From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...
#14
The Onion is counting down its Top 20 "People Who Mattered in 2010." I'm particularly happy to see how they skewer this dick:
With the gaze of the whole world fixed on his small Gainesville, FL–based Dove World Outreach Center this Sept. 11, Pastor Terry Jones shocked an anxious media by calling off his threat to burn 200 copies of the Koran, which is bullshit, really, because the guy should have at least had the balls to torch one measly copy. Right? If Jones, or anyone, wants to get a few hundred million people all riled up on the anniversary of a major national tragedy by saying he's going to burn a Koran, he'd better step up to the goddamn plate and burn a fucking Koran. Just to show the world he's not wasting everybody's time, if for no other reason. ... In the end, 2010's biggest coward simply didn't have the stones to go through with it. Pussy.
Meanwhile, here's a story that sounds like it could come from The Onion, but doesn't: a far-right anti-Islamic group in Britain (Michael Savage and the Tea Party are sweet on 'em) says it's no longer interested in having Jones come speak to the group because it might offend its...gay members??? As an American gay dude, trust me, that's rather mind-blowing.
Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, December 16, 2010
Note: Dear Salvation Army bell ringer: Sorry about what I done with your bell. If you like, you can borrow my wetsuit to retrieve it.
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the 2012 election: 691
Days `til the Oregon Truffle Festival in Eugene: 43
Number of private-sector jobs lost during the Bush years: 600,000
(Source: Sen. Bernie Sanders via Rachel Maddow)
Amount of time China's new bullet train will slice off the ten-hour trip between Beijing and Shanghai: 4 hours
(Source: The Week)
Increase in sales of birth control for American women since 2007: 13%
(Source: Harper's Index)
First recorded date of a decorated Christmas tree: 1510
First recorded date of a cat knocking over a decorated Christmas tree and setting the house on fire: 1510
-
Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
"Some Christians seem to me inclined to lose track of love, compassion and mercy. I don't think I have any special brief to go around judging them, but when the stink of hypocrisy becomes so foul in the nostrils it makes you start to puke it becomes necessary to point out there is one more good reason to observe the separation of church and state: If God keeps hanging out with politicians, it's gonna hurt his reputation."
---December 2005
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: Saved!
-
CHEERS to crashing the gate. I swear tuh gawd, the process of letting gays serve openly in the military is like busting into a castle with a battering ram: you know you'll break through eventually, but in the meantime you've gotta put up with a lot of arrows and hot lead from the jerkoffs in the parapets. After declaring it dead many times, it looks like the 'Don't ask, don’t tell' policy may be about to go bye-bye. Yesterday the House passed a stand-alone bill to turn control of its demise over to the Executive branch, and now all eyes turn to the Senate. Supporting the effort now: Ben Nelson, Susan Collins and President Olympia Snowe. That secures 59 votes, with only one more (Scott Brown? Lisa Murkowski? The check's in the mail! Really!) needed to achieve cloture. Harry Reid---breathing some rare fire yesterday---will defiantly reconvene the Senate after Christmas to tie up loose ends, including DADT. I'm feeling shitty about it and I bet it'll fail. (Shh...that's code for I'm optimistic. Don’t tell McCain.)
JEERS to the giant sinkhole of guns, treasure and lives (not necessarily in that order). The spin doctors in the Obama administration have spun their "eagerly-awaited" review of the Afghanistan War, which turns 10 next year. The positive summary: we win some, we lose some, it's hard work, we can start a drawdown in July but we have to stay there in a combat capacity at least through 2014 (unless a Republican becomes president in 2012, in which case we'll be there at least through the end of time) and the pallets of American taxpayer cash---stacked prettily in two-ton bundles and topped with a shiny red bow---will continue being flown into Kabul airport and replaced with American coffins being flown out, and we have no idea why we're there. The negative summary: all of the above plus every other word insert the word "fucking."
CHEERS to the tax bill. The public loves it! The Senate loves it! I love it! [Spikes ball in the end zone] It's Miller time!!!!
P.S. Harsh my buzz in the comments at your peril. It took me a fifth of scotch, four pounds of psychotropic substances shot, snorted and smoked in a precise sequence, two cheesecakes and a quart of Häagen-Dazs to get me to this place. (Pray you're not in the vicinity when it all starts wearing off...)
CHEERS to docs gone WILD! I haven't said anything about that Virginia judge's decision that the federal health-insurance mandate is unconstitutional because, eh, it's such an outlier---14 judges have ruled the other way, and this Bush-appointed guy seems to be a walking conflict-of-interest. (Adding: I despise the mandate, and will continue to despise it until such time that we know we'll be rewarded with decent coverage options.) On the other hand, I'm giving a polite golf clap to the Maine Medical Association for pushing back against our own governor-elect's plan to join the repeal bandwagon:
Leaders of the association...plan to meet with Gov.-elect Paul LePage or his staff and incoming Attorney General William Schneider and urge them not to join at least 20 other states in a legal challenge, according to Gordon Smith, the association's executive vice president. Even a limited repeal of the most controversial piece of the Affordable Care Act---a mandate that individuals buy insurance---could jeopardize other hard-won benefits of the law, such as higher Medicaid reimbursements and better coverage of preventive care, Smith said.
They wouldn’t be meeting with the governor-elect if they didn’t have a secret weapon up their sleeve, and indeed they do: hypnotic head mirrors. Very sneaky.
CHEERS to civil disobedience...with pinky extended. On December 16, 1773, rebellious colonists dumped a few hundred chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxation, an event now known as the Boston Tea Party. (C&J always wept on this date until we found out it wasn't the Long Island iced variety.) It was an act of defiance against the British Crown for imposing taxation without representation. Which is exactly what the modern day "tea party" is all about, plus racism, birtherism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, secession, guns in schools, sour grapes, a shitty status-quo healthcare system, and making the rich as comfortable as possible...but minus the taxation without representation part since they, y'know, do have taxation with representation. (Hint: they're called representatives.) No doubt they'll be out in force on this, their high holy day. But one thing they won’t be doing is dumping any tea in any harbors. The fines are steep, and the Galt crowd is cheap.
JEERS to letters one shouldn’t have to write in 2010. Sent from C&J via You're-Shitting-Me Post:
Dear Supreme Court of Iran,
Hello! How are you? We're all fine here, thank you.
Hey, I just read that you upheld a decision to pour acid into some guy's eyes as punishment for something or other.
I was originally taken aback at the barbaric nature of this sentence, and hoped that you would at least be compassionate enough to enlist "forensic specialists to oversee the blinding by acid." I see that you have agreed to that provision, so I'm upgrading your status on the historical timeline from the year 985 to 1072. You earned it!
Please don’t let that adjustment go to your head, though. Modernity brings with it great progress, but also great wickedness (i.e. miniskirts, free speech, ragtime music).
Best to the family,
BiPM
I packed the envelope with glitter. They hate that.
-
Six years ago in C&J: December 16, 2004
JEERS to George W. Thumbs. Bush is holding a summit this week on a subject he knows even less about than the U.S. Constitution, CIA intelligence or the teachings of Jesus: the economy. And next week he'll demonstrate the latest gallbladder-removal techniques on C-Span.
CHEERS to doing drugs. In a controversial move (the pharmaceutical companies are pissed, naturally), Consumer Reports says it will start rating prescription drugs. Volunteers for the sex pill trials are lining up around the block.
-
And just one more...
CHEERS to der Muzik Mann. When I was 10, me and a busload of 5th grade classmates went to see the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lorin Maazel. It was the first time I'd ever heard classical music performed by a live orchestra. They jammed on Beethoven's 6th `Pastoral' symphony, and it was quite an awakening---the first time I really realized how live music can be felt as much as heard. Beethoven was deaf when he wrote it, a fact so astounding that my brain still won't allow me to believe it. Today is his 240th birthday. He got us all a present: Goose bumps.
Have a nice Thursday. But don’t expect me to weigh in on this. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
"The successful realization of these simple-structured and robust microlasers through standard wafer-based fabrication makes small-volume directional light sources possible for many important applications such as photonic integrated circuits with high-density chip-scale integration, optical communications, medical/biological sensors, and Cheers and Jeers."
---Masamichi Yamanishi, Research Fellow
Central Research Laboratories at Hamamatsu
-