1/ The always excellent Frank Rich with some thoughts on the toady William Barr.....
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/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, Bill Barr’s cover-up in plain sight, Joe Biden’s fitness for office, and Pete Buttigieg’s sprint up the polls.
Bill Barr’s assertion that “spying did occur” against the Trump campaign has brought condemnations of impropriety from congressional Democrats and career intelligence officials, and raised suspicion that the attorney general is covering for Trump. Has Trump, at long last, finally found his Roy Cohn?
When you invoke Roy Cohn, you have to specify which Roy Cohn. There’s the New York Cohn of the 1970s and ’80s, the Mob-connected fixer who enabled Trump’s rise, of course. But there’s also the earlier, Washington Cohn: the smear artist who abetted Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt to expose supposed Commies in the United States Army during the 1950s.
2/ The SNL cold open set in a prison with some crazy celebrity prisoners.....five amusing minutes....
Saturday Night Live tackled Lori Loughlin and the college admissions scandal, the federal charges against Michael Avenatti and Julian Assange’s arrest with a cold open sketch that placed the Full House actress, played by Kate McKinnon, the celebrity lawyer, portrayed by Pete Davidson and the WikiLeaks founder, played by Michael Keaton, in a jail cell with violent felons.
“I’m the craziest dude in here,” Kenan Thompson’s prisoner warned. “Killed my neighbor then ate his fingers so they couldn’t ID the body.”
Loughlin then emerged from outside the camera’s view, “Oh yeah, you think that’s insane? I paid $500 grand to get my daughter into USC.”
3/ Bill McKibben is one of the senior people in the climate change movement, and he has a new book coming next week that I have just bought.....but from this article the book won't be uplifting reading because we are well on the way to destroying the planet.....
No illusions folks....it's not going to fun for our kids and grandkids...
Oh, it could get very bad.
In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.
A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped in the permafrost. The exposed body released anthrax into nearby water and soil, infecting two thousand reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected some humans; a twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark” — scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska.
4/ The always amusing Tom Tomorrow...
5/ Seth Meyers roasts Thomas Massie, who has to be the stupidest Congressman we have, as he questions John Kerry....just amazing
how idiotic he sounds....two minutes....
6/ Umair with an essay on Brexit and how a supposedly rational society can be manipulated to do the stupidest thing
imaginable......he's passionate, logical and I think brilliant.....see what you think....
If you’re not quite following the bizarre, incredible, self-self-inflicted catastrophe that’s Brexit…well, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s not only labyrinthine…it’s a maze of shameless stupidity, head-spinning folly, and despair-inducing backwardness so deep that they literally seem impossible.
Let me tell you the story, in seven mistakes, that will probably go down in history as among the most hilariously, weirdly, astonishingly tragic set of choices a rich country ever made, (right up there with America cheerily electing a wannabe cartoon Fuhrer, of course.)
The first, formative, fundamental mistake — the one which set the wheels of tragedy in motion — that led to Brexit happened in the halcyon days of 2007. The global financial crisis exploded, the result of decades of financial “liberalization”, which basically means banks and hedge funds were granted open season to do their worst.
7/ Andrew Sullivan with a thoughtful piece on white anxiety.....very good, lots of common sense...
Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
There are times when it feels as if two huge tectonic plates are colliding beneath the surface of Western politics, and, right now, neither seems to be giving ground.
The first plate is the force of demography. In most Western countries, the pace of immigration from the fast-growing and ever-younger global South, and the higher birth rates of immigrants, is shifting us to a whole new model of nationhood: culturally and ethnically far more diverse, with no single historical or traditional national narrative. At the same time, the inhabitants of those countries — still largely white — are increasingly troubled by the pace of change, panicked about the fast-shifting identity of their country and angry at the elites who created this swift ethnic transformation. You have an almost irresistible demographic force and a near-immovable psycho-political response. Hence the deadlock. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” in Gramsci’s words. “Now is the time of monsters.”
8/ SNL spoof's "The View"....quite good, four minutes....
Saturday Night Live‘s cold open was Trump-free, but it wasn’t long into the show until the president’s border policies were the butt of jokes — this time, by the ladies of SNL’s parody of The View.
Kate McKinnon played Joy Behar.
“I don’t like Trump. Trump, Trump, what a chump. Trump, Trump, what a dump. Ok, look, it’s my 2,000th show. At this point, I get paid by the word,” she said.
Melissa Villaseñor as Ana Navarro chimed in: “Mr. Trump, what are you doing to families at the border? It is shameful. It is nasty. It is broccoli in the microwave.”
Aidy Bryant as Meghan McCain declared herself “the princess of Arizona” before claiming that there is a crisis at the border.
9/ The people in charge of large corporations aren't stupid - they know climate change is real but are acting.just like you
would expect predatory capitalists to act.....selfishly....
Excellent story from the business section of the Times...
Rex Tillerson stood under a 32-foot pipe organ at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, explaining how the world worked. It was May 2015, in the middle of an oil-price crash, and Exxon Mobil’s earnings had fallen 46 percent compared with the same quarter the year before. But Tillerson, then Exxon’s chief executive, told his shareholders to be confident in the future. Oil and gas furnished billions of people, including the very poor, with cheap, reliable fuel — a fact not easily negated by a weak fiscal quarter. “Our view reflects the reality,” Tillerson said, “that abundant energy enables modern life.”
10/ Sam Bee with a good one.....the Twitter feud between George Conway, Trump and KellyAnne Conway.....clever and amusing....seven minutes....
11/ Paul Krugman with a sensible column with advice for progressives - go big, but be realistic too....
Right now there are two big progressive ideas out there: the Green New Deal on climate change and “Medicare for all” on health reform. Both would move U.S. policy significantly to the left. Each is sponsored by a self-proclaimed socialist: the Green New Deal by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Medicare for all by Bernie Sanders. (Of course, neither of them is a socialist in the traditional sense.) Both ideas horrify not just conservatives but also many self-proclaimed centrists.
Yet while they may seem similar if you think of everything as left versus right, they’re very different
on another dimension, which you might call purity versus pragmatism.
12/ The unimaginable has happened - a child is injured in an accident.....a moving, breathless and very well written story of
how it unfolds.....will bring tears to your eyes...
The brick fell from an eighth-story windowsill on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Greta was sitting on a bench out front with her grandmother. The two of them were chatting about a play they had seen together the night before. It was a live-action version of the kids’ showChuggington, in which some talking train cars help their friend Koko get back on track after she derails.
“Koko got stuck!” Greta exclaimed over and over.
13/ The new Star Wars trailer - "The Rise of Skywalker".....looks good! Two minutes....
Todays video - the trunk monkey commercials - some new ones too....
Todays kids joke
A family was driving behind a garbage truck when a large dildo flies out
and hits the windshield.
To hide her embarrassment the mother turns and says to her young kids,
"My what a big insect!"
To which her 7 year old says, " I'm surprised it could fly with a dick that big."
Todays dentist joke
A guy goes to a female dentist to have a tooth extracted.
She pulls out a numbing needle to give the man a shot.
"No way! No needles. I hate needles" the patient said.
The dentist starts to hook up the nitrous oxide and the man says: " I can't do the gas thing. The thought of having the gas mask on suffocates me!'
The dentist then asks the patient if he has any objections to taking a pill."No objection," he says. "I'm fine with pills."
The dentist gives him a couple of pills. He swallows them. "What are they?" he says.
"Viagra," says the dentist.
"Heck," the patient says, "I didn't know Viagra worked as a pain killer.""It doesn't" said the dentist, "But it will give you something to hold onto when I pull your tooth."Todays Chinese jokes
Passionate kiss, like spider web, leads to undoing of fly.
Better to be pissed off than pissed on.
Lady who goes camping must beware of evil intent.
Squirrel who runs up womans' leg will not find nuts.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Man who runs in front of car gets tired, man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
Man who eats many prunes get good run for money.
War does not determine who is right, it determines who is left.
Man who fight with wife all day get no piece at night.
It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it.
Man who drives like hell is bound to get there.
Man who stands on toilet is high on pot.
Man who live in glass house should change clothes in basement.
Man who fish in other man's well often catch crabs.
