Author Archives: BerenicPaling

Live From New York It’s…(The End Of The Season Of) Saturday Night Live!

by BerenicPaling Posted on May 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Saturday Night Live has been around forever. The first season wasn’t even on TV, it was performed in the fields, where people lived for millennia prior to the advent of structures. Since then the NBC sketch show has experienced hills & valleys in terms of both relevance and quality. Though the jury on the latter is still deliberating, with regard to the former it seems pretty safe to say 2017 is a peak. Everyone watches because of Trump & co, a clownish bunch who are often hard to distinguish from satire in life but somehow still laid bare in comedy.

The internet has done lots of fun and wonderful things but it’s also done bad and terrible things and, most confusingly, things that are both good and bad. Facebook has turned the world into news consumers. That is both good and bad. Good: More readers of news! Bad: No one can escape the news. So these weeks we’ve had of breaking news interrupting developing news interrupting holy shit omg news, and all of it very serious and terrible and dramatic and unreal, make everyone exhausted. They’re exhausting. So we all gather around basic cable together, like our parents and their parents before us, for some cathartic jokes about Trump and his merry band of incompetent kleptocrats.

One of my favorite lines is from the Hayden Carruth poem Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey. “Here we are now in the White Tower, leaning on one another, too tired to go home.”

It us.

Anyway, tonight is the season finale!

The Rock is the host and Katy Perry, who I still can’t hear without getting sad about the election, is the musical guest.

The cold open had the Trumps (and Death?) singing Hallelujah.

It was a call back to this:

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Then the Rock said he was going to run for president with Tom Hanks.

Remember a few inches above this when I was like, “Death?” That was supposed to be Steve Bannon in the cold open. It’s a recurring thing. I forgot!

Here’s an earlier skit with Bannon as Death:

Then Alec Baldwin really took his Trump impersonation to a whole new level:

Just kidding. That is a scene from the 90s thriller Malice.

This is the real clip from tonight. Alec does a perfect Trump impersonation.

This post is being updated.

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Live From New York It’s…(The End Of The Season Of) Saturday Night Live!

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Ryan Says Obamacare Is Around for Good if Hillary Clinton Wins

by BerenicPaling Posted on November 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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HuffPo’s Jeffrey Young passes along a radio interview of Paul Ryan:

Obamacare doesn’t get repealed, likely ever, if Hillary wins….Agree?

Yes. Yes, I do agree….All of us have basically gotten to consensus on what our plan is, but we have to win an election to put it in place.

OK, that’s good to hear. Except for one thing: remember what Ryan’s predecessor said a couple of days after the 2012 election? Diane Sawyer asked John Boehner if he still planned to repeal Obamacare:

I think the election changes that. It’s pretty clear the president was reelected. Obamacare is the law of the land.

As I recall, Boehner was immediately savaged for saying this, and within a few months House Republican passed yet another Obamacare repeal. Since then they’ve voted to repeal Obamacare nearly a dozen times or so, depending on how you count. The most recent attempt was in February of this year.

If Ryan is smart, he’ll call it quits on Obamacare repeal and work instead on finding places where he can horsetrade with Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, I don’t know if Ryan is smart. Nor do I know if his caucus will allow him to move on even if he wants to. We’ll see.

Original article: 

Ryan Says Obamacare Is Around for Good if Hillary Clinton Wins

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James Bond Gives $50,000 to a Sketchy Bernie Sanders Super-PAC

by BerenicPaling Posted on September 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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James Bond’s latest attempt to save the world didn’t involve blowing things up or chasing down bad guys. Instead, Daniel Craig, the Englishman who plays Bond, acted with his wallet, making a healthy donation to support his preferred presidential candidate: Bernie Sanders. But in doing so, he may have played into a villain’s hands.

Over the summer, Craig donated nearly $50,000 to a super-PAC called Americans Socially United, which claims to support the Vermont senator’s dark-horse bid for the Democratic nomination, according to the Center for Public Integrity (CPI). The pro-Sanders super-PAC is run by a self-described lobbyist, Cary Lee Peterson, who “has routinely run afoul of creditors and the law,” with two outstanding warrants in the state of Arizona. The group was initially called “Ready for Bernie Sanders 2016” and “Bet on Bernie 2016,” both illegal uses of the candidate’s name that caused confusion for Sanders supporters who accidentally donated to Peterson’s PAC instead of the campaign. Peterson’s group has not filed the legally required campaign finance disclosures, CPI reports.

Moreover, Sanders, who supports campaign finance reform, doesn’t want super-PACs supporting his campaign and has asked Americans Socially United to stop its efforts on his behalf. His campaign sent Peterson a cease and desist letter in June, which Peterson continues to disregard.

But Peterson contends that he is simply trying to support his favorite candidate. “You don’t need to look back on my past,” Peterson told CPI. “I’m going out there trying to make a difference.”

Thus far, Craig is sticking to his guns, too. “Currently, I have been informed of no evidence to question that my donation has not been used as intended,” he told CPI. “Should that situation occur, then clearly, I will review my position.”

Super-PACs, which are largely unregulated by the Federal Election Commission, can get away with a lot. As attorney Paul Ryan explained to CPI, the people running these super-PACs could legally use the money they raise “to buy a yacht and sail off into the sunset.”

Originally posted here:  

James Bond Gives $50,000 to a Sketchy Bernie Sanders Super-PAC

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