1/. An amazing article from Lucien Truscott in Salon.....his point is Trump is our reality show President with examples of his derangement.
The last paragraph is wonderful....a well done story you need to read....
Trump is the most powerless president in American history
Trump wallows in a vat of perks as his broken promises pile up
Let’s begin with the war in Afghanistan — because it’s a war, and American soldiers are dying over there; because according to the Congressional Research Service, it costs the American taxpayer $3.9 million to keep one American soldier over there for one year; because according to the Cost of War Project at Brown University, our presence in Afghanistan has cost us $2 trillion over 16 years. Think of it. Two trillion dollars. That would have provided 38 years of funding for the Department of Education, 36 years of funding for the State Department, and 148 years of funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers 9 million underprivileged children, the funding for which Congress just let lapse. By any measure you can think of, we have spent a staggering amount of money over the 16 years we have been there. Which is at least part of the reason Donald J. Trump, as a private citizen and as a candidate for president, repeatedly said he wanted to get us out of Afghanistan.
2/. SNL Weekend Update on the gun debate and Trump in Puerto Rico......the second half is Kate McKinnon with her Justice Ginsberg impression.....
I personally found the first five minutes very funny and spot on.....I hated the Ginsberg four minutes, but we report, you decide....
SNL Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che made a push for gun control in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre.
“The investigation into the tragedy in Las Vegas this week has sparked a larger debate in America between people who want common sense gun control and people who are wrong,” Jost began. “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. The guy had 47 guns. No one should own 47 of anything. If you own 47 cats, you are not a responsible pet owner, you’re a crazy cat lady. And unlike with guns, the government will actually come and take your cats away, because everyone agrees that’s insane.”
“Why is it so hard to get gun control in this country?” Che asked. “I mean, who are these delicate snowflakes that we can’t just tell them, ‘No, you are not allowed to have 40 guns anymore, Earl. From now on you can have one gun, max, and six bullets.’ If you can’t hit what you’re shooting for you in six shots, then your ass need to learn karate or use your words.”
Che noted that only 3% of gun owners 50% of guns in the country.
“That’s the problem; the 3% the country that needs to feel secure all the time,” Che continued. “That’s why I think we should do a buy-back program. For every gun you trade in, we give you one half inch of penis enlargement.”
3/. A chilling story from Nicolas Kristof from the Times, who just visited North Korea. This is our reality folks.....the world is in serious danger of nuclear war....
PYONGYANG, North Korea — To fly into North Korea on an old Russian aircraft is to step into an alternate universe, one in which “the Supreme Leader” defeats craven American imperialists, in which triplets are taken from parents to be raised by the state, in which nuclear war is imminent but survivable — and in which there is zero sympathy for American detainees like Otto Warmbier.
Warmbier was the University of Virginia student who was arrested for stealing a poster, then sentenced to 15 years of hard labor and eventually returned to the U.S. in a vegetative state.
“He broke the law in our country,” said Ri Yong-pil, a senior Foreign Ministry official, adding that Warmbier was returned (a week before his death) as a “humanitarian” act. Another senior ministry official, Choe Kang-il, insisted that North Korea had provided excellent care and spent “all the money for nursing” him.
4/. "The Opposition" with Jordan Klepper is a new show on Comedy Central, and it's styled after the Colbert Report where Klepper pretends to be an alt right loony.....here's a sample where he looks t the actual responses to the Las Vegas attack from crazies like Alex Jones.....
It's an amusing five minutes, but also informative - this is what 'the base" is thinking folks....
A
ll of mainstream media sound the same…same talking points from the same puppet masters, who all espouse facts like, climate change is man-made, Trump lost popular vote, “I can’t park there,” the former The Daily Show correspondent explained.
“That’s how they operate; that’s how they smuggle their dangerous ideas across the open border of your mind,” he warned.
“I want to shut down those borders. I want to close your mind. It’s called mental nationalism, an idea whose time has come,” he promised. The Opposition has its own Golden Rule: May you only hear from others what you’ve already been telling yourself.
You don’t need to be told what to think by the failing New York Times, or Amazon’s The Washington Post. Now “you get to choose which facts are right for you,” he enthused.
5/. An excellent climate change cry from the heart from one of our local writers, David Cohea......it's titled "Climate Change is Climbing Mount Dora", which should get at least Floridians' attention.....
After making landfall, Hurricane Harvey didn’t get far inland before it stalled and downgraded to a tropical storm. Where catastrophic wind was most feared upon its approach, it turned out that rain — a deluge-defining volume of it — was the true menace, setting a new record for rain in a single event in the continental United States — 51.88 inches at Cedar Bayou, Texas. That surpasses rainfall totals of all the other monster storms to hit the Texas coast in the past — Amelia (1978), Claudette (1970) and Allison (2001). It was strange new territory for weather, causing the National Weather Service on Aug. 27 to Tweet a statement that has become defining of our new life in the Anthropocene: “This event is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced. Follow orders from officials to ensure safety.”
The storm slowly pulled back into the Gulf and then made a second landfall in Louisiana on Aug 29. Some 27 trillion gallons of rain falls on Texas and Louisiana in six days. 33 Texas counties were put under federal disaster declaration. Houston — the nations’ fourth-largest city — was flooded, 94,000 homes in Texas are damaged or destroyed (29,000 homes destroyed in Houston alone), and 120,000 residents of Beaumont went without drinking water.
6/. Bill Maher on how Democrats are overdoing political correctness.....he has a point....
On Friday night, Bill Maher went after Democrats for what he believes is their legislative habit of overregulation.
Maher referenced a bill introduced by Senate Democrats who want car manufacturers to be required to put motion sensors in their cars to remind drivers that their children are in the back seat in order to prevent deaths due to heatstrokes.
“Really, it’s called the Hot Cars Act? Because ‘Turn Around Dipsh*t’ was too on-the-nose?” Maher quipped.
The Real Time host mocked the idea of requiring car manufacturers to install motion sensors for “which the cost will be passed on to the consumer” to prevent something that’s rarer than “being struck by lightning.”
“And should reminding you not to forget your baby really be Toyota’s problem?” Maher asked.
7/. In case you think it's just the crazy right wing who are stupid enough to believe fake news, here is a chilling 1 minute clip from Vice News interviewing an Arizona Congressman who believes Charlottesville was a George Soros conspiracy....
Note he got this nonsense from Alex Jones and Infowars....a US Congressman....
Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar suggested the participants in the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August may have been organized by an "Obama sympathizer" and funded by George Soros, whom Gosar accused of having "turned in his own people to the Nazis."
Gosar made the comments to VICE News in an interview about one of his constituents who is suing him in federal court for blocking her on his official Facebook page. The constituent, J'aime Morgaine, argues that Gosar is violating her First Amendment right to engage in debate in a virtual public forum.
8/ Seth Meyers on Trump in Puerto Rico, and Rex Tillerson's "moron" comment.....an amusing and informative 9 minutes....
“Tillerson, of course, was forced to issue a statement at a hastily arranged press conference yesterday, where he took the extraordinary step of trying to assure the American people that the president is not, in fact, a moron. Man, to think a guy’s a moron and then be forced to publicly say he’s smart: I guess when your name is Rex, you’re going to be good at rolling over.” — SETH MEYERS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
9/ Bill Maher's opening monologue and this week he's pretty good......an amusing six minutes....
The U.S. had a rough week and let's just say Bill Maher was not impressed with President Trump's response to everything. The "Real Time" host immediately went after the president in his monologue Friday, criticizing him for his embarrassing behavior down in Puerto Rico.
"I'm glad you're in a good mood let's get right to the disasters," he said to start his show. "Right? I mean Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, Donald Trump. We had a rough week and he does not make it better. You know you've heard that term first responders? He's got a new thing: worst responder."
It took Trump two weeks to finally visit the devastated island. Maher offered a theory as to why it took Trump so long.
"He said he would have come earlier except his hairdresser told him it was too dangerous," he joked. He lands on the island like Ponce de León and you know the natives immediately said, 'Can we have the hurricane back.'"
10/. Samantha Bee with a history lesson on how we have screwed Puerto Rico for the last 100 years.....amusing, and informative.....
Puerto Rico, still dealing with the fallout of Hurricane Maria, was met Tuesday with a "category five tsunami of self-congratulation," Samantha Bee said during her monologue on "Full Frontal" Wednesday night. The late-night comedian was referring to President Trump's obscene trip to the Caribbean island, where he briefly met with locals and talked about how burdensome their recovery was for the nation.
Trump insisted that the federal government has gone all out to help Puerto Rico, and in turn he had received the highest grades from officials. He also noted that Hurricane Katrina was far deadlier than Maria, which he chalked up as a win for his administration.
"The lowest score doesn't win, doofus. A hurricane is not a golf game, or an election," Bee said, a slight to Trump's popular vote loss.
11/. Stephen Colbert and the "moron" comment.....
Stephen Colbert had some harsh words for Rex Tillerson on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”
A faux outraged Colbert told the secretary of state to “hold on there” after a report earlier in the day said he’d called President Donald Trump a “moron” over the summer.
“No one calls our president a moron,” Colbert sarcastically said, before delivering the punchline — “Except me.”
“No, and other world leaders, and ultimately history,” he added, following a pause.
Tillerson later used an unscheduled press conference to push back on the report, although he didn’t totally deny using the insult.
12/. I love these Jimmy Kimmel street interviews, where they go and talk to random pedestrians outside their studio.....this one explores what people will sign to be on TV.....a very funny five minutes....
Jimmy Kimmel took a break from addressing serious issues such as gun controland health care reform Thursday night to poke fun at a lighter concern. The late night host aired a sketch in which he sent his team out to the street in front of the Live! studio to prove that people will agree to anything to get on TV.
"Whenever we put someone on TV, they sign a legal release that says they're OK with doing that," he explained. "They sign their name on the form and we're good to go. But most people don't bother to really read the form. They trust us, I guess. So we decided to put that trust to the test to find out just how much these people would endure for a chance to be on TV."
The hilarious bit featured Kimmel's on-site correspondent asking people to sign a release agreeing to a myriad of outlandish provisions
— including saying the sentence, "I am not defined by my diarrhea," to the camera — in order to be a part of the clip.
13/. American farmers around Lake Erie are poisoning the Lake with runoff from their [Monsanto] fertilizers causing massive blooms of algae......but does anyone care enough to do anything? Of course not....
Scientists say that algae blooms have been a growing problem for Lake Erie since the 2000s, mostly because of the extensive use of fertilizer on the region’s farmland.
The algae blooms contain cyanobacteria, which, under certain conditions, can produce toxins that contaminate drinking water and cause harm to the local ecosystem.
During last week’s bloom, the amount of toxins in the algae remained low at the intake points where towns draw water from the lake, according to officials.
Todays video - the biggest plane in the world, an A-380 with a hairy crosswind landing.....wow....one minute....
A skilled pilot battled powerful crosswinds to safely land the world’s largest airliner, harrowing new video shows.
The Emirates Airbus A380 was on final approach at Germany’s Düsseldorf airport after a flight from Dubai when it was slammed by Mother Nature.
The giant aircraft, which seats more than 500 passengers, is seen jerking violently from side to side before the pilot brings it under control.
Todays religious joke
The pastor asked if anyone in the congregation would like to express praise for answered prayers.
Suzie Smith stood and walked to the podium. She said, "I have a Praise. Two months ago, my husband, Tom, had a terrible bicycle wreck and his scrotum was completely crushed. The pain was excruciating and the doctors didn't know if they could help him."
(You could hear a muffled gasp from the men in the congregation as they imagine the pain that poor Tom must have experienced.)
"Tom was unable to hold me or the children," she went on, "and every move caused him terrible pain." We prayed as the doctors performed a delicate operation, and it turned out they were able to piece together the crushed remnants of Tom's scrotum, and wrap wire around it to hold it in place."
(Again, the men in the congregation cringed and squirmed uncomfortably as they imagined the horrible surgery performed on Tom.)
"Now," she announced in a quivering voice, "Thank the Lord, Tom is out of the hospital and the doctors say that with time, his scrotum should recover completely."
(All the men sighed with unified relief.)
The pastor rose and tentatively asked if anyone else had something to say.
A man slowly stood up and walked just as slowly to the podium.He said, "I'm Tom Smith." The entire congregation held its breath.
"I just want to tell my wife -- the word is sternum."
Todays teacher joke....
