Japan disaster relief sites list
From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Coming Soon to a City Near You!
(Assuming Boston, Massachusetts is a city near you.)
From the tastefully-appointed desk of Mary Rickles at Netroots Nation:
Want better media? So do we! That’s why from April 8-10, we're heading to Boston with thousands of activists, media makers, bloggers, journalists and others who are committed to changing the media and changing the world for the National Conference for Media Reform.
Like Netroots Nation, this event includes jam-packed days of speeches, panels, hands-on workshops, meetings, film screenings, live entertainment, parties and more. NCMR is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to take control over the future of media and discuss strategies to build the movement for better democracy.
Speakers include Netroots Nation veterans House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, as well as former White House technology adviser Susan Crawford, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Federal Communications Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and many more.
If you register by this Friday, you'll get a $50 discount on the regular rate. Click here and then type in the discount code NETROOTS. (Please use your pinky fingers only or it won’t work.)
Lord knows we need all the media reform we can get.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Note: Ann Coulter is proof that you should never stick your head inside an exposed nuclear reactor core. Tell the children so they will know!!!
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the launch of the Shuttle Endeavor: 28
Days `til the National Cherry Blossom Festival in D.C.: 4
Percent of the federal budget that the $5 million de-funding of PBS by the GOP in an "emergency session" of the House last week represents, according to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post: "one ten-thousandth of 1 percent"
Minimum number of weekly NPR listeners: 30 million
(Source: The Washington Post)
Percent of 12-17 year-olds who say they attend schools that have phone bans…but they bring their phones anyway: 65%
Percent who say they text in class at least once a day: 43%
(Source: Pew Research survey)
Percent of Americans who say they'd blame the GOP and President Obama, respectively, for a government shutdown: 53%, 22%
(Source: PPP via TPM)
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Tuesday Words of Wisdom from the Right-wing Blogosphere:
Speaking of trains, Glenn Beck just said something that struck me…
“When you board the wrong train, it is no use running down the aisle in the other direction”. In other words, get off the train! I like that! We are all running down the aisle on the wrong train and it is futile. Nothing will change until we get off the train and onto the right one.
---Commenter Happyscrapper at the Michelle Malkin blog
All together now: One…two…three… Woo woo?
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Puppy Pic of the Day: And where's Dad? Out chasing sticks with his buddies…
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JEERS and CHEERS to Operation Dawn: Takes Khaddafi Out of Your Way. [Sigh] This little kerfuffle (well, technically a "brouhaha" on the International Conflict Scale) is gonna be a bit of a long haul, so I'll conserve my comments. Today I would like to say one thing to the rebels who we're liberating: stop shooting your fucking guns in the air, you nitwits! I watch footage of you guys on the TV, and you shoot them straight up---Brackabrackabrackabracka!!!---and the bullets fall back down and half of you end up in the clinic with holes in your feet. STOP IT! Tomorrow: tips for how French pilots can improve the efficiency of their laser-guided brie bombs. Because I'm here to help.
CHEERS to sticking up for the little guy. Pvt. Bradley Manning is being tortured in violation of international and domestic law and---this is the part that really pisses me off---your tax dollars are paying the salaries of his torturers. It's an embarrassment, and a growing chorus of voices is saying, "Enough.":
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the gates of Quantico Marine Base in Virginia Sunday to protest the treatment of Bradley Manning, who is being held at the base prison on charges that he released classified government documents to WikiLeaks. Daniel Ellsberg, the 1971 Pentagon Papers leaker…said Manning's imprisonment is illegal. "The president could change this treatment of him. Apparently, (President Barack Obama) has been told by the Defense Department that this is appropriate," Ellsberg said. "That's a terrible commentary on our standards, which means that they feel free to use illegal measures against someone in their custody."
Someone's Nobel Peace Price is getting a wee bit tarnished.
CHEERS to another miracle in the muck. The latest needle-in-a-haystack rescue in Japan: an 80 year-old woman and her teenage grandson were pulled from the rubble that was Grandma's house. Meanwhile, not-so-good good news at the Fukushima nuclear plant, where the threat level has been elevated to Double, Double Toil and Trouble; Spent-Fuel-Rod Cooling Pool Is All A'Bubble. But at least one person is making out like a bandit---literally---after he or she walked off with the equivilent of $480,000 from a bank whose vault got cracked open and flooded. The burglar shouldn’t be too hard to catch, though---cashiers are keeping an eye out for someone at the checkout counter who wrings out their yen before paying.
JEERS to morons among us. A new Fox News poll is out, and one result sticks out like a sore thumb:
Do you think ACORN will steal the election for Barack Obama next year or not?
Think ACORN will steal the election 25%
Think they will not 43%
Not sure 31%
As Digby so helpfully points out, there ain't no ACORN no more. Facts---such pesky things.
JEERS to rudeness on the road. Remember how Republicans wailed and moaned anytime anyone said anything critical about George W. Bush "on foreign soil?" I sure do. For example, I remember how conservatives went berserk after one of the Dixie Chicks said at a concert in Britain that she was ashamed Bush is from Texas. They got death threats, their music was pulled from national radio playlists, and one radio station invited listeners to bring their Chicks CDs so they could literally be steamrolled. Naturally, I assume those same conservatives will be launching similar tirades against Sarah Palin for dissing President Obama in India. That means, of course and without hesitation, pulling her books from store shelves and online retailers, witholding donations to her PAC, boycotting her personal appearances and changing the channel when she's on Fox News. Right? Right???
[20 years elapse]
No. I didn’t think so.
P.S. Tim Pawlenty announced yesterday he's forming an explorazzzzzzzzzzz…..
CHEERS to 60's TV icons who will never not be cool. Today is the late Werner "Colonel Klink" Klemperer's 91st birthday. (Hogan's Heroes has a permanent spot in my personal sitcom Hall of Fame.) Meanwhile, William "Kirk" Shatner---very much alive and ever-evolving---turns 80. In honor of TV's good old days, we'll put down the remote and go change the channel manually.
Update: Oh, my achin' flab. That was painful. We lived like animals in the old days. Animals I tell you!!!
CHEERS and JEERS to Year 1. One year ago, a day after the House passed the health insurance reform bill, Robert Reich's words were useful for putting what had just happened in perspective. They're worth revisiting, both to remind ourselves what the bill is…and what it ain't:
Obama's legislation comes from an alternative idea, begun under the Eisenhower administration and developed under Nixon, of a market for health care based on private insurers and employers. [...] So don't believe anyone who says Obama's health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama's health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.
The significance of Obama's health legislation is more political than substantive. For the first time since Ronald Reagan told America government is the problem, Obama's health bill reasserts that government can provide a major solution. In political terms, that's a very big deal.
Unfortunately---and predictably---there was little effort by the Democratic leadership to promote the hell out of the immediate and future benefits of the bill, and they found themselves swamped by the pushback from the 24/7 GOP tea party noise machine. But in spite of all that, the legislation does have---pardon the cliché---a pulse:
Polls show that about 1 in 8 Americans believe they have been personally helped already, well before the main push to cover the uninsured scheduled for 2014. […] While Obama returns from Latin America on the signing anniversary Wednesday, administration officials will fan out across the country. Community commemorations that [started yesterday] come as the health care battle moves to the states. Even states suing to nullify the law's requirement that most Americans carry health insurance are proceeding with building blocks of the new system.
If nothing else, everyone's slowly getting used to the idea that we're all going to be working off roughly the same page from state to state when it comes to health insurance---and the worst abuses of the system are coming to an end. But, man, so far this has been some uuuuugly sausagemaking.
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Five years ago in C&J---March 22, 2006: TRIPLE PLAY!!!
CHEERS to getting her turn at bat. At yesterday's whiny-jokey conference, President Bush called on Helen Thomas for the first time in over 3 years, who knocked him into the middle of next week:
Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet---your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth… What was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil---quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?
And he thought he got banged up when he fell off his bike.
JEERS to whoppers, Part I. As part of his meandering answer to the question above, Bush said lied:
"...when [Saddam Hussein] chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it."
He said the same thing in 2003 to justify going to war. It was a lie then and it's a lie now. But thanks for reminding America of that.
JEERS to whoppers, Part II. Bush again: "Democracies don't war." No, but whatever you've turned our country into sure does.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to bouncer-backers. Bit of a scare yesterday: after arriving in Italy following a trip to Afghanistan, Speaker-of-the-House-to-be-again Nancy Pelosi made a pit-stop in a hospital. Doctors say her nausea dissipated as soon as she found out that Silvio Berlusconi was too busy with the Libya campaign and wouldn’t have time to stop by and kiss her hello.
Oh, and Happy Birthday, McMom---and many blessings on your camels! Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
At defiant march, Syrians shout 'No more Cheers and Jeers!'
---USA Today
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Testing: