Obama Hijacks the Show but Colbert Report Pulls No Punches
If you missed it, watch the revamped segment Colbert calls, “The Word,” but which Obama called, “The Decree.” The president out-deadpans the deadpanner himself.
Tag: Popular Culture
America is Awash in Guns — And Fear of Them
What if we’re missing a bigger issue in our musings about Ferguson and race and unarmed black men being shot by white guys, often police officers? Yes, systemic racism and a breakdown in our ability to trust police are serious problems. But are we overlooking something more basic?
It’s a rare day without a story like this one:
A white cop observes a black man cut through a parking lot to avoid a red light. He follows the car and when it starts to pull into an apartment complex, he turns on his cruiser’s lights to pull it over. The black man, 29-year-old Brian Dennison, drives further into the complex and parks in a parking space. When he gets out of the car, the cop shoots at him. Luckily, the shot missed. It was lucky because Dennison had his 6-year-old daughter in the car. And she was having an asthma attack. And her inhaler was inside their home, where Dennison was rushing when he drove around the red light.
So why did Officer J.C. Garcia get it so wrong?
Too Soon? Obama Comes Out Swinging After Midterm Elections
How “not mopey” is Pres. Obama? Not mopey enough to send an email blast less than a week after the 2014 midterm elections that leads respondents to the screen shot shown.
Hertzberg: ‘Elections are decided by low-information voters, people who cannot be troubled to figure out whether they are Democrats or Republicans’
Republicans were already complaining that Obama wasn’t contrite enough about the recent Democratic election losses. They, of course, took the results as a mandate for their issues, like repealing the Affordable Care Act, building more fences along the border with Mexico, and keeping women from carrying out their reproductive lives in private.
Obama heard a different signal.
Jon Stewart to FOX on the Coffee Salute: ‘You’re Just Trying to Score Points in a Game No Else is Playing’
First, I am not opposed to the United States and other countries trying to wipe out ISIL. Whether they are an immediate threat to us is not the only concern. That Americans, including and especially journalists, can move around the world freely is a huge concern.
Second, I can’t agree more about the disgusting hypocrisy, hostility, and pettiness shown the president of the country these people claim to love. He was elected by more than half of us, and those are the rules under which your “beloved” country operates so please suck it up, like we did when the moron was in power and we were under threat from abroad. Put your country, not your hatreds, first.
What Are You Searching For? It Depends on How Much Money You Have
If you’re not dirt poor, with few prospects for changing your situation, it’s hard to consider how much of your thought would be devoted to grim subjects. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir illustrated the concept and the myth of the so-called cycle of poverty in their recent book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Being stuck in perpetual crisis mode is less about wasting your food stamps buying lobster, the authors say, and more about what they call lack of bandwidth.
It works like this. When you’re laying in bed all night wondering how you’re going to pay your child’s daycare provider if you put tires on the car, but if you don’t get tires it’s just a matter of time before you have a flat and can’t get to work and then you’ll lose hours of pay and possibly your whole job…let’s just say you don’t have a lot of energy left for healthy meal planning, shopping, and preparation. The authors call this a “bandwidth tax” on the poor that America’s better off just don’t have to pay.
Leonhardt: The dark side of religion is of special interest: “Antichrist,” “hell” and “rapture” make the top 10 search terms
Now Google, courtesy of The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, is giving a stark glimpse into the mindsets of those on the losing end of income inequality. The search terms of poor people show that they and the well-off live in different countries, and possibly on different planets.
FOX’s Shepard Smith: Robin Williams Was a Coward Who Committed Suicide in a “Fit” of Depression
We were already not fans of FOX News but this is a new low, even for them. Watch to the end for an appalling display by Shepard Smith.
Oh yeah, and he had smoked pot before too. Who says this stuff?
Pres. Obama’s Statement on Robin Williams
Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny, a president, a professor, a bangarang Peter Pan, and everything in between. But he was one of a kind. He arrived in our lives as an alien – but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit. He made us laugh. He made us cry. He gave his immeasurable talent freely and generously to those who needed it most – from our troops stationed abroad to the marginalized on our own streets. The Obama family offers our condolences to Robin’s family, his friends, and everyone who found their voice and verse thanks to Robin Williams.
May we just add, nice use of the word, “bangarang,” Mr. President.
It’s Amazon’s World and We Just Live in It
I wanted to buy a book a few months ago for a relative who was hospitalized in a city about 40 miles north and who wasn’t a TV watcher. I figured I’d stop off at the mall or a shopping center as I drove up and pick up some books and magazines.
Except there were no bookstores. While I had been floating along, ordering books from Amazon because they were cheap or putting them on my Amazon wish list and waiting for the prices to come down, book shops all around me were going out of business. Instead of finding some cool books and artsy, interesting magazines, I had to stop at a grocery store to buy a lame edition of O Magazine by Oprah. I believe it went unread.
Your reading choices will someday be either 50 Shades of Gray or The Hunger Games…or a copy of O Magazine
If you watch the Colbert Report, you know that the responsible thing to do right now is to boycott Amazon. The massive “Don’t Be Evil” online seller is engaged in a very evil battle with traditional publishers to control pricing and set off a dumbing down process that will likely promote self-publishing as an Amazon work-around.
To my conservative friends tempted to find outrageous things liberals have said in order to argue that both sides are equally to blame, I’d respond this way: Find me all the examples of people who shot up a church after reading books by Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman, and then you’ll have a case.
— Greg Sargent, Washington Post columnist, in a splendid piece titled, “How Much Does Right-Wing Rhetoric Contribute to Right-Wing Terrorism?“
Would It Kill You to Like Us on Facebook?
We are THIS CLOSE to a milestone: 200 “Like-ers” on Facebook! How exciting would it be to leap from our current 199 “Like-ing” people to 200? Pretty, pretty, pretty, durn exciting!
So help us out. If you don’t already like us on Facebook, would it KILL you to hit that stupid blue thumbs-up icon? We didn’t think so.
And here’s the thing. We do share some different stuff there than we do here. More quickies, more funny stuff, more of the best of other great, like-minded sites, etc. And “etc.” is not a term we use lightly.
Oh, and here’s something else: we’re on a first-name basis with people on Facebook. That’s right, there you can just call us, “Pensito.”
We’ll talk to you about following us on Twitter another time. For now, please like us on Facebook. Thanks.
Update: You “Like” us, you really “Like” us! As of now we are all the way up to 202 “Likes!” Thanks guys! We “Like” you too!
