The sudden resignation of John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives has thrown the political situation within the Republican party, already roiled by the tumultuous primary race, into a deeper state of uncertainty and I predict that it will make a bad situation even worse in the long run (long in this sense being a few months), though it may be able to ease the immediate situation.
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Jerry Seinfeld has an online show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which is exactly as the title says, with each episode featuring a different comedian and a different car, and the two comedians chatting while driving, walking, and drinking coffee.
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I hate shopping. When I have to do it, my goal is to make it as quick as possible and that usually means buying what I have always bought at the same store where I bought it before. What frustrates me is when that item seems to be no longer being produced and I have to then try and find a replacement.
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The relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump oscillates between hot and cold with remarkable rapidity. Trump was a favorite on Fox but when he was seemingly ambushed by the moderators during the first debate, he took umbrage and attacked Megyn Kelly in particular and vowed to never appear on their shows again. Fox head Roger Ailes than quickly apologized and Trump agreed to withdraw his boycott, though he continued to occasionally lob attacks at Kelly.
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In responding to the biting criticisms by Yale University academic Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of her tenure as CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina’s campaign hit back at him by charging that Sonnenfeld was fired from Emory University for vandalizing school property, though why that invalidated his criticisms was not made clear.
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The Values Voters Summit is an annual event that gathers together all the religious right wing crazies, and politicians go and pander to them by throwing out red meat rhetoric on their favorite issues for them to devour. For these people, establishment Republican leaders are wimps who won’t really fight for conservative causes by threatening to bring government to a halt unless they get their way.
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You may be familiar with the neologism ‘gaydar’. The idea is that people who supposedly have this quality can intuit accurately a person’s sexual orientation simply by observing them. I had heard about this and naturally was curious to see if I had this ability. But a few casual attempts on my part to do so had such variable results that I concluded that even if there were such a thing as gaydar, I certainly did not have it.
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The ignominious early departure of someone as unlikable as Scott Walker was bound to create a great deal of schadenfreude, especially given the risible way he tried to describe his defeat as somehow a call by god for him to exercise a novel form leadership. Stephen Colbert decides to give Walker a farewell too, likening the elimination process in the Republican primary race to what happens in The Hunger Games. Not having read the books or seen the films, some of the allusions are lost on me.
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While the UN does a lot of good work, one of its biggest problems is that many of the roles on its committees are either arrived at by rotation or by some Byzantine process that can result in what to outsiders seems like utterly ridiculous outcomes. In this category is the news that Faisal bin Hassan Trad, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador at the UN in Geneva, has been appointed chair of a panel of independent experts on the UN Human Rights Council, even as that nation is about to behead a young man Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr “accused of a variety of crimes against the state, all stemming from protests he took part in against the Saudi government” and who was just 17 years old at the time of his arrest.
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