Jon Stewart:
Seth Meyers:
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Jon Stewart:
Seth Meyers:
[UPDATE: Arizona senator Ruben Gallego says that he thinks Trump is literally insane and that “Everyone needs to stop pretending this is rational.” We need to encourage more people to say this.]
Trump has been doing many cruel and absurd things, too many to list, and besides which most readers of this blog are already aware of them. It has provided late night comics with plenty of fodder. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show provides many examples over a few days from just the past week.
But this is no laughing matter. It is tempting for people who are sane and rational to try and find reasons for Trump’s bizarre and erratic behavior. One of the most popular ones is that he is a master of distraction and uses these things to take people’s attention away from his declining popularity, the high cost of living and housing, lack of health care plans, and of course, the Epstein files.
But his actions over Greenland, his weird text message to the prime minister of Norway complaining about not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize being a factor in his attempt to annex Greenland (even though it is a protectorate of Denmark and not Norway) and that he would impose tariffs on European countries if they did not agree to his demands, suggest to me a level of irrationality that cannot be easily explained away as some kind of deep fake.
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I know that the Christmas season is over but I found some amusing stuff that I wanted to share just to break up the bad news that has been happening recently.
It is the custom in the UK for the monarch to give a Christmas message to the nation and the satirical puppet show known as Spitting Image provides a parody. (Thanks to commenter brigerjohannson.)
Another tradition that began in 1993 is for the UK’s Channel 4 to give an alternative message to the monarch’s speech and this year US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was surprised to be asked.
Here is Kimmel’s message.
Much has been written in tribute about Rob Reiner after the brutal murder of him and his wife Michele. Rob was the son of actor and writer Carl Reiner and became well known playing the liberal Michael Stivic as a counterpoint to the bigoted Archie Bunker in the groundbreaking TV series All in the Family, a show that broached many social issues and taboos.
Much to Archie’s displeasure, Stivic is the boyfriend (and later husband) of Bunker’s daughter Gloria. In this clip we see the first meeting of Stivic and Archie and Edith (his wife) and hear the first time that he is called ‘Meathead’, the name that stuck forever after.
The writer and digital rights activist coined the term ‘enshittifcation’ to describe the deterioration of the internet and it caught on. I wrote about it a couple of times (see here and here). He now has a book with that title that I will get and read soon.
In this interview with Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show Doctorow explains succinctly how enshittification comes about and what can be done about it. It is an excellent informative interview.
The stories of brutality and violations of people rights by the thugs that now make up the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) forces keep appearing daily. It is now apparently the case that those groups are attractive to violence-prone individuals who relish the chance to throw their weight around while wearing masks and assault anyone they dislike knowing that what normally would have landed them in prison is now fully protected by the Thug-in-Chief in the White House and his minions who occupy most of the high levels of government, including the attorney general Pam Bondi
But even through this dense mass of what would be criminal behavior if done by anyone else, some news stories still stick out, like this one where an attack dog was used to deliberately injure someone.
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The insufferably pompous, arrogant, and sexist former president of Harvard University has been forced to withdraw from many of his public positions because of his tawdry email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein. However, he says that he plans to continue teaching at Harvard though it remains to be seen if that is possible given the outcry. It is a deserved comeuppance of someone who had a ‘kiss up and kick down’ attitude to people. When those peoplel get wounded, few will come to their defense.
You can read all the details of his rise and fall here.
On The Daily Show, Ronny Chieng discussed Summers and other Epstein files fallout.
I have not written much about the Epstein files and the recently released trove of emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Trump and other various well-known people because it is being covered so extensively in the media. Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker that the Epstein emails are becoming a chronic problem for Trump.
On Capitol Hill, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, kept the chamber in recess from mid-September to mid-November in what seemed to be a transparent effort to block a vote on releasing the Justice Department files. This, I’ve long thought, should have been more of a scandal in its own right—Congress closing for business for weeks and weeks because a Speaker was running interference on behalf of a President who didn’t want more details to emerge of his dealings with a sleazy dead rich guy who had sex with underage women on his private island? How was that not a bigger deal?
But, in order to end the longest-ever government shutdown, Johnson had to give in this week and order the House to return to work. That meant swearing in a new Democratic member who had won a special election in September; she quickly became the two-hundred-and-eighteenth signatory of the discharge petition that will now force Johnson to hold a floor vote on releasing the files.
