From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Movement on the Molly Movie
We have our usual Thursday Molly Ivins Moment (which might be C&J's most popular weekly feature) below the fold, but up top I thought you might like to see how things are going for director Janice Engel and the crew working on their Ivins documentary Raise Hell. This week they posted an update in their Kickstarter page:
We had a blast while we filmed in Molly’s beloved Marathon, waded with gear through the Rio Grande in gorgeous Santa Elena Canyon and drove deep into in Big Bend National Park to capture that “no country for old men” look that is West Texas.
We hit the two-lane blacktop for Austin when a tire blowout just a mile outside Ft. Stockton in 96-degree heat, thank you Jesus as we could have been 50 miles in the middle of nowhere, gave us pause and a gift. We learned we’d been driving on 4 bald tires! New tires, food in our bellies, we arrived in Austin, Texas, where the mere mention of her name gets a great smile and, “Boy I sure do miss Molly, can you imagine what she’d be writing/ saying right now…”
When we weren’t filming we were knee deep in Molly’s archives, unearthing fantastic photos and screening videos of her television appearances. … Team RH is back in Houston and LA respectively prepping for the next round of interviews in NYC in December. We’ve got some great folks lined up so stay tuned!
You can check out the extended trailer and help fund the film through this link. The new Star Wars flick may be at the top of my must-see list…but Raise Hell is a close second.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, November 19, 2015
Note: Today is Have A Bad Day Day. If you violate the spirit of the occasion by having a good day, that would be very bad, which would actually make your good day a bad day. Good for you! (In a bad way. Which is good! But that’s bad. Good! Good bad!)
By the Numbers:
Days 'til Festivus: 34
Days 'til the National Christmas Tree lighting: 14
Obesity rate in the U.S., up from 32% in 2005 according to the CDC: 38%
Estimated number of death-by-police killings in the U.S. so far this year, according to researchers at The Guardian: 1,000
Growth in the craft beer industry last year: 18% in barrel volume
(Source: FiveThirtyEight)
Percent of Americans who have a great deal of confidence in American banks, according to Gallup: 12%
Number of Americans who intend to eat human brains for Thanksgiving dinner, up from 622 last year and spreading rapidly from northwest to southeast---stay tuned to your short-wave radios for updates and lock your doors: 1,942
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
Speaking of offbeat ideas, what to our wondering eyes should appear but a suggestion from some unhappy right-wingers (George Will, Katie O'Beirne) that House Speaker Newt Gingrich should step down and be replaced by---tah-dah!---Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois? Mirabile dictu! Quel stroke of political genius. As Will noted, Mr. Hyde has a splendid mane of white hair and looks the way a congressman should. And if that's not reason enough to make him speaker of the House, I don't know what is.
Hyde is also the leader of the anti-abortion forces in Congress, so this would also be a dandy way to solve the Republican Party's gender gap. Just what women want in a leadership position: The man who has made it almost impossible for poor women to get an abortion.
---November 1996
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Puppy Pic of the Day:
Update on Smiley, the puppy mill survivor with no eyes.
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CHEERS to leading by example. While Republicans in this country---egged on by presidential candidates fighting over who can appeal to the intellect of the dumbest likely right-wing fuckwad Iowa caucus-goer---engage in a transparently disingenuous, politically-motivated war against Syrian refugees fleeing that horrible war zone, liberal French President Francois Hollande is showing us what real leadership looks like:
French President Francois Hollande today promised that “France will remain a country of freedom,” defending his decision to honor a commitment to accept migrants and refugees despite Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris.
“Life should resume fully,” Hollande told a gathering of the country’s mayors, who gave him a standing ovation. “What would France be without its museums, without its terraces, its concerts, its sports competitions? “France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on [with] our lives.”
Right on, France. You go on with your lives and we'll handle the fear and loathing duties on your behalf. Thanks to our teabaggers, we've become very good at it.
CHEERS to pink lungs and fatter bank accounts. Put down the death sticks…today is the Great American Smokeout:
The idea for the Great American Smokeout grew from a 1970 event in Randolph, Massachusetts, at which Arthur P. Mullaney asked people to give up cigarettes for a day and donate the money they would have spent on cigarettes to a high school scholarship fund. Then in 1974, Lynn R. Smith, editor of the Monticello Times in Minnesota, spearheaded the state’s first D-Day, or Don’t Smoke Day. The idea caught on, and on November 18, 1976, the California Division of the American Cancer Society got nearly 1 million smokers to quit for the day. That California event marked the first Great American Smokeout, and the Society took the program nationwide in 1977. Since then, there have been dramatic changes in the way society views tobacco advertising and tobacco use. Many public places and work areas are now smoke-free – this protects non-smokers and supports smokers who want to quit.
There's a support group here at Daily Kos that's helped a lot of people toss their habit in the butt can. It's called Gave Up Smoking (GUS), and they'd love to see you. My partner Michael (Common Sense Mainer here) had his last cigaboo seven-and-a-half years ago, and in addition to feeling a lot better physically, I figure we've saved around $60,000. Now if I could just give up my candy corn addiction, we might see some of that money in the bank.
CHEERS to President Blinkandyoullmisshim. Happy birthday to "#20" James Garfield, born 184 years ago today in a log cabin---the last president to have that distinction. He only got to enjoy his status as the first left-handed Commander-in-Chief for 200 days before he died of lead poisoning from an assassin's bullet that doctors could never find. He might've actually been a decent president, who knows? But I do know this: shaaaame on him and running mate Chester Arthur for using $400,000 in campaign money to bribe Indiana voters with two-dollar bills. Why, that could've eroded the public's trust in politicians.
JEERS to alternate-home-sweet-alternate-home denied. Sorry to break it to ya, but the closest thing we have to Earth ver. 2.0 may not be habitable enough to support our special brand of bipedal parasitic craziness:
Every few hundred days, the host star of Kepler-438b---an exoplanet just 12 percent wider than Earth that appears to be the right temperature to host life as we know it---blasts out "superflares" of high-energy radiation more powerful than any eruption ever recorded from our sun, the researchers said.
These flares by themselves likely do not have much of an impact on the planet's habitability, the researchers said. But if the flares are accompanied by gigantic explosions of plasma known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), as strong flares from the sun generally are, life might have a hard time getting a foothold on Kepler-438b, they noted.
We have similar flare-ups that threaten habitability in our house here on earth. They're called dog farts.
JEERS to the Great New England Shuffle of Aught Fifteen. Yesterday morning when we woke up there were a bunch of Royal Canadian Mounties standing over us wondering what Maine was doing in New Brunswick, eh. We had no freakin' clue, but then it dawned on us: Ben Carson must've stolen a crayon from his campaign manager's coffee can and tried to make his own map of the United States from memory. Yup….he did, and Maine got shoved way up north:
So we called Senator Al Franken and he whipped out his whiteboard and made things right again:
So things are back to normal. Now if I could just get the pickled herring smell out of the drapes.
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Nine years ago in C&J: November 19, 2006
CHEERS to first-aid for a blue planet. Over in Kenya, the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference is winding down, and it looks like at least a little progress has been made. When the American delegation arrived, they commented on how hot it was. Their Kenyan hosts said, "Just wait...in 50 years you'll call this winter in North Dakota."
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And just one more…
CHEERS to off-the-charts eloquence. On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address as he dedicated a national cemetery at the Pennsylvania battlefield. I read these words every year and their simple elegance makes me appreciate them more each time:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
If only today's politicians could be that brilliantly brief. But if you still don’t have time to read it all, here's the Dilbert-approved Power Point Presentation of the speech. A century and a half later we still haven't perished, but Lincoln would no doubt be mighty pissed at the new rabid wave of secession talk flying around just because we have a black president who wants Americans to have jobs and health care. Forget about cloning a wooly mammoth---we need to work on a new this #16.
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:
"And also, ya know, livin’ my life, putting it in God’s hands, knowing that you just never know what kiddie pool may be open, and if the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool is open, I’m built to run through it, man!"
---Sarah Palin
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