From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
Look Who Randy Rainbow Caught Playing Dress-up...
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And just like---[Snap!]---that, all the social media was cleaned up. And everybody got a free pith helmet. Vive le inappropriate reminders of British colonialism.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Note: All computers and smart phones will be receiving the latest download of the C&J app today. This will take several hours and require you to surround your device with sandbags in a non-inhabited area as you stand back 500 yards wearing a blast helmet and safety goggles. Also, please don’t forget to click "I accept" when you get the pop-up box with the 249 pages of revised terms and conditions. And now that we think of it, standing back 600 yards would probably be better. ---Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Halloween: 14
Days 'til the Salt River Fields Spooktacular Balloon Festival in Arizona: 9
Number of Sears employees in 2008 and 2018, respectively: 300,000 / 68,000
Date on which Sears declared bankruptcy after 132 years as America's "original Amazon.com": 10/15/18
Percent chance that Democratic strategists say running on health care this year is a winning strategy across districts, according to the AP: 100%
Percent chance that conservatives in the Florida panhandle are starting to come to grips with the fact that, yeah, maybe they shouldn’t have poo-poo'd stronger hurricane building code preparedness: 100%
Expected sales from Halloween sh*t this year, according to the NRF: $9 billion
MLB Championship Playoffs
Red Sox lead the Astros 2 games to 1
Brewers tied with the Dodgers 2 games to 2
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 183 (including 3 famines and 1 irritating gaggle of flat-earthers). Soul Protection Factor 8 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Monday was National Pug Day. Encore, encore...
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JEERS to the new kid on Terrible Team T. Oh, we're always so excited up here when someone from Maine gets tapped to fill a big, important part of the federal government of the United States. And the Trump administration has tongues a' waggin' up here now that it's official---Governor Paul LePage's former destroyer of the Department of Health and Human Services is coming down to D.C. as the new Destroyer of Medicaid. And her reputation precedes her:
Mary Mayhew has been tapped by the Trump administration to lead Medicaid, the health insurance program that covers more than 70 million low-income Americans. … She also will oversee the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which is offered to some families that have children and make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. The two programs cost more than $350 billion annually, or about 10 percent of the entire federal budget. […]
Mayhew played a major role in eliminating nearly 70,000 people from the state’s Medicaid program and, like LePage, she was an ardent opponent of expanding Medicaid, which was made allowable at the state level under the Affordable Care Act. […]
Mayhew’s tenure at DHHS saw prolonged problems at Riverview Psychiatric Center, which lost its federal certification in 2013 over deficiencies in patient care and still hasn’t gotten it back. She was criticized by some health advocates for a slow and weak response to the state’s opioid crisis, which claimed more than 1,000 lives from overdoses from 2015 to 2017.
Incompetent? Indifferent? Inhumane? Inefficient? Inept? Inadequate? What else can we say? She's in!!!
P.S. Don’t forget that Democrats will be pulling Ms. Mayhew up onto the Hill for severe grillings as she tries to enact her Medicaid-killing agenda under the radar. Sunlight will be a potent disinfectant.
JEERS to losing a pioneer. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen suffered a fatal 404 error Monday and went to the great refurb bin in the sky. He was 65 and, personally speaking, I have never logged onto a computer that didn’t have his proverbial fingerprints on the insides. So, in those terms, he’s been more my muse than anyone:
Mr. Allen co-founded Redmond tech giant Microsoft with childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975. After leaving the company in 1983, he turned his focus to a wide range of other business and scientific pursuits, which ranged from founding the Allen Institute for Brain Science to the real estate arm of Vulcan, which went on to build much of Amazon’s campus.
Mr. Allen was known across the Puget Sound region for his generosity to social services and deep love of sports and the arts. Among the richest people in the world, he believed not in holding on to his wealth, but in giving it away in large swaths. […]
Microsoft’s creation---and the region’s eventual transformation into a world center for software development---began with Mr. Allen and his pal Gates sneaking into a University of Washington building to tinker with its large mainframe computer.
Later it was Mr. Allen who brought Gates a magazine article about one of the first personal computers, excited about the opportunity for them to create software for the nascent platform. They co-founded Microsoft in 1975, launching one of the most profitable businesses ever.
His final words: "Clippy survives…"
CHEERS to book learnin'. On October 17, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Department of Education. It's one of the departments that the tea partiers always threaten to abolish because of its communist-socialist-libtard mission to turn every school into a monolithic institution of brainwashing. Except, well, not so much….
The Department of Education does not establish schools or colleges …
Unlike the systems of most other countries, education in the United States is highly decentralized,and the federal government and Department of Education are not heavily involved in determining curricula or educational standards (with the recent exception of the No Child Left Behind Act). This has been left to state and local school districts. The quality of educational institutions and their degrees is maintained through an informal private process known as accreditation, over which the Department of Education has no direct public jurisdictional control.
Didya catch that? George W. Bush, the mighty titan of the party of "states' rights," increased the federal government’s authority over public education. What will we tell the children? Anyway, happy birthday to all the hard workers at the Education Department. I know religion has no place in our public schools, but with Betsy DeVos in charge, we’re praying for you all.
CHEERS to today's edition of Gee, Them Republicans Ain't Too Good At This Running of Stuff Stuff. Courtesy of TechCrunch…
A new dating app for Trump supporters that wants to “make America date again” has leaked its entire database of users---on the day of its launch.
The app, called “Donald Daters,” is aimed at “American-based singles community connecting lovers, friends, and Trump supporters alike.” Elliot Alderson, a French security researcher, shared the database with TechCrunch, which included users’ names, profile pictures, device type, their private messages---and access tokens, which can be used to take over accounts.
The data was accessible from a public and exposed Firebase data repository, which was hardcoded in the app. Shortly after TechCrunch contacted the app maker, the data was pulled offline.
This has been today's edition of Gee, Them Republicans Ain't Too Good At This Running of Stuff Stuff.
JEERS to getting your clock cleaned by an orange idiot. Senator Elizabeth Warren just couldn’t leave well enough alone. She just had to plunge ahead without thinking (or asking) and get the DNA test she was convinced would end up as the genetic frying pan to Trump’s fat racist face. And so she took the leap to prove her tangential, six-times-removed Cherokee connection, and did a swan dive right into a swimming pool full of concrete. I cannot believe that a human of her intelligence would end up making such an unforced error. This is the official reaction from The Cherokee Nation to her stunt, and it is what will stick:
Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr.issued the following statement Monday in response to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test claiming Native Heritage:
"A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage."
So much for rolling out her Flatfoot 2000 Steamroller to "smooth the way" for a run at the presidency. God, I hate it when my heroes do stupid things.
CHEERS to blowing this popsicle stand. On this date in 532,Boniface II ended his reign as Catholic Pope, having finally saved enough money as a part-time farmhand to step down and blow this town to pursue his dream as a Broadway dancer. No, wait, wait, wait. Sorry---he actually died. That’s the last time I trust my history research to Footlooseipedia.
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Ten years ago in C&J: October 17, 2008
CHEERS to "fundamental disagreements." If that was your drinking-game phrase, you're probably still passed out on your living room floor this morning. If, however, your drinking-game phrase was "Joe the Plumber," I'll send flowers to your funeral. Here are my blow-by-blow thoughts on last night's Obama-McCain, during which McCain perked up but still managed to blow:
> Barack Obama wore a flag pin. McCain did not. According to my Republican Handbook, that means the white-haired guy is a terrorist.
> I think it's safe to say that Joe is the most famous plumber in America this morning, having burst on the national scene last night like a supernova. I expect to see Joe the Plumber mugs, shirts and doggie kerchiefs on Café Press, and a reality series on Bravo by noon.
> Silly me---I thought America was on the verge of a total meltdown and that we might want to, y'know, discuss it a bit. I guess not. Tell me more about how your feelings were hurt by Barack's nasty ads, John. That's much more important than people losing all their money and jobs and houses and stuff.
> Wow, that was fast. Joe the Plumber is already "Out" on Entertainment Weekly's In/Out list.
> Eric Cartman is behaving like a jerk. Oops, wrong channel.
> I expect McCain to lean over any moment now and ask Obama if he likes gladiator movies.
> Charles Krauthammer: "Obama is remarkably unruffled. His discipline is remarkable." To paraphrase LBJ: "If McCain's lost Krauthammer he's lost the election."
The Portland Press Herald's headline sums it up: McCain Goes On Attack, Obama Fires Right Back. But the real winner of the night was the wisdom of Bob Schieffer's mom: "Go vote now. It'll make ya feel big and strong." Especially in your deltoids.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to doling out the droll. Apart from a few standout gems, this has been yet another interminable election season for political ads. If I hear the words "We need a new direction" over gauzy slo-mo footage of a candidate shaking hands with constituents like he or she's on an Ambien cocktail, I'm gonna puke. Same thing with super-jock candidates who think the way to voters' hearts is by locking and loading a firearm and shooting some backstop target representing some American value or other. They're not just stupid, wasteful ads…they're dull ads. So kudos to real creative director Richard Linklater for taking the most mockable candidate of all---tough-talkin’ Texan Ted Cruz---and making him look like a clueless yuppie bonehead with barely a raised eyebrow by this “average guy” down at the diner:
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That was fun. We now return you to the dull ads. In sloooooooo…...mo. (That’ll be $115,000, please---check payable to ACME Cookie Cutter Creative. Have a nice day!)
Have a happy humpday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
“Bill in Portland Maine? He doesn’t have to say anything, he’s just got that pissed puppy dog puss that he has on his face.”
---Chris Cuomo
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