From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Quotable Philly: Part I
Hand-sliced and slathered in Cheese Whiz for good eatin':
"Trump University is about more than bilking people. Although trust me, you WILL get bilked..."
---Sen. Al Franken
"His entire campaign is a late-night infomercial. And for one low, low price, he’ll even throw in a goofy hat.”
---Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Trump
"Valiente---brave---that's what Hillary Clinton called me when I told her I was worried my parents would be deported. Hillary Clinton told me that she would do everything she could to help us. She told me that I didn't have to do the worrying because she will do the worrying for me and all of us. She wants me to have the worries of an 11-year-old, not the weight of the world on my shoulders."
---American-born 10-year-old Karla Ortiz, daughter of undocumented immigrants
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
---Cory Booker, citing an African proverb
"Can I just say to the Bernie-or-bust people: you're being ridiculous."
---Sarah Silverman
"Based on her ideas and her leadership, Hillary Clinton MUST become the next President of the United States."
---Bernie Sanders
"When I needed her, she was there. When our first responders needed her, she was there."
---9/11 survivor Laura Manning
"I stand with my Democratic family in making sure we win this fall. Paul LePage is my governor. I do not need to see anyone like him become the president of this United States. Whether you support Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton we are all in this together and we will all have a voice in the Clinton administration."
---Maine state rep. and Bernie supporter Diane Russell
“That is the story of this country. The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful intelligent black young women playing with their dog on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all of our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States. So don't let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great---that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this, right now, is the greatest country on Earth.”
---Michelle Obama
"Michelle’s speech was so good, I want to hear it again! When is Melania doing it?"
---Stephen Colbert
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Note: Today's C&J is paired with a 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild Jeroboam. Please deposit $144,000 and then place your glass under your USB port. And don’t be uncouth---please use a crazy straw with pinstripes.
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the start of the Summer Olympics in Rio: 9
Days 'til the Iowa State Fair: 15
Minimum number of recording artists (or their estates) who complained about the use of their music during the Republican convention, including Queen, The Rolling Stones, Luciano Pavarotti, Paul Rodgers, Air Force One score composer Jerry Goldsmith and George Harrison: 6
Number of the stronger, less-explosion-prone oil tanker train cars that are now ready for service, 1/5 of the total mandated to be fixed according to AP: 10,000
Minimum number of condoms being set out in a bowl for the Olympic athletes in Rio's Olympic Village: 450,000
Percent chance that Maine Gov. Paul LePage and Republicans running the state CDC are proposing a new rule to deny public records requests on outbreaks of measles, chickenpox and other infectious diseases, according to The Portland Press Herald: 100%
Year in which pole-vaulter Bob Richards became the first Olympic athlete to appear on a box of Wheaties: 1958
-
Mid-week Rapture Index:
187 (including 3 False Christs and 1 "Left Behind" nutball who just left us all behind). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: Rock-a-bye woozle…
-
CHEERS to historic history dripping with historicalness. So, uh…this happened yesterday evening 'round about 6:30. A woman became a major party's nominee for President of the United States for the first time---96 freaking years after the 144 years women had to wait just to get the right to vote. And the winner, with 2,842 delegate and superdelegate votes, is:
Somewhere in the hereafter, the suffrage movement pioneers are still dumping buckets of Gatorade over each other's heads.
CHEERS to Night 2. The longer this Democratic convention goes on, the more it makes the Republican hootenanny look like a bunch of six year olds eating Play-doh in a treehouse. Just the diversity alone, compared to last week's blinded-by-the-white event, should give America all the reason it needs to re-up the party that looks like all of us (minus the neo-Nazis and KKK, who are permanently shackled to the GOP). Kos is right that the three highlights (among many others) were the Mothers of the Movement segment, Bernie's emotional and classy passing-of-the-delegates to Hillary, and Bubba's valentine to Hillary that also landed a few good punches to the right-wing creators of what he called "the imaginary Hillary." Plus we got twinge of nostalgia as Howard Dean re-enacted most of his 2004 "scream" (which wasn't really a scream so STOP CALLING IT A SCREAM, STUPID MEDIA!!!) As if that wasn't enough, Hillary herself appeared at the end, by video surrounded by girls and women ready and eager to walk in her shoes.
Tonight everything ratchets up by a few hundred percent with rafter-rattlers from Barack Hussein Obama and Joe BFD Biden, who will likely stick their rhetorical forks into their Trump roast and, since they're in cheesesteak territory, slice him thin. Watch with plenty of napkins---you'll need 'em.
JEERS to Trump as usual. It's bad enough that he stiffs grownups out of money they're owed for services rendered, but my god, stiffing kids? That's low:
You remember the video: Three preteen girls in star-spangled outfits crisply working through simple choreography as they lip-synced an upbeat update to "Over There." […]
Jeff Popick, father of the smallest Freedom Kid and author of "Freedom's Call" (the song performed at the Trump rally), told The Washington Post by phone on Monday that he planned to file a lawsuit against the campaign for violating its agreement with the group. […] "We are now asking and DEMANDING for what has been promised to us and is now long-overdue (and has been rightly earned by us); that is, a performance at the convention," an email dated July 9 reads. "Or, be made whole." […]
It's worth noting that Popick's story mirrors analysis of Trump's record in working with small business owners, some of whom allege that the Republican nominee failed to live up to financial and other commitments he'd made to them.
That sound you hear is alarmed toddlers locking their candy away in a their newly-installed Playskool Baby’s First Wall Safe.
CHEERS to the end of the end. It was all over for Tricky Dick 42 years ago today, thanks to a 27-11 vote by the House Judiciary Committee to adopt the first of three articles of impeachment against President Nixon who, said ABC News's Tom Jarrell at the time, was "presumably still in his swim trunks" while on vacation in California when he heard the news. Meanwhile, then-VP Gerald Ford just couldn’t help but play a little game of up-is-downism:
Ford: It's interesting that every Democrat on the committee---north and south---voted for the article. ... It tends to make it a partisan issue.
Reporter: Even if one-third of Republicans voted for it?
Ford: Well, the fact that every one of the Democrats voted for it, I think, uh, lends credence that it's a partisan issue, even though some Republicans have deviated.
...said the Republican who later unilaterally exonerated the Republican crook. But, hey, what's a little hypocrisy among friends?
CHEERS to the view from our galactic window. It really wasn't that long ago that Galileo was punished for daring to suggest that our blue marble wasn't the center of God's universe. Now here we are, in 2016, and our knowledge of what's out there is mind blowing. The latest discovery, courtesy of NASA, shows that the huge gas pocket enveloping our galaxy is actually spinning, and at about the same speed and direction as us:
This new knowledge sheds light on how individual atoms have assembled into stars, planets, and galaxies like our own, and what the future holds for these galaxies.
“This flies in the face of expectations,” says Edmund Hodges-Kluck, assistant research scientist. “People just assumed that the disk of the Milky Way spins while this enormous reservoir of hot gas is stationary---but that is wrong. This hot gas reservoir is rotating as well, just not quite as fast as the disk. The rotation of the hot halo is an incredible clue to how the Milky Way formed,” said Hodges Kluck.
The good news: this whirling gas blob is a tremendous discovery that expands what we know about how our galaxy was formed and even where we’re headed. The bad news: after analyzing all the data, it's now looking much more likely that we're here because God farted in the bathtub and we ended up in one of the bubbles.
JEERS to hounding the wrong guy. With the Rio summer Olympic games just around the corner, it's worth noting that twenty years ago today domestic right-wing terrorist nut Eric Rudolph detonated a pipe bomb at the Summer Olympic games in Atlanta. The blast killed one person and injured over a hundred more, but it could've been worse if security guard Richard Jewell hadn’t found the bomb and tried to move people out of harm's way. The hero was later pilloried in the press and by the late-night gaggle (Leno called him the "Una-doofus") when it became known that the FBI considered him a suspect. Then, when his name was officially cleared, they moved on and dumped his reputation by the side of the road like a rodent carcass. Wikipedia reminds us of what the media should've learned:
Jewell's case became an example of the damage that can be done by reporting based on unreliable or incomplete information...
Mr. Lesson From The Past, meet Mr. ADD.
-
Ten years ago in C&J: July 27, 2006
JEERS to Day 14, same as Day 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. On the Israel/Lebanon border, mayhem and destruction continue as opposing sides go at it with brute force and merciless tenacity. Which reminds me...only 4 months ‘til the official start of the Christmas shopping season.
-
And just one more…
JEERS to the worst governor in America. This was posted by Eclectablog’s Chris Savage this morning. Ladies and gentleman, this is what Republican leadership---i.e. “We will do everything in our power to fix this and make things right”---looks like. I have no words:
Well, maybe these three words: what an asshole.
Have a tolerable Wednesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
"By turns playful and gripping, disturbing and detailed, poignant and powerful, Cheers and Jeers is superb family entertainment."
---Mark Shenton, The Stage
-