From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
"It's A Festivus Miracle!"
Today is the magical holiday known as Festivus. In accordance with tradition, I submit part of my 2015 list for the Airing of Grievances. The following have disappointed me over the past year:
• Those in the traditional media who gave us another year of their "both sides do it" and "some say" journalism shtick that generates more heat than light. On the one hand, you're hacks. On the other hand... Oops, we're out of time so we'll have to leave it there.
• Donald Trump, for working harder than any presidential candidate in recent memory to bring out the worst in our country by feeding raw meat to America's orc class…and succeeding beyond anyone's wildest expectations.
• The science deniers, who accomplish for the advancement of civilization with a Bible and ignorance what a baby accomplishes with a diaper and creamed corn.
• Whoever stole the flag from the Daily Kos home page. We will find you and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.
• DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, for being such a bad spokesperson for our party and appearing to take virtually no interest in the ideas and concerns of the Democratic base.
• The entire Republican death star smear machine, for throwing over fourteen dozen “--gates” at President Barack HUSSEIN Obama over seven years and failing to make a single one of them stick. You’re getting schlonged, you incompetent boobies!
• Antonin Scalia, whose open racism and homophobia are more suitable to a backwoods bench in Podunk, Alabama than the Supreme Court.
• God, for not coming down here and straightening out this mess of a planet. She's dating another universe, isn’t she?
• The fates that took from us Leonard Nimoy, Beau Biden, Maureen O'Hara, Julian Bond, B.B. King, Lesley Gore, Mario Cuomo, Christopher Lee, James Horner, Yogi Berra, Scott Weiland, Wes Craven and Anne Meara. And also the trigger-happy assholes who took thousands of lives with their NRA-approved death machines.
To them and the other 422 on my list (down from last year's 455) I say... "I GOT A LOT OF PROBLEMS WITH YOU PEOPLE!"
If you're not able to join C&J tomorrow evening for our live bean supper nudeblogging and sharing of the conspiracy theories, have a super, great and awesome The Holidays. Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Note: Here's the schedule for the week ahead…
Tomorrow evening: Join us for our A Very Special C&J Christmas Eve Bean Supper Nudeblogging and Sharing of the Conspiracy Theories
Friday and Monday: A Very Special Two Days Off
Tuesday-Thursday: A Very Special Look Back at 2015
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til Martin Luther King Jr. Day: 26
Days 'til the Arizona Vegetarian Food Festival in Scottsdale: 17
Percent increase in pay for female and male Chief Financial Officers, respectively, in the U.S. last year at S&P 500 companies, according to Equilar and AP: 11%, 7%
Increase in the average Arctic surface air temperature since 2000, according to NOAA's Arctic Report Card: 5 degrees
Minimum age to use a tanning bed if the FDA gets its way with new rules: 18
Age of the first web page as of last weekend: 25
Average time it takes to grow a Christmas tree, according to some web site: 7 years
Mid-week Rapture Index:
A four-year low of 179 (including 5 gogs and 1 essential Right-wing Christmas gift guide). Soul Protection Factor 6 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
Puppy Pic of the Day:
You'll want to click this ----> It says it's important.
DOUBLE CHEERS to people who work on Christmas eve and Christmas day. Police, fire, medical, electric, media, national security, rum distilleries...you know who you are. If you're not getting at least double pay and comp time, your employer should get a one-way ticket to a quail-hunting junket with Dick Cheney. (Or at least a one-way trip to fluff Ted Cruz's wattle...or is that too cruel?)
CHEERS to expanding the dynasty. Right on schedule, Chelsea Clinton and her husband are expecting their second child. According to the devious plan hatched shortly after Bill murdered Vince Foster in the library with the candlestick, Chelsea would get pregnant late in 2015, boosting Hillary’s image as a “tough grandma” and allowing her to coast to victory in the primary. Then, Chelsea would deliver the child onstage at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, resulting in a collective national “Awwwww” moment and sweeping her mom into the White House in a landslide. I just hope Fox News doesn’t figure it ou…..oh, damn:
Subbing for Bill O’Reilly, host Eric Bolling discussed the news that Chelsea Clinton is pregnant with her second child---Fox News style: by using what should have been good news to make Hillary Clinton look bad.
“Lovely news for the family,” guest Dana Perino began innocently. “Chelsea Clinton just announced she’s pregnant with her second child. It will be born next summer so Hillary Clinton has this image: she’s the tough grandma, and she’s got a new haircut for 2016 and she’s the one to beat.” She added suggestively that it was “the narrative” the Clinton team wants.
Now that Fox has exposed their devious plot, it looks like they’re gonna have to go to their backup plan: disappear all their enemies the usual way. (Insider trading tip for today: buy stock in all the publicly-traded candlestick makers you can find.)
CHEERS to great breakthroughs. On December 23, 1947, John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor in New Jersey (and later won the Nobel Prize in physics for their feat). It originally was a relatively big old thing, but today they're as small as a single atom. To put that in perspective, it's the equivalent of all the good Republican ideas for dealing with the income inequality, climate change and health care combined. Except bigger.
JEERS to today’s hopeful holiday words of peace and friendship to the American Muslim community in San Jose, California…from a Donald Trump supporter:
Wild guess: he’s really, really hoping for a white Christmas.
CHEERS to famous first lines. On December 23, 1776, Thomas Paine wrote: "These are the times that try men's souls." The world wrote back: "No shit, Sherlock."
CHEERS to failure. Last week we told you about a gang of right-wingers in California that was trying to cobble together enough signatures to put a referendum on the 2016 ballot that would green-light so-called “bathroom vigilantes.” Anyone who caught a transgender person using the “wrong” restroom and ratted them out would be rewarded with a “bounty” of up to $4,000. We mentioned at the time that if it passed the state’s public bathrooms would be so crowded with money-seeking wackadoos staring at each other’s crotches that there wouldn’t be room for anyone else. So this is good news for people who actually have to, y’know, go pee:
Backers of a proposed ballot initiative that sought to require transgender people to use the public restrooms that correspond with their biological sex say they have failed to qualify the measure for the California ballot.
They’ll be back, of course. Because if there’s one thing we know about conservatives, there’s no non-existent problem they won’t try to fix.
Ten years ago in C&J: December 23, 2005
CHEERS to brown-bag justice. Wal-Mart just got fined $172 million for not giving thousands of workers their lunch breaks. The company agreed to fork over the money only after they learned of punishment option B: 30 days on a diet of nothing but Lunchables.
And just one more…
CHEERS to saving our celluloid. Twenty-five movies from yesteryear have been inducted into the National Film Registry. Some of them---Ghostbusters, L.A. Confidential, The Shawshank Redemption---are mainstream hits. Others are less known but just as important, such as…
Black and Tan (1929) In one of the first short musical films to showcase African-American jazz musicians, Duke Ellington portrays a struggling musician whose dancer wife (Fredi Washington in her film debut) secures him a gig for his orchestra at the famous Cotton Club where she’s been hired to perform, at a risk to her health. Directed by Dudley Murphy, who earned his reputation with "Ballet mécanique," which is considered a masterpiece of early experimental filmmaking, the film reflects the cultural, social and artistic explosion of the 1920s that became known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Winchester ’73 (1950)
Jimmy Stewart collaborated with director Anthony Mann on five taut, psychological Westerns from 1950-55 revolving around themes of hidden secrets, vengeance, shifting personal morals and concepts of heroism. Film historian Scott Simmon calls Winchester ‘73 "the film where a gun is more of an object of worship than in any other American film." Ironically, it’s fascinating that even in this most gun-obsessed of movies, nobody is allowed to carry a gun in town.
Humoresque (1920)
Based on a story by Fannie Hurst, Humoresque presented to mainstream American audiences a sympathetic portrayal of immigrant Jewish life through its vivid details of street life and rituals, and a riveting performance by Yiddish Theatre actress Vera Gordon, "seemingly a character from life, living," rather than acting, as a New York Times reviewer observed.
Our Daily Bread (1934)
During the heart of the Great Depression, as the nation’s capital experimented with New Deal programs to solve the nation’s ills, most Hollywood productions remained escapist. A radical exception to the rule, King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread, faced the problem of unemployment head-on by dramatizing an experiment in cooperative farming that proposed pooling resources collectively as an alternative to individualistic competition for jobs. Criticized for its purportedly socialist ideas and also for its seemingly fascistic traits, Our Daily Bread remains a document that embodied political contradictions that marked widely divergent contemporary assessments of the New Deal itself.
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 Wednesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Study: Republicans are embarrassed to admit how much they like Cheers and Jeers
---Vox
-