Late Night Snark: “He’s Taking What???” Edition
"President Trump says he's taking an unproven anti-malarial drug [hydroxychloroquine] as an 'additional level of safety.' … Side effects can potentially include agitation, insomnia, confusion, mania, hallucinations, paranoia, as well as lasting psychiatric and neurological symptoms. So either Trump’s lying about taking it, or he’s been taking it for 73 years.”
—Seth Meyers
“After Trump made the announcement, a lot of experts told him what he was doing is dangerous. Then Trump was like, ‘Relax, if anything goes wrong, I can just drink bleach and clean it all out. I’m good.’”
—Jimmy Fallon
Continued...
Caution: You are now below the fold. This is where things gets dicey.
"Today for me is day 70 of stay-at-home. I've now been in this house—this is true—longer than it took Columbus to get to the new world. We are in Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria territory now. … This year for Memorial Day we've got a plan. We're packin' up the kids and taking them to the laundry room."
—Jimmy Kimmel
What I Googled in January: "Who directed Ford v Ferrari?"
What I Googled in May: "Can murder wasps get coronavirus?'"
—Conan O'Brien
"Let me tell you what it's like being a comedian while Trump is the president. The Trump presidency is an 18-wheeler full of monkeys and PCP. And it has crashed into a train full of diarrhea. And now there's diarrhea-covered monkeys on PCP running around. And everyone's watching it like, 'Holy shit, look at this!’ And then you as a comedian walk up and go, 'Hey, do you want to hear a joke I wrote about this?' They're like, 'No, dude, we're good. I mean, Jesus, look at all this. You can take a break.'"
—Patton Oswalt, from his new stand-up special I Love Everything
And Happy Birthday to Daily Kos Director of Community Building Neeta Lind (aka Navajo) and Contributing Editor Greg Dworkin (aka DemFromCT of Abbreviated Pundit Roundup fame), who turn hffrfrrrfhrr years old today. And many blessings on your camels.
And now, our feature presentation...
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Cheers and Jeers for Friday, May 22, 2020
Note: We wish you a safe, healthy, and hammock-filled holiday weekend. C&J will return on Tuesday, May 26. Probably with an errant lawn dart or two stuck in our foot, thigh, chest, head or buttock region. Because we hate to break with tradition. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the New York Democratic primary: 32
“Moscow Mitch” McConnell's approval rating with independents in Kentucky, according to PPP: 30%
Percent of Americans polled by PPP who would vote for Barack Obama and Donald Trump, respectively, if #44 and #45 were squaring off today: 54% — 43%
Percent of Democratic, Independent, and Republican registered voters, respectively, polled by Quinnipiac who believe everyone should wear a mask in public places: 87%, 60%, 40%
Approval by registered voters of vote-by-mail in the 2020 election, according to the latest Fox News poll, versus 30% disapproval: 63%
Age of White House butler and doorman Wilson Roosevelt Jerman, who served under presidents Eisenhower through Obama, when he died this week of complications from Covid-19: 91
Year in which Congress officially declared Waterloo, New York as the birthplace of the Memorial Day holiday: 1966
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Weekend plans…
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CHEERS to multitasking. As our endorphins go wild over the prospect that our first warm-weather holiday weekend (and the unofficial start of summer) is upon us, the editors at Chicago's Lake County News-Sun offer up a few words on the occasion, including an opening sentence that's a master class in understatement:
Monday we will mark Memorial Day. It will be one of the strangest observances of the holiday in modern times.
Because of the contagion, usual ceremonies remembering lives lost in the nation’s wars will be restrained or skipped entirely. Since Decoration Day began in 1868 with a proclamation by John Logan, a Union general and Illinoisan, the nation has honored those who have died defending the United States. […]
Besides our war dead lost in combat, this Memorial Day there are others who have lost their lives on the front lines of the contagion: Health-care workers, police, fire and other vital workers. Let’s remember them, too.
Philosopher George Santayana once noted: “The common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero.” There’s plenty of them around these days.
And since free time is something most of us have in abundance at the moment, take a few extra moments to reflect on Dwight Eisenhower's words: "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." Me, too. Minus the living it part, but I'll take his word for it.
CHEERS to looming leisure. The summer season is officially here, and the traditional way to kick it off is, of course, by battling traffic. But thanks to the coronavirus you're probably not going to run into much this holiday weekend. In fact, we're locked down so tight that the weekend forecast from AAA is, as you'd expect given current circumstances, not very “Horn Honky." In fact, for the first time in two decades the nation's official pavement prognosticators…
…will not issue a Memorial Day travel forecast, as the accuracy of the economic data used to create the forecast has been undermined by COVID-19.
“Last year, 43 million Americans traveled for Memorial Day Weekend – the second-highest travel volume on record since AAA began tracking holiday travel volumes in 2000,” said Paula Twidale, senior vice president, AAA Travel. “With social distancing guidelines still in practice, this holiday weekend’s travel volume is likely to set a record low.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to recommend that Americans stay home and avoid nonessential travel. Americans should heed all official warnings and refer to the latest updates from the CDC and U.S. Department of State to help decrease the spread of COVID-19.
If you absolutely must travel this weekend, please drive with care and be sure to flip people off responsibly—with a gloved middle finger from at least six feet.
CHEERS to the visionaries. 233 years ago this week, the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia with George Washington presiding. They came to blows over their first order of business, but after much quill-stabbing and cane-beating, they finally agreed: We hereby resolve that Cheesesteak shall not be considered Cheesesteak without Cheez Whiz. It was mostly smooth sailing from there.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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Look! America finally had an honest-to-god Infrastructure Week:
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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JEERS to kiddiegarten: White House edition. I wasn’t going to get into heavy news on a Friday before a holiday weekend, but this is really something that belongs in the C&J time capsule. If you're a historian of the future and you're reading this, I swear this is true: the White House Situation Room—the epicenter of the planet's most secretive and sophisticated intelligence operations—literally had to be converted to Romper Room to accommodate the simple and easily-distracted mind of President Donald J. Trump:
U.S. Intelligence agencies have been forced to hire outside consultants to study how to present vital national security information to President Donald Trump in a way he will understand the data, The New York Times reports.
[U]nlike most presidents, Trump prefers to rely on conversations he has with close friends instead of information collected by the nation’s top spies and intelligence professionals.
“The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult,” The Times adds, citing former intelligence officials. “He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information."
No one's quite sure which consultants have been hired to digest the sensitive security data and regurgitate it at Trump's unique mental wavelength. But visitor logs show recent visits by Big Bird, Peppa Pig, and the ghost of Captain Kangaroo.
CHEERS to Abraham "That's Using the Old Bean"-coln. On May 22, 1849, Honest Abe received patent #6469 for his design of a floating dry dock—in fact, he was the first president to receive a patent. Sadly, he never found the time to complete his follow-up invention: the floating wet bar. Our nation's loss.
CHEERS to home vegetation. Here's some of the haps on TV this weekend, starting tonight with a pre-Memorial Day MSNBC reality check by Hayes and Maddow. (Yes, I'm on a last name basis with them—so proud.) If you've been pining for a celebrity escape room show—and who hasn't?—tonight at 8 you can catch NBC's Celebrity Escape Room with Jack Black, Lisa Kudrow, and Ben Stiller. Bill Maher's guests on HBO's Real Time at 10 are Friedman Unit baron Thomas Friedman, Michael Moore, and Dr. Cate Shanahan. Will Ferrell and Mark Ruffalo are guests on The Graham Norton Show at 11 on BBC America).
New home video releases include Sonic the Hedgehog and the Ben Affleck Hoosiers-wannabe but decently-reviewed The Way Back. If you're into revenge porn, turn on NBC at 3 tomorrow afternoon and you can re-live the massive spanking that the United States Olympic hockey team, led personally by President Barack Obama, gave Russia at the 2014 games in Sochi. Later, at 8pm, ABC is showing episodes one and two of the Michael Jordan series The Last Dance. In a bittersweet blast from the past, NBC is re-airing the October 14, 1978 SNL hosted by the late Fred Willard tomorrow night at 10.
LIVE SPORTS ALERT: Sunday night at 8, Fox is airing NASCAR’s Cocaine 600 (or it might be the Coca-Cola 600, I can't find my reading glasses) in which cars go round and round in circles without getting anywhere—just like Devin Nunes's lawsuits. And if you want to put your bladder through an endurance test, try sitting through all four-and-a-half hours of Titanic, which starts Sunday night at 7 on CBS. Spoiler alert: happily, in this version the crew and passengers plug the hole with a mammoth wad of Dubble Bubble. Their hearts will go on and on, and so will your pee stream if you make it to 11:30 in one sitting.
Now here's your Sunday morning lineup:
Meet the Press: TBA
This Week: TBA
Face the Nation: Former Homeland security Secretary Michael Chertoff; Wyndham Hotels CEO Geoffrey Ballotti; Boston Federal Reserve Bank President & CEO Eric Rosengren; former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb; National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien. Wow, five white guys. Great job, booking staff.
CNN's State of the Union: Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ); Sen. Rick Sssssssscott (R-Moscow); Rep. Val Demings (D-FL); White House stooge Kevin Hassett.
Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: Gov. Ass Hutchison (R-AR); American Health Care Association president Mark Parkinson; Dr. Deborah Birx.
Happy viewing!
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Ten years ago in C&J: May 22, 2010
JEERS to monsters among us. Republican Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty vetoed the "Tim Pawlenty Is Not A Scumbag Act"...
...that would allow a surviving same-sex partner to sue to recover damages in the case of wrongful death and to execute a deceased partner’s funeral wishes. Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, called the veto "partisan extremism," and Project 515 said Pawlenty got his "facts wrong."
Forgive me for getting personal, but I'd like my partner, Michael, to know something: Honey Bunch, when I die, please don't bury me. Just drag me under Tim Pawlenty's house and leave me there. Revenge is a dish best served pungent over a period of weeks.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the Mayor of Castro Street. Speaking of LGBT rights, today marks the 90th birthday of the late San Francisco District Supervisor and gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk.
“It takes no compromising to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no survey to remove repressions.”
“All young people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, deserve a safe and supportive environment in which to achieve their full potential.”
He was a talented politician—smart, witty, eloquent, tireless, eager to learn from his early mistakes, but not without his flaws and personal demons. He understood well the power of grassroots campaigning and consensus-building, which is an itty bit critical as we find ourselves ramping up for the most consequential election since 1864. One of my favorite things Harvey wrote is his 10 rules on how to win a local election (from Randy Shilts' brilliant book The Mayor of Castro Street):
1. Interviews with all major papers. ['All' was underlined three times.]
2. Knock on all doors.
3. Ride buses
4. Visit non-gay bars during the daytime and any singles bars at nite.
5. Coffee shops and restaurants. Stop off early in morning and late at night.
6. Shake hands.
7. Shake hands.
8. As few meetings as possible—just meet the people.
9. Door to door of registered Demo's is very best thing you can do outside of media coverage.
10. Don't stop.
If he hadn’t been assassinated in 1978 at 48, he would've no doubt been a guiding force and leading fighter for full state and federal equality of LGBT citizens, and the steadily-rising poll numbers for marriage equality (63% now, says Gallup) would've made him cheer as much as the Trump administration’s rollback of LGBT-friendly federal policies would’ve made him bristle. His now-famous core message of hope predated Obama's by 30 years, but is just as relevant today:
"It’s about the us’s out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s. Without hope, the us’s give up. I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. So you, and you, and you…you gotta give em’ hope.”
Have a great weekend. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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