From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Late Night Snark: Dog Days Edition
"According to a new poll, Jeb Bush saw a 6 percent drop in support after the first debate, but experts say he still has a shot because he's likable and qualified. Then Donald Trump said, 'Weird, the opposite is working for me.'"
---Jimmy Fallon
Nailed it.
"This weekend many of the Republican candidates said they used a Fitbit. In fact, Jeb Bush uses his to see how much distance he can put between himself and his last name."
---Conan O'Brien
“[In California] we are begging El Nino to hit us. That is what it has come to. We are praying for one weather disaster to save us from the other weather disaster.”
---Bill Maher
"Josh Duggar was outed for signing up on Ashley Madison using the screen name Josh The Man to meet women for sex. He released a statement today apologizing for cheating on his wife while serving as executive director of the Family Research Council. I guess that's not the sort of family research they had in mind for him."
---Jimmy Kimmel
And this from
The Nightly Show:
Larry Wilmore: If it feels like The Nightly Show is getting a little repetitive, I totally agree. I mean, at this point my writing staff just has to fill in the names:
Larry's Libs
"I'm furious about the video of [Name of victim], the unarmed black [gender] being murdered by a white cop with the [city] police department. It makes me want to [verb] all over everything with a big [vegetable]."
Congrats, by the way, to Larry for airing his 100th episode Wednesday. So far so good.
Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Friday, August 21, 2015
Note: When will we foul up the Arctic with an oil drilling disaster? Guess correctly and you could win a free tank of gas! Register now before it's too late and stand by to WIN!
---Your Friends at Shell Oil
-
7 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the start of the Labor Day weekend:
14
Days 'til the
Grand Canyon Music Festival:
7
Number of people fatally shot by British police in the past three years:
2
Average number of people fatally shot by U.S. police each day so far this year
2.6
(Source: Harper's Index)
Active accounts that Christian family values advocate
Josh Duggar has at the cheating site Ashley Madison.com, according to a document dump by hackers:
2
Percent of North Carolina voters who favor independent candidate "Deez Nuts," who's actually a 15-year-old Iowa student:
9%
(Source: PPP)
Percent of Americans who have a Facebook account:
72%
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: Oh, Ralph… (Click to start, click again to stop.)
-
CHEERS to that equal treatment thing. Another gender barrier was secretly snuck up on, ambushed and neutralized this week as the first two women to graduate from U.S. Ranger School at Fort Benning were introduced to a grateful nation:
First Lt. Shaye Haver and Capt. Kristen Griest
talk with Defense Sec. Ash Carter as he calls
to congratulate them.
The two women---Captain Kristen Griest and First Lieutenant Shaye Haver---appeared alongside fellow Ranger School graduates at Ft. Benning, Georgia, to talk about their experiences in the Army's famed small units tactical course.
Both Griest and Haver said they understood that many people neither believed they could complete the course nor wanted them there. "We had our guards up, but no chips on our shoulders," said Haver, a military police officer from Orange, Connecticut. The women knew that they had to prove to their fellow students that they could be trusted.
"Every time we accomplished something, it gave us a foothold as part of the team."
On the downside: being double-X chromosomed means they can't try out for service in the famous 75th Ranger Regiment. On the upside:
"yet."
CHEERS to turning on one of your own. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is proving to be quite the underwhelming presidential campaigner. To me he always looks like the slacker in school who you can tell is praying to god he can remember the stuff he crammed for the night before so he can squeak by with a D- on his oral book report. Like 2012 VP lightweight Paul Ryan, I think Walker's destined for irrelevance on the national stage, and the residents of his state don’t seem to be much interested in circling the wagons around him:
Photo apparently taken moments after Gov.
Walker got hit in the head by lightning.
Nearly two-thirds of Wisconsin voters, 63 percent, said they did not like Walker's decision to run, the survey found. In addition, the poll found, Walker's support for his presidential run among GOP primary voters in Wisconsin has nose-dived from earlier this year. [T]he latest poll showed he had 25 percent support, compared with 40 percent before he entered the race.
Of course, Walker can raid similarly-disliked candidate Chris Christie's playbook for the
perfect comeback: "A lot of those people in that 63 percent want me to stay. And I've heard that from lots of people at town hall meetings: don't leave to run for president because we want you to stay." But that would require Walker to lie. So he'll probably do it.
JEERS to the little man in the big codpiece. Just a quick reminder of what happened nine years ago today when Jeb Bush's brother was finally backed so far into a corner that he finally had to admit that one of his central justifications for war---that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the attacks on 9/11---had been spun out of thin air:
President Bush: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.
Reporter: What did Iraq have to do with that?
President Bush: What did Iraq have to do with what?
Reporter: The attack on the World Trade Center.
President Bush: Nothing!!!
Now that we've cleared that up for the ninth year in a row, we now return you to our regularly scheduled GOP terror porn:
Everybody safely cowering under the bed now? Good. Moving on…
Hawaii, you joined a
really strange country.
CHEERS to securing macadamia nuts for the motherland. Fifty-six years ago, on August 21, 1959, President Eisenhower---whose somewhat moderate views would prompt right-wing comparisons to Hitler if he was around today, which would be weird considering he defeated Hitler---signed an executive order proclaiming
Hawaii as America's 50th state, unwittingly setting the stage for a secret plot by scalawags to, three years later, import a Kenyan-born baby in swaddling clothes to take over the Executive Branch in 2009 and kill all our old people with death panels. Even though Cokie Roberts may tut-tut Hawaii---aka the "Book 'Em Danno State"---for being too much of a
"foreign, exotic place," we luv ya just the way you are. Tonight we celebrate with some tiny bubbles in the wine, and later maybe a few more in the tub.
CHEERS to booting Brian Brown in his big bigot butt. Brown is the head of the National Organization for Marriage, and one year ago today he got so jazzed by a state judge's ruling against gay marriage in Tennessee and the Supreme Court-issued stay on Virginia's federal ruling that he couldn't help but leap to his computer and send out a declaration of victory to all his minions...
Boy, was his crystal ball wrong THAT day!
Great news! … After winning many lawsuits in lower federal courts presided over by hand-picked, liberal, activist judges, the momentum behind the marriage redefinition agenda is waning. … You might not know about it because the media is doing everything it can to ignore the facts. The rush to judgment declaring marriage to be unconstitutional is not only premature---it's flat out wrong!
I bring this up not to laugh at and ridicule Brown, whose
raison d'etre shattered last June like a wine glass sitting in front of Beverly Sills as she hits a high C, but to…okay, okay, I
do bring this up to laugh at and ridicule Brown. Please join me.
Tonight on "Real Time": Donna!
CHEERS to home vegetation. If the TV beckons this weekend, here are some fine programming choices for your viewing pleasure. First, there's the 92 hours of stuff you've recorded but haven't got around to watching yet. Beyond that, slim pickins. On HBO's
Real Time, Bill Maher talks with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Marc Maron, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), Dan Buettner and conservative guy Charles Cooke. The
bleh slate of new DVD releases
is here and the
baseball schedule is here. (The Red Sox are on such a roll that they're only
five games shy of no longer being in the cellar, woo hoo!) And I don’t know how
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver will top last week's epic takedown of TV evangelists, but I'm sure he'll give it a go (Sunday night on HBO).
And here's your Sunday morning lineup:
Meet the Press: California Gov. Jerry Brown; Carly Fiorina; Rand Paul.
This Week: Gov. Martin O'Malley; Gov. Scott Walker; Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.
Face the Nation: Sen. Ted Cruz; Gov. Chris "I'm So Unpopular In My State Because People Love Me So Much" Christie; Filmmaker Ken Burns on the 150th anniversary of President Andrew Johnson declaring the official end of the Civil War.
CNN's State of the Union: Presidential candidates Jim Webb and Ben Carson.
Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: Alert the media! For the first time ever, Fox's roundtable---Robert Costa, Juan Williams, Kimberly Strassel, Peter Baker---doesn’t include any card-carrying right-wing lunatics. But Mike Huckabee will balance all that out. Plus: Draft Biden 2016 advisor Josh Alcorn.
Happy viewing!
-
Ten years ago in C&J: August 21, 2005
CHEERS to close proximity. At Kings College in London, researchers announced that they've isolated bacteria that act like Swiffers against bad breath and stinky feet. And it reportedly makes Republicans disappear altogether.
-
And just one more…
The Fantom of the Kiddie Pool.
CHEERS to the birthday pootie. Six years ago today, Michael and I visited our local shelter to adopt a feline fuzzball, and chose the one that bit our ankles the least. Fantom is a petite calico with stubby legs---the dachshund of the cat world, we like to call her. She's pretty much in the middle of the Sociability Scale: says hello half the time, says goodbye half the time.
Fantom's days are filled with typical cativities: eat, barf, sleep, drink out of the faucet, barf some more, have stare-downs with squirrels, teach our dog Haley who's boss, de-wing flies, purr when skritched, fill out petitions to impeach Obama, and turn down any food not topped with beluga caviar. She's a cat schooled in the mysterious arts of "teh kitteh," and today we prostrate ourselves at the altar of Fancy Feast and wish Fantom a Happy Barfday. Did I mention she barfs a lot? She barfs a lot.
Have a great weekend! Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-