Friday Reads

It’s Friday! Get ready for the Zombie Apocalypse!

Today’s another one of those remembrance days that stings all of us but is traumatic and personal for others.  I’m not going to focus on the anniversary of the attack on NYC’s Twin Towers but I will point you to one of JJ’s posts from 4 years ago.  JJ’s story is well worth the read as is everything she shares with us.  It’s odd that JJ, BB, and I have all been through three of the nation’s recent defining moments.  JJ’s is 9/11. BB’s is the Boston Marathon Bombing.  Mine is, of course, Hurricane Katrina.

I’m just going to spend another day without TV news anxiously awaiting the second season premiere of Z Nation.  This is the most creative and fun zombie show I’ve ever watched. It has a sense of humor and loves taking swipes at movies and pop culture in general. I had the pleasure of getting BB addicted to it within about 2 shows last year.  She sent me this fun bit of news for the upcoming season.

Nothing is going to stop George R.R. Martin from finishing his Game of Thrones novels!

The bestselling author will have a cameo during the second season of Syfy’s post-apocalyptic thriller Z Nation playing himself as a zombie, EW has exclusively learned.

And as you can see from the photo above and the two others below, Martin is quite undead while signing his own books (and even tries to munch on one brainy copy). The title of Zombie Martin’s book is a fun tease — “A Promise of Spring,” which plays off A Dream of Spring —the expected title of his eventual seventh (and presumably conclusive) novel in his epic A Song of Ice and Fire saga. Currently Martin is working on Book 6, The Winds of Winter.

Declared Martin: “I just want to prove to my fans that even in the Zombie Apocalypse, the Song of Ice and Fire books will still come out!”

Martin will appear in the eighth epsiode of this year’s Z Nation, which returns to Syfy on Friday at 10 p.m. In the show, Martin has been imprisoned by a character called the Collector, who captures celebrity zombies and keeps George chained to a desk for his own nefarious purposes.

The ensemble cast is great!  They cross the country and you never quite know where they will show up.  The cast has evolved of the last season but the kick ass leader of the group is a fantastic black actress Roberta Warren who is helped by a stranded at the north pole national security nerd who goes by Citizen Z.  You’ll never know what he’ll hack to get in contact with them.  Cast members have been killed off, left, and lost but most of the central crew remains.

I had to laugh yesterday at Bobby Jindal.  He held a press conference and attacked Donald Trump as being a narcissist and devoid of substance.  I can imagine that at some level he feels his public life melting into a pool of irrelevance but right now, he’s trying every stupid thing possible.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump responded on Thursday to attacks from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal by suggesting he’d hardly even heard of his GOP rival.

Jindal has consistently ranked at the bottom of the polls, and the GOP frontrunner was happy to point out that out, according to a tweet by Bloomberg politics managing editor Mark Halperin.

Jindal called Trump a “narcissist” and “egomaniac” and released a video Wednesday suggesting actor Charlie Sheen as Trump’s running mate.

Trump dismissed the failed governor as some one below 1%  in the polls and therefore not deserving of a response.   Jindal’s not letting go, however.  This is seriously a man with nothing to lose.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal launched a Twitter tirade against Republican frontrunner Donald Trump on Friday, continuing a 24-hour assault on the business mogul that’s skewered him on everything from his hair to his policy positions.

It started with Jindal’s charge during Thursday’s press conference at the National Press Club that Trump was “shallow,” a “narcissist and an egomaniac,” and a “non-serious carnival act.”

The real estate mogul fired back on Twitter later that day, saying that “Bobby Jindal did not make the debate stage and therefore I have never met him” and that he would “only respond to people that register more than 1% in the polls.”

“I never thought he had a chance and I’ve been proven right,” Trump’s tweet read.

In response, Jindal mocked the businessman with a line Trump has popularly used to criticize candidates like Jeb Bush.

“I’m disappointed,” he tweeted. “Is this the best you can do? Are you suffering from low energy today?”

I will say that Jindal’s pretty good with the come backs.  That’s about all he’s good for, however.

Mitch McConnell was dealt a serious blow in the Senate yesterday as Senate Democrats found their spines and stood up for the President’s Iraq deal.  The GOP is showing signs of major butt hurt.  I’m enjoying this one.

It may be years before the political fallout of the Senate’s mostly party-line vote Thursday to preserve the Iran nuclear agreement becomes clear. But it’s already a defining campaign issue — and like the Iraq War and Obamacare votes last decade, looks likely to remain a stark dividing line in many election cycles to come.

Republicans are plotting to make Democrats pay dearly for backing an agreement the GOP argues hinges on an historic enemy of the United States playing nice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to return to the floor next week to force Democrats to take more votes Republicans say they’ll regret as soon as Iran violates the terms of the deal or sponsors terrorist attacks, which critics believe is just a matter of time.

After that will come the attack ads, national GOP officials say. It’s expected to be a key cog of Republicans’ electoral strategy: some GOP senators are already comparing it to Obamacare in its scope and potential to damage Democratic supporters politically.

“It will be very harmful to their chances,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

“I don’t know what else the Democrats could do to chase the pro-Israel community in the United States any further in the Republican direction,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former NRSC chairman. “This is the same mistake they made on the Affordable Care Act. They made this a partisan issue.”

Democrats acknowledge the political risk of the vote — 42 Democrats successfully filibustered a resolution to scuttle the Iran deal — but say Republicans are overplaying their hand. If the agreement succeeds in curbing Iran’s nuclear program, the GOP effort will at the very least fizzle, they say, if not hurt Republicans for opposing a move toward peace.

The Boston Globe is reporting that zombies are heading towards Trump Towers. Yes!  Team Romney is back!

Some of them go back to 2002, the win. Others slogged through Iowa, twice, and rode aboard the Mitt Mobile. In 2012, they were so close to the White House they could taste it.

Now, the Mitt Romney diaspora — an army of former aides and advisers from Romney’s long political career — are arrayed among a host of Republican presidential campaigns. But, through no concerted effort, they are curiously aligned once again in common cause, a stem-to-stern effort that has united old comrades even as they nominally play for different teams: stopping Donald Trump.

“We are united,” said one former Romney aide now working for another campaign, which he said would not permit him to speak for attribution.

“It’s a common goal and not just for Romney people, but for anyone invested in Republicanism, conservatism, and anyone who gives a flying [expletive] about what we’re trying to do here. Even if you’re not getting paid, this isn’t good for anybody,” he said.

“It would be ironic if it wasn’t like every single person in the political wing who can stare more than five seconds into the future wasn’t mortified or petrified at the prospect of Trump being the nominee,” said Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson who called a Trump nomination “an existential threat” to the party.

Yes, the insurgent base of the Republican party is certainly to going to love it when the Party Establishment goes down the war path for an identifed “existential threat”.   I can just see Huckabee’s gang of Baptist Thugs cockblocking Ted Cruz for the photo op on this one!

Hillary Clinton went on the offensive calling Scott Walker “a tool of the Koch Brothers”.  What’s fun is that she actually did this in Wisconsin!!

Making her 2015 debut in Scott Walker’s home state of Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton on Thursday unleashed her harshest and most extended diatribe yet against a Republican rival not named Donald Trump, accusing the governor of being a tool of the billionaire Koch brothers.

“It seems to me, just observing him, that Governor Walker thinks because he busts unions, starves universities, guts public education, demeans women, scapegoats teachers, nurses, and firefighters, he is some kind of tough guy on a motorcycle, a real leader,” Clinton said to a packed audience at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Well, that is not leadership folks. Leadership means fighting for the people you represent.”

While Clinton frequently criticizes her Republican opponents on the campaign trail, her barbs are rarely so extended or pointed. She also mentioned Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul on Thursday evening — but Walker faced the brunt of her fire.

“It looks like he just gets his marching orders from the Koch brothers and just goes down the list,” she added.

Opening her speech, the Democratic front-runner recounted her time spent in Wisconsin while growing up in Chicago. “What happened?” she asked the crowd in feigned disbelief, implying that the state had declined.

“Scott Walker!” the riled up crowd responded, jeering.

Minutes later, the crowd again drowned her out after she started asking, “What happens when you’re a proud union member and your governor wants to—?”

That’s our gal!

Well, I’ve got papers to grade and popcorn to pop!  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?