From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
"Oh, Harding Har Har!"
Today is the 30th annual "Presidential Joke Day." Since it's Monday and I've already OD'd on news this month (I thought August was supposed to be the "slow" month), enjoy some POTUS punchlines:
"Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day."
---Truman
Reporter at press conference: The Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution saying you were pretty much of a failure.
John F. Kennedy: I'm sure it was passed unanimously.
(See it here at 33 seconds in.)
"Remove my wife from the
premises---please! Ha ha."
"Sock it to me???"
---Nixon
“Washington, DC is 12 square miles bordered by reality."
---Andrew Johnson
'My esteem in this country has gone up substantially. It is very nice now when people wave at me, they use all their fingers.”
---Jimmy Carter
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'"
---Teddy Roosevelt
"He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met."
---Lincoln
"There is no pleasure in having nothing to do. The fun is having lots to do and not doing it'"
---Andrew Jackson
"I’m feeling sorry, believe it or not, for the Speaker of the House. These days, the House Republicans actually give John Boehner a harder time than they give me, which means orange really is the new black."
---Obama (2014 WH Correspondents Dinner)
And one from George W. Bush, who created unintentional humor out of anything handy…like when he
tried to redefine one of his signature phrases:
"We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be The Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free Societies Who Happen To Use Terror As A Weapon To Try To Shake The Conscience Of The Free World."
Or SAIEWDNBIFSWHTUTAAWTTTSTCOTFW for short. For the life of me I can't understand why it never caught on.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, August 11, 2014
Note: If you need a penny take a penny. If you have a penny, quit taking our pennies.
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5 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til primaries in Connecticut, Minnesota and Wisconsin:
1
Days 'til the
Silopanna Festival (note: autoplay video) in Annapolis, Maryland:
5
Number of unaccompanied children apprehended after crossing the U.S. border from Mexico in July, half the number taken in May and June:
5,500
Number of parents with children arrested, down by more than half:
7,400
(Source: DHS)
Amount in the new VA bill dedicated to hiring new medical and mental health personnel:
$5 billion
Expected size of this year's soybean crop, a record due to
perfect weather conditions:
3.8 billion bushels
Size of the corn crop, not a record but still huge:
13.9 billion bushels
(Source: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)
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NEW! Your Monday George Carlin Brain Droppings
"No comment" is a comment.
People used to take drugs, now they do drugs. Some people don’t do drugs, they do lunch. Instead of taking drugs, they take meetings. They used to have meetings. Now, instead of having meetings, they have relationships. Some people who don’t do drugs but have a relationship will take a meeting while they do lunch.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Cue the music from Psycho…
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CHEERS to a lazy goof-off week. Here's the way things stand around the country:
The Senate is off. The House is off. The President is off. The Supreme Court is off. State legislatures are off. Bosses are off. I got an idea: let's go steal their staplers.
JEERS to grifters for Gawd. Pulpits were a' pounded and Amens were a' shouted at the annual Religious Hypocrisy and Bible Verse Cherrypicking Summit in Ames, Iowa over the weekend. The reason for the gathering, according to their website, is "to educate and mobilize the conservative base regarding worldview application and issues that impact the family." Here's a brief summary of what attendees learned about the family:
Unable to attend, as usual: God.
(Although many who did attend,
as usual, thought they were.)
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> Christian marriages that end in up in divorce half the time are better than non-Christian marriages that end up in divorce half the time.
> Don’t touch yourself there, sonny, or you'll grow hair on your palms.
> Non-Christian girls who get "knocked up out of wedlock" are demonic sluts. Conservative girls who are "single and with child" are God's most precious gift and perfectly positioned to become abstinence-only advocates.
> Real Christian families pay for their health care with bake sales.
> Real Christian families kick their gay children out of the house to prevent the gay from spreading to other family members.
> Real Christian families recognize the sanctity of knowing which non-Christians should be tolerated and which should be bombed.
> Real Christian families know that Barry Hussein O'Butthead is….well, he's just….OH WE HATE HIM LIKE THE BIBLE TELLS US TO!
All in all it was a fine conference. But more important, it was an even finer money extraction.
JEERS to dumb moves. On August 11, 1984, during a radio voice test, President Reagan joked (and this joke became the spark for Presidential Joke Day): "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." (Listen to it here.) The Russians had a good laugh over it...right after they carefully put their missiles back in their silos and sucked down a bottle of vodka (not necessarily in that order).
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Answer Man. John Kerr at Media Matters asks: Will Fox News finally stop pushing the Benghazi hoax?
No.
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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JEERS to culinary chaos. As huge chunks of the civilized world punish Vladimir Putin's reckless imperialism with sanctions and scorn, the Russian people think the dictator with the puppet parliament is just peachy. But that might change, now that Putin has struck back at the west by sending his own people's taste buds into a tailspin:
In Russia, soon to be break-
fast, lunch and dinner.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning to banning the import of western food in retaliation for new NATO sanctions over the escalating Ukraine crisis. While the details list of food imports to be banned has yet to be released, the ban will reportedly encompass all imports from America and many from Europe.
So now Russians have to subsist on Russian food? I say no more than three months before Pootie Poot gets the bootie boot.
CHEERS to cleaning up after "The war to end all wars." Here's some obscure trivia that might come in handy if you have a million bucks riding on a question about post-W.W. I Germany. On August 11, 1919, the Weimar Constitution came into being. It was quite liberal for its time:
Looka the biceps on
that bundesbird!
Persons have the right to be notified within a day of their arrest or detention as to the authority and reasons for their detention and be given the opportunity to object. This is equivalent to the principle of habeas corpus in the common law of England and elsewhere. (Article 114)
Privacy of correspondence, of mail, telegraph, and telephone are inviolable. (Article 117)
Germans are entitled to free expression of opinion in word, writing, print, image, etc. This right cannot be obstructed by job contract, nor can exercise of this right create a disadvantage. Censorship is prohibited.
(Article 118)
Wow. And then Hitler came along and fucked it all up. Anyway, it was signed 95 years ago today by President Ebert. He gave it two thumbs up.
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Five years ago in C&J: August 11, 2009
CHEERS to a friendly li'l chat. President Obama will be in Portsmouth, New Hampshire today, speaking to an audience of 1,800. Naturally, the opposition is barking orders to its gullible goon squad to go and cause trouble. To keep it fair, Obama will field questions with one brain lobe tied behind his back.
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And just one more…
JEERS to fear-based marketing: the annual update. Three years ago the conservative media outlet "Newsmax" posted an ad that caught my eye on Facebook. The ad still shows up occasionally on right-wing conspiracy sites, and this was the copy they posted to get people to click on it:
Obama's Coming Depression
50% unemployment,
90% stock market collapse,
100% inflation.
See the evidence.
Shocked and horrified, I clicked as fast as I could so I could "see the evidence." It turns out they're---
surprise!---feasting on ignorant people's fear and paranoia to sell shitty investments. I actually read the fine print, and here's what it said, in part (and, yes, in all caps):
NO GUARANTEE OF ANY KIND IS IMPLIED OR POSSIBLE WHERE PROJECTIONS OF FUTURE CONDITIONS ARE ATTEMPTED. IN NO EVENT SHOULD THE CONTENT OF THIS REPORT BE CONSTRUED AS AN EXPRESS OR IMPLIED PROMISE, GUARANTEE OR IMPLICATION BY OR FROM THE SERVICES, NEWSMAX OR ANY OF ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AFFILIATES OR OTHER AGENTS THAT YOU WILL PROFIT OR THAT LOSSES CAN OR WILL BE LIMITED IN ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER.
Translation: The sky is falling, the world is crumbling (SEE the evidence!!!), and we at Newsmax have a product that offers nothing to protect you in any way whatsoever unless you get really, really lucky playing roulette with your money, from which we'll extract hefty fees whether you win or lose.
And just for shits and giggles, a three-years-later fact-check: unemployment is 6.2 percent, the stock market is in record-high territory, and inflation is 2.1 percent. So I say, buy! (Disclaimer: By that I mean buy anything but what Newsmax is selling.)
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Obama: Bill in Portland Maine Generally ‘Fact-Based and Reason-Based,’ Unlike GOP ‘Nonsense’
---Mediaite
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