DramatistDreamer

One of the few plusses of watching the ESPN3 livestream (the other, being coverage of all courts where matches are being played) is that I get other commentators from the world feed, so I don't have to listen to them! These mid 30s babes are showing the rest of the WTA how it's done this Australian Open (Mirjana Lucic Baroni at 34, Serena at 35 and Venus at 36!!!). I like how the Australian schedules their matches. Little lag time between matches, especially on RLA. As much as I love the US Open, sometimes those lags between matches seems infinite!

Four more journalists get felony charges after covering inauguration unrest https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/24/journalists-charged-felonies-trump-inauguration-unrest?CMP=share_btn_tw

Tweets and screeches about voter fraud are diversion tactics. Remember when people were talking about the Internet providers slowing down transmission speeds for some (small companies/individuals), while maintaining higher speeds for others (big companies with big profits)? That might become an issue again. Trump's nominee for head of the FCC, Ajit Pai does not believe in net neutrality and does not want the Internet to be treated as a utility (therefore regulated). That two-tier system may be implemented after all. FCC chairman nominee is bad news for musicians

Just as there is a bill being started in the House to nullify certain HUD regulations that many think would render housing discrimination laws effectively, toothless. Sigh. https://getliberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Local-Zoning-Decisions-Protection-Act-2017.pdf

Remember Guillermo Cañas? He's going to be coaching Jelena Jankovic. He looks...different.

Which makes me ask again, when is Trump going to divest himself of his businesses? Giving control to his sons is not the same thing.

By the way, The WH announced that they fully intend to go ahead with the Dakota Access Pipeline. Add environmental degradation to the growing list.

Well, the FBI is said to be still investigating certain Trump associates so there's that. Perhaps Trump believes that if he keeps Comey under his purview, he can control what comes out of that investigation (if anything at all comes out of that investigation). The worst case scenario is quid por quo, which I'm sure Trump believes in but does Comey?

Perhaps but right now, it just makes them look lazy and inefficient. I decided to watch a few minutes of CBS This Morning and there was a very enlightening interview with the CEO of FedEx that recently met with members of Trump's administration. He disagreed with the U.S. pulling out of the TPP talks, thinks it's a mistake to pull away from trade. Things that pulling apart NAFTA, as the Trump admin. wants to do, could have a "catastrophic" effect on the economy. That interview is worth watching, if you can find it. If I see it anywhere online today, I'll try to post here. BREAKING NEWS: And of course, Trump decides to keep Comey around. "You did a heck of a job, Comey" he probably said.

The Trump administration has not filled at least 3/4 of the 100 most important positions that do not require Congressional approval. Omarosa is the most experienced staff member of this new administration according to the NYT. Donald Trump and a Sea of Empty Desks How lazy is this Trump administration?!

So Trump is being sued by a group of ethics lawyers over constitutional violations and guess who will foot the bill for Trump's legal counsel? The American taxpayer, is who.

There were jokes going around yesterday that her fiance Alexis had better take her dog Chip with him and sleep on the couch for the rest of the tournament.

The ex governor of North Carolina is such a small and petty man. McCrory didn't hand over social media keys to Cooper

Perhaps, after they've tried to strip other things out and are unsuccessful. That will depend on how vociferously the public fights it. As it is now, they're already experimenting with taking Medicaid to grant blocks assigned to states, instead of federal funding. This would be a big change with the possibility to inflict damage on states that have large ratios of very vulnerable people.

Trump’s health care plan would repeat the failures of welfare reform

Just read an article showing the list of lies that Spicer and Kellyanne (Ms. "Alternative Facts") Conjob have been spouting over the last several days. This administration is definitely now known as the Compulsive Liars Club. They make demonstrably false statements that are easily proven false, possibly as a diversion tactic in order to obfuscate, confuse and muddle while they proceed to wreck the ACA, Medicaid (with their disastrous idea of 'block grants') and civil rights policies.

So when is Trump going to divest himself of his company holdings? Because until that paperwork gets filed in those three states, he's still in violation of the rule. A few weeks ago, I read all about how a certain peanut farmer had to give up his business for the Presidency, so why should any one president be an exception to this rule?

Has this been posted? Well, this is interesting but hardly surprising.

This is why I cannot feel sorry for Melania, check her spouting her hubby's birtherism remarks at 1:54

It's not old but if you're stuck in a 1984 mentality, like McEnroe, you were practically chased into retirement by then. Maybe this will be the year people finally stop taking McEnroe's words as gospel.

Probably Wimblegeddon- that year that a whole lot of players crashed out in the first week, a few years ago. Nothing else comes to mind.

Stacey Dash was a tool. Everyone knew this except for, maybe, Stacey Dash. Besides, now that FoxNews Channel's preferred party managed to secure the WH and Congress, while riding on a wave of hate, they no longer have to pretend to tolerate Dash and those of her ilk. They can now pretend to hate celebrities again, even ones on the D List like Stacey. Don't know whether I posted this but apparently a bakery confirmed that they made the Trump inaugural cake and that they were asked to copy Obama's inaugural cake (is there no end to the plagiarism with Trump folks?) but apparently the cake was hollow and had styrofoam on the inside- a very fitting analogy for what we can expect from this administration. Interesting take on the neo Nazi punch heard/seen around the world.

The Trumpkins won't care about this, but On his first day in office, Trump broke 34 promises It's utterly ridiculous that anyone would make promises to complete over three dozen acts on the first day in office but sanity won't apply with this administration.

I didn't even know that Madonna had appeared until I saw a headline on news homepage online. I guess a lot of people were talking about it, but not in my particular circles. On an international note, the former president of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh has finally conceded (after the African Union, the UN warned that they would intervene and several of his cabinet ministers resigned, etc). A flood of people had crossed over into bordering countries like Senegal as a peremptive measure, fearing violence, while Adama Barrow, the newly elected president, went to Senegal for security reasons, to be sworn in as president. It was feared that Jammeh might have the military at his disposal but several military were quoted as expressing confusion over the fact that they seemed to have two commanders-in-chief, and they can only serve one commander-in-chief at a time. As I read about Jammeh boarding a plane for an unknown destination I thought "what a shame that a president can stay in so long and have his constituents get so sick of him, that they want him removed from the country, he cannot even stay in his country, that's how bad he made things!" It also made me reflect on the fact that President Obama was always cognizant of the fact that many of his detractors would be only too eager to label him as an 'African dictator', of sorts, which is why he never even entertained the idea of staying on and made an extra point of using words like "citizen" when talking about what he planned to do next. (I remember his speech in Ethiopia where he only half-joking talked about being perplexed about why certain leaders would want to be president for decades when for him, two terms was enough and how he looked forward to a post presidency where he could go to a beach somewhere and relax while drinking from a coconut--many people cheered this as they themselves were from countries that had experienced dictatorships and "presidents for life"). Of course, reasonable people know the U.S. has term limits but like the nutters screaming about Obamacare 'death panels' and Kenya, there were bound to be people who actually believed he would try to wrest control of the presidency for longer than two terms because they simply "didn't trust that man". To their chagrin, Obama left in the same elegant fashion that he entered the presidency.

Yeah, but there has often been a considerably large (though not majority) faction in the Philippines that has been fairly anti-American for decades. What has changed is Duterte's opinion of the man occupying the White House. Unstable recognizes unstable. Speaking of yesterday's march, There is an article in NYMag that Jared Kushner's brother was spotted at the Women's march. Not really surprising, since I heard that the family is split ideologically, if you can call it that- basically Jared has split off from the views of several family members including his brother.