• Morning AB, All. As always, thank you AB for doing this thread so reliably and keeping the peace with gentle thread policing. Thank you Bray for weekly written wisdom, Thank all yon contributors for excellent commentary to flesh it all out.
• Below are the words from my daily political diary. It is quite long so scroll on by if not interested. But do stay around and add your commentary and point of view to the thread.
Especially check out the wise commentary of Kahuna
Tuesday Date- 3/5/18
The Academy Awards is probably NOT a subject for a political column but like the NFL, once the players start inputting politics, well it becomes a political subject. No?
I remember as a child on through to a young woman, I always loved the academy awards. Like now, I seldom went to the movies as nominated but I would, after the award show, often attend a movie featuring a movie that intrigued me.
I also quite adore the fashion by the ladies for if ever there was an occasion to dress up it would be the Oscars.
Finally, there was something about movie music that used to enchant. Many of the top tunes of our era were in a movie at the start. “White Christmas”, “I Will Always Love You”, “Exodus”.
But of late I have not heard a single music feature, from this year or last year, that I ever heard.
And this year they had some woman, Andra Day, who screamed her song.
And, of course, there is the distasteful politics inserted in this thing. Although last night it wasn’t too bad except for Jimmy Kimmel, who is simply awful.
As much as anything, the world has changed greatly since the day I watched to critique the dresses and listen to the songs.
There’s about 8,000 different networks delivered by cable provider. Also the Internet has Roku, Hulu, Netflix and other content providers.
The Oscars, a bunch of people with not too many brains all full of themselves while giving themselves awards, is now too boring for most people.
I watched it and thank goodness I have DVR as I didn’t have to snore loudly at four hours of boredom.
That bit about going to a nearby movie screening while shooting food from hot dog canons was stupid and nowhere near funny.
The songs, like I say, were all boring, most of them sung by not so good singers.
The jokes were lame and I cannot stand Jane Fonda.
So never mind the fashion and songs, I will not watch the Academy Awards ever again.
I’ve just grown up beyond it.
Wednesday Date-3/6/18
I been doing some thinking about this independent prosecutor thing.
My first experience with unfair charging was Watergate with Richard Nixon. I was only 21 at the time and not especially political. But I do remember the big brouhaha over some tape missing 18 minutes and a rinky-dink break in at a DNC headquarters.
Somehow Woodward and Bernstein, two losers, found some asshole who was mad over a skipped FBI appointment and he became their “Deep Throat”.
It was nothing blown up into a big something but hey, I was young and couldn’t believe that here in America a President would be bought down by such a flimsy matter. So I believed the media and spectacular Woodward and Bernstein.
So around 2003 Scooter Libby, Chief of Staff for VP Dick Cheney. Joseph Wilson got involved in some back deal involving yellow cake uranium and Saddam Hussein.
At some point this item became big news and, of course, people had to be punished.
So Valerie Plame is Wilson’s wife and serves lunch in the CIA cafeteria or some sort. Robert Novak, a journalist, published an article where he revealed this bit of information about Plame and can’t have the identities of CIA cafeteria workers loose for the public, can we?
So a special prosecutor is appointed….by GUESS WHO? The Deputy AG JAMES COMEY!!!
They live die and breathe special prosecutors in the swamp, don’t they?
At some point Novak revealed his source about Plame but it was not Scooter Libby.
They wanted to punish Cheney via his Chief of Staff, Libby because special prosecutors are all about punishing people who cause pain for people in the deep swamp.
Novak revealed that then deputy secretary of state told him about Plame’s status, Richard Armitage.
So it wasn’t Scooter Libby but bear in mind, DICK CHENEY AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION HAD TO BE PUNISHED.
So the fair and balanced Patrick Fitzgerald ignored notification that Libby did not leak Plame’s status as VP of spaghetti in the CIA cafeteria.
So Libby got found guilty but not to worry. George Dubya Bush, a fellow with nothing between his ears and less between his legs, did pardon Libby but hey, how about someone with some courage shut down these stupid special prosecutors?
It’s all about punishing those who would hurt the swamp people and now we have President Trump who dared, DARED I TELL YOU, to win over Hillary Clinton.
And so he had to be punished.
Well the fabulous Mueller is working on it, spending millions of dollars trying to prove something that did not happen. It’s been over a year now.
How many poor people could have gotten a lifetime residence for the money Bob Mueller and the swamp people are soaking up.
I wonder if Patrick Fitzgerald can sleep nights.
Thursday Date-3/8/18
Whatever, this guy looks EXACTLY like Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank.
So Jeff Sessions is coming down on California, a state which makes its own laws fooey on those federal things.
The new thing in California is to allow illegal immigrants to vote, let them poop in the streets in San Francisco, and the latest, the elected officials go public and warn illegals to hide from ICE-Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
I agree with Sessions. America is a Republic, a collection of states. But we HAVE federal laws and they are there for a reason.
California wants to break off into a separate country with its own laws.
Time for the Feds to take over.
Friday Date-3/9/18
So the big news of the day is that North Korea’s dictator Kim Jung-Un wants to sit down and talk with President Trump.
This guy has been a pain in the butt for years and know that the Clintons and Obama administration kissed his fat, bad-haircut butt for years.
Remember Yassar Arafat, how they kissed that nothing-burger’s behind and now he is buried and forgotten in someone’s garden?
Sure it’s a bit nerve wracking. Don’t forget these are the fine people who methodically tortured and killed Otto Warmbier, even pulling out his teeth and putting them back in elsewhere in his mouth.
Awful, horrible people.
Do I think that silly Kim Jung will launch a nuke at America or one of its territories?
I don’t think he’ll do such a thing without the blessing of China and I don’t think China wants such a thing.
Further, what the hell does China have to do with these nasty dictators and why? What does China get from a zero country like North Korea?
I suppose it’s some kind of proxy but surely there’s better than these losers.
And ole Hillary comes out and tells President Trump that Kim Jung-Un will just smile in his face while doing bad things behind his back.
Or something.
Hillary, God bless, thank goodness she’s not our president now.
She’d give Kim Jung-Un CALIFORNIA!!!
So we hear that AG Jeff Sessions is considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate abuses of the FISA bill.
Which well he should. That crew in the deep state, along with the pathetic FBI that is such a zero, has no right to be investigating Americans without close scrutiny by the courts.
I’m pretty sure someone is secretly watching me. In due course Mueller will be calling me to his kangaroo court.
I don’t know how that guy lives with himself, he is so bad.
Recall he is the one who went after the wrong guy for an anthrax scare because….well because he’s stupid, that’s why.
Saturday Date-3/10/18
In a political move of sheer genius, President Trump pardoned Kristian Saucier, the young man who took pictures of the inside of the nuclear sub in which he was assigned.
Evidently it’s illegal to do such a thing. So while Sec. of State Hillary Clinton was sharing top secrets with everyone who attended Chelsea’s wedding shower and her yoga class, Kristian Saucier went to jail for a year.
Yesterday, Trump pardoned the guy. Why should Hillary run free and unfettered while a mere soldier in our army was thrown in jail.
It was a stroke of political genius. How is Hillary ever going to answer any question as to how she feels about Saucier’s pardon?
Not that the media will ask her or anything.
Kristian Saucier, the former U.S. Navy sailor who served a year behind bars for taking photos of classified areas in a nuclear submarine, has been pardoned, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday.
https://www.facebook.com/politicsbypat/
The media keeps repeating “Trump is a racist” over and over, but there is no proof. The media must prop up the Democratic Party any possible way to try to save what is left. Trump is the Rock Star now. He is the one responsible for ratings negative or positive. The Trump base loves the fact he is fighting back and actually fulfilling many of his promises during the election. Trump brings energy to the political scene. The media brings only doom and gloom and the sky is falling each day. Many of us are much better off, only one year since Trump took office. It is getting better all the time!
I thought about the cultural changes brought about by this and think our common history as Baby Boomers was especially unique.
I say this because for about 40 years or so, we all experienced the new thing called Television but in our lives it was limited but that had a big impact on our culture.
We had three networks; ABC, CBS and NBC. PBS was a junior partner. What this meant is we all had cultural ties to certain things. As a society, we could talk in school or around the office water cooler about the show the next day.
Who hadn't watched the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan Show?
If you lived in the Fifties and Sixties, you knew about:
Milton Berle,
Ozzie and Harriet and David Nelson,
The Flintstones and the Jetsons,
Dick Van Dyke,
Cowboy/Westerns,
Lost in Space,
campy Batman,
The Monkees,
Wild World of Sports and the guy falling down the ski jump,
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and how Marlin got to hold the chimp in the studio while Jim got to wrestle the crocodile,
Laugh-in,
Adam-12,
Walter Cronkite,
space launches live on TV,
Vietnam War coverage from the field,
Watergate,
Saturday Night Live,
Taxi,
Barney Miller,
Dallas,
Cheers,
Challenger exploding,
The Fall of the Berlin Wall...
Then the Fox channel and cable TV started to dilute the common culture and in the 1990s the Internet spread it like a falling rock causing rings in a pond...
So nowadays no one watches the same thing.
Honestly, I've never watched 24 or the Walking Dead. Wildly popular at least here but their numbers are nothing compared to Ed Sullivan's show on a bad night without Topo Gigio (the mouse puppet) and no teenage singing guests.
I don't watch network or even cable news any longer but get it here and on Youtube. I no longer read newspapers or news magazines but listen to Rush on Youtube every evening and read Drudge a couple of times a day.
My 88 year old father still watches the Nightly News every evening and the Today show every morning--he hates Trump--surprised?
Still, we are bound by our culture, so we need to keep in mind the culture we grew up with is dead or in the past.
Kids today have way more choices and avenues to go down. What is popular is some show with a 7% audience rather that the 60-75% of our day.
Nice summary
Great move by Trump Re Sailor. Clinton’s / Obama’s pardon crooks/ criminals. trump sets bar on dual standards of deep state and ups the ante on multiple approach’s to hillys. Email kabuki theater