From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
As Many Enter Stage Right, One Exits Stage Left
On the same day that the Republican clown car pulls into Cleveland for the first official Top Ten primary debate (preceded by the insulting bottom seven kiddie table debate), Jon Stewart bids farewell to The Daily Show. In the spirit of that great American milestone known as the Hey You Got Your Chocolate in My Peanut Butter No You Got Your Peanut Butter In My Chocolate Skirmish, C&J combines the wit of Jon Stewart with the twits of the GOP debates:
Romney at a 2012 debate: When I saw Ted Kennedy running virtually unopposed in 1994…I said someone's got to run against him. I was happy that he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me.
Jon Stewart: You forced Ted Kennedy to take a mortgage out on one of his houses? What a weird rich-guy thing to brag about. 'Did I ever tell you about the time I bested Richard Branson at that zeppelin auction? I drove up the bidding on a gold-plated dirigible I didn’t even want, ha ha ha! Branson had to sell part of his archipelago, ha ha ha…'
"I may miss you two most of all..."
"The Tea Party Republican debate! Truly a remarkable pairing, as a fringe, often-derided, incompetent bunch of yahoos was finally granted legitimacy by pairing with the tea party."
"The only candidate not to mention his kids at all was Newt Gingrich, although he did challenge the others to a 'most wives' contest."
"It's like [Republicans'] ideal candidate is a rare, super-heavy element that could only exist in a particular particle accelerator. And even
then, only for a fraction of a second before you all
remembered how much you hate science."
Stewart: And what will Governor Palin have to do [at tonight's VP debate]?
Clip of CNN pundit: She has to prove that she can simply speak in a normal English sentence.
Stewart: So to be successful, her standard tonight is the same as a roadside sobriety test.
Tom Tancredo answering a 2007 Fox debate question on how he would deal with a possible terrorist attack: I'm lookin' for Jack Bauer.
Stewart: Oh my god. I just figured out the problem with the Republican party. The country they want to run is fictional.
And although this isn’t directly related to the debates, it's relevant to the kind of collective mindset that will be on display tonight at the top of a certain conservative peak above the clouds, in what is perhaps my favorite sound bite of all time:
Stewart: The biggest problem with the denizens of Bullshit Mountain is they act like their shit don’t stink. If they have success, they built it. If they failed, the government ruined it for them. If they get a break, they deserve it. If you get a break, it's a "handout" and an "entitlement." It's a baffling, willfully-blind cognitive dissonance best summed up by their head "coach" in what is perhaps my favorite sound bite of all time:
Clip of actor Craig T. Nelson on Fox News: I've been on food stamps and welfare. Did anybody help me out? No!
Thanks for 16 years of Daily Showing, Jon. We'll be looking forward to Act II.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, August 6, 2015
Note: Thank you for all the birthday wishes yesterday. I particularly enjoyed the Bill O'Reilly Pez dispenser President Obama sent to me in the envelope marked "Return to Sender." It's awesome and I hope you liked yours too, sir!
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8 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the New England Patriots season opener against the Pittiful Steelers:
35
Days 'til the
Atlanta Bar-B-Q Festival:
8
Years since wages have grown as slowly as they did last spring:
33
(Source: Labor Dept.)
Minimum number of vehicle passengers and innocent bystanders, respectively, who have been killed during high-speed police chases
since 1979:
2,456 / 2,610
Amount GOP candidates have raised in 2016:
$67 million
Amount GOP Super PACs have raised in 2016:
$272 million
(Source:
The Washington Post)
Number of states in which gas is expected to fall below $2 per gallon by Christmas:
20
(Source: Gas Buddy via
The Portland Press Herald)
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
I think one reason ["Against the Tide: the Battle for America's Beaches" by Cornelia Dean] is such a fun book to read is that it's one of those deals we all secretly relish: All the experts are wrong, the government is once again doing really dumb things and any of us could have told them it wouldn't work. Ever since the Bible was written, we have known not to build our houses on sand. You'd think we'd have got it by now. …
Dean's discussion of "The Big One"---the monster hurricane that could crash into Florida, wipe out the Gulf Coast and drown New Orleans---is one of those "Holy gamoley!" deals. It's also sobering to reflect that it's not a "Oh-it'll-never-happen" so much as an "Amazing-it-hasn't-happened-yet."
---August 1999. This month is the 10th anniversary of the "Holy gamoley!" hurricane Katrina that drowned New Orleans.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Surf's up
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JEERS to smoking guns that really were mushroom clouds. In all the history and social studies classes I took in school, World War II always seemed to end when the Germans surrendered. It was like we studied all the details up until May of 1945, and then we were given a quick, "Oh, and then we dropped a couple bombs on Japan and our troops came home to ticker tape parades." Well, the bomb that fell on Hiroshima 70 years ago today vaporized 140,000 people. Today, solemn remembrances and calls for nuclear disarmament:
The Genbaku Dome at the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial is the only structure
from the bombing that is still standing.
The Hiroshima Municipal Government said it expects representatives from a record 100 countries to attend its annual ceremony on Thursday to mark the U.S. atomic bombing, as peace activists gathered in the city. The participants will include U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, who will be attending the event for the second year in a row after assuming her post in late 2013, and a senior U.S. State Department official in charge of arms control, according to the U.S. government. […]
At a conference convened by the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, known as Gensuikyo, 90-year-old atomic bomb survivor Sunao Tsuboi stressed the need to join forces to eliminate nuclear weapons, recalling his painful memories and physical suffering after experiencing the blast from about 1.2 km away. “Illnesses caused by the atomic bomb continue to haunt me,” said Tsuboi, one of the chairpersons of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations.
Two ways to think about today in context. The optimist in me says, "Nukes haven't been used in warfare for 70 years." The pessimist in me says, "Nukes haven't been used in warfare for
only seventy years." So how's that Iran deal coming, guys?
DERP! to the Rumble in the Buckeye State Jungle! Shortly after the runts of the GOP litter (Fiorina, Santorum, Gilmore, Perry, Jindal, Graham and…the other one) finish yipping and yapping from their cardboard box in the basement of the aptly-named Quicken Loans Arena, the big boys (and only boys, no girls) led by Captain of Industry Donald Trump will compete for Craziest-in-Show tonight at the Fox News GOP primary debate in Cleveland. I checked on the last Fox debate from 2011, and here are some of the themes that were big back then:
> Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
> [Insert number here]-point plans were big, but specifics attached to them were not.
Yes, there will be tri-corn hats.
(And poofy pirate shirts!)
> Any sentence containing a positive reference to the death penalty is a surefire applause line. "I love cheeseburgers with BBQ sauce, bacon and the death penalty." [Rah!!!]
> Climate change is not supported by science. It's a myth, a hoax and/or a liberal plot to bring socialism to the galaxy.
> I doubt anyone will resuscitate Herman Cain's "9-9-9" plan that was going to be the miracle cure for America's ills, but you never know!
> At the 2011 debate candidate Michele Bachmann promised 2-buck-a-gallon gas. That won’t be an issue this time as gas prices under President Obama are expected to be less that 2 bucks a gallon by Christmas.
Tonight the villains will be, in order: illegal immigrants, Planned Parenthood, President Obama, Iran, President Hillary Clinton, ISIS, and George Soros. Tonight's drinking game: take a swig every time someone says "failed policies of the past," and a shot every time someone calls for dismantling a government program or agency. As always, I will see you under the table.
JEERS to the hypocrite du jour. Let's check in with Ronald Reagan clone and fiscal hawk Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and see how his unshakeable devotion to zero-deficit fiscal conservatism has trickled down into his "kitchen-table" budget management. I can't wait to read the method he uses to "pay as he goes"…
Walker's current net worth
due to his fiscal responsibility!
National Journal's Shane Goldmacher reported Monday that new federal financial documents showed that Walker had credit-card debts totaling more than $20,000 from two separate cards. The personal financial disclosure forms filed with the Federal Election Commission also revealed that Walker owed another $100,000 in student-loan debt for his children. … Walker's assets, by comparison, are not substantial.
I see. The classic Do As I Say Not As I Do method. Vintage Reagan.
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Answer Man. The End Times-obsessed reporters over at World Net Daily ask: Is this a 'demon' racing in front of Obama?
Yes!
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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CHEERS to the promise of immortality. As I turned another year older yesterday, I gobbled up the news that scientists of the having-science-degrees variety (as opposed to the Jesus-rode-a-dinosaur variety from the Creationism Museum gift shop) have discovered that when old mice are given young blood, something fountain-of-youthish happens:
Among the test subjects is 82-year-old
Gladys Higginbotham, seen here getting
her fifth young blood injection.
Old mice that received young blood experienced a burst of brain cell growth in the hippocampus. They had three to four times as many newborn neurons as their counterparts. But that was not all: old blood had the opposite effect on the brains of young mice, stalling the birth of new neurons and leaving them looking old before their time. … In October 2014, Wyss-Coray launched the first human trial of young blood. At Stanford School of Medicine, infusions of blood plasma from young people are being given to older people with Alzheimer’s disease. The results are expected at the end of the year. It is the greatest test yet for the medical potential of young blood.
So far the results are mixed. Old people are still yelling at kids to get off their lawn, but now they twerk while they do it.
CHEERS to great moments in human dampness. On August 6, 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first American woman to swim the English Channel. It took her 14½ hours. Because she kept stopping to check her makeup! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!! This misogynist message brought to you by the National Consortium of Republican-Controlled State Legislatures, whose members just snorted milk out their noses.
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Ten years ago in C&J: August 6, 2005
JEERS to the cost of the war. Thanks to Kossack Scott Fanetti for making us aware of this depressing online counter: the monetary cost of the war in Iraq. Coincidentally, it also reflects the number of people who now realize the whole thing was bullshit from the start.
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And just one more…
Due to yesterday's birthday rave, today's "Just One More" area
has been deemed unfit for human habitation. Please enjoy this
footage of the moon photobombing the earth instead. ---Mgt.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
John Oliver Thinks Cheers and Jeers Would Make a Much Better State Than Florida
---Mediaite
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