From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
"Oh, Harding Har Har!"
Today is the 31st annual "Presidential Joke Day." Since I've already OD'd on news this month (I thought August was supposed to be the "slow" month), enjoy some POTUS punchlines:
"Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day."
---Truman
Reporter at press conference: The Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution saying you were pretty much of a failure.
John F. Kennedy: I'm sure it was passed unanimously.
(See it here at 33 seconds in.)
Rank of Van Buren's sidetribbles
among all presidential
sight gags: #1.
“In my administration, sometimes our right hand does not know what our far right hand is doing.”
---Reagan
“Washington, DC is 12 square miles bordered by reality."
---Andrew Johnson
'My esteem in this country has gone up substantially. It is very nice now when people wave at me, they use all their fingers.”
---Jimmy Carter
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'"
---Teddy Roosevelt
"He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met."
---Lincoln
“Six years into my presidency, people still say I’m arrogant, aloof, condescending. People are so dumb---no wonder I don’t meet with them.”
---Obama (2015 WH Correspondents Dinner)
And one from George W. Bush, who created unintentional humor out of anything handy…like when he tried to redefine one of his signature phrases:
"We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be The Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free Societies Who Happen To Use Terror As A Weapon To Try To Shake The Conscience Of The Free World."
Or SAIEWDNBIFSWHTUTAAWTTTSTCOTFW for short. For the life of me I can't understand why it never caught on.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Note: My toothpaste says it "fights bad breath for hours." But it doesn't say if it ever wins.
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4 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til
Star Wars Episode VII---The Force Awakens:
129
Days 'til the
Milford Oyster Festival in Connecticut:
4
Number of people shot and killed by police in the U.S. so far this year:
585
Number of police officers killed in the same time:
18
(Source:
The Washington Post)
Minimum number of heavy metals contained in the muck that gushed from that shuttered Colorado gold mine into the Animas River that can be lethal for humans:
2 (Arsenic and lead)
(Source: AP)
Jobs added in the U.S. in July:
215,000
(Source: Labor Dept.)
Year Booker T. Washington became the first African-American on a postage stamp:
4/7/40
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Tuesday Words of Wisdom from the Right-wing Blogosphere:
The commenters at Breitbart.com weigh in on the GOP debate:
Trump's stronghold.
Twenty Four Million people watching and Megyn Kelly brings up a 12 year old quote about Rosie O'Donnell, and then it took them 40 Minutes before Ted Cruz was asked a question....sad. Fox news is not a friend of conservatives!
---Wattsamatta
If the other candidates had to field questions like Trump there wouldn't have been as big a firestorm. "Fair and balance" is a load of BS.
---thebspolice
Megyn Kelley should apologize to the GOP primary voters. We want to pick a POTUS candidate; not watch the Jerry Springer show.
---overtheedge
she should be made to wear a badge if she cannot perform her normal job when she has a period. Period.
---verivond998
All together now: 1…2…3…
Classy!
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Puppy Pic of the Day (via Kossack wild hair): How the C&J kiddie pool gets filled every morning…
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CHEERS to #BlackLivesMatter: Voter Edition. Greg Sargent at The Plum Line reminds us that a federal judge will be ruling this year on whether or not to strike down---under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act---the worst of North Carolina's Republican-passed anti-minority voter suppression law that "reduced early voting, ended same-day voting and registration, nixed the counting of votes cast in the wrong precincts, and ended early registration for teenagers." Here's a bit of the interview Sargent had last week with ACLU NC legal director Chris Brook on the range of possibilities when the final gavel drops:
It's a big thing.
PLUM LINE: What’s the absolute best case scenario here? What could victory here mean in the long run?
BROOK: Our hope would be to get reinstituted the voting practices that hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians relied upon during the last decade.
If the robust interpretation of Section 2 holds sway, that is going to result in the invalidation of many voting restrictions that we’ve seen considered and adopted by state legislatures in recent years. In turn, that will make politicians more thoughtful about establishing a rationale as to why changes in voting procedures are necessary.
PLUM LINE: What is the absolute worst case scenario? What could a loss here mean nationally?
BROOK: The voting restrictions in North Carolina have been called “the mother of all voter suppression bills.” If such legislation is found to comport with the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, that could easily encourage other state legislatures to adopt similar voter restrictions in other states.
Not that they won't try anyway.
CHEERS to remembering the good guys. Pretty amazing to think that preparations for the war with Iraq started nearly fourteen years ago, when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney hatched a grand scheme to politicize the terror-inducing Not-By-Saddam attack on the World Trade Center by ginning up bullshit evidence on Iraq WMDs---the "smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." There were many villains in the run-up to that catastrophic adventure, but also many heroes who exposed it for the sham it was. It's worth etching their names in bloggerstone when they die so that we don’t forget them, and this morning we tip our hat to former CIA bigwig Tyler Drumheller---gone at 63---who exposed the "Curveball" myth:
Tyler Drumheller's words
helped destroy Bush's
Iraq war rationale.
Mr. Drumheller took the unusual step of publicly saying that he had warned his superiors that an Iraqi defector who claimed Iraq was equipped with mobile, lethal germ factories was mentally unstable. […]
“The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. … The agency is not blameless and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the C.I.A.,” he said. “But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe, I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war.”
An Iraqi chemical engineer who defected to Germany in the late 1990s---appropriately code-named Curveball---later admitted that he fabricated the story while seeking asylum. No mobile laboratories were ever discovered.
Drumheller is in heaven now, and because of that we know one thing: he'll never bump into Bush or Cheney again for eternity.
CHEERS to cleansing your soul. The Perseid meteor shower is putting on a display of Perseidiousness this week:
A meteor is also a metaphor for Lindsey
Graham's chance of becoming president.
No matter where you live worldwide, the 2015 Perseid meteor shower will probably be fine on the mornings of August 11, 12, 13 and 14, with the nod going to August 13. On a dark, moonless night, you can often see 50 or more meteors per hour from northerly latitudes, and from southerly latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps about one-third that many meteors. Fortunately, in 2015, the waning crescent moon comes up shortly before sunrise, so you’re guaranteed of dark skies for this year’s Perseid meteor shower. Thus, on the Perseids’ peak mornings, moonlight will not obscure this year’s Perseid meteors. […]
If you trace all the Perseid meteors backward, they all seem to come from the constellation Perseus, near the famous Double Cluster. Hence, the meteor shower is named in the honor of the constellation Perseus the Hero.
Everyone agrees that meteor showers are beautiful, unite Americans in a common activity, and make lots of people happy and curious about the universe and the wonders of science. And in other news, Republicans announced this morning that they plan to introduce a constitutional amendment banning all future meteor showers.
CHEERS to today's edition of "He Says That Like It's A Bad Thing!" Via The Hill:
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Saturday said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is repelling voters by attacking Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. Bush said Trump will not attract female voters [to the GOP's side] in 2016 by speaking crudely about Kelly and other women. “What he said does not win elections [for Republicans]."
This has been today's edition of "
He Says That Like It's A Bad Thing!"
Ha Ha! funny.
JEERS to opening big mouth before engaging small brain. On August 11, 1984, during a radio voice test, President Reagan joked (and this joke became the spark for Presidential Joke Day): "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." (Listen
to it here.) The Russians had a good laugh over it...right after they carefully put their missiles back in their silos and sucked down a bottle of vodka (not necessarily in that order).
JEERS to friendly fire (via Kossack David Waldman's embarrassingly large Gun FAIL vault). In Rochester, Minnesota, a man tried to protect himself (from who or what we're not sure) by sleeping with his gun in an unfortunate place:
Emergency responders…found the man with injuries to his left hand and thigh. The bullet passed through both limbs, the report says. He told police he keeps the .22 caliber handgun with him for protection after receiving threats, Sherwin said, and had fallen asleep about 6 p.m. with the gun between his legs.
Said the man's wife: "Well, that's different. Usually he shoots blanks down there."
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Ten years ago in C&J: August 11, 2005
CHEERS to Bond...Peter Jennings Bond. C&J was weaned on ABC News 25 years ago when he, Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson juggled the stories of the day. With Jennings' death at 67, the three are united again to report on happenings in the hereafter. But it's just not the same with the ABC News theme played on nothing but harps---"dink dink DINK dink."
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And just one more…
CHEERS to scandals on screen. When the widespread crimes against children by Catholic priests came to light, all---pardon the pun---hell broke loose, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in Boston. The story of the events leading to that scandal has been crying out to be told on film, and this fall---after Pope Francis has skedaddled from his U.S. trip---it'll hit theaters around the country with an A-list cast and a very good director:
The first trailer for Tom McCarthy's ensemble film Spotlight has been released---showing Michael Keaton as Boston Globe editor Walter Robinson and his "Spotlight team" of reporters on a mission to find out the truth about allegations of child abuse and a cover-up by local priests. Spotlight follows Robinson and his fellow editors Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) and Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery) and reporters played by Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo. The movie is based on the true story of the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning year-long investigation that revealed a massive cover-up of child abuse by priests throughout the Boston Archdiocese.
Watch the first preview here:
If memory serves, the last major movie to feature a Ben Bradlee (senior) was the investigative thriller All the President's Men and it won a boatload of awards including four Oscars. Spotlight opens November 6. Barring an act of God, of course.
Have a nice Tuesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Bill in Portland Maine Is Way More Popular Than All The Republican Candidates For President
---Think Progress
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