Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Thoughts for the Horrified (NY Times Column)
Tuesday's fallout may last decades, but we must still stand up for American values now.
Paul Krugman: Despair, American Style (NY Times Column)
In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have "lost the narrative of their lives." That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we're looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.
William Saletan: The Five Baskets of Trump Voters (Slate)
The deplorables make up only one basket. If Democrats dismiss the other four, they'll keep losing elections.
David Wong: How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind (Cracked)
I'm going to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon in three movies. And then some text.
Dr. Michael Gregor: Morning Sickness May Protect Mother and Child (Nutrition Facts)
Why do those eating plant-based diets appear to suffer less from morning sickness?
Paul Keegan: Lethal Pastoral (London Review of Books)
Any life of A.E. Housman is an assemblage of the already known and the well documented. Housman's stage-management of his reputation was as controlled as his quatrains, and the mask of reserve - assumed directly after he inexplicably failed his finals in Greats at Oxford - became a perfected gesture, a way of being in the world structured as a renunciation.
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"Doug's Most Shared Facebook Post" Today
wrote:
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Suggestion
Thank You Notes
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Temp
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"FAREWELL AMERICA!"
BURN IT ALL DOWN!
THE CATS VOTE.
"WELL, SET EM' UP JOE, I GOT A LITTLE STORY I'D LIKE YOU TO KNOW."
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Found the remaining caterpillar dead this morning. Seems to have fallen off the plant and died in the dirt. Sigh.
Throws Down Gauntlet
Elizabeth Warren
U.S. Democrats' liberal firebrand, Senator Elizabeth Warren, threw down the gauntlet to President-elect Donald Trump (R-Pendejo) on Thursday, telling labor union members there are financial and social issues where her party will fight him and continuing to blast the Republican.
Battling bigotry is the first job for Democrats after the election, said Warren, of Massachusetts, giving a sense of how her party will operate now that it no longer controls the White House and remains the minority in both chambers of Congress.
"We will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled Americans - on anyone," said Warren, who sparred frequently over Twitter with Trump and criticized him on the campaign trail in the weeks leading up to Tuesday's election. "Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever."
She said Trump had "encouraged a toxic stew of hatred and fear" and during the campaign "regularly made statements that undermined core values of our democracy."
In the speech to the AFL-CIO labor federation, Warren also said Democrats will resist attempts to loosen financial regulation, "gut" the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Elizabeth Warren
Retiring From Acting?
Robert Redford
Robert Redford says he is planning on retiring from acting soon to focus on directing and on his first love - art.
The 80-year old star of "Out of Africa" and "The Sting" told his grandson Dylan in an online interview that he was getting tired of acting.
"I'm an impatient person, so it's hard for me to sit around and do take after take after take," Redford said in the interview published on Thursday for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. "Going back to sketching - that's sort of where my head is right now."
Redford, who has never won an Oscar for acting despite a storied 50-year career, will not be departing from the big screen any time soon.
He said he has two more acting projects in the works. One is a love story for older people with Jane Fonda, his co-star in the 1967 romantic comedy "Barefoot in the Park," and the other is a lighter movie with Casey Affleck and Sissy Spacek. According to movie website IMDB.com, both movies are expected to be released in 2017.
Robert Redford
US Close To Accepting
Australia's Refugees
The United States and Australia are close to announcing a deal in which the U.S. would resettle hundreds of asylum seekers banished by Australia to Pacific island camps, a newspaper reported on Friday.
The U.S. had agreed to accept up to 1,800 refugees held for up to three years at Australia's expense in camps on the impoverished island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, The Australian newspaper reported.
Such an agreement struck with the Obama administration could be opposed by President-elect Donald Trump (R-2 Immigrant Wives), who has called for a moratorium or tight restrictions on Muslim immigration. Most of the asylum seekers are Muslims from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The agreement could empty the camps that have been condemned by human rights groups as a cruel abrogation of Australia's responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention.
Australia's Refugees
Scraps Planned Nuclear Plants
Vietnam
Vietnam is scrapping plans to build two nuclear power plants over soaring costs and safety concerns, state media reported on Friday.
The communist nation approved plans to build the plants in 2009 in Ninh Thuan province with an eye towards easing energy shortages brought about by its rapidly industrialising economy.
They were slated to have a capacity of 4,000 megawatts, developed with assistance from Russia's Rosatom and a Japanese consortium, and would have been the first nuclear plants in Southeast Asia.
But state-run media reported that the government has asked Vietnam's rubber stamp parliament, the National Assembly, to suspend the projects.
The country of 93 million relies mostly on coal and hydropower but has said it wants to increase renewable energy production in the next 15 years.
Vietnam
Fears For His Life
Pro-Choice Doctor
As I've headed to work in recent days to see abortion patients in my office, I have felt bereft: All the premises of my life, work, education, and future were gone. Something very profound in the meaning of the America I know has been destroyed with the election of Donald J. Trump as president.
One of the reasons I've felt this way is that, for the past 45 years, I have dedicated my medical career, skills, and life to the assistance of women who need my services as a physician in performing safe abortions.
It is my definition of practicing medicine: a noble art that involves helping other people at the most personal level. There is nothing more personal, intimate, and private for a woman than deciding whether to have a baby or end a pregnancy.
This lifetime dedication to helping those women means for me, among other things, that I have a home, a family, an office, a staff, deeply satisfying work, and all the connections and financial obligations that those things bring.
But I have lived for the past 45 years under constant stress. Anti-abortion protests have targeted me personally. I have received innumerable death threats because I do this important work.
Read the original article
Pro-Choice Doctor
Zimbabwe Drops Charges Against Hunter
Cecil the Lion
A Zimbabwean court has thrown out charges against a local hunter accused of failing to stop the killing of the country's most prized lion by an American dentist, his lawyer said on Friday.
Walter Palmer, a lifelong big-game hunter from Minnesota, touched off a global controversy when he killed Cecil, a rare black-maned lion, with a bow and arrow outside Hwange National Park in western Zimbabwe in July last year.
While Zimbabwean authorities said Palmer had legal authority to hunt, they were stung by the international outcry and charged local hunter Theo Bronkhorst, who assisted Palmer, with failing to prevent an unlawful hunt.
Bronkhorst's lawyers then applied to the High Court in Zimbabwe's second city of Bulawayo to set aside the charge, arguing it could not have been an offence under the country's wildlife laws if Palmer had a permit to hunt.
Cecil had been fitted with a collar to track his movements but strayed outside the confines of Hwange National Park and was then shot. Bronkhorst was accused of laying bait to lure Cecil out of the park. Palmer said at the time that no one in his hunting party realized the targeted lion was Cecil.
Cecil the Lion
Cabinet Fills Out With Washington Insiders
'Drain the Swamp'?
Donald Trump on Friday announced Vice President-elect Mike Pence (R-Pro Rape) would take over transition planning from Chris Christie (R-Soon To Be Indicted), a move that sources say reflect a diminished role for the New Jersey governor.
Sources tell NBC News that the controversy surrounding two former Christie aides being convicted in the closure of George Washington Bridge lanes was an issue, but more significant was Christie's failure to vocally defend Trump at key moments throughout the campaign.
Christie will remain a vice-chair, along with a number of other key campaign advisers, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Philanderer), Gen. Mike Flynn and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-Philanderer), among others.
Pence, as well as Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and campaign chief Steve Bannon (R-Racist) will be leading the charge to whittle down names for cabinet positions. The transition executive committee will include three of his children (by his first wife), Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump.
But despite Donald Trump's campaign pledge to "drain the swamp" in Washington and his outsider campaign, many of the prospects are clear Washington insiders.
'Drain the Swamp'?
Shocking! Resigns at CNN
Corey Lewandowski
Corey Lewandowski is leaving CNN… and probably joining the Trump administration.
Donald Trump's former campaign manager has resigned from his job as political commentator, the cable news network announced Friday. And Lewandowski was spotted paying a visit to Trump Tower on Friday morning, so it's easy to conclude that he'll have a role in President-elect Trump's White House. (Press secretary, perhaps?)
Lewandowski joined CNN in June, shortly after being fired as Trump's campaign manager. The network took a lot of criticism for putting a Trump insider on the air as a political pundit - especially since he was still receiving severance pay from the campaign. He was also a target of criticism for grabbing reporter Michelle Fields by the arm during a Trump event in March. (Trump said at the time of Lewandowski's firing that he was "a good guy, a friend of mine, but I think it's time now for a different kind of campaign.")
Corey Lewandowski
Sets Record
Dave the Giant Earthworm
Imagine being in your garden and stumbling on an enormous earthworm that measures about as long as a standard bowling pin is tall, and that weighs about the same as a small chocolate bar. The encounter, while likely startling, ended up being a record-setting encounter for a man in the United Kingdom, after he came across what has now been crowned the earthworm that is not only the longest ever found in the U.K., but also the heaviest known wild worm in the world.
The earthworm was named Dave by the stepson of the man who discovered it. It was then sent to the Natural History Museum in London for evaluation, where museum experts determined that Dave is a lob worm, Lumbricus terrestris.
The worm measures nearly 16 inches (40 centimeters) long and weighs almost 1 ounce (26 grams), which sets new records in both categories. In fact, Dave nearly doubled the previous heavyweight record holder: a worm found in Scotland that weighed just 0.5 ounces (15 grams).
Emma Sherlock, senior curator of free-living worms at the Natural History Museum and chair of the Earthworm Society of Britain, said that Dave's size is astounding.
Dave's size is particularly impressive for a worm in the wild, according to experts. With plenty of natural predators and other threats, the Natural History Museum noted that earthworms don't typically survive long enough in the wild to reach such a record size. Sherlock said that the vegetable plot in which Dave was found must have been "incredibly fertile and well-drained."
Dave the Giant Earthworm
In Memory
Robert Vaughn
Robert Vaughn, best known for playing the suave Napoleon Solo in 1960s television spy series, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E," and the last surviving actor from the original "Magnificent Seven" movie, died on Friday from leukemia, his manager said.
Matthew Sullivan said Vaughn, 83, died in a hospital surrounded by his wife Linda Staab and two children, Cassidy and Caitlin. The actor had been receiving treatment for acute leukemia, Sullivan said.
New York-born Vaughn starred with David McCallum in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E," a tongue-in-cheek drama about battling world evil that was inspired by the James Bond books and movies.
The 1964-68 series gave way to a number of spinoff movies including "One Spy Too Many" and "One of Our Spies is Missing" that also starred the two actors.
Vaughn appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows over his 60-year career, including the 1960 movie "The Magnificent Seven", alongside Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen. He was the last survivor of the movie's original seven lead actors.
Other movies included "Bullitt" in 1968, again with McQueen, and "The Young Philadelphians" in 1959, for which he received a supporting actor Oscar nomination.
On television, Vaughn appeared in numerous shows, including "The A-Team," a 1998 TV version of "The Magnificent Seven," and, in 2012, as a character in the long-running British soap opera, "Coronation Street."
British actor Stephen Fry said on Twitter that Vaughn was "such a fine actor, one of the best Columbo villains (no higher praise than that) and utterly charming man."
Robert Vaughn
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