Entertainment Overnight -- Donald Trump Version

Big man, pig man

Ha, ha, charade you are

You well heeled big wheel

Ha, ha, charade you are

And when your hand is on your heart

You're nearly a good laugh

Almost a joker

With your head down in the pig bin

Saying 'Keep on digging'

Pig stain on your fat chin

What do you hope to find

Down in the pig mine?

You're nearly a laugh

You're nearly a laugh

But you're really a cry

Bus stop rat bag

Ha, ha, charade you are

You f*cked up old hag

Ha, ha, charade you are

You radiate cold shafts of broken glass

You're nearly a good laugh

Almost worth a quick grin

You like the feel of steel

You're hot stuff with a hatpin

And good fun with a hand gun

You're nearly a laugh

You're nearly a laugh

But you're really a cry

Hey you, Whitehouse

Ha, ha, charade you are

You house proud town mouse

Ha, ha, charade you are

You're trying to keep our feelings off the street

You're nearly a real treat

All tight lips and cold feet

And do you feel abused?

You got to stem the evil tide

And keep it all on the inside

Mary you're nearly a treat

Mary you're nearly a treat

But you're really a cry

I Have Great Neighbors

Check that out.

I've no idea who they are and they don't know me but these are some great neighbors, that's all I can say.

Smart. Educated. Intelligent.

Heck, I bet they're even good-looking.

Enjoy your Sunday, everyone.

Quote of the Day -- On The Orange One

Even Right Wing, Republican, very Conservative Fox commentator Charles Krauthammer gets it:

"I defended Trump with this Russia thing until today. Look, if you're contacted by the Russians, you go to the FBI. You don't take the meeting .. It's game over"

Linka:

Trump Jr. brushes off explosive emails, admits he ‘probably’ had more meetings with Russians

 E-mail revelations definitely not trouble only for Junior Trump

On This Election, Donald Trump and Russian Intervention

A Facebook friend of mine and area resident, one Kent Hartland wrote and posted the following on Facebook today. I thought it worth the time and thought.

The CIA says they have clear evidence Russia is hacking into American servers in an attempt to alter the apparent outcome of a presidential election. Twenty states have also reported evidence of Russia attacking servers in an attempt to overthrow state-wide elections for congress. Yet most folks here seem oblivious or complacent.

If Russia assassinated one of our candidates or launched a strike against us to eliminate the person we chose as our leader, we would all be down at the recruiting station to enlist. But that is what they are doing. The 21st century equivalent of a Regime Change. A political assassination.

No matter what your politics, if you claim to be an American, a patriot, then this should be your line in the sand. Do not facilitate, accept, brush aside or look away from what is currently happening.

Russia has launched a cyber attack on America. Our president has promised a proportional response. Russia is warning it's citizens and America of the growing risk of nuclear war.

Nuclear war.

This from CNN:

"It is now clear that the illegal hack of my personal email account was -- just like the other recent, election-related hacks -- the work of the Russian government," John Podesta said in a statement. "This level of meddling by a foreign power can only be aimed at boosting Donald Trump and should send chills down the spine of all Americans, regardless of political party."

Trump has called on Moscow to hack into Clinton's computers, downplayed criticism of Putin's authoritarian tendencies, tried to suggest that Russia hasn't hacked US systems and promoted foreign policy positions that jibe more closely with Moscow's than Washington's. He's relied on aides with ties to Russia and most recently, quoted an incorrect Russian news report to raise questions about Clinton.

"Russia, are you listening?" Trump said from the stage of a rally, calling for a foreign country to interfere in an election, an unprecedented moment in presidential politics.

Trump has taken foreign policy positions that analysts say would please Russia, declaring in March that he would consider pulling the US out of NATO because it's "obsolete." The 28-member organization, founded in 1949 to defend against the Soviet Union, is the core US-Atlantic security mechanism.

Trump campaign advisers have had ties to Russia. Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort lobbied on behalf of Russian-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich. Carter Page, described at one point by the campaign as an informal policy advisor, reportedly had investments in Russian gas company Gazprom and has publicly criticized the US in a speech in Moscow.

A Trump security adviser, Lt. General Mike Flynn, the retired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, attended a December gala for the the state-backed Russia Today television network, placed two seats away from Putin, according to Politico.

Trump's refusal to release his tax returns makes it impossible to get a full sense of his investments and whether he has any in Russia, but he does have business ties to Russians.

Trump has also written about trying to build a Trump property in Moscow since 1987 in his book "The Art of the Deal," signing his most recent deal to build in Moscow in 2013, according to the Washington Post.

The Republican candidate worked with Russian oligarchs to stage the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. And his son Trump Jr told a real estate investment conference in 2008 that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," adding that they "see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

"I've been there many times, I've spent quite a bit of time in Moscow looking at deals," Trump Jr. said.

---

If Russia doesn't want Clinton or the Democrats in power and DOES want Trump and the GOP in, that should tell you who to vote for.

Stand. Take a strong and immediate stand against these attacks. Russia cannot see a divided America, where some of the citizens are cool with Russia literally trying to overrule our choices for elected officials.

Back to me:

I don't think this, he, is overstating the situations. Seems like good to great food for thought.

Additionally, this story broke yesterday.

Trump's refusal to accept intelligence briefing on Russia stuns experts

I hope this is all only fascinating.

The Most Important Thing You'll Read Today

And no, I don't mean the most important thing you'll read today is what I write here.

I was just turned to a writer, one Tom Englehart and his fellow writers and editors over at TomDispatch. 

I'm surprised I didn't know of it earlier, good as it is. It seems to have very clear, calm, intelligent, resourceful writers, if this piece I read today is any example. Here is that most important thing:

Tomgram: John Feffer, 

Slouching Toward the Apocalypse

I think it's a brilliant, if deeply scary piece. It's about not just Donald Trump but about his followers, as well. Herewith, I post just a part of it but the most important part, to me, anyway:

Trump the Arsonist: Evangelicals, Survivalists, the Alt-Right and Hurricane Donald

By John Feffer

The world according to Donald Trump is very dark indeed. The American economy has tanked. Mexico has sent a horde of criminals over the border to steal jobs and rape women. The Islamic State, cofounded by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is taking over the globe. “Our country’s going to hell,” he declared during the Republican primaries. It’s “like medieval times,” he suggested during the second presidential debate. “We haven’t seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world.”

For Trump, it’s not morning in America, it’s just a few seconds before midnight on the doomsday clock. Although his campaign doggedly continues to promise a new beginning for the country, the candidate and his advisers are sending out a very different message: the end is nigh. These Cassandras all agree that, although Obama’s two terms were no walk in the park, the stakes in 2016 are world-destroyingly higher. If Clinton is elected, the future could be, as conservative political operatives Dick Morris and Eileen McGann titled their recent book,Armageddon.

Presidential challengers often paint a grim picture of the world of the incumbent, overstating the case for dramatic effect. Ever the showman, Trump has no compunction about repeatedly going way over the top, calling the U.S. military a “disaster” because it’s supposedly underfunded and the United States a “third-world country” thanks to its precipitous economic decline. Trump talks as if he were the hybrid offspring of Karl Marx and Ann Coulter.

Trumpworld, however, is a photographic negative of statistical reality. The U.S. economy has been on an upswing for the last several years (though its benefits have been anything but evenly distributed). Nationally, violent crime is on the decline(though murder rates are soaring in some cities like Chicago). The Obama administration averted war with Iran and negotiated a détente with Cuba (though it continues to wage war in other parts of the world and has maintained sky-high Pentagon spending). If the Obama years are hardly beyond criticism, they are hardly beneath contempt either.

In dispensing with what one of his senior aides called the “reality-based community,” George W. Bush’s administration attempted to create an alternative, on-the-ground reality, particularly through the direct exercise of American military power -- and we know how well that turned out. Trump seems to have even less interest in the “reality-based community.” He’s evidently convinced that the sheer power of his own bluster, even without the firepower of that military, should be sufficient to alter our world. After all, didn’t it win him a loyal following on TV and -- to the disbelief of politicians and media commentators everywhere -- the Republican presidential nomination?

The reality-based community -- which Trump labels the “elite” -- wants nothing to do with him. The discrepancy between his rhetoric and what other people call facts explains in part why even conservative elites -- prominent Republicans like Brent Scowcroft and John Warner, conservative columnists like George Will, and even neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, not to speak of right-leaning newspapers likeThe Arizona Republic and the Dallas Morning News -- have made historic decisions to abandon their party's presidential nominee.

But don’t kid yourself. There is method to Trump’s particular version of madness. He and his slyly smiling running mate Mike Pence are playing up their vision of scorched-earth America not just to win general political points but to appeal to a very specific set of voters by tapping into the apocalyptic strain in American politics. The evangelicals, anti-globalists, and white power constituencies that form the bedrock of his support hear in Trump’s blasts more than just a set of fun-house facts. When the Donald says that Hillary is "the devil" and America’s going to hell, this constituency -- steeped in Biblical prophecy, survivalist ideology, and racist conspiracies -- takes him literally. America is on the verge of (take your pick): the Rapture, an end-of-days contest between American patriots and U.N. invaders, or an all-out race war to the finish.

And here’s what makes Trump’s carnivalesque presidential campaign especially topsy-turvy. He’s been slouching toward just about every kind of Armageddon imaginable, except the genuine planetary ones that are -- or should be -- almost unavoidable these days. He has, after all, dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and a Chinese scam. He is so blasé about nuclear weapons that he’s been comfortable with the thought of American allies Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabiadeveloping their own. He has nothing whatsoever to say about potential global pandemics (but plenty to spout about the potentially malign effects of vaccinations).

To grasp the nature of such genuine dangers requires at least a minimal understanding of science. It also requires a genuine concern that the world as we know it could indeed end in our lifetimes or those of our children and grandchildren.

Of course, not everyone thinks the apocalypse is a bad thing.

I suggest that any and all who find any truth and insight in the above, go to the post and read the rest, too, certainly. It sheds a great deal of light on these people, what they think, what they're doing and what they may yet do. I also suggest you go to the link below to find out about or find out more about Alex Jones, depending what all you know of him.

Meet Alex Jones

Heaven and God help us all, folks, pun intended. There are some scary, really scary, uninformed, misguided, dangerous and/or potentially dangerous, emotional, religious people out there. Until reading this, I thought Trump would merely be crushed, electorally, November 8, and then he'd slink away, he and all his supporters.

Now, I'm not certain of that second part at all.

Note:  To prove, too, just a bit of what Mr. Feffer writes in the article, this story just broke 37 minutes ago--

Trump loses it: Hillary Clinton has secret meetings to 'plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty'

How quickly we forget

Get ready for gasoline prices to spike, Mr. and Mrs. America

Breaking:

Four nations urge U.S. gas exports amid Ukraine crisis

Final Olympic medal count

1	Russia	13	11	9	33
2	Norway	11	5	10	26
3	Canada	10	10	5	25
4	United States	9	7	12	28
5	Netherlands	8	7	9	24
6	Germany	8	6	5	19
7	Switzerland	6	3	2	11
8	Belarus	5	0	1	6
9	Austria	4	8	5	17
10	France	4	4	7	15
11	Poland	4	1	1	6
12	China	3	4	2	9
13	South Korea	3	3	2	8
14	Sweden	2	7	6	15
15	Czech Republic	2	4	2	8
16	Slovenia	2	2	4	8
17	Japan	1	4	3	8
18	Finland	1	3	1	5
19	Great Britain	1	1	2	4
20	Ukraine	1	0	1	2
21	Slovakia	1	0	0	1
22	Italy	0	2	6	8
23	Latvia	0	2	2	4
24	Australia	0	2	1	3
25	Croatia	0	1	0	1
26	Kazakhstan	0	0	1	1

Repeat after me:

WE'RE NUMBER FOUR!!  WE'RE NUMBER FOUR!!

There is this, anyway:
United States is king of the bronze

Some facts on the final Olympics counts for us:

It didn’t look good for the United States. No medals in individual figure skating for the first time since 1936. No medals in speedskating for the first time since 1984. The four most identifiable Winter Olympians — Shaun White, Bode Miller, Lindsey Vonn, Shani Davis — won a total of one bronze medal. (In Vonn’s defense, she wasn’t competing in Sochi due to injury.) The women’s hockey team blew a late 2-0 lead in the gold-medal game and the men’s team was outscored 6-0 in the medal rounds. Still, it wasn’t all bad. American athletes won 28 medals, good for second on the overall medal count. (That was nine fewer medals than the U.S. won in Vancouver, however.) Team USA’s 12 bronze medals were the most for any nation. It’s the third time in the past four Winter Olympics the Americans have won that tally.

Links:  The 14 most fascinating facts about the final 2014 Winter Olympics medal count

Inside the Final Medal Count at the 2014 Winter Olympics

On Edward Snowden

Let me get this straight.

You want to fight against your nation's secretive ways that you insist are against the nation and your fellow countrymen and the people of your nation and to do it, you go to Russia?


Seriously?

Did you see this yet?

My sister sent this to me today. I hadn't seen it yet.

Notice it was done by Karl Rove's American Crossroads.

What kills me is that either uninformed or paranoid, insecure people would be worried or bothered by it.

That said, I liked the music.

Democracy breaking out in Putin's Russia, "Occupy"-like

First, Vladimir Putin's ruling party got beat up, earlier this week, so "Even with all the ballot-stuffing, cyber-attacks, and manipulations, the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, only got forty-nine per cent of the vote—results that were hardly cheering to Putin or his allies." Putin blamed the vote on Hillary Clinton, of all people. Now? "Tomorrow, thousands of Russians are expected to come out onto the streets of Moscow and demonstrate against the corrupt and profoundly undemocratic regime..." In the video above, a premier Soviet journalist accuses the media and medium of "getting more and more sophisticated at exciting, captivating and entertaining and amusing the audience but it can hardly be called a civil, socio-political institute." Man, if that doesn't ring true for American television, nothing does. Anyway, it seems Russia is getting it's own "Occupy" movement. "For a long time now, dissent has been taking hold among younger people who are unwilling to forgo freedoms, and promises of freedom, made within living memory" --David Remnick, The New Yorker Magazine. Good for them. Now if more would just break out over here. Maybe we could get a true third political party, one that's for the people and not just the wealthy and corporations. As ever, here's hoping. Links: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/world/europe/russians-vote-governing-party-claims-early-victory.html?pagewanted=all; http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/12/putins-television.html#ixzz1g4XjaZX3; http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/12/09/143461580/russian-government-says-it-will-permit-massive-protest-this-weekend?ft=1&f=1001

It's the weekend--let's lighten up