From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Breaking:
Millionaires Abandon Protest Movement
(NEW YORK)---A group of multi-millionaires claiming to represent the oppressed wealthy minority in America has abandoned its street-level protest in lower Manhattan, vowing instead to fight on from its upper-floor penthouses and secure gated communities.
Hoisting signs bearing gold-embossed slogans like "We are the 1%" and "Gordon Gekko 2012," the group calling itself Shut Up, Occupy Wall Street! marched half a block before returning to the valet-parking booth from which the protest started. The event lasted an estimated four minutes, according to observers.
"We're rich as hell and we're not going to take it anymore," said Winthorp P. Adelay III, 61, who supervises a Goldman Sachs office in the financial district. "It's damn difficult to get any derivatives trading done with all that shouting by the riff-raff going on down below."
"They want preferential treatment," said capital investments executive Margaret B. Plackmore, 58, as she stepped into a Bentley that was to chauffeur her to a private clinic for her monthly botox and seaweed-wrap treatment after the rally. "All the banging and honking and chanting and what have you. Why, it's driven my poor bichon frise back into therapy. Besides, I hear Burger King is hiring, so what do they have to be so angry about?"
March organizer Laurence Davenport IV, a senior analyst at AIG, said the goal of Shut Up, Occupy Wall Street! was threefold: "Lower taxes, less regulation, and tell those Occupy Wall Street protestors to shut the hell up and go get a job."
Police say the multi-millionaires' protest was peaceful, but Inspector Anthony Bologna of the NYPD randomly pepper-sprayed several of the Occupy Wall Street protestors a few blocks away, "just to keep 'em from getting any crazy ideas."
When asked why the millionaires' march lasted only a few minutes, Adelay said that conditions on the ground were worse than they realized. "There's grime and grit down here," he said. "When that first scuff appeared on my Salvatore Ferragamo python loafers, I knew this environment was too hostile. It's like the wild west."
The group hasn’t decided if they'll try again. They plan to meet for Sunday brunch at the Waldorf Astoria to discuss their options.
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Correction: The group members didn’t march, but were shuttled down the sidewalk in golf carts. The damage to Mr. Adelay's loafers was due to a falling martini olive.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, October 6, 2011
Note: Λ Λ Λ Λ Λ Λ Λ Λ Λ
(Until further notice, Occupy C&J's Note has pitched its tents for the long haul. List of demands soon to follow.)
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Yom Kippur: 2
Days `til the Wellfleet OysterFest on Cape Cod: 9
Portion of bills vetoed by, respectively, Grover Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt, the busiest veto-pen-wielding presidents: 1-in-5 / 1-in-6
(Source: USA Today)
Age of Tony Bennett, the oldest singer to get a song on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, as he did this year with his "Body and Soul" duet with Amy Winehouse: 87
Elapsed time since his last appearance on the chart, also a record: 44 years
Percent chance that Bennett was on the very first Hot 100 chart in 1958: 100%
(Source: Entertainment Weekly)
Rank of Bennett's "Duets II" on Billboard's Top 200 chart after selling 179,000 copies: #1 (his first #1 album)
(Source: L.A. Times)
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
The beauty of thinking long-term is that when you look at a problem like illegal immigration, your first thought is not building a fence on the border, it's helping economic development in Central and South America. This not only makes us more friends, it's a much better solution to the problem. Lots of folks have dandy ideas on how to have more friends and fewer enemies---for example, convert the money we spend in this hemisphere on the drug war to economic development. We should set up clean drinking water systems in all Third World countries---that suggestion comes from a reader who thinks the total cost would be less than we spend in Iraq in a month.
---November, 2005
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Betty White helps congratulate the Hero Dog Award winners in L.A.
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CHEERS to getting your closeup. Last night, while dissecting the Occupy Wall Street Movement (including the hypocrisy of the naysayers on corporate shills CNBC and Fox), one of our favorite Kossacks got some face time on The Daily Show:
Clip of Jesse LaGreca (aka MinistryOfTruth) speaking to Fox News at the NYC protest site: After thirty years of having our living standards decreased while the wealthiest one percent have had it better than ever, I think it's time for maybe, I dunno, some participation in our democracy.
Jon Stewart: "Daaaamn! That motherfucker brought game!"
Studio audience: Whooooo!!! Whooooooo!!!
Stewart: Y'know what he said? "Whazzup, tea party! I'll see your tri-corner hat and raise you a Union-soldier kepi!"
A star is born.
CHEERS to the simplest instructions in the world. I'll never forget the first time I really "got" the hero worship of Apple. It was when the iMac came out. A friend showed me his (it was a "blueberry") and to get started all you did was plug it in. That was insane! Whose cockamamie idea was it to make it that easy? Oh…Steve Jobs? Well, bully for him. I slunk back to my gray PC. [Sigh.] I never did make the switch---old habits and all that.
But Apple stole my heart when it entered the music arena. I'm a huge mix tape fan, and I still have little faux-leather cases filled with cassettes (always Maxell, never Memorex), some of which go back 30 years. 90 minutes of music each---wow! And then Steve Jobs introduced the iPod and iTunes, and holy shit-the-bed, Batman, I must've said "Cool!" a thousand times the first day alone. That's what Jobs created---technological cool. And technological freedom. Zipping through songs and customizing playlists and downloading tunes I hadn’t heard in eons…it was a rush that people must've felt when the first saw Edison's movies. I don’t know what his impact, good or bad or both, was on the music industry. But for consumers, it was a sea change.
You'd have to be living literally under a rock to not appreciate what Jobs gave us, the huddled masses yearning to just plug-in and go. He was a genius who found the nexus of simplicity and usefulness and giddy fun (I haven't even mentioned the iPhone or the iPad). His left brain and his right brain ran on all cylinders. Unfortunately cancer doesn’t give a shit about that and it killed Jobs yesterday at 56. If you're wondering why his successors are wearing binoculars around their necks today, it's so they can look up and see how friggin' high he set the bar.
JEERS to USA Today. Oh, pity the rich 'n famous celebrities and their hellish existence...but thank god The Nation's Newspaper is on the case:
Like many homeowners selling in a stubbornly depressed market, Candy Spelling didn't get her asking price. Her 14-bedroom, 57,000-square-foot mansion in the Holmby Hills section of west Los Angeles was on the market for 28 months---at $150 million, the priciest private home ever listed in the United States. Spelling eventually accepted $85 million from Petra Ecclestone, the 22-year-old daughter of British billionaire Bernie Ecclestone.
If Spelling is feeling seller's remorse unloading The Manor, she is hiding it well. "At the time it was listed, $130 million was the bottom line. If market conditions had been better, maybe I would have gotten more," says Spelling, who pocketed another $6 million from Ecclestone on artwork and furnishings after closing the sale this summer.
It's barely enough to keep baby in diamond-encrusted booties. Anyone up for a telethon?
CHEERS to Great Moments Republican gaffery (and this was a biggun'). On September 6,1976, President Gerald Ford claimed during a debate with Jimmy Carter that there was "no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe." The GOP let 72 hours pass before correcting themselves, giving Carter time to drop the hammer. Today, of course, Republicans don’t even bother to correct anything. They just get Fox News to stick a "(D)" next to the offender's name and send in Andrew Breitbart to concoct a new story. Heh, corrections. Really...how quaint.
CHEERS to Rick Perry: color-coordinated cowboy. Stumping in New Hampshire (by which I mean voters were stumping him by not liking him very much), the Texas Governor and sinking-fast presidential contender recently quoted St. Ronald, His Excellency the Reagan: "Now is the time for bright colors, not pale pastels, and I'm that bright color." Yes, and given what I hear is written on the welcome rock at your hunting lodge, I'm guessing that color is bright red.
CHEERS to getting pucked. Hey everybody, the NHL hockey season starts tonight! I'm so giddy I just know I'll be knocking strangers' teeth out all day. Bru-ins! Bru-ins!
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Five years ago in C&J: October 6, 2006
CHEERS to steamed Greens. In Pennsylvania, the Green Party's Republican-funded (!!!) bid to stay on the ballot and siphon votes from Bob Casey's campaign is officially dead as a doornail. Reason: they're idiots. Let's move on...
CHEERS to the way things stand. Here's a quick day-by day recap of the state of the Republican Party from their September 11th propaganda blitz through today, less than a month 'til the mid-term elections: Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Offense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense, Defense. Defense. Nice trend.
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And just one more…
JEERS to dollars and nonsense. Maine Governor Paul LePage is going to regret the day he ever took down that mural celebrating the working class from our state's labor building. He's given one excuse after another for dismantling it and tossing it in storage, but the bottom line is he can't stand the labor movement and I can prove it. His latest reason for taking down the mural, which he gave to NBC News' Brian Williams, is that it's a money thing:
“I have absolutely nothing against organized labor. My objection to the mural is simply where the money came from,” LePage responded. “The money was taken out of the unemployment insurance fund, which is dedicated to provide benefits to unemployed workers. They robbed that account to build that mural. Until they pay for it, it stays hidden.”
Unfortunately for him, I have this thing called a "memory." I remember that, at the same time he was taking down the mural last winter (for "not [being] perceived as equally receptive to both businesses and workers," said his acting labor lackey at the time), he was doing something else in the same building: ordering the conference rooms to be renamed, thus erasing references to significant labor leaders including César Chávez and Frances Perkins. None of those conference rooms, of course, had anything to do with the "unemployment insurance fund." Inescapable conclusion: you bet your Pants-on-Fire our governor has something against organized labor. But at least there's one bright spot to this story: after he finishes his one and only disastrous term in office and is replaced by a sensible Democrat or Independent, there will never, ever be a conference room in the Dept. of Labor building named after Paul LePage. He'll get the broom closet, though---they'll name it "The Liar's Den."
Have a nice Thursday. And in all fairness, I have to admit: sometimes Michele Bachmann makes perfect sense to me. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Awkward: Apple's Siri translates as 'Bill in Portland Maine's buttocks' in Japan
---TechnoLog
10/5/11
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