We Could Try Laughing Him Out Of Office

Gif of DailyShow’s version of the BBC toddler photobomb starring Spicey, Kellyanne, Uncle Ben and Trumpy.

Tracey Ullman’s dead-on parody of the kind of interview assault victims have to endure with insensitive male law officers.

I include this because this is the kind of nasty mindset Trump has legitimized and elevated, making all of us feel embarrassed and insulted.

Trolling Trump. (The left can play this game too.) The Indian a cappella group doing their Trump version of a Village People classic.

The Onion gets a cease and desist letter from White House for making fun of the Orange Orangutan in Chief. The New Yorker reports.

Rich vs. Poor

FoxNews: “If you don’t want to be poor, get a job.” Gosh, it’s actually that simple.

Jon Stewart takes his usual calm reasoned look at the hatred on FoxNews

Where does poverty come from? Did the freed slaves actually sit down and say they’d never work again? NPR tackles the long sad story of what really happened.

Meanwhile, American capitalists have fallen in love with workers they can own and don’t have to pay or provide benefits for. The NYTimes on the creatures who are taking our jobs.

A strong work and employment environment requires that money be put to work too, but put to work for the broader society not just part of it. American Prospect compares the success of Minnesota and the failure of Wisconsin.

The Poor Pay. The Rich Don't.

"Johnny is a cheating teacher on a train traveling 80 mph west, to jail. Charlie is a cheating Wall Street executive on a train traveling 40 mph…. I'm kidding, it's a helicopter and he's going to a party where a giant ice sculpture of David is peeing vodka." ~Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart examines with his usual sharp wit and perceptiveness how the rich get away with everything.

The working stiff pays for his crime by doing time. The rich are given a pass… Heck, they’re rich and therefore not culpable.

You may remember this story about the rich kid excused for killing someone with his car while driving drunk because he was also driving while rich. Wealth was the excuse.

We have high-end crime in America because they are rich enough to ignore the law. For them Crime Pays.

In Scandinavia they can at least wipe that smug look off their faces. (The Atlantic reports)

This demonstrates again that the biggest force in the economy is something no news story will report on and no news anchor ever mentions.

It’s called THE RULE OF ACCUMULATED ADVANTAGE.

The more advantages you have the more they leverage every other advantage you have.

The more disadvantaged you are the more those disadvantages leverage other disadvantages to keep you down.

The rich defy gravity. The poor sink.

Jon Stewart arm wrestles Grover Norquist (and wins)

Here's the Jon Stewart interview. (Dontcha wish actual newspeople interviewed this well?)

I have a pledge for you. And I bet it'd work.

"Any congressional district that elects anyone who signs Grover Norquist's pledge shall have its federal funding adjusted to equal its federal taxes paid."

This would affect mostly Republican districts who get more than they pay in. And it would balance the budget almost immediately.

Take it a step further: all congressional districts that elect a Democrat shall not have to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal funding. This would affect most Democratic districts who tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal dollars.

Ya see, here's the Big Hypocrisy: the districts that get the most from the federal government are Republican districts. And Republican districts nationwide, on average, get more from the federal government than they pay in.

So we'd be doing them a favor. We'd be helping them be honest, helping them be true to their ideals. No more federal gravy train for Republican districts who signed Grover's pledge (which he thought up when he was twelve–––I'm not making this up, it's on tape.) And Democrat taxpayers would stop being ripped off by the lazy, tax evading Republican parts of the country.

Anyway, Jon Stewart does a pretty fair job of outdebating Norquist. He points out that Reagan raised taxes a dozen or so times. He points out Clinton raised taxes and created a budget surplus and a boom, and Bush cut them and destroyed the global economy and bankrupted the country. Norquist doesn't blink or argue because it's all true.

Stewart does miss one big fat opportunity. When Norquist says we should get rid of public pensions and replace them with 401K's because then everyone knows exactly what they are going to get, Jon should have pointed out that 401K's are the accounts that Wall Street cleaned out over the past four years. The money went away. (Well, it didn't go away as much as it went into Goldman Sachs executive bonuses.)

Retirees under the privatized system have to pray really hard that the economy is up when they retire.

The thing Norquist hates about pensions is they are promises that have to be kept even if the market is being wiped out by pirates. Norquist doesn't like promises made to working people. Only promises made to pirates and CEOs, who are sometimes the same thing.