Last week I wrote about how House Democratics leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, people who have been loudly protesting Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, then turned around and lobbied to pass a bill that would continue to give him sweeping warrantless domestic spying powers. The bill then went to the senate and there too Democrats were instrumental in enabling it to pass, as Alex Emmons writes.
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Now that I have seen Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, I can understand and enjoy parodies of it. Until I had seen its introduction of the new Darth Vader-like villain Kylo Ren, this comedy sketch would have made no sense to me. Now I find it pretty funny.
This sketch from last night’s Saturday Night Live captures precisely the sorry state of affairs in the US, both in terms of the people who are elected to office, the people who work for them, and the people who are responsible for covering the news.
In a recent episode of Joepardy a contestant got dinged because he mispronounced the word ‘gangsta’. Fortunately Coolio is on hand to help those of us who are not versed in hip-hop slang.
… so that you don’t have to spend your time wading through it.
Before he delves into the details, he gives us the gist:
1) Trump has almost no ideological convictions and is motivated almost entirely by the classic narcissistic value equation, i.e. how much praise or scorn he gets on a second-to-second basis, from whom, and why. Had he not run as a Republican – and in particular won on a platform scripted by ap nationalist true believer like Bannon – he might very well by now have been pushed into a completely different kind of presidency. Trump wants so badly to be liked that, especially with the influence of Kushner and Ivanka, he might easily have allowed his White House to drift back toward his original politics, which (as New Yorkers and furious conservatives alike will clearly remember) was once squarely in the Bob Rubin rich-guy sort-of Democrat mold.
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It turns out that Donald Trump’s ‘executive time’ (i.e., time to watch TV, tweet, and gossip on the phone with his friends) occupies a much larger portion of his daily schedule than was previously reported, with many such periods included throughout the day. In fact, it looks like being president is just something he does in his spare time, and that may not be altogether a bad thing.
He is at this moment hosting the annual awards show and his opening monologue is already online even before the show ends. I do not watch these shows but the opening monologues by the host sets the tone. Meyers made the recent revelations of abuse by powerful people in the film industry the focus of his jokes.