Cheers and Jeers is a mild weekday panic attack from the great state of Maine.
The late-nighters are on indefinite hiatus, having gone underground to science the shit out of this pandemic. Here, Conan emerges to announce he’s solved the toilet paper crisis:
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Bonus tip: Consumer Reports finds that the top three most effective alternative butt wipes are: white papers from the Heritage Foundation, judicial recommendation summaries from the Federalist Society, and any page from Don Jr.’s book, now available for free in finer dumpsters across America.
Continued…
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, March 19, 2020
Note: You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not a good thing. The other dreamer is evil and drives a steamroller.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Passover starts: 20
Number of droplets a single cough can produce: 3,000
Number of seconds you're supposed to wash your hands: 20
Number of surgical masks and ventilators, respectively, the Pentagon says it will give to Health and Human Services for responding to the coronavirus outbreak: 5 million / 2,000
Registered voters in the latest YouGov/Economist poll who favor, respectively, Democratic and Republican control of Congress: 49%, 39%
Percent of Americans who favor amending the Constitution so the presidential candidate who receives the most votes wins, versus 40 percent who don't, according to Pew Research: 58%
Age of The Carol Burnett Show's Lyle Waggoner when he died Tuesday (effing cancer): 84
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
At this point, the administration would probably be delighted if it could find the WMDs the Reagan administration gave Saddam Hussein. At least it could point to some WMDs. [...]
You don't have to be an expert on WMDs in the Middle East to know that when the administration starts spreading the word that "it wouldn't really make any difference if there were WMDs or not," it's worried about not finding any. [...]
Maybe the American people can be brainwashed into forgetting why we supposedly went to war. Near as I can tell, our national memory span is down to about two weeks, and the media have been spectacularly unskeptical on this issue. But the rest of the world is not going to forget that WMDs were our primary reason for an unprovoked, pre-emptive war.
---April 2003, one month after Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq seventeen years ago this week. No WMDs were ever found.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Social distancing FAIL…
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CHEERS to a certain rising sea level. It's baked in the cake: the administration currently in charge of the executive branch will forever be known as the gang that diddled and gaslighted while a pandemic swept the nation. The Trump Virus, aka Dotard-45, has done what the impeachment and Mueller investigations couldn't, according to an interview with a Wall Street elbow-rubber in Mediaite. The upshot appears to be that 2020 is poised to play out like 2008, when Democrats were called in once again to clean up a Republican mess by an overwhelming margin:
With scores of high-level contacts, Charles Gasparino of Fox Business is as dialed in as anyone when it comes to knowing what key investors are thinking. So what do they believe will happen at the ballot box this November? “Trump is toast.”
Yes, according to Gasparino, the current read from Wall Street is that not only will President Donald Trump lose in the fall, but there will be a larger blue wave which will result in Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress, in addition to the White House. […] “Some of this fear [driving down the market] is that the Democrats are now going to sweep,” Gasparino said.
That is so Wall Street: terrified of an easily-absorbable increase in taxes for the first time in years that'll be spent on fixing stuff that's been broken for years. Adorbs. But, hey…blue wave! If you need me today I’ll be in the basement adding another coat of varnish laced with itching powder to Susan Collins’ retirement rocking chair.
JEERS to the scammers among us. As we wrote yesterday, we don’t plan on inundating C&J with information on the Dotard-45 virus because it's widely available from faaaaar more credible sources than me, Farty McSquirrelwhisperer. But we certainly won’t ignore it, either. And today's spotlight shines on the bullshit floating around with almost as much reckless abandon as the microscopic virus droplets themselves. HuffPo has a decent rundown, including:
Herbal remedies—including mixtures of honeysuckle,cinnamon twig, and peony root—have gained some traction thanks to false claims that they can treat flu-like symptoms or boost the immune system. Twitter is also all in on garlic right now, asserting that the herb has antimicrobial and antiviral properties. “Garlic, my goodness,” [Ben] Neuman [head of the biology department at Texas A&M University-Texarkana] said.“SARS-CoV-2 is not a vampire—garlic is tasty in spaghetti sauce, but it is not an antiviral.” […]
There’s a rumor going around that gulping down water can push the novel coronavirus into your stomach, where stomach acids will kill it. Neuman said this advice is “mostly bonkers.” […]
People who can’t get a hold of a face mask (which, remember, isn’t foolproof) are now reaching for latex gloves, but there’s no proof they provide any protection. The novel coronavirus cannot be absorbed through the skin, according to Neuman. It can easily hang out on the gloves and reach all the areas where you can contract the illness (face, eyes, nose).
There's more debunked quackery at the link above. To be safe, just stick with the fundamentals: hand washing, social distancing, and, for added protection to keep the virus far away from your home, Ted Nugent's greatest hits turned up to at least "3" on the Victrola. Solidarity, people. We suffer together.
CHEERS to making it official. Not that Marie Newman needed Rep. Dan Lipinsky's blessing after her resounding victory in Illinois' 3rd District Democratic primary Tuesday night, but it wraps up the contest in a tidy little box. The seemingly untouchable congressman, protected at all costs by the DCCC and the Chicago Political Machine, dried his eyes yesterday and threw in the towel:
"As the numbers stand right now, it appears that I will not prevail," he said in a news conference. He called Newman to congratulate her.
Or at least we think he was congratulating her. A translator is still confirming the meaning of "Hisssssssssss."
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END OF BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to avian homecomings. Another sign of impending SPRING (which arrives at 11:50 tonight). Once they make the pathetically-easy glide between the gaping steel slats of Trump's low-I.Q. border fence, a flock of feathered friends will float into California to take up residence (though without the usual fanfare, festivities, and fawning followers this year) in their conical summer homes:
The miracle of the “Swallows” of Capistrano takes place each year at Mission San Juan Capistrano, on March 19th, St. Joseph’s Day. Swallows migrate 6,000 miles from Goya, Argentina to San Juan Capistrano in large groups.
The town of San Juan Capistrano welcomes visitors from all parts of the world to witness the return of the swallows, a tradition that has been celebrated since the early 1930s.
A few years back the swallows were showing up in smaller numbers, so the experts started luring them with artificial bird calls and pre-built nests. Due to the success of those tactics, they're adding extra enticements this year: free cable, wi-fi, and turndown service that includes leaving a mint-scented insect on their pillows.
CHEERS and JEERS to the new old guy in the funny hat. Speaking of famous migrators from Argentina, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio officially became Pope Francis—the first Jesuit pope— seven years ago today, an extraordinary event seeing as his predecessor was, as best as anyone could tell, still breathing.
After a promising start (he won our Friday "who won the week" poll six times during his first three years), he's been more or less brought to heel by the Vatican Machine, and his attempt to smooth over the pedophile priest pandemic has been clumsy at best. But at least he's opening discussions on contentious issues (climate change, the widening wealth gap) and is ditching a lot of the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric of his predecessors.
He's currently holed up in his apartment waiting out the plague sweeping his fiefdom, taking care of business and binge-watching back episodes of Portlandia. And praying, of course. In an interview forLa Repubblica he says "I asked the Lord to stop the epidemic: ‘Lord, stop it with your hand.' That is what I prayed for.” Yeah, just make sure He washes it first. I think that's what got us in this mess to begin with.
P.S. You know where the pope goes when he needs to sell off a chalice or a painting to make some quick cash? Why, a pawntiff shop, silly.
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Ten years ago in C&J: March 19, 2010
CHEERS to civil disobedience in uniform. In an act of bravery, patriotism, pride and just a hint of the kinky, Lieutenant Dan Choi and Captain Jim Pietrangelo, decked out in their Army fatigues, handcuffed themselves to the White House fence yesterday to protest the military's 'Don’t Ask Don’t Tell' policy. Pushing the envelope further, today they went to court and said, "Fine? We ain't payin' no stinkin' fine. We're goin' to trial." Then they shouted"Huah!" together and gave the judge windburn. Meanwhile, the new poster child for those opposed to DADT is a retired general—I believe his name is Ninny McDramaqueen—who claims that gay soldiers are genocide enablers. Now I know why his grandkids have to take a double dose of Zoloft before he reads 'em a bedtime story.
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And just one more…
JEERS to the Very Seriousest of the Very Serious People. The Iraq war, started by a pandemic of Republican warmongers infecting America’s brain with bullshit, started 17 years ago today. Usually I feature the most nutball quotes from the likes of Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld and their circus tent full of conservative Patton-wannabes. But this year I think I’ll just pull this gem out of cyber-storage. This is Tom Friedman's rationalization for why inflicting pain and punishment on Iraq was teh awesome. Literally, he told the Middle East: "Suck on this"...
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?
Well Suck. On. This. Okay? That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.
On the one hand, what a typical American know-it-all bully jerk, so symptomatic of the media’s fawning cheerleading during those early days. On the other hand, if someone's going to present himself as an expert on sucking, I can think of few people more qualified than Tom Friedman.
Have a tolerable Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Fox Business Guest Says Cheers and Jeers is ‘Almost Perfect’: Bill in Portland Maine Was ‘Born for This Moment’
—Mediaite
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