From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Maine's Shit-on-a-Shoe Governor Ain't Got No Coattails
Lance Dutson is a Republican strategist/consultant of some repute here in Maine. I remember him most from his blogging days during the Bush years---I think he may have kicked me off his site for being too much of a liberal gnat buzzing around his head. But he deserves props for consistently despising virtually everything about our current embarrassment in the governor's mansion---now referred to more often as Paul LePlague than Paul LePage---and being vocal about it.
Last week Dutson wrote a post-mortem on LePlague's influence in the 2016 election here, and it's a fun read for anyone who enjoys seeing the jerk get knocked down a peg or two…or, in Dutson's tally, nine. The governor backed the losing horse in four of the five ballot questions, including marijuana legalization, raising the minimum wage, and additional funding for public schools via a tax on the wealthy. One of the questions, proposing a ranked-choice voting system, was "put on the ballot and passed as a direct answer to the question, 'How do we keep Paul LePage from happening again?'” And Four fringe candidates (including Trump) who he backed over mainstream GOP objections lost here.
This abysmal showing on Election Day was nothing new for Paul LePage.
Since he came onto the political scene in 2010, he has never garnered majority support in Maine for anything. He won election and re-election with less than 50 percent support. His first two years in office resulted in the Republican Party losing both the House and the Senate. His tax plans have failed, his energy policies have gone nowhere and the Legislature has gotten used to fashioning the state budget without his input. His endorsements fail time after time, and his approval ratings remain the lowest of any of Maine’s major elected officials.
LePage and his alt-right allies may be louder than their opponents, but they do not make up a governing majority. It bears repeating: Mainers do not support Paul LePage, his causes or his candidates. This should be a reality Maine legislators remind themselves of in these last two years of his term.
Although Dems didn’t win back the Maine senate this year, we did hold onto the House, enough to keep LePage’s activities during his final two years confined to ribbon cuttings and obscenity-laced tirades. We look forward to documenting his continued spiral into irrelevance as we plan to take back the governor’s mansion in 2018 and start doing what Democrats find ourselves doing much too often: cleaning up the mess a Republican left behind.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, November 21, 2016
Note: This morning I cooked up four strips of turkey bacon for breakfast. It would've been five but I pardoned one of them.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the National War-on-Christmas Tree lighting: 10
Days 'til the Boston Tuba Christmas Concert in Faneuil Hall: 5
Number of people living in America last year who were born in other countries, according to Pew Research: 46.6 million
Number of illegal "criminal" immigrants Donald Trump promises to deport: 3 million
Number of illegal "criminal" immigrants the DHS says actually exist in America: 900,000
Percent chance the Obama administration just banned offshore oil drilling for five years in Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort Seas and off the coast of four southern states: 100%
Number of Americans who intend to eat human brains for Thanksgiving dinner, up from 1,942 last year and spreading rapidly from northwest to southeast---stay tuned to your short-wave radios for updates and lock your doors: 2,065
Totally Random NFL Score:
New England Patriots 30 San Francisco 49ers 17
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Puppy Pic of the Day: "Another life saved by 83 Engine…"
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CHEERS to short workweeks. Only three days for most Americans this week---hopefully you're among them. Then it's turkey, gravy, spuds and a whole lotta nothin' else. Except, of course, our usual 14 hours of daily blogging. ("Pass the stuffing, dear. And the screen shammy...")
JEERS to morning in America Trumpland. Here's a quick rundown of some of the transition-time circus acts that were performed since we last gathered here in the kiddie pool:
» Donald Trump, realizing that his presidency was doomed if he proceeded to trial for defrauding over 6,000 students in his fake university scam, did the very thing he vowed never to do "out of principle": he settled. For $25 million. "No problem, I got this, it's the least I can do" said Vladimir Putin, whipping out his checkbook.
» Trump's vice president-elect, the Earl of Pence, attended a performance of Hamilton Friday night and had to fend off a savage attack with his shield---the one bearing his official crest, a Bible opened to Leviticus---as a handful of audience members booed and the entire cast joined hands to say "We hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values, and work on behalf of all of us." In response, the Trumpbots began a boycott of the show which, considering the availability of seating, will start having an effect within ten years after Trump leaves office.
» Trumpbots have started going to Starbucks to protest the libtards by buying copious amounts of overpriced coffee so that the baristas (all hired by George Soros and the ghost of Saul Alinsky, of course) will have to write "Trump" on the cup and call out the name. This morning regular Starbucks customers are coming to the realization that they had no idea there were so many people named "T. Rump" in America.
» Trump, now staffing his administration with unstable goons who spend their nights dreaming in cross-burnings and Nurnberg rallies, invited Mitt Romney---who has frequently said that Trump possesses "a character and temperament unfit for the leader of the free world”---to kiss his ring and think about being his Secretary of State. Of course, we know how this ends: Trump exacts his revenge by passing Romney over for a turd in a jar.
And in other news, Hillary Clinton now leads the election count by 1.67 million votes. Nothing to see here, please move along.
JEERS to the worst quiz show in the world. Hey! Welcome to The Worst Quiz Show in the World!!! Here we go: Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was denied confirmation as a federal judge back in 1986 because his racism was so blatant that not even a Republican-led committee could put lipstick on his kind of pig. Thirty years later, President-elect Donald Trump is nominating Sessions for which position that goes waaaay beyond the scope of a federal judge?
A) Four Star General
B) Surgeon General
C) Attorney General
D) U.N. Secretary General
If you chose C, congratulations---[DingDindDing!!!]---you're right! At a time when violence against blacks is roiling the country, Donald Trump wants to put a guy in charge of the Justice Department who believes every American should sleep in confederate flag jammies. For correctly guessing this horrific development, you win a free set of matching Samsonite luggage! Just as soon as my intern finishes removing the ID tags from my neighbor's set of matching Samsonite luggage! [Applause!!!]
CHEERS to reaching dry land. On November 21, 1620, after being denied boarding passes at Heathrow because they were on the no-fly list, a bunch of "pilgrims" from England with a bad case of B.O. and no sense of humor landed in New England after 66 days at sea and promptly got all quill-crazy, signing the Mayflower Compact “to enact, constitute, and frame just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." By the way, the ship was destined for the northern edge of the Virginia Colony, but they ended up dropping anchor in a totally different place: Provincetown, Massachusetts. After spending several years reviewing all the available evidence, I've come to an inescapable conclusion: GPS sucked back then.
CHEERS to the lexicon of our lives. Some people say that we only use a handful of the words available to us in the English language. I'm no "expert," but I'd still like to respond to that by saying: no fart no no booger no no fart no booger booger fart no. Now that I've gotten that off my booger booger fart, here's Oxford Dictionaries' #1 "word" of 2016:
After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth---an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
The term has moved from being relatively new to being widely understood in the course of a year---demonstrating its impact on the national and international consciousness. The concept of post-truth has been simmering for the past decade, but Oxford shows the word spiking in frequency this year in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US, and becoming associated overwhelmingly with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics.
Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’.
Other letter-based vittles on the shortlist include alt-right (ideological grouping associated with extreme conservative or reactionary viewpoints), Brexiteer (a person who is in favor of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union), coulrophobia (extreme or irrational fear of clowns). Latinx (a person, or relating to a person, of Latin American origin or descent---used as a gender-neutral Latino or Latina) and woke (alert to injustice in society, especially racism). We salute all the winners and, as always, hope they enjoy their lifetime supply of alphabet soup.
CHEERS to spinning in circles. On this date in 1877, Thomas Edison announced to the world that he had invented the phonograph machine. In fact, he broke the news via a phonograph recording, which sounded like this:
"Hello, is this thing on? Testes...testes one two three. We begin bombing the Russians in 30 minutes. Ha ha! That always cracks 'em up at the Elks Lodge! But seriously, folks. Mary had a little lamb---her parents were mortified. I just can't help myself... You folks fly in from out of town? I bet your arms are tired! I slay me... Oh, by the way, the walrus will be Paul and Luke will be Vader's kid. Oops…'Spoiler alert!' I'm bored. Can I go home and invent the light bulb now?"
Only known cure for Restless Inventor Syndrome, according to doctors: take out two patent applications and call me in the morning.
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Ten years ago in C&J: November 21, 2006
JEERS to messes America should never be in the position of having to clean up. With any luck our team will pass legislation that will better regulate the use of electronic voting machines (a move the Republicans have avoided like the plague). But, as the New York Times pointed out yesterday...
The problems with elections go well beyond electronic voting. Partisan secretaries of state continue to skew the rules to favor their parties and political allies. States are adopting harsh standards for voter registration drives to make it harder for people to register, as well as draconian voter identification laws to make casting a ballot harder for poor people, racial minorities, the elderly and students. Some states have adopted an indefensible rule that provisional ballots cast at the wrong table of the correct polling place must be thrown out.
There's only one viable solution: we've got to turn our elections over to the Canadians.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to new shiny objects. Big day last week for the U.S. Mint:
[Inserts four freshly-minted South Carolina "America the Beautiful" series Fort Moultrie National Monument state quarters into squawk box]
[Pushes START]
"The reverse of the Fort Moultrie America the Beautiful quarter features what is arguably one of the most action-packed and visually dynamic coin designs of the entire series.
The soldier at the heart of it all is Sergeant William Jasper, a hero of the British attack on June 28, 1776. The flag, tattered but still waving, features a crescent moon in the upper left corner, similar to the crescent found on Sgt. Jasper's hat. This is the "Moultrie flag" (or Liberty flag) of the 2nd regiment, which gets its name from Col. Moultrie, who designed it himself. It is the ancestor of the current flag of South Carolina.
Meanwhile, two primitively rendered British warships sit amidst a large cloud of smoke (implying heavy cannon fire) on the edge of the almost brutally choppy… Please insert four more South Carolina America-The-Beautiful-Series state quarters to hear the rest of this program….."
[Clink Clink Clink Clink!]
"…water. The end."
D'oh!
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Humans only have a thousand years to find a new Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool, said Stephen Hawking during a speech at the Oxford University Union.
---Nature World News
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