From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Conan Taps the Phones
We're not posting tomorrow, so we’ll say our “Happy War on Christmas” to you now. Safe travels. Have fun. And let me know what you think of the Hammacher Schlemmer blimp I got you this year. I bet you'll love the cup holder.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, December 22, 2016
Note: This'll be our last C&J until next Tuesday. From our blogger hut to your blogger hut and all the biological dwellers within, have a convivial and jocund Festivus, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Boxing Day. Permission granted to hit the sauce early. ---Mgt.
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the Women's March on Washington: 30
Days 'til Hidden Figures gets its wide release: 15
Number of people President Obama pardoned (78) and shortened the sentences of (153) Monday, the highest number of individuals granted clemency in a single day by a U.S. president: 231
Amount of time Santa can spend at each household in order to reach 2.5 billion of them in time for Christmas, according to the firm Sweco: 34 microseconds
Speed at which his reindeer have to fly: 3,604 miles per second
How quickly his sleigh would burst into flames based on the air resistance encountered at such speed: 4 milliseconds
Percent of Americans who would open Grandma's gifts or send them back, respectively, if she got run over by a reindeer, according to PPP: 40%, 30%
-
Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
And a Merry Christmas to all, including people who have white Christmas trees decorated entirely with purple balls. Merry Christmas to the Red states and the Blue states, to the R's and D's, and to all the troops stationed in Afghanistan, including the French troops there---Mais oui, Chwistmas, y'all. […]
Feliz Navidad to all our immigrants, legal and otherwise---may La Migra be far away and tamales close at hand. By the way, there are some new legal rights groups that will go after the scum who hire you and then refuse to pay you. Joyeux Noel to all our friends in Canada, and please overlook the pifflebrains who keep insulting you. […]
Happy holidays to the sailors and ballroom dancers, the birders and the bingo players, the squaredancers, the folklorists, the scrapbook makers, the railroad buffs and everyone else with a harmless passion---we appreciate you all. Here's to the carolers and the altar guild, the vestrymen (vestrypersons?) and the Santas, and to all who volunteer. Here's to everyone who suffered in the Florida hurricanes, including the claims adjusters---may your days be merry and bright.
---December, 2004
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: The truth about huskies…
-
CHEERS to Obamajitsiu! This is pretty sneaky, in a good way. President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau got together and forged an agreement written with lightning on steel to ban drilling in the Arctic areas under U.S. and Canadian control, a move that will be hard for the incoming Fossil Fuel administration to undo:
Obama was able to act under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which outlines how the offshore leases are carried out.
The law has a provision that allows presidents to block areas from drilling--- which has been used before, but only with time limits. This appears to be the first time a president has used the law to permanently protect waters from oil exploration. […]
There is no legal precedent for challenging this action, and experts suggest it would take years ---or even decades --- to determine how and whether it could be legally revoked.
The order also protects the first-ever Atlantic marine national monument that runs from Maryland up to Canada, which Obama designated in September. So now, instead of offshore rigs, the energy companies will have to settle for offshore wind turbines. Oh, the horror.
JEERS to the big con. With all the votes finally certified, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes---48.2% to Trump's 46.1% (plus one corrupt Republican FBI director sticking his thumb on the scale). But thanks to the weirdness of the electoral college, one of the worst human beings ever born will take up residence in the White House with his daughter but maybe not his wife. And before Donald J. Trump has even been sworn in, he's taking a sledgehammer to his biggest campaign promises. There will be no wall. He won't separate himself from his business interests. He won’t "lock her up." And you can add these two to the junkpile:
1) Trump made rebuilding the nation’s aging roads, bridges and airports very much part of his job-creation strategy in the presidential race. But lately lobbyists have begun to fear that there won’t be an infrastructure proposal at all, or at least not the grand plan they’d been led to expect. … [Trump] acknowledged that he didn’t realize during the campaign that New Deal-style proposals to put people to work building infrastructure might conflict with his party’s small-government philosophy. “That’s not a very Republican thing---I didn’t even know that, frankly,” he said.
2) A leader of Donald Trump’s transition says the president-elect is no longer interested in his catch phrase “drain the swamp” of Washington. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said his understanding is that Trump “now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore.”
That leaves one remaining campaign promise: to "make America great again." And we can kiss that one goodbye in---[looks at box with skull-and-crossbones in it on January 2017 calendar page]---29 days.
CHEERS to the Great Pale Yellow Goddess. I typically don't promote fundraisers for bloggers outside of Daily Kos. There are enough outstretched hands (my own included) right here in Orange Satanland. But I always make one exception: Hillman Prize winner Digby aka Heather Parton, creator of the Hullabaloo blog. She is one of the sharpest, most observant bloggers you'll find on the lefty tubes (one of her posts is currently being discussed on the rec list here at Daily Kos), and when you combine that with her Molly Ivins-like wit it's easy to see why "What Digby said..." has become an often-used blogosphere catchphrase. She's in the middle of her annual fundraiser now so she can keep chasing after the bad guys. If you feel so inclined to send a little holiday cheer in her direction, here's the linky dinky. If you prefer snail mail, her address is on the upper left corner of her page. You won’t get much in return, though...just the equivalent of a Ph.D. in political truth telling and the anguished sound of right-wingers wishing she'd go into another line of work.
DOUBLE CHEERS to keeping the republic running. This is our last C&J until next week, and we'd be a real jerkwad if we didn’t give a shoutout to the people who will be working over the holidays. Police, fire, medical, utilities, shelters, media, national security, rum distilleries, Daily Kos editor-on-duty...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 have to spend a few moments under the mistletoe with Louie Gohmert. Or would that be considered unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment?)
JEERS to Republicans doing exactly what you'd expect Republicans to do. Charlotte, North Carolina's city council repealed its LGBT protection ordinance with the promise that the state legislature would kill its odious HB-2 "bathroom bill." Bad move. They should've known that a Republican's word is as good as…well, the worst comparison I can think of is, a Republican's word:
North Carolina lawmakers failed Wednesday to repeal a law regulating transgender people’s use of public restrooms, despite convening in a special legislative session for the express purpose of rescinding the controversial law…which requires people to use the public restroom that matches with the sex on their birth certificate regardless of their gender identity. […]
“Legislative leaders in North Carolina have proven their dishonesty time and time again, and they proved it again today,” Mara Keisling, president of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in a statement Wednesday night. “They broke their promise to repeal this harmful bill, and then tried to ram through a halfway measure instead---and failed to do that as well.” […]
[A] newspaper in the liberal city of Asheville argued that the compromise was a losing proposition for gay and transgender people---as well as the state. “Even if everything goes as planned, the damage done to the state’s reputation is a bell that cannot be unrung,” the Asheville Citizen-Times editorial board wrote Tuesday. “Further, Charlotte’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender residents are back where they were a year ago, without the protections they deserve.”
So until they get this all sorted out, play it safe: pee only on Republican legislator's bushes.
CHEERS to the Meeting of the Titans. 75 years ago today---two weeks after America was attacked at Pearl Harbor---President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington, D.C. (the Arcadia Conference) to plot their strategy against Germany and Japan. They came up with the following nine-point plan:
1. Declare war on Canada.
2. Send too few troops to the field of battle.
3. Let lawless private mercenaries do much of the heavy lifting.
4. Allow companies formerly run by the vice president to win no-bid contracts and rake in obscene profits while providing shitty services.
5. Ask for no sacrifice from the people and tell them to go shopping instead.
6. Don't give the troops the equipment they need to win battles and protect themselves.
7. Botch the reconstruction.
8. Cut taxes at the same time---twice!
9. Leave office in disgrace six years later having failed to finish the job, and leave it to your successor to clean up the mess.
Thank god they both sobered up. No one could be that dumb.
-
Ten years ago in C&J: December 22, 2006
CHEERS to a double-barrel blast of reality. Two victories in the war on religious extremism. First, a new "Duh!" study from the Guttmacher Institute reveals that 95 percent of Americans don’t wait for marriage to have sex, thus destroying the credibility of programs (especially federally-funded ones) that have the word "abstinence" in them. Second, the school board in Cobb County, Georgia has abandoned its practice of putting stickers in science books claiming evolution is just "a theory." Now, if we can just get them to admit that Jesus was a liberal hippie...
-
And just one more…
CHEERS to spending two minutes and fifty seconds with a drunk giant panda. Oh, and also his giant snowman, which we’ll just assume is drunk as well…
Such hooliganism. Where are the parents?
Have a nice Thursday and a great holiday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
“Bill in Portland Maine seems to pause and dig for the more precise and better language he wants to use, and never finds it. It’s the same dish---it’s a grilled cheese sandwich rhetorically over and over again.”
---Alec Baldwin
-