For me, there is little doubt, or hesitation, about what was the most “memorable moment” of the past two weeks in listening and watching the ubiquitous lies/liars we ALL elected to Washington, D.C., supposedly, to represent us.
However, there was an exception…
Courage, devotion and respect lives in ALL faiths. Of that, I know of what I speak!
Slick Willie seemed to be over-whelmed as the “glass ceiling” was being shattered, doesn’t he?
What’s great about this clip is you’ll notice Timmy Kaine, at about the .10 second mark, glances over at Willie, and attempts to run a little body-lean interference in between the TV cameras and Grandpa Clinton.
Also, what’s with the over-bite, and gaping open-month by Willie ALL the time, have you notice these two impairments?
The tremor in his hands is much more noticeable as well. Hope his health is well enough for the next 101 days.
The national conventions, for BOTH sides of the aisle, are now finis. Thankfully!
In the last couple of weeks, while listening to BOTH Trump and Clinton, the most amazing fact that jumped out to me was neither one of the two nominees addressed our national nightmare, at ALL, our D-E-B-T.
Zero within the content of their respective acceptance speeches. NOTHING!
I’m constantly confounded by two things about this crucial matter:
All of which brings me to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Great group of non-partisan economists and number-crunching nerds.
Attached below, you will note a comparative report on the impact of BOTH a Trump presidency and a Clinton presidency on our Debt. NOT good, either way.
To NO surprise, Trump’s impact would be significantly worse…
Click to access CRFB_Promises_and_Price_Tags.pdf
Washington does NOT seem to understand the word: unsustainable.
Keith Maurice Ellison.
Since 2007, a Minnesota congressman.
Democrat.
52 years old.
First African-American elected to the House of Representatives from Minnesota.
First Muslim elected to the House of Representatives.
Long-time supporter of Louis Farrakan and the Nation of Islam.
However, it appears that Congressman Ellison did NOT take a lot of notes at either Wayne State University and/or the University of Minnesota as pertained to American History, and, specifically, the Civil Rights Movement of America…
One word will cover Mr. Ellison: embarrassing.
After taking in ALL the nauseating verbiage, and visuals, from last night of Day 3 of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, I needed to be brought back to the reality, and truth, of the good old days.
The Cold War.
So, I watched one of my favorite movies of the ’60s, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965).
The main character of the film, Alec Leamus, is a burnt-out British intelligence officer played by the late Richard Burton.
I think it is by far Burton’s best performance on film, ever…
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold might be one of the coolest, but tautest, movies ever made, in all senses of the words. Literally, because the characters always seem to be pulling their jackets against their necks while ducking into offices or bars for refuge from the wind. Figuratively, because director Martin Ritt (of Hud & Norma Rae fame as well) orchestrates the film’s ebb and flow of emotions with a finesse that’s chilling. The characters could be discussing tea, or liquor, or a brilliant plot to indirectly assassinate a German Intelligence Officer or his ambitious underling interrogator, or something else altogether, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from a cursory evaluation of the conversation’s tone. You would have to look deeper at inflection and context, and you’d have to probably be familiar with decades of global politics and theoretically suppressed British intelligence gathering, in order to fully understand what anyone is actually saying.
The despairing element, taken straight from the John le Carré bestseller of 1963, that inspired the film, is that NO one really does totally know what anyone else is saying. Spy fiction often allows a reader to indulge an empowering fantasy of possessing otherwise unattainable knowledge, but Le Carré’s books expose that notion for the wishful thinking it probably always is. To be a spy in Le Carré’s fiction, and the author famously lived a bit of what he writes, is to have knowledge that alienates you from the rest of the world. The knowledge you possess, as a Le Carré spy, only underlines how much you still don’t know, and this realization transforms life into a series of stifling paradoxes: The world is huge, yet claustrophobically contained in an endless procession of anonymous bars and backrooms, and every problem reveals a hundred more upon its solution. In other words, the Le Carré spy ultimately knows that he knows nothing.
Mental darkness, in a sense.
Solitude becomes, and is, an undefined enemy in itself.
Oskar Werner, the great Oskar Werner, who plays an East German spy officer, almost steals the movie…
Do yourself a favor, watch greatness…
Reality can be sad…
The King is dead, long live the King…
Remember Larry The Lobster?
Larry The Lobster’s trip to the Maine State Aquarium didn’t go as planned.
The 15-pound crustacean, who gained national attention after he was saved from a Sunrise, Florida restaurant’s boil pot, with the promise of retirement, and a new lease of life at the Maine State Aquarium, succumbed during his journey to Maine, state officials said.
Aquarium staff unpacking Larry yesterday after his trip from Florida, found him dead, said Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the Department of Marine Resources, which runs the aquarium in West Boothbay Harbor.
“It’s very disappointing,” Tin Fish restaurant owner Joseph Melluso (Sunrise, Florida) said when reached by phone yesterday. “It definitely makes for an ugly story for something that had a lot of good energy and good intention behind it.”
Larry was probably between 60 and 80 years old, although Melluso pegged him at 110, based on his weight. Scientists, however, say there’s NO “established method” for calculating a lobster’s age. They can live for more than 100 years, according to the website of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine.
The herculean efforts to save Larry began after Melluso called a local TV station in Florida last week to show off the lobster of unusual size before he became dinner. That caught the attention of a Costa Rica-based animal rescue group, iRescue, which contacted Melluso and persuaded him to keep the creature alive.
The group raised money to ship Larry to the Maine aquarium, and Melluso agreed to give him up.
Being an old lobsterman, even taking into account ALL the best intentions of every one involved in the effort to save Larry, my guess is there was an issue in the way Larry was packaged to take the journey to Maine.
Packing and shipping lobsters is an art!
It’s NOT like ordering a copy of Gone with the Wind from Amazon Prime, with a 2-day delivery.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg added $3.4 billion to his fortune in just over an hour yesterday in after-hours trading, as the market cheered the social media company’s impressive second-quarter results.
The gains pushed Zuckerberg’s net worth to a new high of $56.7 billion, according to FORBES estimates. He is currently the world’s fifth-richest person, right behind Jeff Bezos, who has an estimated fortune of $64 billion.
Facebook’s stock price soared 6.5% in after-hours trading to $131.40, as of 5:15 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday. The rise followed the company’s announcement that revenues and earnings had eclipsed analysts’ estimates, primarily thanks to gains in mobile ad revenue. Revenues in the second quarter rose about 59% to $6.44 billion, topping the $6.02 billion that analysts predicted. Profits increased to $2.1 billion, or 71 cents a share, exceeding analysts’ estimates of 57 cents a share.
In April, Zuckerberg’s fortune rocketed up by $4.2 billion in after-hours trading after Facebook’s strong first-quarter earnings. Like other billionaires who hold the vast majority of their wealth in one company’s stock, his fortune can rise or fall by billions of dollars in minutes or hours, following quarterly reports or other major company news.
At age 32, Zuckerberg is the youngest of the world’s ten richest people. He first appeared on the Forbes 400 in September 2008 with a net worth of $1.5 billion, when Facebook was still a private company.
John Warnock Hinckley, who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, will be released from a psychiatric hospital after a judge today set a series of conditions for him to live with his mother in Virginia.
In a 103 page opinion from U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said Mr. Hinckley’s doctors have found he has “no signs of psychotic symptoms, delusional thinking, or any violent tendencies,’’ and therefore “presents no danger to himself or to others in the reasonable future if released.’’
Mr. Hinckley may be released as early as Aug. 5, the judge ruled.
The ruling means that 35 years after an attack that severely wounded the president and three others, Mr. Hinckley will be a free man—albeit with restrictions on his travel, communications, work and use of the internet.
Mr. Hinckley, 61, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 and committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. Over the past 12 years, his doctors and the courts have been gradually loosening his restrictions, over objections from the Justice Department, allowing him to go to Williamsburg, Va., for unsupervised visits with his family more than 80 times.
Now Mr. Hinckley will be allowed to live with his mother there, provided he still has regular medical and social-work checkups, works or volunteers at least three days a week and adheres to limits on his travel and communication.
The order of the judge also, specifically, bars Mr. Hinckley, or his family from talking to reporters.
How convenient.
He is also forbidden from trying to contact his victims or any of their relatives or descendants, and he is barred from trying to contact the actress Jodie Foster or her family. At the time of the Reagan shooting, Mr. Hinckley was obsessed with Ms. Foster and hoped the assassination would impress her.
Does any one have Travis Bickle’s cell phone number?
Mr. Reagan died in 2004. Another victim of the shooting, White House press secretary James Brady, died in 2014, a death that was ruled a homicide because doctors concluded it was a direct result of the shooting, which left him partially paralyzed.
The Justice Department and the Secret Service declined to comment on Mr. Hinckley’s release.
Donald Trump told reporters today that Mr. Hinckley “should not have been freed.”
The conditions of Mr. Hinckley’s release include a requirement that he must visit a doctor in Washington at least once a month and a prohibition on creating any social-media accounts without unanimous agreement from his doctors.
Because Mr. Hinckley was once obsessed with notoriety and fame, the judge ruled that he can only publish or post music, art, photos, or writings with prior approval from his doctors.
He will also be required to carry a cellphone equipped with geolocation tracking software and give his doctors access to that information, according to the judge’s order. The order prohibits Mr. Hinckley from traveling more than 30 miles from Williamsburg without a relative, or more than 50 miles unless it is to visit doctors in Washington.
The order only requires him to live with his mother for the first year of his release. After that, if his doctors agree, he may be allowed to live elsewhere in the Williamsburg area.
Mr. Hinckley is also prohibited from using drugs or alcohol or possessing a gun, the judge ruled.
Judge Friedman’s ruling indicated he expects some won’t grasp the rationale behind releasing Mr. Hinckley, and he took pains to put his action in the context of the wider criminal-justice system.
“Thousands of times every day, judges across this country attempt the difficult, daunting task of predicting with confidence what a human being may do in the future,’’ Judge Friedman wrote. “This is typically done with considerably less information, analysis and expert opinion than this court has about John W. Hinckley, Jr.’’
The Washington Post is reporting that Turkey’s government has ordered the closure of dozens of media outlets — including news agencies, television stations, radio channels, and newspapers — as part of its widespread crackdown in the wake of a failed coup attempt on July 15.
The dismissed personnel included 1,200 commissioned officers from the navy, air, and land forces. The Turkish Armed Forces said 8,651 personnel — or 1.5 percent of the military — participated in the abortive coup, and that the rebel faction used 35 planes, 37 helicopters, 74 tanks, and three ships during the operation.
There is NO getting around it, this year’s 2016 presidential election is a Donald John Trump Celebrity Reality Show, of the first order.
Say what one wants to about The Weave [and, I’ve had a ton to say already], he seizes on every opportunity, either in a mature manner, or NOT, to make a point on whatever the issue of the moment is that particular day, through his mental filter.
Here he is this morning at his press conference (Grandma Hillary has NOT held a presser in over 235 days, by the way!) in Florida…
I love the reaction by the media. Hysteria around every corner.
Just sit back, and enjoy each second.
It’ll be NON-stop, trust me…
And, come on, what’s NOT to like about Sergey Lavrov…
About John Forbes Kerry‘s – The Chin – reaction?
There’s, literally, a cast of thousands in this reality show! Minute-by-minute. Day after day.
Lobster on the Prairie 