Quarantinewhile… Stephen gets a sneak peek at a human-like robot under development at Disney and previews NSFW named British pastries.
Nov 08 2020
In Memoriam: Alex Trebek – July 22, 1940 – November 8, 2020
The long time host of Jeopardy has lost his battle with pancreatic cancer, Alex Trebek has died at the age 0f 80.
“Jeopardy! is saddened to share that Alex Trebek passed away peacefully at home early this morning, surrounded by family and friends,” said a statement shared on the show’s Twitter account Sunday. “Thank you, Alex.”
The cause of death was not immediately announced. Trebek revealed in March 2019 he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, triggering an outpouring of support and well wishes at the time.
Trebek made history in 2014 by hosting his 6,829th “Jeopardy!” episode — the most by a presenter of any single TV game show. But despite the 35 years he spent on “Jeopardy!,” the syndicated quiz show where answers are presented in the form of a question, Trebek wasn’t exactly an overnight success.
Born in Sudbury, Canada, he studied philosophy before becoming a journalist, working as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
In 1966, while still in his mid-20s, he switched from journalism to hosting game shows, starting with a quiz show titled “Reach for the Top,” and followed a few years later by another, “Jackpot.”
It wasn’t until 1984 that Trebek landed what turned out to be his big break, when producer-host Merv Griffin chose him to emcee a revival of “Jeopardy!,” which was paired with another hit game show, “Wheel of Fortune.”
The combination became a formidable block in the hour leading into prime time while earning Trebek five Daytime Emmy Awards for his role as host.
His longevity was reflected in a personal milestone, when he passed “The Price is Right’s” Bob Barker in the Guinness Book of Records as the person who had hosted the most game-show episodes.
In a 2014 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Trebek downplayed that honor, saying, “I’m just enjoying what I’m doing, I’m happy to have a job. I like the show, I like the contestants and it pays well.”
Mr. Trebek became a US citizen in 1997. He is survived by his second wife, Jean Currivan Trebek and their two children, Emily and Matthew. Trebek’s first marriage, to Elaine Callel, ended in divorce.
Early evening television will never be the same.
Nov 08 2020
Dave Chappelle 4 Years Later
I didn’t watch the 2016 SNL monologue till this morning. I had just seen the coverage. It’s different looking at the 2016 video with 2020 eyes. Here they are back to back-
Summary: Very bad people on both sides.
Nov 08 2020
The Breakfast Club (Limousine Liberal Brunch)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club!
AP’s Today in History for November 8th
Adolf Hitler makes his first attempt to seize power in Germany; Democrat John F. Kennedy wins the presidency; Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California; Bonnie Raitt is born; Led Zeppelin releases the album ”Led Zeppelin Four.”.
Normally I post a Banjo Tune, but I couldn’t find this Ek favorite on banjo. Maybe I’ll have to learn it.
Revolution
Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below
Obama Wants Us to Go Back to Brunch After Trump Is Out. That Would Be A Disaster.
DAVID SIROTA & ANDREW PEREZ, JACOBIN MAGAZINE 11-2-20
In the closing hours of the 2020 election, Donald Trump is dishonestly casting his reelection bid as a crusade against the corrupt swamp that he helped expand and profited from, while Democrats are promising that if Trump is defeated, voters will finally be able to go back to brunch as the Washington establishment returns itself to power.
The former’s message is laughably dishonest, the latter’s message is profoundly cynical and potentially dangerous.
To state the obvious: Trump pretending to be an anti-establishment populist is patently absurd, and everyone knows it. He built his own private swamp in the middle of the corrupt marshland that is Washington, DC. He has used the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his donors, while grossly mismanaging the response to a lethal pandemic.
…he has done almost nothing to help millions of people being pulverized by skyrocketing costs for health care, housing, and other basic necessities of life. Instead of triaging the economic and public health crises, he and his party have focused on packing the court with right-wing extremists and making it harder for Americans to vote him out of office.
In the process, they have transformed unethical voter suppression from a stealth scheme into a very public campaign tactic, normalizing anti-democratic fascism as just another accepted election strategy. And he is now all but threatening to stage a coup …
To counter Trump’s assault, the Democratic campaign this weekend returned to Flint, Michigan — the place the Obama administration left to suffer through a horrific toxic water crisis, exacerbated by Michigan’s then-Republican governor (who has since endorsed Biden).
During the event, Biden declared that during his last tour of duty as vice president, we “went through eight years without one single trace of scandal. Not one single trace of scandal. It’s going to be nice to return to that.”
Biden was joined in Flint by former president Barack Obama, who touted incremental change and preemptively downplayed expectations of economic transformation.
…He also promised that if Biden and Kamala Harris win the White House, “You’re not going to have to think about them every day. You’re not going to have to argue with your family about them every day. It won’t be so exhausting.”
This was the party’s flaccid message in the nation’s poorest city, a former General Motors manufacturing hub destroyed by deindustrialization and offshoring.
The same message was promoted this weekend in the Washington Post by corporate consultant Hillary Rosen, whose firm works for Biden. Rosen told the newspaper that Biden “is not somebody who is coming in to disrupt Washington. He’s coming in to heal Washington.”
This is a shrewdly concocted mix of revisionism and expectation management — and if Biden (hopefully) defeats Trump, it sets the stage for a repeat of the events that got us to this horrible moment in the first place.
…Obama helmed a presidency bankrolled by Wall Street donors that refused to prosecute a single banker who engineered a financial crisis that destroyed millions of lives.
He turned promises of significant health care reform into legislation that included a few positive consumer protections, but also enriched and strengthened the power of private insurance companies and dropped a promised public option.
He acknowledged the threat of climate change, but then publicly demanded credit from the fossil fuel industry for helping boost oil production during a climate apocalypse.
He pledged to walk picket lines if workers’ union rights were under attack, but then he promptly walked away from promised labor law reform.
And yes, Obama’s administration slow-walked the response to the environmental catastrophe in Flint, Michigan.
These kinds of scandals sowed deep disappointment, disaffection, and economic dislocation, which helped fuel the backlash energy that powered the Tea Party and eventually Trump’s presidential candidacy. And they happened because of the kind of disengagement Obama envisioned when he promised that if Biden and Harris win, “you’re not going to have to think about them every day.” In this vision, the new White House lets us all just go back to brunch.
…Obama’s Flint speech went further. Echoing a previous refrain from Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, it was a call to resurrect Brunch Liberalism whereby large swaths of the American left disengage and defer in much the same way it did during the Obama administration, to disastrous effect.
Though it is now forgotten history, the history is clear: After years of mass protest and activism against the George W. Bush administration, many liberal activists, voters, and advocacy groups went to brunch after the 2008 election, fell in line and refused to pressure the new administration to do much of anything. Those that dared to speak out were often berated and shamed.
In touting a presidency we don’t have to think much about, Obama conjures the notion of a Democratic administration once again insulated from pressure from an electorate whose poorer populations are too busy trying to survive, and whose affluent liberals are thrilled to be back at Sunday morning brunch after watching an MSNBC host reassure them that everything is All Good.
…Democrats were originally thrown out of power in Washington and in state capitals, in part, because too many of them spent eight years protecting the gentry while promoting a “let them eat cake” message to a public that was opportunistically radicalized by false right-wing populists.
While planning a new administration from holdover sinecures in Washington, Democrats’ royal-court-in-exile should not now interpret a counterrevolution against Republicans’ mad king as some sort of mandate for stasis. They also should not interpret a Trump loss as popular pining for a return to corporate Democrats’ slightly kinder, gentler version of feudalism.
Yes, the mad king needs to go, but stasis is what brought him to power in the first place, and status quo politics is what would conjure an even more destructive mad king in the future.
…As we head into what is likely to be a tumultuous week, scholars and historians are right now warning that democracy all over the world is on the brink — and the only way to rescue it from autocracy is by generating more activism and civic engagement, not by telling everyone we will soon be able to run off to a mid-afternoon meal.
In America, the best way to prevent a new, more dangerous Trump is to refuse to see this election as an end point. It has to be the beginning of longer-term, fearless engagement that makes concrete demands of every public official — even those we like.
So no matter what happens — whether Trump wins or Biden wins — we should all be able to make one post-election commitment: we’re never going back to brunch, because if we do, our future is doomed. If we don’t, a better world may still be possible.
- Why Is The Election So Close?
Ian Welsh
- A Lot Went Wrong for Democrats on Election Night
DAVID SIROTA, ANDREW PEREZ, JULIA ROCK
- America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent
Zeynep Tufekci
Something to think about over coffee prozac
‘Every. Single. One.’: Ocasio-Cortez Notes Every Democrat Who Backed Medicare for All Won Reelection in 2020
The same cannot be said for those more centrist lawmakers who continue to defend the nation’s increasingly unpopular for-profit healthcare system.
Jon Queally, Common Dreams 11-7-20
Highlighting an interesting—and to many, instructive—electoral trend that others have spotted in the days since 2020 voting ended earlier this week, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday—just as jubilation spread nationwide among Democrats and progressives upon news that Joe Biden will be the next U.S. President—pointed out that every single congressional member this year who ran for reelection while supporting Medicare for All won (or was on their way to winning) their respective race.
Every single swing-seat House Democrat who endorsed #MedicareForAll won re-election or is on track to win re-election.
Every.?? Single.?? One.??
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 7, 2020
The tweet emerged as many across the corporate media landscape, including pundits and former high-level Democratic officials like Rahm Emanuel, unabashedly pushed a narrative that progressives calling for policies like a single-payer universal healthcare system or the Green New Deal are somehow a hindrance to electoral success. Ocasio-Cortez was not standing for it:
Anyone saying this after immigrant organizers delivered AZ, Black grassroots flipped Georgia, MI going blue w reality-bending 94% Detroit margin + @RashidaTlaib running up the margins in her district & Trump publicly challenging @IlhanMN in MN and losing isn’t a serious person. https://t.co/2FtJzqGki8
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 7, 2020
As Common Dreams reported Friday, while corporate-friendly Democrats have continued to go to bat for the for-profit healthcare system that lavishes billions of dollars each year on insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, and pharmaceutical giants, a new poll this week—put out by Fox News no less—shows that 72% of all U.S. voters would prefer a “government-run healthcare plan.” And the poll is far from an outlier, with numerous surveys in recent years showing this trend.
“Polls consistently show a majority of the U.S. electorate [is] considerably to the left of both party leaderships… on issue after issue—the environment, electoral reform, [and] Medicare for All,” said Jacobin’s Luke Savage in response that poll.
Despite what “corporate front groups and lazy pundits always say,” tweeted journalist Andrew Perez, “people absolutely do not like their private health insurance.”
When it comes to the 2020 election—even though Biden himself ran against Medicare for All—the following illustration, which includes Democratic incumbents and challengers, made the connection very clear when it came to races in the U.S. House of Representatives this cycle:
Support progressive policies like Medicare for All and win elections.
Campaign against progressive policies like Medicare for All and lose elections. pic.twitter.com/DZ7mUeE6Po
— Ryan Knight ? (@ProudSocialist) November 7, 2020
As astute political observers have been pointing out for years, the United States electorate remains very supportive of universal programs and other progressive policy ideas that their elected representatives—both Democrats and Republicans—have refused to embrace.
With an increasing focus on the need for radical and far-reaching changes to the world’s economic and energy systems in order to address the existential crisis of the climate emergency, voters across the political spectrum have showed—in poll after poll after poll—their support for such action to be taken.
And as Ocasio-Cortez added to her tweet about Medicare for All on Saturday: “We’re running numbers on [the Green New Deal]” next.
Nov 08 2020
Pondering the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition
Pondering the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
On Sunday mornings we present a preview of the guests on the morning talk shows so you can choose which ones to watch or some do something more worth your time on a Sunday morning.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
The Sunday Talking Heads:
This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on Sunday’s “This Week” are: Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY); Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD); Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE); and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO).
The roundtable guests are: former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ); former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D???); Matthew Dowd, ABC News Political Analyst; Yvette Simpson, Democracy for America CEO; and former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-SD).
Face the Nation: Host Margaret Brennan’s guests are: Former host of Face the Nation Bob Schieffer; Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA); Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA); Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV); former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb MD; and David Becker,election law expert.
Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: The guests on this week’s “MTP” are: House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC); Geoff Bennett, NBC News White House correspondent; and Kelly O’ Donnell NBC News White House and Capitol Hill correspondent.
The panel guests are: David WaSserman, House Editor for The Cook Political Report; Cornell Belcher, Democratic pollster; Peggy “Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins” Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist; and Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Senior Washington Correspondent and MSNBC host.
State of the Union with Jake Tapper: Mr. Tapper’s guests are: House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC); Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT); Symone D. Sanders, senior advisor the President-Elect Joe Biden; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY); Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD); and Stacey Abrams, founder of Fair Fight Action.
Nov 07 2020
Live: President-Elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris Victory Speech
President-Elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris address the nation from Wilmington, DE.
Nov 07 2020
Finally. President-Elect Joseph R. Biden
While Donald Trump was on the golf course, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes were declared for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) putting the Democratic team over the 270 threshold. Mr. Biden will become the 46th President of the United States and Ms. Harris will be the first woman and person of color to be Vice President.
Joe Biden won the presidency by clinching Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes, after days of painstaking vote counting following record turnout across the country. The win in Pennsylvania, which the Associated Press called at 11:25am EST on Saturday with 99% of the votes counted, took Biden’s electoral college vote to 284, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House.
The American people have replaced a real estate developer and reality TV star who had no political experience with a veteran of Washington who has spent more than 50 years in public life and twice ran unsuccessfully for president. Trump is now the first incumbent to lose re-election since 1992, when Bill Clinton defeated George H W Bush.
In a statement, Trump refused to concede to Biden and said his campaign would pursue unspecified legal challenges regarding the results.
With turnout projected to reach its highest point in a century, a fearful and anxious nation elected a candidate who promised to govern not as a Democrat but as an “American president” and vowed to be a unifying force after four years of upheaval.
The result also marked the historic rise of Kamala Harris, who will be the first woman and the first woman of color to serve as vice-president in American history.
The outcome threatened to send convulsions across the country, as Trump’s campaign made baseless claims of voter fraud and vowed to challenge the results.
Biden, 77, is set to become America’s oldest president. His triumph came more than 48 hours after polls closed on election day, as officials in key states worked furiously to tally ballots amid an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 people and infected millions.
A father and husband who buried his first wife and his infant daughter in 1972 after they were killed in a car crash, and decades later buried his adult son after he died from brain cancer in 2015, Biden sought to empathize with Americans who lost loved ones to the coronavirus.
On a personal note, we here at Stars Hollow and Docudharma are mourning the loss of our dear son, brother, friend and confidant ek hornbeck but this win for America eases his loss just a little.
Nov 07 2020
The Breakfast Club (Get To The Other Side)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
>Bolshevik Revolution takes place; America’s 2000 presidential vote faces limbo; Nixon loses Calif. governor’s race; Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapses; Evangelist Billy Graham and singer Joni Mitchell born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Nov 06 2020
Pondering the Pundits
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Paul Krugman: Is America Becoming a Failed State?
Mitch McConnell may make the nation ungovernable.
As I write this, it seems extremely likely that Joe Biden has won the presidency. And he clearly received millions more votes than his opponent. He can and should claim that he has been given a strong mandate to govern the nation.
But there are real questions about whether he will, in fact, be able to govern. At the moment, it seems likely that the Senate — which is wildly unrepresentative of the American people — will remain in the hands of an extremist party that will sabotage Biden in every way it can.
Before I get into the problems this confrontation is likely to cause, let’s talk about just how unrepresentative the Senate is.
Every state, of course, has two senators — which means that Wyoming’s 579,000 residents have as much weight as California’s 39 million. The overweighted states tend to be much less urbanized than the nation as a whole. And given the growing political divide between metropolitan and rural areas, this gives the Senate a strong rightward tilt. [..]
But, you may ask, why is divided control of government such a problem? After all, Republicans controlled one or both chambers of Congress for three-quarters of Barack Obama’s presidency, and we survived, didn’t we?
Yes, but.
Amanda Marcotte: Clown coup: Trump’s effort to overthrow democracy as well-run as his business (and presidency)
Trump had many tools at hand for a coup — SCOTUS, Bill Barr, the GOP Senate — but went with Twitter “declarations”
On Wednesday afternoon, word went out on social media: A group of MAGA yahoos were outside the Philadelphia Convention Center. They were there to offer backdrop to Rudy Giuliani, Eric Trump and other members of Trump’s reality-TV Oberkommando. The authoritarian Klown Korps had been flown in to give speeches echoing Trump’s demands that the vote-counting happening inside be halted — not for any vaguely legitimate legal reason, but simply because he likes the numbers where they are.
But the plan hit a snag: The good people of Philadelphia, who also know how to read a press release and were not interested in letting the second-born failson and a martini-soaked former Lifelock spokesman do a photo-op menacing the dutiful election officials who are just trying to count the votes. [..]
This isn’t over, to be sure. Trump still has a lot of powerful, intelligent and deeply evil people in his camp who have, at least until now, been shameless about saving this idiot from his own incompetence while running his corrupt schemes. (See: Trump, Donald, impeachment trial of.) But so far, Trump’s efforts to steal this election seem to be backfiring, in large part because he can’t hold it together well enough even to pretend he has a legitimate argument. His compulsive need to get in his own way and make everything worse for himself may end up saving our democracy.
George T. Conway III: A presidency fueled by lies finishes with the worst of them all
Trump is squandering his last and best chance to be truthful and, for once, do something right by the country instead of himself.
It’s somehow fitting. A presidency launched with lies, and fueled by them ever since, was destined to finish with the worst of them all.
Donald Trump’s presidency began on Jan. 20, 2017, with what he asserted was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period,” a claim whose absurdity was evident to anyone with eyes. From his first week in office, the president lied about an election that everyone agreed he had won. He claimed that “VOTER FRAUD,” by “millions” of noncitizens, cadavers and “people registered in two states,” had deprived him of a popular-vote majority in 2016.
But all that was just the beginning. Trump has told lies about virtually everything ever since, lies big and small, meaningful and meaningless, saying anything to put himself in the best position or the best light. He lied about paying off a porn star. He lied, despite photographic evidence, about having never met a woman who accused him of rape.
He lied about what he was impeached for, and about what he should have been impeached for, by claiming his phone call with the Ukrainian president was perfect, and by asserting that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had exonerated him. He lied about deceptively marking up a hurricane map with a Sharpie.
And on and on and on.
Jennifer Senior: Republicans, Now Is the Time to Step Up
It’s not too late to end up on the right side of history.
Speaking from the White House briefing room on Thursday night, President Trump tried to delegitimize the 2020 election. This attempt may have been shuddersome, disgraceful and dangerous. But there’s one thing it was not: a surprise.
On the contrary. It was tediously predictable, exactly what you’d expect of a man who has spent four years lumbering through Washington, crushing custom after custom and norm after norm. As Trump faltered on the brink of losing a presidential election — the first incumbent to do so in 28 years — he declared, baselessly, that absentee votes legitimately cast were fraudulent; that the diligent workers paid to count those votes were doing something nefarious; and that the “election apparatus” in the still-unresolved states were controlled by Democrats. (They are not. Georgia’s secretary of state, for one, is a Republican.)
“They are trying to steal an election,” Trump said, speaking (I think) of ballot counters in Detroit and Philadelphia. “They are trying to rig an election. We can’t let that happen.”
But here’s my question for Republicans: Are they going to let this happen? Allow the head of their party to challenge the integrity of an election with record-breaking participation rates — in the midst of a pandemic, no less — just because he despises the result?
Heather Digby Parton: Will Mitch McConnell back Trump’s delusional last-ditch battle? So far the signs are ominous
McConnell doesn’t actually believe Trump can win. But when it comes to maintaining power, he’ll try anything
Biden’s apparent or imminent victory — it was the blessed 36 hours in which we didn’t have to hear Donald Trump’s voice. After his obnoxious declaration of victory at 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, he stuck to primal tweeting until Thursday evening when he emerged to make the worst speech of his career. He disconsolately rattled off a fantasy laundry list of voting irregularities and declared, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” Reading haltingly from a script, he rambled about media conspiracies and lied about vote-rigging, saying, “Ultimately, I have a feeling judges are going to have to rule” which he has always believed was his failsafe. It set a new standard for awful, which is really saying something.
Once again, a majority of Americans were no doubt horrified, embarrassed and frightened that their so-called president was declaring the American system that elected him to be corrupt because he is now on track to lose. [..]
I don’t know if the Democrats can gain those two Senate seats in Georgia. But you can bet that Mitch McConnell will do everything he can to prevent it. If that means helping Donald Trump turn this country inside out over the next couple of months so that his people stay active and engaged, he will do it. And so will his troops. If the last four years have shown us anything, it’s that any niggling concerns Republicans might have about destroying our democracy are easily disregarded, when it’s a question of maintaining their own power.
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