Tag Archives: humor

Ryan, McCarthy Both Deny Nasty Remark About Trump, But It Turns Out There’s a Recording

by LorrineBucher Posted on May 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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Last year, after a meeting with the Ukranian prime minister, the #2 Republican in the House turned to Paul Ryan and said, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” That’s from Rep. Kevin McCarthy, and it’s apparently what he thought back in June after Trump had won the Republican nomination. Ryan quickly shushed him, but the Washington Post found out about it today:

When initially asked to comment on the exchange, Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan, said: “That never happened,” and Matt Sparks, a spokesman for McCarthy, said: “The idea that McCarthy would assert this is absurd and false.”

After being told that The Post would cite a recording of the exchange, Buck, speaking for the GOP House leadership, said: “This entire year-old exchange was clearly an attempt at humor. No one believed the majority leader was seriously asserting that Donald Trump or any of our members were being paid by the Russians. What’s more, the speaker and leadership team have repeatedly spoken out against Russia’s interference in our election, and the House continues to investigate that activity.”

Good on Adam Entous of the Post for getting a response from both men before they knew he had a recording. It’s good for the public to understand how shamelessly and effortlessly they’ll flatly lie about anything they think they can get away with.

Anyway, the new story is that this was just a big joke.¹ That’s also the latest excuse making the rounds for Trump asking James Comey to kill the Russia investigation.² There sure are a lot of jokers in the Republican Party these days.

UPDATE: The transcript is here. McCarthy says, “There’s…there’s two people, I think, Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump…laughter…swear to God.” Then there’s more laughter. So yeah, it sounds like it was just a joke, though probably in a “funny cuz it’s true” sort of sense.

¹Actually, I can buy this. McCarthy’s comment really does sound like dark humor. Still, even if he didn’t mean it literally, it shows just what he thought about Trump and the Russians. In humor, veritas.

²This is pretty ridiculous in the case of Trump, since as near as I can tell he has no sense of humor and never laughs about anything. That’s probably because he’s too busy obsessing about how badly everyone treats him.

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Ryan, McCarthy Both Deny Nasty Remark About Trump, But It Turns Out There’s a Recording

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged brendan-buck, case, election, house, humor, Ona, public, russia, trump, washington | Comments Off

Washington Is Finally Getting What It Deserves as It Sinks Into The Sea

by Myrna Posted on July 30, 2015

Mother Nature has a great sense of humor. Orhan Cam/Shutterstock New research indicates that Washington, D.C., is rapidly sinking into the ocean, news that might not make the rest of the country all that sad. The research, from the University of Vermont, the U.S. Geological Survey and several other institutions, projects the land beneath the Washington area will drop 6 or more inches in the next 100 years. That’s in addition to rising sea levels due to climate change, which is melting ice sheets and causing thermal expansion of the oceans. Climate change has already caused 8 inches of sea level rise since 1880, and is expected to raise average global sea levels another 1 to 4 feet by the end of this century. Relative sea level rise in the Chesapeake Bay region is happening faster than any other part of the Atlantic coast, according to tidal records, and twice as fast as global averages. Read the rest at The Huffington Post. View this article: Washington Is Finally Getting What It Deserves as It Sinks Into The Sea ; ; ;

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Washington Is Finally Getting What It Deserves as It Sinks Into The Sea

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged climate-change, fish, google, grist, humor, introduction, nasa, news, solar, the atlantic, university, vermont | Comments Off

This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

by JeanettHowie Posted on December 4, 2014

This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

By John Lighton 4 Dec 2014 1:15 pmcomments Share

The worst storm of 2014 is moving across the Western Pacific, headed for the Philippines. There’s a chance it will just graze the island nation — but there’s also a chance that Super Typhoon Hagupit is headed straight for the area hit so hard last year by Super Typhoon Haiyan.

Writes USA Today:

Hagupit strengthened into a typhoon Tuesday and continued to strengthen Wednesday, with sustained winds of 150 mph, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center said.

That is equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane. A typhoon is the same type of storm as a hurricane but is called a typhoon in the western Pacific Ocean.

The storm was about 800 miles east of the Philippines and could be near the island nation by Saturday.

When Haiyan struck last year, 7,000 were killed or went missing, and, more than a year later, the country is still recovering. Many people still live in temporary shelters, made homeless by the most powerful typhoon to ever hit land.

At the time, there was also a U.N. climate conference underway in Warsaw, Poland. The Philippines’ climate change commissioner, Yeb Saño, had his hometown destroyed, and went on a hunger strike during the conference in hopes of spurring “meaningful” progress.

Now, as Hagupit bears down, there’s another U.N. climate conference underway, in Lima, Peru. This time, Saño is at home. He is again trying to raise awareness about his vulnerable country’s plight in the face of climate change. Notably, on Twitter:

And sometimes, with a sense of humor about the whole thing:

Fingers crossed that this year’s summit won’t get the same kind of deadly and urgent reminder of the threat of climate change that Haiyan delivered in 2013.

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This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged anchor, area, hagupit, humor, pur, saturday, super, typhoon, year | Comments Off

Did the White House Create a Bunch of Fake Lois Lerner Emails?

by DesireeCheesman Posted on June 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Howard Kurtz thinks Jon Stewart is going too damn easy on our current president:

When it comes to Obama, the humor is gentle. I do recall Stewart pummeling the president over the botched ObamaCare rollout. But on the IRS scandal this week, he mocked the tax agency for almost criminal stupidity in losing all those emails—but never questioned whether the Obama administration is engaged in a coverup.

Yes, Kurtz actually wrote that. He thinks Jon Stewart should have entertained the possibility that someone in the White House invented a time machine and wrote a bunch of emails in 2011 asking the IT department at the IRS to fix Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive. Maybe it was the same time machine that inserted Obama’s birth record in the Honolulu Advertiser in 1961. Or, perhaps, Mission Impossible-like, a crack team of forgers ginned up a bunch of fake emails that just looked like they were from 2011.

Look, I’m not saying that’s what’s happened. I’m just asking the question. It’s what any responsible journalist would do.

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Did the White House Create a Bunch of Fake Lois Lerner Emails?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged house, humor, life, mother, obama, photos, white-house | Comments Off

Will Colbert Use "The Late Show" To Save the World?

by Roger Frost Posted on April 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jumping from his niche cable show on Comedy Central to a plum CBS slot will roughly triple Stephen Colbert’s national television audience. So when he takes over David Letterman’s late night show next year, we at Climate Desk be tracking one thing in particular with great interest: Will he bring his astute political satire about global warming to an even bigger audience?

None of the current late night barons—Kimmel, Fallon, Ferguson among them—are especially notable for speaking out about climate change, though they occasionally work it into the odd monologue or guest appearance. Colbert is different. In his role as right-wing Satirist-in-Chief, Colbert has regularly skewered climate deniers by pretending to be one of them. One of my favorites is this takedown of Fox and Friends (a frequent target of the show), whose hosts had accused Nickelodeon of pushing a sinister warmist agenda…via SpongeBob Square Pants:

The Colbert Report
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And this year, he nailed Donald Trump:

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But Colbert has not just mercilessly parodied the attacks on climate science, he has also delved into some of the more complex aspects of climate adaptation, including geoengineering. During an interview last year, Harvard University environmental scientist David Keith presented the case for pouring out sulfuric acid into the atmosphere to temporarily ameliorate the effects of warming. “It would be a totally imperfect technical fix,” Keith said. “It would have risks. It wouldn’t get us out of the long-run need to stop polluting. But it might actually save people and be useful.”

But perhaps his best—most sobering, most blistering, most poignant—take on the subject was during this segment from January 2013, where he lampooned an emerging trend of commentators throwing up their hands in faux despair, and resigning themselves to the fate of a warming world. (In this case, he’s going after Erick Erickson, who worked for CNN at the time):

COLBERT: Sure, I know: America beat Tojo, we crushed Hitler, we put a man on the moon, but incrementally reducing CO2 emissions? That sounds like a lot of work. And how can fight an enemy we can’t see? I mean, get out of here, get, get out of here, carbon! Swats air. Did I hit it? I don’t know. So it’s high-time we stop trying to solve the problem and resign ourselves to each day getting worse. Because ladies and gentlemen, when Erick Erickson says “get used to it”, he means get used to city-swallowing storms, mass extinctions, deadly heat waves, crippling floods, and droughts that make a desert out of Oklahoma. And, that’s just how it is now. Our problems are just too big to cure. So join me and Erick. Give up. Crawl into bed with a cheesecake and wait for death. And now, sure, the only thing worse than global warming itself might be knowing you’re destroying the planet, and doing nothing, but if guys like me and Erick have our way, you’d better get used to it.

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Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, Hagen, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged chief, climate-change, colbert, episodes, facebook, friends, humor, indecision, venta | Comments Off

"Mitt" the Movie: What’s Not There

by EsmeraldaYarnol Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Forgive me for being parochial, but I was looking for a specific piece of footage in the new Netflix behind-the-scenes documentary on Mitt Romney—simply titled Mitt—that was made by Greg Whiteley, who trailed the GOP candidate for six years through Election Night 2012. I yearned to see Romney’s response to the release of the 47-percent video: how he personally reacted to this revelation and how his campaign planned its public reply. This was a significant moment in Romney’s political life. How he handled it could be quite enlightening. After all, the film does record how Romney dealt with his 2008 loss in the GOP presidential primaries. (In conversations with his family, Romney acknowledges he was branded “the flippin’ Mormon,” and says, “I think I’m a flawed candidate.”) But Whiteley offers us no peek at how the former CEO processed the historic 47-percent moment that did much to define him—or reinforce an existing definition.

In fact, for all the access Whiteley obtained, he serves up little material that will alter the basic story of Mitt. Sure, the viewer will learn that Romney likes to romp in the snow with his grandkids, that he’s happier with a pair of duct-taped gloves than a new set, that he has a somewhat dark sense of humor, that he often thinks of his father, that wife Ann is tightly strung, and that Romney likes to pick up trash from the floors or balconies of hotel rooms during tense moments (say, before he hits the stage for a debate or prior to the announcement of election results). Certainly, Romney comes across as less robotic in these 90-minutes of home-movie-like scenes. But the film offers no insights about the fellow. His faults as a presidential candidate are not examined. What he really believes—other than the notion that the nation is heading off a cliff due to too much taxation and regulation—is left on the cutting room floor. That is, if it was ever captured.

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"Mitt" the Movie: What’s Not There