Today’s high is forecast at 80°, but the building is still hot. Tomorrow will be busy because I have a nurse coming in the morning to do an annual health care evaluation, and tomorrow afternoon is a grocery delivery day. I’m sad to report that I’m taking Immodium AD for Republicosis.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
I received the link in email, but the site is still down. If you’d like to try it later, click here.
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: Political life in America never ceases to astonish. Take last week’s pronouncements from the Republican Presidential field. Please. Mike Huckabee predicted that President Obama’s seven-nation agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Ted Cruz anointed the American President “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” Marco Rubio tweeted, “Look at all this outrage over a dead lion, but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies.” And the (face it) current front-runner, the halfway hirsute hotelier Donald Trump, having insulted the bulk of his (count ’em) sixteen major rivals plus (countless) millions of citizens of the (according to him) not-so-hot nation he proposes to lead, announced via social media that in this week’s Fox News debate he plans “to be very nice & highly respectful of the other candidates.” Really, now. Who’s writing this stuff? Jon Stewart?
Over the decades, our country has been lucky in many things, not least in the subversive comic spirits who, in varying ways, employ a joy buzzer, a whoopee cushion, and a fun-house mirror to knock the self-regard out of an endless parade of fatuous pols. Thomas Nast drew caricatures so devastating that they roiled the ample guts of our town’s Boss, William Marcy Tweed. Will Rogers’s homespun barbs humbled the devious of the early twentieth century. Mort Sahl, the Eisenhower-era comic whose prop was a rolled-up newspaper, used conventional one-liners to wage radical battle: “I’ve arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago, because when I die I want to still remain politically active.” Later, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, and Joan Rivers continued to draw comic sustenance from what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk.”
Four nights a week for sixteen years, Jon Stewart, the host and impresario of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” has taken to the air to expose our civic bizarreries. He has been heroic and persistent. Blasted into orbit by a trumped-up (if you will) impeachment and a stolen Presidential election, and then rocketing through the war in Iraq and right up to the current electoral circus, with its commodious clown car teeming with would-be Commanders-in-Chief, Stewart has lasered away the layers of hypocrisy in politics and in the media. On any given night, a quick montage of absurdist video clips culled from cable or network news followed by Stewart’s vaudeville reactions can be ten times as deflating to the self-regard of the powerful as any solemn editorial—and twice as illuminating as the purportedly non-fake news that provides his fuel.
Kudos to the David Remnick for a most fitting tribute. Click through for the rest of it.
From Common Dreams: New Jersey Republican governor and straggling 2016 presidential hopeful Chris Christie faces a call to resign after he declared Sunday that teachers’ unions are "the single most destructive force in public education in America" and deserve to be punched in the face.
Christie made the comments on CNN’s State of the Union program with host Jack Tapper, who asked: "At the national level, who deserves a punch in the face?"
Christie responded: "Oh the national teachers union," referring specifically to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Extra-wide Barf Bag Alert!!
PIGnocchio is typically Republican in his preference to respond to learning with violence.
From The New Yorker: As preparations get under way for the first Republican Presidential debate, on Thursday night, a new poll shows that Americans are deeply concerned that the rest of the world might see it.
According to the poll, there is widespread fear that, if the debate were to be viewed in foreign countries, the cost to the United States’ prestige around the world would be incalculable.
On a more personal level, many expressed concern that any international broadcast of the debate would greatly diminish their desire to ever travel abroad or talk to foreigners.
As Andy later suggests international broadcast of the Criminal Clown Cavalcade should be blocked. Out reputation requires that the world never know.
Cartoon:
Today’s Republicans would celebrate the arrest.
