Recommended Reading
from Bruce
The making of Hillary Clinton & Donald Trump (hillaryclinton.com)
Hillary has spent the past five decades fighting for kids and families. Trump has spent five decades lining his own pockets. Shuffle through the years to see what each candidate has been up to since they began their careers.
Tom Danehy: Tom thinks Clinton is the worst Democratic candidate, but Trump is the worst candidate ever … ever (Tucson Weekly)
However, while Clinton is the worst Democratic candidate of my lifetime, Donald Trump is the worst presidential candidate of all time. He's worse than white supremacist George Wallace, who actually won five states in the 1968 election. He's even worse than Aaron Burr, whose sole claim to fame is that he killed one of the Founding Fathers.
Suzanne Moore: The backlash against feminism has hit a new low with Donald Trump (The Guardian)
If this was a dude-only election, Trump would win by a landslide. His rise echoes the three-decade pushback against gains made by women.
2016 Nobel Prize In Literature Awarded To Bob Dylan (Reuters)
The announcement was met with gasps in Stockholm's stately Royal Academy hall, followed - unusually - by some laughter.
Jessica Valenti: If only women voted, Trump would lose. We need men on our side (The Guardian)
Can America's kind and decent men please step up their game and help avoid electing a sexist monster?
21 Reasons You're Having A Hard Time Making Friends (Cracked)
If you're feeling really lonely lately, well, take solace in the fact that mostly everyone else is probably the same exact way. As it turns out, the deeper we dive into the 21st century, the less friendly our species is becoming.
Carolyn Burke: 8 Insane Donald Trump Moments The World Totally Forgot (Cracked)
8. Trump Discontinued Medical Coverage For His Own Disabled Nephew
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Bonus Links
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"GRAB THEM BY THE PUSSY!"
"GO BACK TO CHINA."
"…A MESS OF CONFUSION. THAT IS WHY IT WORKS."
"JUST A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR…"
"PREDATORS IN ARMS"
"THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!"
"EVERY DAY A FUNERAL"
THE "SITZKRIEG" ENDS.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Got my (free) fancy-schmancy VR glasses for this Sunday's Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXVII from Knoxlabs in the mail.
Nobel Prize for Literature
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first American to win the top honor since Toni Morrison in 1993 and the first musician to be recognized.
The 75-year old singer-songwriter was honored for his intricate, evocative lyrics, and for his alternately political and phantasmagoric anthems such as "Blowin' in the Wind," "Forever Young," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," "Rainy Day Women#12 & 35," and "The Times They Are a-Changin'." He joins the ranks of William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Saul Bellow, William Butler Yeats, and Ernest Hemingway - all previous laureates.
In selecting Dylan, the Nobel committee praised the singer and songwriter "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." His prize comes with 8 million Swedish kronor, which roughly equals $900,000. He will be honored in Stockholm, Sweden, in December.
Dylan's selection is a break with tradition. Although he has authored a book of poem, a collection of writings and drawings, and an acclaimed memoir, "Chronicles: Volume One," the bulk of his writing has been the songs he popularized. Typically, the Nobel is awarded to poets or authors of short stories and novels.
Dylan's work draws on myriad influences. He first came to prominence as a folk singer, building on the tradition of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. As his career continued, he has worked in many genres, from gospel to country to rock and roll, even releasing an album of Christmas songs.
Bob Dylan
Blistering Speech
Michelle Obama
An impassioned Michelle Obama delivered a blistering indictment against Donald Trump (R-Orange Pendejo) at a campaign event for Hillary Clinton in Manchester, N.H., Thursday.
Though she did not mention the Republican presidential nominee by name, it was clear that the candidate - and the volley of allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against him by multiple women - were the targets of the first lady's remarks.
"The fact is that, in this election we have a candidate for president of the United States who, over the course of his lifetime and over the course of this campaign, has said things about women that are so shocking, so demeaning, I simply will not repeat anything here today," she said.
Referring to the recently released 2005 recording of Trump making lewd comments about groping and kissing women without consent, Obama said, "I can't believe that I'm saying that a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women."
This was not "just locker room banter," she said, referring to Trump's defense of the comments. "It was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior."
Michelle Obama
Dakota Pipeline Review
Bernie
Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and four other U.S. senators on Thursday called on President Barack Obama to order a comprehensive environmental review of a pipeline project that has stirred widespread opposition from Native Americans and environmental activists.
After a federal appeals court on Sunday night denied a request to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the senators asked Obama to direct the Army Corps of Engineers to complete a full environmental impact statement, including stronger tribal consultation, for a contested part of the route.
"The project's current permits should be suspended and all construction stopped until a complete environmental and cultural review has been completed for the entire project," said the letter by Sanders and Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein, Ed Markey, Patrick Leahy and Benjamin Cardin.
Also on Thursday, the governments of 19 cities, including St. Louis and Minneapolis, passed ordinances to support the Standing Rock tribe in opposition of the pipeline.
In recent weeks, protests against the Dakota Access pipeline led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota have drawn international attention, prompting the U.S. government to temporarily block construction on federal land.
Bernie
Immigrants Matter
2016 Nobels
Scientists based in the United States won the lion's share of this year's Nobel prizes in science and economics but all of them were immigrants, making literature laureate Bob Dylan the only U.S.-born winner of 2016.
Of the nine winners in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics, six work at U.S. universities. Five of those were born in Britain and one in Finland, making this the first year since 1999 that no American-born scientist has claimed a Nobel.
The roll of honor highlights the pre-eminence of the United States in attracting the world's most brilliant scientists.
According to one of the British winners, it also reflects the political climate that drove many scientists to leave his home country a generation ago.
Atif Mian, a professor of economics at Princeton who was born in Pakistan, said the science prizes were a reminder of the value of immigration when many voters, from the United States to Britain, are demanding tighter controls.
2016 Nobels
Film-Makers Fined $2 Million
Harrison Ford
A film production company was on Wednesday fined £1.6 million ($2 million, 1.75 million euros) over an accident on the set of the latest Star Wars movie in which the actor Harrison Ford broke his leg.
Prosecutors said Ford, then 71, was pinned to the ground by a metal hydraulic door after it broke during filming of the blockbuster film at Pinewood Studios west of London in June 2014.
It acted like a "blunt guillotine", coming down "millimetres from his face" as the actor passed underneath, pinning him by the pelvis to the ground, prosecutor Andrew Marshall told the court, adding that the door was "capable of killing one or possibly two people".
The Disney-owned Foodles Production (UK) was handed the penalty after it admitted two breaches of health and safety laws during filming of "Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens" in which Ford reprised his role as Han Solo.
Ruling in the case, Judge Francis Sheridan said the production company had carried out a risk assessment on the door, but failed to tell Ford about the dangers.
Harrison Ford
Shut Down Tar Sands Pipelines
Climate Activists
Wielding little more than wire cutters, wrenches and a willingness to be arrested, a group of climate activists shut down five oil pipelines across the United States on Tuesday.
As of 10:30 a.m. ET, the activists said they had cut down wire fences and manually turned emergency shutdown valves on pipelines in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Washington. Activists also alerted pipeline operators before shutting down the lines.
The targeted pipelines carry a particular type of heavy, high-carbon crude oil from Canada's tar sands region in Alberta.
Nine people, including filmmakers, were arrested and removed from the sites, said Afrin Sopariwala of the Climate Disobedience Center, which helped organize the protests.
She said activists had turned the pipelines' emergency valves to warn of the climate change "emergency" that threatens to bring rising sea levels, more extreme and frequent storms, and other effects.
Climate Activists
Police Face Discipline
Texass
Several San Antonio police officers who wore Republican presidential nomineeDonald Trump's "Make America Great Again" hats during his stop in Texas on Tuesday face discipline for violating a policy against endorsing a candidate while on duty, the police chief said.
More than a dozen officers in uniform wore the red caps with Trump's slogan as they stood with the candidate at an airport, in a video posted on Trump's Twitter page.
The 25-second clip bears the words "We will make America safe & great again, together" as the officers walk away.
San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor later said on Facebook she was "deeply disappointed" by the display and Police Chief William McManus said in a statement the officers showed "poor judgment."
"I expect them to know better than to give the appearance of endorsing a candidate while on duty and in uniform, regardless of the political campaign or the candidate," McManus said.
Texass
Too Minuscule To Be Measured
Texass
Drug criminalization in the United States has inflicted devastating consequences on users while offering few, if any, benefits to public safety, a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday found.
The rights group issued a joint call with the American Civil Liberties Union for nationwide decriminalization of all illicit drugs, arguing that criminalization imposes crippling costs upon users, their families, and taxpayers, and drives racial discrimination and human-rights abuses.
"Every 25 seconds in the United States, someone is arrested for the simple act of possessing drugs for their personal use," the report said.
Nowhere was this concept more powerfully demonstrated than in Texas, where more than 16,000 people were incarcerated in 2015 alone for possessing less than one gram of drugs, according to the report.
Texas defines the possession of such an amount as a "state jail felony," even though the amount weighs less than a quarter of the contents of a sugar packet.
Texass
Land Returned
500,000 Acres
The Obama administration has met its goal of transferring 500,000 acres of land to the control of U.S. tribes under a push by the Interior Department to restore more historic tribal homelands, federal officials said.
A bill signed last week to transfer a 71,000-acre swath of federal public land in Nevada to six tribes in the state helped the administration surpass the mark it set years ago for placing land into trust for tribes.
The strategy ensures the tracts can't be taken from tribes or sold because only a congressional vote can remove the land from tribal ownership or jurisdiction.
Restoring tribal homelands has been a key part of the Obama administration's Indian Country policy. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Larry Roberts, who oversees the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs, said the policy represents a shift from historic federal efforts that resulted in tribes losing millions of acres of land across the U.S. over several hundred years.
500,000 Acres
In Memory
Dario Fo
Dario Fo was one of the leading figures in modern farce and political theatre, whose brilliant satire earned him both a rebuke from the Vatican and the literary world's highest honour.
The Italian satirical dramatist, who died on Thursday aged 90, was banned, censored, rebuked, reviled and refused a US visa for his political affiliations.
Yet he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1997 and many of his 40-odd plays were translated into dozens of languages and performed to packed houses all over the world.
Mime, stand-up comic, historian and political commentator, described by one critic as "quite possibly the world's largest performing rabbit," Fo was a darling of the avant-garde but a thorn in the side of bureaucrats and politicians.
His agit-prop drama drew on such highbrow effects as Jacobean and miracle plays, Japanese theatre and Aristotle, not to mention the writings of Marx, Freud and other polemicists.
The eldest of three children of a railway station master and amateur actor, Fo was born on March 24, 1926, in Sangiano, "a town of smugglers and fishermen" on the shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy.
He made his debut as an actor in 1952 at Milan's Teatro Odeon and recorded a series of comic monologues for radio.
At the same time he began to write satirical cabarets and to act in the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, forming his own revue company with two friends.
Their first collaboration was an irreverent history of the world, "A Finger in the Eye", in which the actress Franca Rame, a member of a famous theatrical family, was a member of the cast.
Fo married her in 1954 and together they founded their own company, in which she was the leading lady and Fo writer, producer, mime and actor.
Early plays were gentle satires like "Corpses Disappear and Women Strip" (1958) and "Archangels Don't Play Pinball" (1960) and "Anyone Who Robs A Foot Is Lucky In Love" (1961).
His work became more political in response to the popular uprisings and turmoil of 1968. With left-wing support he founded the cooperative theatre "Nuova Scene," which soon however wound up because of ideological controversy.
He found a ready audience for his topical satire, epitomised by "Mistero Buffo" -- a retelling of the Christian gospels in an improvised format, which allowed him to comment on everything from corruption in the Catholic church to contemporary social and political issues.
In 1970 Fo broke with the Communists and formed a new troupe, "La Comune", with one of his best known works, "The Accidental Death Of An Anarchist", opening that year.
His outspoken views and political commitment did not endear him to the authorities, and he had numerous run-ins with the Italian government and his works resulted in court cases.
Fo's 2003 play "The Two-Headed Anomaly", which took aim at Italy's then-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, sold out in the theatre but was censored on television after a complaint by one of the billionaire politician's aides.
Dario Fo
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