From the top floor of Cheers and Jeers MONDAY
World Headquarters, in the true-blue state of Illinois.....
Less than 24 hours to go, folks. I was going to do a snarky opener based roughly on "Bull Durham" but I'm not a quality enough writer to make it work (it was going to be a riff on learning our cliché's, since we will be going to The Show. It didn't work.)
This is being posted earlier than usual because I'll be in the field today, working with the McCaskill campaign in St. Louis. I encourage all of you to do something today to help our Party take back both houses of Congress, if you possibly can. Before we go out and save the world, though, we need a full meal deal of snark to send us on our way.
To victory in 2006.....and beyond!!! Cheers and Jeers MONDAY begins in the extended copy section (Sa-wooooooshhhhhhh!)......right Now! (GONG!)
DISCLAIMER: AAbshier's Cheers and Jeers are not affiliated in any way, shape, or form, with Bill in Portland Maine's Cheers and Jeers. The use of the words JEERS and CHEERS , the swoosh/gong device, pie references, lusty wenches, mattress references, insults to Armando (wherever he is), and flicked peas are all used with permission of Bill in Portland Maine and the members of the C&J Café community. Any further resemblances to BiPM`s Cheers and Jeers are deliberately coincidental. So there.
DOC'S BAD JOKE OF THE WEEK
(In the gray box so you can avoid it and not miss anything else)
A kangaroo walks into a bar and orders a martini. The bartender
figures that a kangaroo probably isn't very economically aware, and
charges him $50. The marsupial orders a beer next time, and is charged
$60. Finally, the bartender's curiosity gets the better of him. He
casually remarks, "You know, we don't get too many kangaroos in here."
The kangaroo replies, "At these prices, no wonder."
Katherine Harris: Pure. Comedy. Gold.
She's not just another pretty face:
You may think this is the last of the series, but no, I'm expecting a concession speech tomorrow night that will be worthy of an Academy Award nomination. That should be worth a couple of items in next week's C&J! Meantime our hapless heroine limps towards the finish line:
Jeers to the Princess inserting one more Christofascist foot in her mouth:
U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, who has made past comments that raised questions about her religious sensitivity, prayed in a telephone prayer service recently that God would "bring the hearts and minds of our Jewish brothers and sisters into alignment."
The Princess says she meant bringing the Jews into alignment with the Republican party, not convert them to Christianity--this from someone who professes a love of Israel and wants to live there someday. Oy veh.
Jeers to putting the kibosh on reporters--at a time her campaign needs publicity the most. She has now been reduced to sending staffers to keep reporters from talking to the people that she talks to that don't seem interested in her message, saying that they are "intimidating" them. This occurred at a stop in Kissimmee. The afternoon event, a walkthrough of downtown Lakeland, was marked NO PRESS.
Cheers to Starbucks. Thanks to the Princess's insane Starbucks habit, the company made $950.00 from 133 different runs to Starbucks her campaign made for her during the third quarter of 2003. (That's 1.46 runs to Starbucks for each day of the quarter!). The data, originally posted on Wonkette, prompted this comment:
Now can someone graph this and but it up against major fumbles in her campaign (another lost campaign manager, coming to a floor vote shoeless, etc.). The data here needs some context.
Should be interesting reading--probably better than the Pink Sugar's upcoming book. (Thanks to Interstate4Jamming for the tip)
Here she is with $5.50 worth of her $950.00:
And we have a guest Jeer, from the Independent Florida Alligator Online--actually they call it a Dart:
Speaking of hypocritical recovering alcoholics who talk to Jesus, we fling a wake-up-and-smell-the-failure DART at Katherine Harris, the only person in the world who thinks Katherine Harris has a chance in next week's Senate election. She may be down 29 points in the latest polls, but she insists "they" - the CIA? the Comintern? Jews? - "can make the polls say whatever they want." Sure they can, Kathy. And that bustline of yours is all natural.
The Rest:
Cheers to nailing the hypocrisy of Ted Haggard flush to the plank. In OpEd News, Dean Powers writes:
Every Sunday for three years Haggard woke up and washed the filthy "sin" off his body and then stood before 14,000 devoted emulators of his behavior and advised them to let vindictive hate for homosexuals corrode their souls.
This while he was getting "massages" from his gay escort. Nice bit of Dominionist Christianity, there.
Jeers to a pain in the butt. Via Dave Barry's blog, we have this wonderful headline to enjoy and share. No word on if he had any involvement with Ted Haggard.
Cheers to good riddance to bad rubbish. In Mississippi, former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel H. Bowers, convicted in the 1966 fire-bombing murder of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer, died in prison. I'm sure his Klan vestments will be all the rage in the Underworld (I mean, Nazi uniforms are soooo last year.)
Cheers to Keith Olbermann, who participated in a discussion of his new book on Firedoglake with his typical grace and wit:
(Stimp@22): I wanted to thank you for all the splendid work you are doing. I really enjoyed your book. Do you find reporting on this adminstration is more or less frustrating than the Clinton term?
Well, Stimp, I spent eight months trying to get out of my contract during the Lewinsky nonsense. My main complaints then were a) this really isn't news, b) it doesn't seem to CHANGE from day to day, and c) it's not important. These days none of the above seem to apply. And my best to Ren.
And yes, Mr. Olbermann is a Grandmaster of Snark:
(Pachucatec@75): Keith, did Ann Coulter have that Adam's Apple at Cornell?
I don't know. He was several years after me there.
We're not worthy! We're not worthy!
Cheers to interesting anniversary convergences. On this date in 1962, the United Nations General Assembly officially condemned apartheid in South Africa. Though it would be decades more before South Africa was free, the process of ending apartheid began on the same day of the month that the man who would later be known as the Great Emancipator--Abraham Lincoln--was elected 16th President of the United States, in 1860.
Finally, Cheers to a great hymm that has always inspired me:
Sound Over All Waters (John Whittier, 1873)
Sound over all waters, reach out from all lands,
The chorus of voices, the clasping of hands;
Sing hymns that were sung by the stars of the morn,
Sing songs of the angels when Jesus was born.
With glad jubilation, bring hope to the nations:
The dark night is ended, and dawn has begun.
Rise hope of the ages, to rise like the sun
All speech flows to music,
All hearts beat as one,
The dark, dark night has ended....and dawn has begun!
Blow, bugles of battle, the marches of peace;
East, west, north, and south, let the strong quarrel cease;
Sing songs of great joy that the angels began,
Of glory to God and of good will to man.
Hark, join in the chorus, the heavens before us:
The dark night is ended, and dawn has begun.
Rise hope of the ages, to rise like the sun
All speech flows to music,
All hearts beat as one,
The dark, dark night has ended....and dawn has begun!
May we all sing this, or whatever song inspires us, very soon. Meantime: GOTV!
The floor is open.