, a Utah parent says there’s one that hasn’t been challenged yet, but that they believe should be, for being “one of the most sex-ridden books around.”
So they’ve submitted a request for their school district in Davis County to now review the Bible for any inappropriate content.
“Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide,” the parent wrote in their request, listing topics they found concerning in the religious text. “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”
18/. Mrs. Betty Bowers explains how Republican politicians should answer questions.....wryly amusing....
19/. Vanity Fair on the part of DeSantis's platform that he is going to run on - anti-vax!
On December 14, 2020, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, wearing a mask, watched expectantly as a FedEx truck backed up to a loading dock at Tampa General Hospital. The truck carried precious cargo: boxes of the very first COVID-19 vaccines. With a flourish, DeSantis signed the FedEx manifest. “Today, we will have shots going in arms,” he proudly declared.
At the time, Republicans across the country were eager to share credit for a singular feat in President Donald Trump’s otherwise disastrous handling of the pandemic: the record-speed development of COVID-19 vaccines that offered hope of a return to normal life.
20/ Scott Maxwell with an excellent column about the craziness of our Florida politics....
Consider some of our recent stories making national news:
A principal at a school in Tallahassee said she was forced to resign after a parent accused her of trying to show porn to children. The alleged porn? Michelangelo’s statue of David.
In St. Petersburg, a school has at least temporarily banned a Disney movie about civil-rights icon Ruby Bridges because a single parent objected.
https://www.orlandosentinel.
21/. There's a secret world of making money from selling your plasma......if you're poor,
it's tempting to ruin your health like this....
Iwas sitting in the bright sun watching a college football game next to my dad last fall, talking with him about the book I’d just finished writing and he’d just finished reading, several months before it would be released to the public.
“Are there really that many people who sell plasma?” he asked.
I paused for a minute and thought about it for what must have been the thousandth time. It was a central question that had puzzled me for years.
It’s a tale of Americans who sell their blood proteins to get by financially, and my own physical dependence on them (I need regular plasma injections to keep me healthy). It’s also a tale of a system that relies on economic precarity, a hidden part of the US economy shunted off in strip malls by the Dollar Store or relegated to the poorer sides of the tracks in major cities, in places often neglected and ignored.
22/. "The Night Agent".....we've watched four episodes and it's really good.....
Slicker-than-slick fun … Luciane Buchanan and Gabriel Basso in The Night Agent. Photograph: Dan Power/NetflixThe Night Agent is a political thriller, based on Matthew Quirk’s 2012 political thriller of the same name, about a night agent who gets caught up in some political thrills. What’s a night agent, I hear you ask? Well, in this case, he is an FBI agent called Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), who saves a bunch of ordinary joes from a bomb on a subway train. For some reason, he is put on desk duties in the basement of the White House, doing admin while he waits by a helpline phone that undercover operatives can call to let the powers-that-be know they are in trouble.
23/. The best movies on Amazon Prime right now, according to the Times.....
As Netflix pours more of its resources into original content, Amazon Prime Video is picking up the slack, adding new movies for its subscribers each month. Its catalog has grown so impressive, in fact, that it’s a bit overwhelming — and at the same time, movies that are included with a Prime subscription regularly change status, becoming available only for rental or purchase. It’s a lot to sift through, so we’ve plucked out 100 of the absolute best movies included with a Prime subscription right now, to be updated as new information is made available.
Today's senior joke
A 95 year old man is crying on a park bench.
“Sir,” says a concerned Policeman “what’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter?” he says. “I went on a dating website after my wife died. This young woman sent me an email. She liked older men. She’s Swedish. We meet. It’s wonderful. She’s beautiful. She takes care of the apartment. She makes me eat gluten-free. I haven’t felt so good in years. My children love her. My grandchildren love her. And the sex..oh my god is great”
“Well, that sounds wonderful,” the Policeman says. “So why are you crying?”
“I can’t remember where I live!”
Today's wifely joke....
A man returns from the doctor and tells his wife that the doctor has told him he has only 24 hours to live.
Given this prognosis, the man asks his wife for sex.
Naturally, she agrees, and they make love.
About six hours later, the husband goes to his wife and says, "Honey,you know I now have only 18 hours to live. Could we please do it one more time?"
Of course, the wife agrees, and they do it again.
Later, as the man gets into bed, he looks at his watch and realizes that he now has only 8 hours left.
He touches his wife's shoulder, and asks, "Honey, please...just one more time."
She says, "Of course, Dear," and they make love for the third time.
After this session, the wife rolls over and falls asleep.
The man, however, worried about his impending death, tosses and turns, until he's down to 4 more hours.
He taps his wife, who rouses. "Honey, I have only 4 more hours. Do you think we could..."
At this point the wife sits up and says, "Listen, I have to get up in the morning. You don't!"..
Today's golf joke
One day Leonard said, "Frank, we both loved playing golf all our lives, and we started playing soon after high school. Please do me one favor: when you get to heaven, somehow you must let me know if there’s golf there."
Frank looked up at Leonard from his deathbed and said, "Leonard, you’ve been my best friend for many years. If it's at all possible, I’ll do this favor for you."
Shortly after that, Frank died.
A few weeks later, Leonard was awakened from a sound sleep by a blinding flash of white light and a voice calling out to him, “Leonard!"
"Who is it?" asked Leonard, sitting up suddenly. "Who is it?"
"Leonard -- it's me, Frank."
"You're not Frank. Frank just died."
"I'm telling you, it's me, Frank," insisted the voice.
"Frank! Where are you?"
"In heaven," replied Frank. "I have some really good news and a little bad news."
"Tell me the good news first," said Leonard
"The good news," Frank said with joy and enthusiasm, "is that there is golf in heaven. Better yet, all of our old buddies who died before me are here too. Even better than that, we're all young again. Better still, it's always Summertime and it never rains. And best of all, we can play golf all we want, and we never get tired. And we get to play with all the Greats of the past."
"That's fantastic," said Leonard. "It's beyond my wildest dreams! So what’s the bad news?""You're in my foursome this Saturday!"
Today's Hooters joke
Two guys grow-up together, but after college one moves to Georgia and the other to Texas. They agree to meet every ten years in Florida to play golf.
At age 32 they meet, finish their round of golf, and head for lunch.
"Where you wanna go?"
"Hooters."
"Why Hooters?"
"They have those servers with big boobs, tight shorts, and gorgeous legs."
"You're on."
At age 42, they meet and play golf again. "Where you wanna go for lunch?"
"Hooters."
“Again? Why?"
"They have a cold beer, big screen TVs, and side action on the games."
"OK."
At age 52 they meet and play again.
"So where you wanna go for lunch?"
"Hooters.”
"Why?”
"The food is pretty good and there's plenty of parking."
"OK."
At age 62 they meet again.
After a round of golf, one says, "Where you wanna go?"
"Hooters."
"Why?"
"Wings are half price and the food isn't too spicy."
"Good choice"
At age 72 they meet again.
Once again, after a round of golf, one says, "Where shall we go for lunch?"
"Hooters."
"Why?"
“They have six handicapped parking spaces right by the door and they have senior discounts."
"Great choice."
At age 82 they meet and play again.
"Where should we go for lunch?"
"Hooters."
"Why?"
"Because we've never been there before."
"Okay, let’s give it a try."
Today's Grandad joke
I went shopping today in Aldi and I was behind a grandfather and his badly-behaved grandson. He has his hands full with the child screaming for sweets, biscuits, all sorts of things.
The granddad is saying in a controlled voice: “Easy, William, we won’t be long . . . easy boy.”
Another outburst and I heard the granddad calmly say : “It’s okay William. Just a couple more minutes and we’ll be out of here. Hang in there, boy.”
Granddad says again in a controlled voice : “William, William, relax buddy, don’t get upset. We’ll be home in five minutes, stay cool William.”
Well, I was really impressed, so I went outside to where the grandfather was loading his groceries and the boy into the car.
I said to the Grandad “It’s none of my business, but you were amazing in there. I don’t know how you did it. That whole time you kept your composure, and no matter how loud and disruptive he got, you just calmly kept saying things would be okay.
William is very lucky to have you as his granddad.”
“Thanks,” said the Granddad. “But I am William. The little bastard’s name is Kevin.”
Finally, a blonde joke!
Jack, a handsome man, walked into a sports bar around 9:58 pm. He sat down next to this blonde at the bar and stared up at the TV as the 10:00 news came on.
The blonde looked at Jack and said, "Do you think he'll jump?"
Jack says, "You know what, I bet he will."
The blonde replied, "Well, I bet he won't."
Jack placed $30 on the bar and said, "You're on!"
Just as the blonde placed her money on the bar, the guy did a swan dive off of the building, falling to his death.
The blonde was very upset and handed her $30 to Jack, saying, "Fair's fair... Here's your money."
Jack replied, "I can't take your money, I saw this earlier on the 5 o'clock news and knew he would jump."
The blonde replies, "I did too; but I didn't think he'd do it again."
Jack took the money.
