Oh! More Things I Know:
» It's a little weird that, following a president who promised to drain the swamp and make America great again, President Biden's two most pressing agenda items starting on January 20th will be draining the swamp and making America great again.
» After the last four years, it is now beyond dispute that the 25th Amendment is the U.S. Constitution's equivalent of the Maytag repairman.
» Every time you ring a bell an angel gets its wings. Every time you hold in a fart an angel explodes.
Continued...
» If the weather forecasters hadn't mentioned all this damn snow in their forecast, we wouldn't be having all this damn snow.
» There needs to be a law that any U.S. senator or representative—accompanied by aides—can conduct a snap, full-access inspection of any immigration detention center or postal facility anytime, anywhere.
» A Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie you'll never see: The Atheists' Christmas Miracle.
» One of the things I'm most looking forward to being released by the Biden White House: the entire "perfect call" between Trump and the President of Ukraine. The other is Trump in jail.
» I'm cautiously optimistic that Kamala Harris will bring back the honored vice-presidential tradition of shooting a lawyer in the face while quail hunting.
» This blog has gone zero days without a dreidel-related accident. My bad.
» I'm tired of always having to spell out the entire word blog. From now on, to save time and reduce my susceptibility to carpal tunnel syndrome, I'm condensing it to og.
» I can think of 81,268,867 patriotic, democracy-loving Americans who should each get a Medal of Freedom.
And now, our feature presentation...
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Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, December 17, 2020
Note: Reindeer run over by revenge-seeking zombie grandma with hair matching color of blue and silver candles. Film at 11.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the “Christmas Star” appears—the closest visible conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 800 years: 4
Percent of Americans polled by Fox News who approve of how Joe Biden is handling the transition: 65%
Number of state and local public health leaders who have resigned, retired, or been fired since April, the largest exodus of public health leaders in American history: 181
Amount of covid relief money religious grifter Joel Osteen received from taxpayers like you, after saying he didn't receive any: $4.4 million
Fine imposed by California against Uber for failing to provide regulators with details about sexual assault and harassment claims: $59 million
Date of the start of the torch relay for the rescheduled Tokyo Olympic Games: 3/25/21
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
Here's to all the Americans on both sides of this year's unusually peppy fights over the allowability of religious symbols on public property.
This annual battle, in which the American Civil Liberties Union strives once more to make itself as popular as the Grinch, is over the part of the First Amendment that says the government cannot sponsor religion.
I always liked what former Gov. Ann Richards said when informed there were demands that the large star on top of the state capitol come down.
"Oh, I'd hate to see that happen," she drawled. "This could be the only chance we'll ever have to get three wise men in that building."
—December, 2004
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Caught it!
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CHEERS to expanding the team. President-elect Biden's cabinet continues to take shape with a fresh slate of smart, honorable, America-aligned patriots who will soon take over for the current sty full of of dumb, evil, Russia-aligned boobs now in the final throes of their super-spreading-the-stupid tenures. And the envelope please…
Transportation Secretary Former South Bend Mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who would become America's first openly-gay cabinet member and the youngest cabinet member, at 38, since Alexander Hamilton.
Interior Secretary New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, who would become America's first Native American cabinet member.
Energy Secretary Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm who, like the position suggests, is a human ball of energy.
White House Climate Policy Coordinator Former EPA director Gina McCarthy, a good pick because it's always useful to have a Bostonian inside the circle to crack skulls and throw around terms like "wicked pissuh."
First task on their plate: getting rid of the mess, covid infestation, corruption, and rancid stench left behind by their predecessors. Which, if they work 24/7 and everything runs on schedule, should let them start working on their own first-term goals by the start of Joe's second term.
JEERS to the familiar sound of forehead smacking table. Well thank god the experts waited fifty years to break the news to us, because if we'd only waited twenty or thirty or forty years we may have been premature in our assessment. I'm shocked, shocked…
Tax cuts for rich people breed inequality without providing much of a boon to anyone else, according to a study of the advanced world that could add to the case for the wealthy to bear more of the cost of the coronavirus pandemic.
The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth. […] Their findings published Wednesday counter arguments, often made in the U.S., that policies which appear to disproportionately aid richer individuals eventually feed through to the rest of the economy. … “Our research suggests such policies don’t deliver the sort of trickle-down effects that proponents have claimed,” Hope said.
Will we ever be able….to trust Reagan….again?
CHEERS to the original airhead. Happy Wright Brothers Day! On this date in 1903, after paying a $50 luggage fee, shuffling shoeless through security and spending eight-hours on the tarmac next to a screaming baby, Orville Wright made the first controlled, sustained flight in a power-driven airplane at Kitty Hawk on North Carolina's Outer Banks:
At 10:35...the flyer moved down the rail as Wilbur steadied the wings. Just as Orville left the ground, John Daniels from the lifesaving station snapped the shutter on a preset camera, capturing the historic image of the airborne aircraft with Wilbur running alongside.
Again, the flyer was unruly, pitching up and down as Orville overcompensated with the controls. But he kept it aloft until it hit the sand about 120 feet from the rail. Into the 27-mph wind, the ground speed had been 6.8 mph, for a total airspeed of 34 mph. The brothers took turns flying three more times that day, getting a feel for the controls and increasing their distance with each flight. […]
This was the real thing, transcending the powered hops and glides others had achieved. The Wright machine had flown.
The jalopy-of-the-skies was in the air for less than a minute. It would've been longer but they ran out of booze.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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JEERS to our hunka hunka burnin' planet. How hot has 2020 been? Hotter than the steam coming out of Trump's ears as he watched the electors voting. Hotter than the seat a Wall Street bankster sits on at a committee hearing as Rep. Katie Porter says, "My first question to you is…" Hotter than the solemn, lava-like procession of hair dye oozing down Rudy's face. Yeah…that hot:
NOAA’s calculations show that the first 11 months of 2020 were .02 degrees cooler than record-hot 2016, but there’s a 55 percent chance that 2020 will end up the warmest on record.
If December is as much above normal as November was, then 2020 will at least tie 2016 as the warmest on record, Sanchez-Lugo said. Florida, Virginia and Maryland so far have had their hottest year on record, while California had its hottest fall.
For its part, NASA said 2020 so far is the warmest on record and it’s likely to stay that way. Using NASA data, if December is just 0.59 degrees above the 1980 to 2010 average, 2020 should be the hottest year on record.
November was much more above average than that, and December so far has been 1.16 degrees above normal, said Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist with the Berkeley Earth climate-monitoring group.
But all hope is not lost. The EU climate talks just ended, and in a brave move that took everyone by surprise, the organizing committee suggested to the organizing panel that the organizing subcommittee to the organizing commission inform the organizing task force that they're throwing the whole thing in Greta Thunberg's lap. And no ice cream until you fix it, young lady.
JEERS to lame attempts at swaying the tin-foil hat crowd. 51 years ago, on December 17, 1969, the U.S. Air Force closed its Project "Blue Book" by concluding there was no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind the thousands of UFO sightings they'd investigated:
The Air Force supplies the following summary of its investigations:
1) No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security;
2) There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and
3) There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as "unidentified" were extraterrestrial vehicles.
It might have been more credible if the spokesperson delivering the news, Captain Blurp Oorksplorg, hadn't been speaking out of a tentacle.
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Ten years ago in C&J: December 17, 2010
JEERS to being behind the curve. Time magazine announced its "Person of the Year" this week and the winner is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook, of course, is just one of a long line of cool grassroots online hangouts that got infested years ago with spam, viruses, overly-complex user agreements, and privacy invasion. So pardon me if I don’t stand and cheer. On the other hand, if he can catch the person who keeps making poopies on my rutabagas in Farmville I'll give him a polite nod. [12/17/20 Update: Ten years later, Mark Zuckerberg is the anti-Christ and his site has become Disinformation Central. Who knew???]
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And just one more…
CHEERS to saving our celluloid. Twenty-five movies from yesteryear have been inducted into the 32nd class of the National Film Registry. Many of them—Grease, The Blues Brothers, The Dark Knight—are mainstream hits. Others are less known but significant in their own right, such as…
Freedom Riders (2010)
During 1961, more than 400 people from across the nation, black and white, women and men, old and young, challenged state-sanctioned segregation on buses and in bus terminals in the Deep South, segregation that continued after the Supreme Court had ruled the practice to be in violation of interstate commerce laws. Some 50 years later, “Freedom Riders,” a two-hour PBS American Experience documentary made by Stanley Nelson, charted their course in considerable depth as they faced savage retaliatory attacks and forced a reluctant federal government to back their cause.
With Car and Camera Around the World (1929)
Filmed from 1922 to 1929, “With Car and Camera Around the World” (1929) documented the expeditions of Walter Wanderwell and Aloha Wanderwell Baker, the first woman to travel around the world by car. The couple, along with a crew of volunteers, crisscrossed dozens of countries in a caravan of Ford Model Ts, filming people, cultures and historical landmarks on 35mm film.
Mauna Kea: Temple Under Siege (2006)
Produced and directed by Puhipau and Joan Lander of Nā Maka o ka ʻĀina, this documentary about the dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawai’i examines the development vs. ecological preservation battle between scientists who use the mountain summit as an astronomical observatory and Hawaiians who want the mountain preserved as a cultural landscape sacred to the Hawaiian people.
As ever, I remain hopeful that the all-time greatest movie ever—Cats and Dogs—will one day find itself nestled among the NFR's pantheon of greatness for its message of universal truth in a world gone mad: "Dogs drool, cats rule."
Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Cheers and Jeers might not be the best-written blog post, but it’s at least got all the heart, humor, charm and splashy kiddie pool action you could ask for.
—Rotten Tomatoes
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