1/. This is one of the really good Lefsetz rants......in my opinion, he nails it.
The story for me is how out of touch the press is.
The right said Trump had a mandate.
The left said the party had to run to the center.
And everybody in the pundit class, everybody in D.C., seemed to have no understanding of the mind-set of the people. And the question arises, if the press is wrong on this, what else are they wrong on?
If you’ve made it all the way to TV or Congress you’re pretty self-impressed, you ran the gauntlet and emerged victorious. But did you know that the median age of an MSNBC viewer is 72? This isn’t even your parents, this is your GRANDPARENTS! And this is my generation and I’ve got to tell you, it’s as baked into its ways as the generations before it. We thought it would be different for boomers, after all they had the greatest number of people and changed the world, but not anymore. https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2025/11/05/tuesdays-election/
2/. Weekend Update......the guys were on form this week!
Most amusing, some good zingers.....6 minutes.....
3/. The wonderful Tom Tomorrow......
4/. An excellent analysis of the administration Trump has put in place.....incompetents and internet trolls.....
n 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.” She found the Old World lacking in civic maturity and commitment compared with her new home, the then-booming United States, noting that “the peoples of Western Europe have developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach.” She believed that her adopted country, by comparison, enjoyed a kind of clarity of public vision: “With the possible exception of the Scandinavians,” she wrote, “no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans, for whom a certain amount of responsibility, i.e., of moderation in the pursuit of self-interest, is almost a matter of course.” Arendt wasn’t celebrating a perfect America; rather, she was lauding a people who approached political life with an adult sensibility and a reserve of self-control.
6/. Trump wants to abolish the filibuster,,,,,Thom Hartmann on why this might be a great idea....
Emperor Trump saw this wipeout election coming and he knew who to blame in advance: the Senate. On Tuesday (election day) morning, he posted to his Nazi-infested social media site: “TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER NOW, END THE RIDICULOUS SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATELY, AND THEN, MOST IMPORTANTLY, PASS EVERY WONDERFUL REPUBLICAN POLICY THAT WE HAVE DREAMT OF, FOR YEARS, BUT NEVER GOTTEN. WE WILL BE THE PARTY THAT CANNOT BE BEATEN – THE SMART PARTY!!!”
Republicans yawned and ignored him; they’ve been hiding behind the filibuster for decades to avoid having to actually take a serious vote on the crazy crap that Republicans in the House keep sending them, like bills to outlaw abortion nationally, end voting rights for married women, or end climate protections and deregulate the fossil fuel industry. https://hartmannreport.com/p/a-republic-if-you-can-count-to-51-bc5?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=302288&post_id=178121707&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=2cwgv&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
7/. Desi Lydic having a religious meltdown.....most amusing.....3 minutes...
Democrats enabled Donald Trump to become president twice because of repetition compulsions that still propel the party’s leaders – undermining the party’s potential to end the real-life nightmare of Maga control over the federal government. Scrutinizing how this century’s Democratic leaders set the stage for Trump’s electoral triumphs is crucial not only for clarity about the past. It also makes possible a vital focus on how such failures can be avoided in the future.
Elites did quite well after Barack Obama took back the presidency for Democrats in January 2009, amid the Great Recession. He bailed out big banks while a huge number of people lost their homes. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, he had facilitated “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million US homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century”, the journalist David Dayen pointed out. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/02/trump-democrats-playbook?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
9/. Angus Petersen on cybersecurity.
It's not enough to "trust, but verify" any more, we all have to be much more sceptical than that.
Good article.....
It’s a strange feeling, realizing how many of the systems we trust to keep the world spinning now depend on code written by someone we’ll never meet. That same software might be patched, revised, or exploited before the week is out — and somewhere, the fallout will land on a family like yours or mine. The gap between what’s possible and what’s stable is widening, and it’s being filled with algorithms, automation, and anxiety.
Over the past year, the speed of technological disruption has started to feel less like progress and more like acceleration without traction. Regulators scramble to keep up, markets cheer or panic, and the rest of us watch the gears spin faster. Europe’s landmark AI Act — once hailed as the world’s strongest attempt to govern artificial intelligence — is already softening around the edges. Both Reuters and the Financial Times report that the European Commission plans to “ease parts” of the law, offering grace periods and phased labeling requirements. In the language of bureaucracy, that sounds harmless. In practice, it signals that even the most ambitious policymakers are blinking under pressure from industry. https://medium.com/edge-of-collapse/deepfakes-layoffs-and-the-new-reality-war-1e39ac50d323
10/. Jimmy Kimmel with one of his street interviews......amusing.....3 minutes.
11/. Bill Gates was supposed to be a "good" billionaire - he isn't.
None of them are, their gross example of wealth inequality and evil corporations are the cause of the world's problems......
Let’s begin with the fundamental problem: Bill Gates is a politics denier. Though he came to it late, he now accepts the realities of climate science. But he lives in flat, embarrassing denial about political realities. His latest essay on climate, published last week, treats the issue as if it existed in a political vacuum. He writes as if there were no such thing as political power, and no such thing as billionaires.
His main contention is that funds are very limited, so the delegates at this month’s climate summit in Brazil should direct money away from “near-term emissions goals” towards climate “adaptation” and spending on poverty and disease.
Yes, the funds available for any good cause are scarce, but that’s not because of some natural law, some implacable truth about human society. It’s because oligarchic power has waged war on benign state spending, leading to the destruction of USAID and drastic cuts to the aid budgets of other countries, including the UK. Austerity is a political choice. The decision to impose it is driven by governments bowing to the wishes of the ultra-rich.
12/. Guys - don't let this happen to you! 3 minutes.....
Ladies, you will appreciate this.....
13/. Great results from last Tuesday's election you haven't heard of......
Yesterday was the first time in five years that reading political news invoked something other than frustration or dread: the election results were almost uniformly exciting, and perhaps aware of the shift in public opinion that precipitated the conservative thumping, even the Supreme Court teased a willingness to check some of Donald Trump’s most autocratic impulses.
You’ve no doubt read reams of political analysis and poetic meditations on the success of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (including mine), looked into the surprisingly strong performance of New Jersey’s next governor, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, and smiled at Donald Trump’s attempts to avoid blame for a Republican thumping.
You also probably felt relief at hearing the news that Democratic leaders are moving aside for the next generation: former Speaker Nancy Pelosi is retiring, while her longtime deputy, Rep. Steny Hoyer, is reportedly looking at wrapping up his distinguished career. Oh, and I hope reveled in the confirmed innocence of the sandwich avenger in DC.
14/. Letters home from the civil war!
15/. Let them eat lead! No, not bullets, lead!
16/. Bob Lefsetz on Musk's trillion dollar compensation.....yes, trillion....
I was told I could be President. I learned that in first grade. I could see the opportunity, the trajectory, we were all starting from the same line. Now, who would want to be President? Certainly not me.
I was told if I worked hard I could be wealthy. They called it the American Dream. There were hoops to jump through. Mostly dealing with education. And if you reached the brass ring…you were comfortable, you didn’t have to worry about money, you could do things other couldn’t.
They never told us you would do things that were completely separate, that the rest didn’t have access to. You could fly in the front of the plane, you could fly as much as you wanted, but the idea of having your own jet? That was an incomprehensible fantasy. Owning your own island? None of these were possibilities, even on the radar screen until the eighties, when those who’d professed love for everybody in the sixties got greedy.
But then came private equity. And Bill Simon’s leveraged buyout of Gibson Greetings for $80 million. In only eighteen months the company was taken public with a value of $290 million, Simon’s $330,000 investment yielded $66 million. Wow!
And you might not have been paying attention, then again if your goal was to make it, to be rich, to win, the line of scrimmage had been moved way down the field.
17/. The local news! SNL, amusing.....3 minutes
18/. Remember the Truman Show? Maybe it's time to give it another look.
This Guardian review makes you think.....
The great Australian director Peter Weir is perhaps underrated as an auteur, simply because his filmography doesn’t follow any thematic or stylistic principle; each of his contributions feels like a complete work of art unto itself. While Picnic at Hanging Rockremains his finest work, his foray into Hollywood culminated in the utterly transfixing, intermittently horrifying Jim Carrey vehicle The Truman Show. Almost 30 years after its theatrical release, the film has only grown in stature and prescience.
Ostensibly a dark satire on voyeurism and the inexhaustible manipulations of the media, The Truman Show predated the television juggernaut Big Brother by a single year, and it’s hard not to see something causal in that. Both are about surveillance and the murky line separating reality from entertainment; both involve hidden cameras watching the participants’ every move. The key difference – the one that gives the film such moral potency – is that Truman doesn’t know he’s on TV.
19/. "All Her Fault" - 5 star guardian review........
We have watched three episodes and it's amazing.....
Look, I am a mother, a neurotic and – if one of my HRT patches sloughs off without me noticing – very quickly a clinical paranoiac. But even if that were not true, this latest tale of a playdate gone unthinkably wrong would have me firmly in its grip. All Her Fault, an adaptation of bestselling thriller writer Andrea Mara’s 2021 book of the same name, braids a number of popular TV trends together, interrogating White Lotus-style the phenomenon of middle-class US affluence and the protections it offers and corruptions it encourages, a missing child narrative and an examination of the penalty women pay for motherhood. It is rare that all these things are held in balance, without at least one element becoming preachy or the thriller part becoming baggy or preposterous, but All Her Fault manages it brilliantly. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/nov/07/all-her-fault-review-sarah-snook-andrea-mara?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Today's golf joke
A man was out on the golf course one sunny day when he suddenly realized he was lost.
Spotting a woman ahead of him, he walked over and asked, “Excuse me, could you help me? I’m not sure which hole I’m on.” She smiled politely and said, “You’re one hole behind me. I’m on the 7th; you’re on the 6th.”
Relieved, he thanked her and went back to his game.
A little while later, he found himself lost again.
Embarrassed, he noticed the same woman and approached her once more. “I hate to bother you again, but I’m lost. Can you tell me what hole I’m on?”
She chuckled and replied, “You’re still one hole behind me. I’m on the 14th; you’re on the 13th.”
Grateful for her help, he thanked her again and finished his round.
Later, in the clubhouse, he saw the woman and decided to thank her properly. “Can I buy you a drink to thank you for your help out there?” he asked.
She agreed, and they started chatting over their drinks.
As the conversation flowed, he asked, “So, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m in sales,” she said with a shy smile.
“No way! Me too!” he exclaimed. “What do you sell?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Well… it’s a little embarrassing.”
“Come on,” he said, coaxing her. “I promise I won’t laugh.”
After a moment, she sighed and said, “Alright, but you really can’t laugh. I sell sanitary napkins.”
He managed to hold a straight face—at first.
But then, unable to contain himself, he burst into laughter, doubling over and nearly falling out of his chair, tears streaming down his face.
“You promised not to laugh!” she exclaimed, glaring at him.
Through his laughter, he managed to choke out, “I’m sorry! But I can’t help it—I sell toilet paper... and I’m still one hole behind you!”
Today's Marital joke
A woman was sure that her husband was cheating on her by having an affair with the maid. So she laid down a trap.
One evening she suddenly sent the maid home for the weekend and didn't tell her husband.
That night when they went to bed, the husband gave the old story:
"Excuse me my dear, my stomach aches" and went to the bathroom. The wife promptly went and got into the Maid's bed. She switched the lights off.
When he came in silently, he wasted no time or words but had his way with her.
When he finished and was still panting, the wife said: "You didn't expect to find me in this bed, did you?"
And then she switched on the light.
"No ma'am", said the Gardener.
Another marital joke
Woman comes home and tells her husband, "Remember those headaches I've been having all these years? Well, they're gone."
"No more headaches?" The husband asks, "What happened?"
His wife replies, "Margie referred me to a hypnotist.
He told me to stand in front of a mirror, stare at myself and repeat 'I do not have a headache; I do not have a headache, I do not have a headache.'
It worked. The headaches are all gone."
His wife then says, "You know, you haven't been exactly a ball of fire in the bedroom these last few years. Why don't you go see the hypnotist and see if he can do anything for that?" The husband agrees to try it.
Following his appointment, the husband comes home, rips off his clothes, picks up his wife and carries her into the bedroom.
He puts her on the bed and says, "Don't move, I'll be right back."
He goes into the bathroom and comes back a few minutes later and jumps into bed and makes passionate love to his wife like never before.
His wife says, "Damn! That was wonderful!"
The husband says, "Don't move! I will be right back."
He goes back into the bathroom, comes back and round two was even better than the first time.
The wife sits up and her head is spinning.
Her husband again says, "Don't move, I'll be right back."
With that, he goes back in the bathroom. This time, his wife quietly follows him and there, in the bathroom, she sees him standing at the mirror and saying,
She's not my wife.
She's not my wife.
She's not my wife.
His funeral service will be held on Saturday
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