From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Late Night Snark: Racist-in-Chief Edition
"Trump has spent the week reeling off a series of unhinged tweets and tirades defending his racist attack on four Democratic congresswomen of color, in which he told them to 'go back and help fix the totally-broken and crime-infested places from which they came.' Of course, they're Americans—three of them were born here and the fourth is a refugee and naturalized citizen. So, [Trump], if their country is broken and crime-infested, that's on you."
---Seth Meyers
"This morning he wrote, 'Those tweets were not racist. I don’t have a racist bone in my body.' Here's the thing. We're not worried about your bones being racist, we're worried about your brain and your mouth being racist. "
---Jimmy Kimmel
"If Trump strikes you as a little racist, you do not know the meaning of the word little."
---Stephen Colbert
"Our government now describes asylum not as an internationally recognized right, but as a 'discretionary benefit,' which is bullshit. A 'discretionary benefit' is free make-up samples at Sephora."
---Samantha Bee
And 10 years ago this week:
"To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, the astronauts from Apollo 11 visited the White House. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were allowed to set foot inside the White House while Michael Collins was forced to drive around in circles outside."
—Conan O'Brien
C’mon down and splash. The kiddie pool’s filled with Tang and tonight we’re bobbing for chunks of freeze-dried ice cream. Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Friday, July 19, 2019
Note: Today is Daiquiri Day. Daiquiris are the brainchild of Jennings Stockton Cox, who invented the drink in the Cuban mining town of—are you sitting down?—Daiquiri. Today in the C&J cantina we’ve got beer. Sorry, no daiquiris. We drank ‘em all last night. Bad planning. Oops. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the next Democratic candidates debate: 11
Days 'til the 10th annual Milwaukee Brewfest: 8
Percent of veterans who believe the Iraq war wasn't worth fighting, according to a Pew poll, versus 62% of the general public: 64%
Percent chance that the best way to reduce unintended pregnancies via birth control pills is to give women a full year's supply up front (versus only a few months at a time), according to research from the University of Pittsburgh and the VA: 100%
Average back-to-school spending on K-12 kids this year, according to USA Today: $519
Peak year for Volkswagen sales in the U.S., accounting for 40% of all VWs sold (the Beetle is ceasing production this week): 1968
Number of life-size female dolls hanging from a chandelier in Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan mansion, according to the FBI: 1
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Weekend plans…
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CHEERS to happy homecomings. The national backlash to Trump’s racist attack on Congresswoman Ilahn Omar (D-MN) was nice. The House resolution condemning Trump’s racism was also nice. But despite all that support, it was still a tough week for Omar, the target of the GOP, which no longer stands for Grand Old Party but for Guttermouth Orc Pack. So it was great to see that she had the last laugh as she came home and was greeted with thunderous applause from the people who matter most: her constituents:
Wow. I got all verklempt seeing that. A scene as beautiful and inspiring as it is rare: a passenger smiling at an airport.
CHEERS to advancing to the Perjury Olympics semi-finals. Round 1: tut-tutting. Round 2: pleading. Round 3: calling a hearing. Round 4: issuing a subpoena. And now round 5: unleashing the primal forces of nature…
[T]he House has voted to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt of Congress for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas in the House investigation of administration efforts to add a "citizenship" question to the 2020 census. The courts ruled that the administration's stated reasons for adding the question were pretextual; evidence instead suggested Ross and other administration officials sought the new question as means of discouraging minority census responses.
[The] vote marks the first time the House has charged a Trump administration official with criminal contempt.
And with Barr all but certain to ignore his and Ross's contempt citations, it's on to Round 6: placing leaves and twigs over an open manhole cover.
CHEERS to half a century of giant leaps for mankind. 50 years ago tomorrow, at 10:56 pm eastern time, John Kennedy's vision to put a man on the Moon by decade's end was realized when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on a heavenly body not named Earth—the landmarkiest of landmark human events I (along with a microscopically-small percentage of all humans who have or will ever inhabit this planet, which makes us pretty damn lucky) got to witness with my own 5-year-old eyes. It almost turned tragic when they nearly landed inside a boulder-strewn crater, but quick-thinking Armstrong switched the controls to manual and guided the module to a flatter surface. And then...magic:
See amazing high-res pics here. A couple months later my grandparents (the ones in Cleveland) surprised me with this cardboard “moon walker” and you’d think I’d won the lottery. Note the little cardboard “footprints” that came with it…
The entire world was united in awe that day—the kind of awe that our next phase of human space exploration has to match, now that the shiny shuttles have been long mothballed. My verdict so far: the SpaceX rockets look promising and are generating a real "gee whiz" factor, and we hope they (and other private companies working on their own projects) and NASA keep it up. For your enjoyment of the anniversary, this evening the C&J cafeteria is servin' up as much Tang as your tummy can hold.
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True fact: in space, nobody can hear you belch.
JEERS to same corrupt gang of fools, different day. A reminder that the definition of the psychological term 'projection' means "A way to transfer guilt for your own actions onto another as a way of not admitting your guilt to yourself." The Trump era will be remembered for, among other nefarious things, employing projection more frequently than Melania Trump employs Michelle Obama's speeches. So when the left gets accused of election fraud, you just know who's really guilty of it:
A former commissioner on President Donald Trump’s now-defunct Voter Fraud Commission reached a settlement this week with a group of Virginia voters who claimed they were subjected to false accusations of felony voter fraud.
The initial lawsuit was filed last year in Virginia federal court by voting rights groups and four individuals accusing the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and its president and general counsel J. Christian Adams of creating and distributing reports that falsely mislabeled them as non-citizens who illegally registered to vote—despite all of the plaintiffs being American citizens. […]
Adams, a former attorney for George W. Bush’s Department of Justice, must also provide a written apology to the plaintiffs on behalf of himself and the group, which is also required to remove any personal information of individuals purported to have illegally registered to vote from its current and future reports.
Yeah, about that apology. Someone needs to witness it to make sure he doesn’t have his fingers crossed behind his back. They're sneaky that way.
CHEERS to today's edition of But You Already Knew That. According to a new poll:
Michelle Obama is…..
…..the most admired woman in the world.
This has been today's edition of But You Already Knew That.
CHEERS to one of South Dakota's biggest moral compasses. Disproving the theory that only the good die young, World War II hero (35 combat missions as a B-24 pilot), former Senator and Democratic presidential contender George McGovern—whose gravestone lists his first accomplishment as humanitarian—would’ve been 97 today.
If he'd been elected in '72, the Vietnam War would've ended sooner, progressive values would've sunk their roots deeper into the American consciousness, and the integrity of the office of the President would've held fast. Instead we re-elected a corrupt, paranoid, scheming, power-obsessed Republican loon who ended up trashing the office of the presidency. Thank god we learned our lesson from that experience, huh.
CHEERS to home vegetation. A quick roundup of some of the eyestuff that may end upon your TV this weekend. Not much tonight, although Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell will be all over the Friday news dumps, so they’re worth a looksie. New home video releases include the snarky superhero sensation Shazam! and, one of the most relevant retro-releases in the Trump era: the Ingrid Bergman-Charles Boyer paranoia thriller Gaslight. The baseball schedule is here, but most eyeballs of the sporting variety will be watching the British Open, which is taking place in Northern Ireland this year at the fabled Weebit O'Whiskey course, where all the traps are filled not with sand but with pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. BBC America has a Star Trek marathon starting at 3:30am. On 60 Minutes: how Holland is keeping the North Sea from flooding the lowlands, and a profile of falconer Laura McGough. Sunday night at 9, you can choose between MSNBC’s special The Mueller Report: What you Need to Know (his House testimony is next Wednesday) or the season finale of HBO's Big Little Lies.
Now here's your Sunday morning lineup:
Meet the Press: TBA
This Week: TBA
CNN's State of the Union: Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Ron Johnson (R-WI).
Face the Nation: Corey Booker; Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA); walking Hefty trash bag Liz Cheney.
Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) previews next week’s Robert Mueller hearings; hair Club for Men dropout Stephen Miller does that racist thing he does (blowing up twitter in the process).
Happy viewing!
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Ten years ago in C&J: July 19, 2009
JEERS Calamari Gone Wild. This sounds like a bad horror movie. An earthquake rattled the southern California coast last Saturday, and it was almost immediately followed by an invasion of mad flying squid. Combine these unsettling events with the state's financial collapse and I think it's pretty clear: God's really pissed that Prop. 8 passed. Fair warning: a little birdie tells me the next cataclysmic event will involve hail, downspouts, and Jon Voight in a Speedo.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the put-down of put-downs. Oh, that crazy summer of '09, when town hall meetings got so boisterous—with birther bullshit and teabaggers demanding the government do the exact things that would make the economy even worse—that they dominated the news, and security was often forced to step in to protect congress members from deranged loons who were egged on by the conservative media empire. But out of the wankery came a hero from the left who actually won a town hall skirmish: former Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who gave a Nazi-card-playing Lyndon LaRouche supporter something to cry in her strudel about when she trashed the Democrats’ effort to upgrade America's broken health insurance system:
"When you ask me that question, I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: on what planet do you spend most of your time?"
Responded Jon Stewart later that night: "Apparently a planet where a mixed-race president and a gay Jew qualify as Nazis." Saaaaalute!
Have a great weekend. Be prepared to dump many bowls of ice cubes down your shorts. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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