From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
8 weeks 'til the Netroots Nation convention!
Here's your weekly update on all things hashtagNN14, starting with a hair-on-fire alert from Nolan Treadway:
We wanted to let you know that our hotel block is filling up fast. If you have not yet made a hotel reservation, book your room as soon as possible to get the Netroots Nation rate. Click here to make your reservation for at the group rate. If the Marriott website says rooms are unavailable, we suggest calling them and ask what rooms are available at the Netroots Nation rate.
• Just announced: a
pre-convention welcome party that's so hot you'll need a cold beer to cool down, says Mary Rickles:
The Michigan Senate Democrats and the DLCC are hosting a welcome party for Netroots Nation attendees, and you're invited! Join Michigan Senate Democratic Leader Gretchen Whitmer and other special guests on Wednesday evening, July 16, at the Detroit Beer Co. ("Home of award-winning ales and lagers brewed on-site," says Wikipedia.) To RSVP, Click here and they'll mark ya down.
The party starts at 7, so you can still fit in the
Daily Kos/C&J Meet 'n Greet at
Vicente's Cuban Cuisine, which starts at 5:30. The earlier we get a head count the better, so if you want to put your name on the list, let Navajo know via kosmail
by clicking here.
• Panels Panels Panels!!! You'll find them here. Here's just a teeeeeny tahny sample of the participants who'll be up on various daises: Chris Bowers, Melissa Ryan, Joe Sudbay, Chris Savage, Howard Dean, Ali Gharib, the Daily Kos Elections crew, Ben Wikler, Laura Clawson, Sally Kohn, Emily Rusch, Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez, Rashid Shabazz, Zerlina Maxwell, Dr. Michael Dorsey, David Dayen, and Feminista Jones. Totally excellent.
Eric Thut (c) and volunteers.
•
Call for volunteers! A big reason for the success of Netroots Nation every year is the dedicated gaggle of people who chip in to help with some of the various tasks that need to be taken care of before and during the convention. You get to rub elbows with some cool fellow bloggers, plus time spent volunteering won't be deducted from your lifespan. Drop an email to NN's Volunteer Poobah (recently promoted from Viceroy) Eric Thut---
volunteers[at]netrootsnation.org---to learn more and sign up.
• Also this:
• I intend to get to the bottom of this! Specifically, I wanna know which famous Detroit Coney dogs are better: the ones at American Coney Island or the ones next door at their longtime rival Lafayette Coney Island. I may have to return several times during the convention to fully explore the issue.
• Registration info is here.
• Follow NN14 on twitter here.
Meanwhile, Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, May 22, 2014
Note: Due to the Memorial Day holiday there will be no C&J on Monday. Back Tuesday to show off my first lawn dart wounds of 2014.
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16 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the
2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio:
806
Days 'til the
SWINE Festival ("Where cork meets pork") in Ankeny, Iowa:
16
Amount JPMorgan Chase plans to invest in Detroit for home loans, job training and blight removal:
$100 million
(Source: AP)
Annual ice-sheet loss in Antarctica, according to three years of data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat 2 satellite:
159 billion tons
Number of complaints the FDA has received from consumers about pets getting sick after eating treats made in China (and over 1,000 pet deaths reported):
4,800
Percent chance that Petco is going to stop selling pet treats made in China by the end of the year:
100%
Age of Lucy Li, who
qualified to play in the U.S. Women's Open:
11
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
Of course I am above sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. So serious a servant of the public interest am I, I can fogey with the best: On my better days, I make David Broder look like Page Six.
I don't care what anyone smoked 20 years ago, I approve of those who boogie 'til they puke, and I don't care who anyone in politics is screwing in private, as long as they're not screwing the public.
---May, 2006
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Puppy Pic of the Day: And the best cities in which to be owned by a dog are…....
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CHEERS to anticipation. Hooray! Only one more day 'til the start of the Memorial Day Weekend and then it'll be July 4th and then back-to-school and then the midterm elections and then Thanksgiving and then Christmas 'n Hanukkah 'n Festivus and then "Happy New Year 2015!" and then fucking winter and then spring and then only one more day 'til the start of the Memorial Day weekend. Oh, the joy of having been around the block a few times.
JEERS to two all-beef(-flavored) patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions and a trip to the pokey in handcuffs. I worked in fast food a while back. It's a greasy, nasty, hectic job in which you spend your eight hours dealing with people you'd like to strangle. So good on the fast-food workers who put themselves in the thick of it yesterday as McDonald's annual shareholder meeting looms. From Fast Food Global:
Really, guys? Riot gear?
Fed up with low pay, wage theft and McDonald’s refusal to listen to them, 101 McDonald’s employees from nearly three-dozen cities surged onto the company’s Oak Brook, Ill corporate campus Wednesday, calling for $15 an hour and a union, and were arrested. In all, more than 2,000 workers, clergy and community supporters marched on McDonald’s headquarters, just a week after strikes and protests rocked 230 cities around the world in what MSNBC called the “biggest fast-food strike ever." Earlier in the day, McDonald’s shut down a corporate headquarter building in Oak Brook where workers had planned to protest.
More action is expected today when the shareholders meeting actually gets underway. And that reminds me: if someone here could remind my partner Michael to add "Fastest Quarter Pounder Flipper in New England Two Summers in a Row---'84, '85") to my tombstone when I kick off from the cumulative effects of eating McDonald's food, that'd be great. Tell the engraver to supersize it.
What Republicans hope the
Benghazi hearings will look like.
???EERS to going toe to toe with the teabaggers. Nancy Pelosi made the call yesterday. Even though the GOP refs are corrupt and the game will be rigged, five Democrats---Elijah Cummings and Tammy Duckworth among them---
will fill seats on the House select committee investigating "You-know-wherezi." Since the proceedings are nothing more than a political stunt designed to exploit a two-year-old tragedy to scrape up votes from under the right-wing base's rocks, the Democrats' mission will be to make the Republicans look bad. Which pretty much means all they need to do is sit back and not say a word.
JEERS to sending in the cavalry. There's a lot of really abusive shit going on against women around the world, but the kidnapping of those schoolgirls in Nigeria is, for the moment, the situation everyone's focusing on, with condemnation coming from around the world (Limbaugh, Coulter and Kim Jong Un excepted, of course). As the Boko Haram terrorists continue their attacks, help continues to arrive (we're sending drones---and no one knows drones like we know drones), including from a homegrown bunch of badasses:
I'm sending this to Nigeria. You
may fire when ready, Gridley.
Traditional hunters armed with homemade guns, poisoned spears and amulets have gathered in their hundreds, eager to use their skills and what they believe to be supernatural powers to help find nearly 300 schoolgirls abducted by Islamic extremists.
Some 500 hunters, some as young as 18 and some in their 80s, say they have been specially selected by their peers for their spiritual hunting skills and have been waiting for two weeks in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital and the birthplace of Boko Haram, to get backing from the military and get moving. A spokesman for the hunters stopped short of actually criticizing the military. "We're not saying we are better than the soldiers, but we know the bush better than the soldiers," said Sarkin Baka.
That sound you hear is the bad guys sleeping with one eye a little more open than before.
CHEERS to knowing where there is. The 25th annual National Geography Bee ended yesterday in Washington, D.C. and the winner is Akhil Rekulapelli, an 8th-grader from Virginia. He gets a cool $50,000 in scholarship money and a free trip to who-knows-where. So here's the final question:
"Oyala, a planned city located in the rainforest 65 miles east of Bata, is being built as a capital for which African country?"
The winning answer is
Equatorial Guinea. Unless you're a Republican, in which case
your winning answer is
Benghazi.
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Five years ago in C&J: May 22, 2009
JEERS to re-branding denied. Sorry, gang, but we hafta stay the "Democratic Party" for another year, seeing as the RNC failed to pass their resolution yesterday that would've re-labeled us the Democrat Socialist Party. But at least they put some serious thought into the effort:
"One point of view is that calling them a 'socialist party' is not quite accurate; they're more like a 'national socialist party' the way the Nazis were."
Thanks a lot, crazy old paranoid white guys. Now what am I gonna do with the five hundred boxes of Democrat Socialist Party stationery I've got sitting in my living room? Somebody pass the ketchup.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the "Mayor of Castro Street." Today is the 84th birthday of the late San Francisco District Supervisor and gay rights (aka civil rights) pioneer Harvey Milk. Not coincidentally, today is also the fifth annual Harvey Milk Day:
Harvey's own stamp gets
its official release today in
a White House ceremony.
Milk served 11 months in office and was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another city supervisor who had recently resigned but wanted his job back. Milk's election was made possible by and was a key component of a shift in San Francisco politics. The assassinations and the ensuing events were the result of continuing ideological conflicts in the city.
Despite his short career in politics, Milk became an icon in San Francisco and "a martyr for gay rights", according to University of San Francisco professor Peter Novak. In 2002, Milk was called "the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States". Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: "What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and
then he set about to create it for real, for all of us."
He was a talented politician---smart, witty, eloquent, tireless, eager to learn from his early mistakes, but not without his flaws and personal demons. He understood well the power of grassroots campaigning and consensus-building.
“It takes no compromising to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no survey to remove repressions.”
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“All young people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, deserve a safe and supportive environment in which to achieve their full potential.”
Harvey would no doubt be thrilled with the gains made in the military (he was a Navy vet himself), marriage equality, corporate non-discrimination policies, and the overall de-stigmatization of LGBT Americans. But he'd be impatient as all get-out at the snail's pace at which those accomplishments happened, and furious that anti-LGBT violence is still happening with depressing regularity.
Harvey's now-famous core message of hope is as relevant as ever, and it's one of the reasons he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009:
"It’s about the us’s out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s. Without hope, the us’s give up. I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. So you, and you, and you…you gotta give em’ hope.”
And favorable circuit court rulings ain't bad, either.
Have a nice Thursday. Oh, and also happy birthday to Greg Dworkin, aka DemFromCT, who turns hffrfrrrhrr years old today---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:
Mysterious Fairy Circles Not Caused by Bill in Portland Maine
---Discovery.com
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