From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Republicanland Is Open!!!
Check out the awesome attractions at America's newest theme park:
The Rick Perry Water Slide You start at the top and plunge to the bottom. Good luck figuring how to get to the top again!
Scurvy Newt's Pirate Conquest Avast, me doughy hearties! Set sail on the tide with Admiral Gingrich as he searches for a deserted island to bury all traces of his revolving Tiffany's account. On the way back, fire broadsides at the meddling media and liberal elites until they hoist the white flag. But don’t mention his wives or he'll make ye walk the plank, matey!
Ron Paul's Magical Mystery Ride! Build it yourself. Run it yourself. Ride it yourself. If you get hurt, have your neighbors hold a bake sale to cover your medical expenses.
The Jon Huntsman Cornfield Maze to Nowhere (formerly owned and operated by Tim Pawlenty Enterprises) No one notices when you enter. No one notices when you exit.
Mitt Romney's Kissing Booth! Step right up and get a smooch from the front-runner! Only one dollar! No waiting! Seriously, there is absolutely no one in line at the moment to kiss Mitt Romney. He's wide open and ready to feel the love!
[Crickets]
Okay, what if he pays you? Anyone? Aw, c'mon!
Grover Norquist's Ass-Kissing Booth Don’t miss this attraction! (Seriously, don’t miss it or your career is over…)
Ronald Reagan's House of Mirrors No matter which one you look into, you always appear as a mighty and flawless hero on a white stallion!
Herman Cain's Excellent Mexican Adventure! Swim the moat, outrun the alligators and scale the electrified fence topped with barbed wire to win a job picking American produce for two bucks an hour!
The Scott Walker Whack-A-Union Booth Use your iron fist to crush the collective bargaining rights of public workers. Made possible by a generous grant from Koch Industries.
Michele Bachmann's Scariest Spook House in the World! It's basically just you and her in a room in a house.
The Rick Santorum After-Hours Tent What happens inside? Only Google knows for sure. Strictly 21+.
To get there, park in the lot and board the crazy train. (Oops! It's been defunded. Guess you'll just have to drive there yourself.)
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Note: Today is the start of Rub Your Shoes On The Carpet And Then Touch Your Cat's Nose With Your Finger Season. Or, as emergency rooms call it: Missing Finger Month.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the 2012 Summer Olympics in London: 282
Days `til the 2nd annual Mount Rainier Fall Wine Festival in Ashford, Washington: 17
Percent of Americans who support additional federal spending on teachers, police and firefighters: 75%
Percent of Americans who support additional federal spending on roads, bridges and schools: 72%
(Source: CNN poll via Jed)
Percent of gay U.S. soldiers who are out to at least some of their unit: 78%
(Source: OutServe)
Approximate number of iPhones in use worldwide: 128 million
Minimum number of pre-orders for the iPhone 4S on the first day of sales: 1 million
(Source: Apple)
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 180 (including 3 Satanisms and 1 really awesome way to suck the fun out of Halloween forever). Soul Protection Factor 666 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: The movement spreads…
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CHEERS to the best junior high school debate ever. But jeers to the fact that last night's debaters are all running for president of the United States. There's no way to sugarcoat the conclusion: it was a knockout. For Barack Obama. As soon as it was clear that "apples and oranges" was going to be the recurring theme of the evening, and as soon as petty bickering broke out for the dozenth time, it was just a matter of degrees by which the candidates would out-crazy each other. (As usual, Ron Paul displayed most of the flashes of sanity, which shows how far down the rathole the rest of the field was.) I took copious notes for future historians:
- Oh, zing! Point to Romney. He just tut-tutted Perry. This could end with a duel in the back alley later on.
- If Cain's 9 percent federal sales tax only applies to new goods, it'll be a boon to the refurbished condom industry.
- Drill, Perry, Drill! How very original.
- I'd read that Rick Santorum was boycotting the debate over Nevada's caucus schedule or something. He showed up anyway. Political jiu-jitsu…Hai!!!
- Michele Bachmann says there are "too many magnets in this country." I find that an attractive argument.
- Bachmann botches her terminology. They're not "anchor babies," Congresswoman, they're "terror babies." Just ask your tea party soulmate Rep. Louis Gohmert. Slloppy.
- That sound you hear is 9-9-9 circling the drain-drain-drain.
- CNN breaks in to report a sequin malfunction on Dancing with the Stars. There are no injuries. Physical ones, anyway.
- And the winner is: my 2nd-grade teacher, Mrs. Martin. She inspired me to be a better boy and smelled like apricot.
It's my understanding that the next debate won’t happen for a month. Mainly because that's how long they figure it'll take to clean the lecterms of claw marks and spittle.
JEERS to Fox News. Monday during the noon hour, we decided to check out the GOP propaganda channel for shits and giggles. On my teevee appeared some hyper-caffeinated Fox business analyst who said (in that haughty, "I'm an intrepid hippie hunter on safari" tone) that the Occupy Wall Street protests were a) organized by communists b) totally disorganized c) populated by lazy, unmotivated slackers and d) on the verge of exploding into violence. In fact, he said quite emphatically that "it's not safe to go down there." Then came the punchline. After the host asked, "This is your opinion, right?" the Fox business guy responded, "It's not my opinion. It's my observation." (And he'll cry if he wants to.) What a dick. Meanwhile, the decidedly non-dickish Chris Bowers has an excellent recap of yesterday's OWS highlights. I can't keep up with it all anymore. But one thing I love abut the movement is how it's producing, spontaneously, heroes like Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas. No wonder the elite overlords are so nervous. Once you let a little conscience out of the bag, who knows where it will lead???
CHEERS to wars worth fighting. On October 19, 1781, British General Lord Cornwallis (or, rather, a representative of Cornwallis) surrendered to Washington's Continental Army outside of Yorktown, effectively ending the War of Independence. The surrender agreement contained the first recorded use of the phrase "Nyah Nyah!" (Full disclosure: Lafayette's idea.)
CHEERS to Blowhard vs. Blowhead. So you may have heard that Rush Limbaugh, whom no Republican has ever crossed, put himself in hot water when he complained that Commander-in-Chief Obama was sending 100 troops to dismantle the guerrilla army known as the "Lord's Resistance Army" because he wants to defeat Christians…or something, which is amazingly ignorant because the LRA is basically a massacre machine. But in an amazing display of Crazy vs. Crazy, Senator James Inhofe stepped in to let Limbaugh know in no uncertain terms that he's full of shit:
Using Limbaugh’s and his cohorts name, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), said, “some people have mistakenly said that [the LRA's leader] is a Christian, and I want to make sure everyone knows that he was officially disavowed by the Catholic Church in Uganda.” He went on to detail their group’s atrocities.
I believe Limbaugh's exact words were: "Fine. Whatever. Now please get your #!#@! plane off my lawn. You're scaring the goats."
JEERS to the Big Dump. On October 19, 1987---on Saint Ronald Reagan's watch---stocks plunged 508 points amid panicky selling. They called it "Black Monday." The lowlights:
10:30 AM---With 140 million shares traded, the Dow is down 101 points, to 2145.
11:45 AM---A brief turnaround gives traders a flicker of hope as the Dow regains 95 points in a half-hour.
1 PM---As rumors spread about a NYSE shutdown, the Dow plunges 100 points in the next hour.
2:15 PM---With the Dow down 300 points, an investor outside the NYSE screams, "Down with Reagan! Down with MBAs! Down with yuppies!"
4 PM---The NYSE closes. Chairman John Phelan says it was the closest thing to a "financial meltdown" that he had ever seen.
The percentage decline (22.6%) was actually worse than the crash of 1929. Thank god we learned our lesson and, through sensible legislation, never had to experience anything like that again. Attaboy, Congress!
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Five years ago in C&J: October 19, 2006
CHEERS to "a very honest general." Britain's new top army chief, Sir General Sir Richard Sir Dannatt, says it's bloody obvious that the Queen's subjects would be better served by pulling the country's troops out of Iraq soon: "I want an Army in five years time and 10 years time. Don't let's break it on this [war]." My sentiments exactly: let's don't let's. I think.
JEERS to today's Bullshit Moment. From TIME magazine's interview with Rupert Murdoch comes this whopper:
TIME: Is there anything Fox has done in the past 10 years that in retrospect you thought was "unfair and unbalanced"?
MURDOCH: Nothing I can think of. As someone who is reputed to be more conservative than I really am, I get annoyed sometimes that subjects are not put out properly, explained properly. But in short, no. [Fox News chief] Roger Ailes has been insistent on equal time for all sides.
TIME forgot to add Murdoch's coda to that statement: "Wink Wink!"
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And just one more…
CHEERS to coming out of the closet…of stupidity. A fun activity for the heterosexuals in our C&J family: try and turn yourself gay. No, go ahead…I'll wait. [Tick Tock Tick Tock] Yeah, harder than it looks, isn’t it? In fact, it's a fool's errand, am I right? If you're straight, you're straight. And yet a persistent gaggle of conservative Christian "Ex-Gay ministries" have profited off of their flim-flam mission to "Hate the sin, change the sinner" and to "Pray away the gay." Oh, the lives they've fucked up---thousands. And one of the worst offenders is John Smid of "Love in Action." A real piece of work. Among other things, he…
…took away the underwear of clients if the undergarments appeared too gay. The strict Memphis-based ministry also used an egg timer in the bathroom to make sure its clients would not masturbate while showering. Of all the “ex-gay” ministries this was the most cult-like---with Smid keeping tight control over the social lives of his clients, who paid a pretty penny to live in the residential program.
Happy to say that Smid is finally dropping the bullshit and fessing up. He's finally admitting that, while facing one's sexual orientation can be confusing and difficult to accept, ex-gay therapy is, in essence, homohooey. Smid's money quote is absolutely devastating to those, like the GOP candidates running for president, who cling to the notion that being gay is a "lifestyle choice." It's as if Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage came out for gay marriage. Admits Smid: "Actually I’ve never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual." Make no mistake, Smid has blood on his hands---namely, from any gay person who committed suicide because they felt they couldn’t "turn straight for Jesus" under his tutelage. But if he devotes the rest of his life to publicly atoning for his grave sin of imposing a biological and psychological impossibility on vulnerable people---if he takes an active role in exposing the other "ex-gay" ministries and their insulting tactics---he might just be asked to lead a pride parade when he's old and gray. It'll be a watershed moment. And I predict he'll look fabulous in sequins.
Have a nice Wednesday. Let the thinkin' commence. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Cranes, trucks and construction workers file in and out of the hole, usually through a passageway between the White House and the Old Executive Office Building. The cavernous hole has inspired much speculation. Is it an Olympic-size swimming pool for the fitness-conscious first couple? A more spacious bunker? A place, perhaps, to hide Bill in Portland Maine?
---The New York Times
10/18/11
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