Energize an Ally Tuesday
EIGHT weeks 'til the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 8th, and if there was any justice the whole Republican party would go down in flames just for being insurrectionist-supporting halfwits. But we live in strange times, so scrape-and-claw our way to victory we must.
Your Tuesday C&J "Energize An Ally" assignment this week is simple: just take an action that you think will do the most good at this moment in some corner of the Democratic universe. Up here in Maine, our Dems are in good shape—Governor Janet Mills' reelection campaign is flush with cash and her polling looks good (against Paul LePage, running again to be the biggest boil on our state's butt. All my local candidates have no chance of losing to a Republican. Hooray.
So this morning we're making another donation to the joint effort by Daily Kos and Emmy magnet Julia Louis-Dreyfus to keep our indispensable majorities on the state supreme courts in Michigan and North Carolina, and flip Ohio's from red to blue. My expectation is that mine will be the donation that puts them over the top in 56 days, and then I assume they’ll all start fighting over who gets to hire me as their new clerk. Easy on the shirt, guys. It’s chiffon.
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Note: This month the 13th falls on a Tuesday. Lucky you.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til autumn: 9
Days 'til Mayberry Days in Mt. Airy, North Carolina: 6
Percent of Americans polled by The New York Times who said Democrats and Republicans, respectively, have handled the Covid pandemic better overall: 45%, 32%
Percent chance that Visa, AmEx and Mastercard are going to start categorizing gun purchases to help track suspicious surges in sales: 100%
Rank of Brighton NY, Nashua NH, and Worthington OH on the latest list of the hottest housing markets in America, according to realtor.com's 2022 Hottest Zip Codes Report: #1, #2, #3
Rank of Windham and Auburn, Maine: #5, #10
Age of the first Good Humor ice cream truck as of this year: 120
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Roll call…
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JEERS to our top story of the day by law. Here's a mandatory update on the most critical development affecting the planet over the last 24 hours:
♔ The Queen's coffin used to be over there.
♔ But now the Queen's coffin is over here.
♔ Later today the Queen's coffin will be somewhere else.
♔ This will happen for six more days until the Queen's coffin stops moving around so they can have a funeral.
♔ Then the Queen's coffin will move around some more until a meek voice cries out, "Plant me in the bloody ground already, gol' blimey."
This update will be updated several hundred more times today. (Update #5 will shock you.)
CHEERS to putting Putin in his proper place. Napoleon and Hitler, their heads teeming with delusions of grandeur, made the mistake of thinking they could invade Russia and ride triumphantly through the streets of Moscow. Russia drove them out. Fast forward to 2022: Vladimir Putin, his head teeming with delusions of grandeur, makes the mistake of thinking he can invade Ukraine and ride triumphantly through the streets of Kyiv. And guess what, Batman? It's going about as well for him invading west as it did for the little corporals invading east:
Ukrainian troops have made sweeping gains, raising their flag again in multiple towns and villages in the northeast of the country that were, until recently, occupied by Russia's invading forces. […]
As CBS News correspondent Debora Patta reports, the Ukrainians' recent battlefield successes around their country's second largest city of Kharkiv have been among their most significant since they crushed the bid by Vladimir Putin's military to seize capital Kyiv near the start of the war. Their counteroffensive, focused largely around Kharkiv, has already taken back about 1,000 square miles of the territory that Ukraine had lost since Putin launched his invasion on February 24.
Ukrainian forces [are] being greeted like conquering heroes, with civilians rushing to offer flowers, embraces, and tears of joy.
Vlad needs to get out of this jam ASAP. But what to do now? I dunno. (If it’s any help, I hear Afghanistan is available again.)
CHEERS to the grand finale. I don’t know about you, but I've hoovered up so much 2022 primary-election action over the last six months that I am positively stuffed. But it all comes to a timely close today with the final contests in three states. Here's an exclusive preview, courtesy of C&J's elections team:
Delaware If Mississippi lent Missouri her New Jersey, then what would Delaware? Tonight we find out. (My money is on something frilly.)
New Hampshire Mama tells me to stay away from New Hampshire because there's stuff going on over there that my eyes shouldn’t bear witness to. Sometimes a strong sulfur smell comes over from there. We all go inside, close the windows, and say lots of Bible stuff until it passes. New Hampshire blames Vermont for it, but I'm not so sure.
Rhode Island Can you believe these jokers have spent 232 years claiming to be an island and no one—not one person—has ever challenged their assertion. Well that stops here and now. I've empaneled a grand jury and issued a subpoena to every resident so we can get to the bottom of this fraud.
The Daily Kos Elections Team ("The Best in the Business") will be liveblogging all of the above tonight. But I can say one thing right now: shame on Mississippi for not even bothering to text Delaware. Ridiculous.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to the ultimate spin machine. Don’t forget to hug your hard drive—today marks the 66th birthday of the IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), the first computer to ship with a hard drive:
The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."
"It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running," recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-'50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims was the very first unit delivered by IBM." It really turned the tide [in the Information Age]," he says.
Here’s the original promotional film for it. “Another business service of tomorrow made possible today by IBM...”
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And now, as is custom, let's all say Happy Birthday to the hard-workin' hard drive: "01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01000010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001" And a 00010001 to grow an inch.
CHEERS to rolling up the ol' sleeves and doing the people's business. After a splendid August munching cocktail weenies with all the cool millionaires on Nantucket, the members of the Senate swathed themselves in their gussiest togas again and got to work with the House on making life a little more pleasant for us, the unwashed village rabble. On the agenda:
Senate negotiators expect to reach a deal on a bill to protect same-sex marriages in time to begin considering it on floor [this] week, which would put it on a path to pass before the end of the month. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the lead Democratic negotiator, confirmed the expectation is to “start the process at the end of [this] week.” […]
The House passed its version of the Respect for Marriage Act in July by a vote of 267 to 157, with 47 Republicans joining all Democrats in passing the measure.
Republicans say they're open to the legislation, as long as it contains mandatory horse-deworming paste distribution, an increase in fossil fuel subsidies, privatization of Medicare, and a ban on everybody always yelling "Hey asshole!" at them in airports and stores and on the street. (They're very sensitive, you know.)
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Ten years ago in C&J: September 13, 2012
CHEERS to boldly going where no one has gone before (except for the invisible people in Clint Eastwood's head). The spacecraft Voyager 1, which was launched 35 years ago, is breaking up with us and leaving us for another solar system. The split is amicable: we get to keep the photo album and it gets to keep the 8-track player.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the last Lone Star State governor to have more than two brain cells to rub together. Former Texas governor Ann Richards—whose reelection campaign was thwarted in part by Karl Rove's smear tactics ("I'm not saying she's a lesbian, but…")—died sixteen years ago today, dammit. Age 73. Born during the depression just outside of Waco, she mulled her epitaph back in '95:
"I did not want my tombstone to read, 'She kept a really clean house.' I think I'd like them to remember me by saying, 'She opened government to everyone.'"
As the snippet of her 1991 inaugural address engraved her headstone shows, she got her wish. (Although it must be said that her record on the death penalty, while not nearly as sadistic or prolific as her successors', is the worst of the few blots on her record.) Molly Ivins and Richards became close friends—you can read Molly's tribute here. In January, 1995 she wrote this after Richards lost to George W. Whatsizface:
Richards said in a farewell interview with the press corps that if she'd known she was going to be a one-term governor, she would have "raised more hell."
I wish she had.
But these are relatively minor quibbles with what is, overall, a distinguished record. My political memory of Texas goes back to Allan Shivers, and I know that in that time we have not had a governor who worked nearly as hard as Ann Richards. Who was nearly as gracious as Richards. Who made more good appointments than Richards. Who set a higher standard of honesty than Richards. [...]
What our notoriously weak governors actually do is set a tone for the state. So let it be recorded that for four brief shining years, Ann Richards gave the joint some class.
Good on ya, Annie.
Yeah. Ditto.
Have a tolerable 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 now officially King Billeh I. The coronation—the underwear-crowning ceremony for the new sovereign—won’t happen for a number of months, but his status as kiddie pool king is already set.
—Vox
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