There is a reason something gets 60,000,000 views on Youtube.

(Don't click the link before reading the rest of this.)

I'm a bit behind because this happened a year ago, but it hasn't been mentioned here yet. Last year, 12 year old Grace VanderWaal walked out onto a huge stage, in front of thousands in the building and millions more on TV, a tiny girl in yellow leggings. It was an audition for America's Got Talent. She had no performing history. She carried a ukulele. It was a generational moment.

Grace got a ukulele when she was eleven.  She learned to play it from YouTube videos.  A month or two after starting on the instrument, she thought she might write a song.  One year later she walked out on that stage, the first public performance of her life.

She admitted to the hosts that most of her friends didn't even know she sang. Simon Cowell was clearly skeptical when she said she was going to perform an original song.

She had less than two minutes to make her case. She had to shorten her song a bit to get it in, so she didn't even have the opportunity to present it as she wanted. She was so nervous her voice quaked a little. By the second line of the song the audience was gasping, by the end they were on their feet and cheering for a pre-teen girl with a ukulele.

The song, "I Don't Know My Name," has now been covered hundreds of times by all sorts of musicians, many of them young girls with ukuleles.

Grace VanderWaal is a generational musician, already polished somehow from the very start, unafraid of an audience, which loves her to an extent few performers ever see.  This little girl, now all of 13 years old, is already a world class songwriter and singer, gifted with perfect pitch and a haunting voice that carries as much emotion as Janis Joplin's, but without the chemical burden.

The beauty of the original link is that it shows something exploding on the world with no preface, something that I expect to be with us a long time and only get better.

Everyone in the building, including Grace, was taken by surprise. Unbelievably mature at 12, this woman will become a musical icon, and this was the moment when she found out -- and the world found out -- that she was better than merely good, she was great.

You can't watch it happen without feeling the  the emotion of the moment.  I have watched it dozens of times, it never gets old.

Exit polls are indicating that while the Conservative Party will retain a clear plurality in the 650-member House of Commons, it will lose 17 seats and thus its outright majority. If that holds, this will be by all accounts a crushing political blow for Prime Minister May, who had hoped to gain 60 to 70 seats when she called for the snap election last month, three years before the end of the Conservatives' five-year term in office.

The biggest winner here is the oft-criticized and lampooned Jeremy Corbyn, who prior to tonight was perceived to have been the weakest leader of the Labour Party in a generation, and a sitting duck for Mrs. May in the snap election. Instead, he rose to the occasion and rallied the party faithful throughout Great Britain and Northern Ireland, drawing huge crowds. Labour looks to gain 34 seats.

The second biggest losers appear to be Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish National Party (SNP), which is on track to lose 22 of its 56 seats in London.

The BBC is projecting that when the smoke clears, the Conservatives will hold 314 seats (-17), Labour 266 (+34), SNP 34 (-22), Liberal Democrats 20 (+6), and others 22 (-1). So, with nobody in the majority, the Tories will have to woo either the SNP, Liberal Democrats or the various other fringe parties in order to cobble together a working coalition majority.

What this will mean for Mrs. May's Brexit strategy and her government's negotiations with the European Community to accomplish that, I haven't the foggiest idea. But again, if these projected results hold, tonight's results may indicate that British voters are experiencing, at least in part, a case of buyer's remorse regarding last year's Brexit referendum.

Dems cannot get distracted.

Mr. Trump just wrote  yuuuge check with his mouth that his giant buttocks will not be able to cash.

Going back 20 years, the purpose of the Paula Jones trial was not so much to get some form of justice for Ms. Jones, but to get Bill Clinton under oath.

Once they had him sworn, they dropped the unrelated Monica question that had been fed to them by people close to Scaife.  As we know, the case was settled out of court which makes that deposition moot, as though it never happened, but it was the basis for the perjury charge that they hung the impeachment on.

If you will recall, Bush and Cheney refused to give sworn testimony in the 9/11 investigation.  ("Hey, we'll talk, just don't hold us to what we say, mmmkay?")  I suspect they knew what the pitfalls were.

Having set a precedent that perjury is an impeachable offense, we now have the world's biggest liar OFFERING to give sworn testimony.  The Democrats need to seize on this statement like a pitbull and use it at every opportunity. They need to demand a date and a place for this voluntary testimony.

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The president's job approval rating dips to a new low, a negative 34 - 57 percent, compared to a negative 37 - 55 percent in a May 24 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University, and a negative 35 - 57 percent April 4, his lowest score so far.

American voters say 68 - 29 percent that President Trump is not level-headed, his worst grade on that quality. Republicans say 64 - 32 percent he is level-headed. Voter opinions of most other Trump qualities are negative:
59 - 36 percent that he is not honest;
58 - 39 percent that he does not have good leadership skills;
58 - 40 percent that he does not care about average Americans;
62 - 35 percent that he is a strong person;
57 - 40 percent that he is intelligent;
64 - 33 percent that he does not share their values.

Sure, the initial accident avoidance was non-existent, but look at the accident recovery.

The car has all sorts of broken parts, tires, etc., but it tracks straight and true and never deviates from the center of the lane. Probably avoided hitting at least one, and perhaps both, of the cars that were near it.

Prosecutor Jennifer Solari says investigators seized a notebook from Winner's house in Augusta, Georgia, and in it, Winner made references about traveling to the Middle East. At one point she wrote, "I want to burn the White House down ... find somewhere in Kurdistan to live. Haha."

"Whether that's a jest or not, it still concerns me," Epps said."

If she did what she's accused of, I wonder how big a role the media played. Did she think she was doing the right thing?  

Juilian Assange appears to be a fan of her...

Alleged NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner must be supported. She is a young women accused of courage in trying to help us know.

im pretty sure she meant THE Queen but that is making me chuckle every time the mental image creeps into my head.

I had a face-to-face encounter with a Sandy Hook "truther" yesterday. Should've kept my big mouth shut and smiled and backed away slowly and said Have a nice day, but I just couldn't do it.

Geimer, 54, has long-forgiven Polanski for having sex with her in 1977 while she was 13, and said that Polanski should be sentenced in absentia to time served in part to end the scrutiny she has faced in the case...
"Justice is not only about punishment, it is about equity and consideration," Samantha Geimer said.

Geimer has made similar statements before, but this is the first time in front of  judge.  Will it work? Doesn't sound like it ....

But prosecutors countered that dismissing the case based on Geimer's wishes would only disrupt the judicial system.

this is great

But there's an explanation for at least some of the leaks that's a little more cunning than the rest--one that might bring some actual resolution. Four current and former law enforcement officials believe prosecutors have been treating Trump and his associates like a criminal network, and subjecting them to an array of time-tested law enforcement tricks.
One of those tricks involves floating names of potential targets of the investigation, to try and get potential co-conspirators to turn on one another. Another, called "tickling the wire," entails strategically leaking information to try and provoke targets under surveillance into saying something dumb, or even incriminating.
"You want people to freak out, to say, `are they talking about me? Is this me? What do they know?'--and you want them to do this in a way that is captured," one former FBI official said about the Russia investigation.
"Now we wait for the cover up."

President Donald Trump contradicted his own secretary of state on Friday, hours after Rex Tillerson called on Gulf states to ease their blockade on Qatar.

"I had no other choice. I didn't want to shoot Mr. Castile. That wasn't my intention," Yanez said while wiping tears from his eyes, CNN affiliate WCCO reported. "I thought I was going to die."

their default position

this is what the are watching

no idea what lives there but clearly something does

Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the investigation of President Trump, have been hailed for their impeccable character by much of official Washington, the truth is, as top law enforcement officials of the Bush administration (Mueller as FBI Director and James Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled Bush-Cheney fabrications to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited plain vanilla incompetence.

In response, untold thousands of people representing an array of groups and causes showed up this morning. The march from Hollywood Blvd. and Highland Ave. in Hollywood to West Hollywood Park along Santa Monica Blvd. was estimated to be over three miles in length. Conservative estimates placed the crowds at around 300,000-plus.

It was a truly amazing display of cross-spectrum solidarity, and one which stood in sharp contrast to yesterday's divisive Anti-Sharia Schittshow in San Bernardino which drew about six dozen far-right supporters and about four times that number of counter-protestors from the left.

Many thanks to the Christopher Street West Association and all our LGBTQ friends for sponsoring the march and making this wonderful day happen.

The US president said he did not want to come if there were large-scale protests and his remarks in effect put the visit on hold for some time.

Perhaps she should apologize for the viciousness her father heaped on President Obama:  wanted his birth certificates, wanted his college grades, ec., etc..  Furthermore, First Lady Michelle Obama, should come out and talk about the viciousness she confronted by the Republicans and her father. REMEMBER, NO HEALTHY GARDEN, NO HEALTHY INFORMATION FOR OUR CHILDREN WITH DIABETES BECAUSE OF UNHEALTHY DIET, etc., etc,.  APOLOGIZE IVANKA! 😡