Little Gay Billy's BIG Gay Newsapalooza!
I'm here, I'm queer, and I brung ya some beer. And these hearty snacks…
» October is anti-bullying month. Don’t forget to go purple for Spirit Day on the 20th. (GLAAD)
» Olly Olly Oxen Free! Next Tuesday is "Coming Out Day." This year marks my 24th year out of the closet, and I'm happy to say my toaster oven still works. (HRC)
» Our thoughts and prayers go out to former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore on the occasion of his getting booted from the bench for being a lawbreaking homophobe. We understand this must be a difficult time for him and Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!! Sorry…that just slipped out.
» One day the LGBT community will control all three branches of the federal government, and the country will thrive as never before. I promise! The quiet coup is underway now, with a record number of LGBT people are serving in government leadership positions, and nearly two-dozen more 2016 candidates endorsed yesterday by the Victory Fund. Go get 'em!
» In North Carolina, HB2 signer Squinty McClueless is in trouble:
Top of my November 8th wish list is seeing Hillary destroy Trump. Watching McCrory get booted by Cooper is a close second.
» Fair-minded Australians are trying to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples, but conservatives keep pushing a non-binding "plebescite" referendum to gauge public support for it first. That would be a waste of time, money and, of course, precious vegemite, because a new poll shows 62 percent of Australians are in favor of marriage rights. Parliament is being pressured to skip the theatrics and just pass it into law already.
» Speaking of marriage rights: remember all those fundamentalist Christians who said they were either going to go to jail or set themselves on fire if homosexual "marriage" (they love putting that word in quotes) became the law of the land? I just want to go on record as saying I'm disappointed with the media blackout of all those jailings and self-immolations. Why, there must have been hundreds or probably more like thousands of them, yet I haven’t heard about a single one besides Kim Davis. Bad, media, bad!
» Perennial reminder: with all the gains we're making, people can still be fired for being gay in 29 states and for being transgender in 32, a fact that still makes Republicans shiver with delight.
» If you missed the happy, strange voyage of the first LGBT pride flag into space (Planting Peace gets bragging rights for pulling it off), it’s an inspiring two minutes and 25 seconds.
Have a fab-o day. Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, October 5, 2016
Note: I was working as a waitress at a cocktail bar. That much is true.
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til election day: 34
Days 'til the Richmond Folk Festival in Virginny: 2
Number of Republicans in Maine who have requested an absentee ballot so far: 4,866
Number of Democrats in Maine who have requested an absentee ballot so far: 11,152
Percent of the U.S. labor force currently Hispanic or Latino/a, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: 16.6%
Percent projected to be Hispanic or Latino/a in the year 2060: 30.3%
Last time coach Bill Belichick lost a home game in a shutout, as the Patriots did (0-16) Sunday against Buffalo, according to FiveThirtyEight: 9/27/92
-
Mid-week Rapture Index:
188 (including 5 earthquakes and a bad case of Sodom and Gomorrah on steroids). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: Guess who slept through the alarm?
-
CHEERS to the fracas in Farmville. Two aging white guys in a rapidly-diversifying nation sat down last night for a vice-presidential debate at Longwood (huhhuhhuhh…he said long wood) University in Virginia. As usual, Republicans declared premature victory before the Kaine vs. Pence thing began via a premature press release. You should go back and read the terrific live-blogging by Joan McCarter (I hope she’s getting hazard pay), and here are some random notes I scribbled down on my cocktail napkin as the weirdness unfolded:
- Tim Kaine started rough (annoying interruptions), but quickly caught his footing as Mike Pence devolved into denying easily-provable truths and bobblehead-like head shaking.
- Zinger #1: "You will look in vain to see Donald Trump ever taking responsibility for anybody and apologizing."
- Zinger #2: "Donald Trump can't start a twitter war with Miss Universe without shooting himself in the foot."
- Mike Pence in a word: icy. He's the middle school teacher you hope you never get.
- Moderator: How would you stop American terrorists? Pence: I would reform our immigration system.
- Pence: "You whipped out that Mexican thing again." Whoa.
- Pence: “I try to spend a little time on my knees every day.” Whoa whoa.
- Bottom line: Kaine interrupted too much and Pence lied too much. I'll take the former over the latter any day.
Still, I admit that neither candidate won me over because neither offered to fix the potholes on my street. So I'm rooting for the libertarian, who is outside our house now filling them himself in exchange for my vote. "Faster,What's Aleppo Guy! Faster!"
CHEERS to Quayle hunting. Speaking of veep debates, it was twenty-eight years ago today, in 1988, when Democrat Lloyd Bentsen---Dukakis's running mate---opened a can of whupass on Dan Quayle during their debate:
ka-BOOM. It was one of the great zingers in campaign lore, and today it's a staple of debate-highlight montages. Four years later, of course, came the famous potato"e" gaffe, thus proving Quayle wasn't a very smart vice president. But he was a terrific warm-up act for George W. Bush.
CHEERS to the eggheads who walk among us. More hot scientist-on-scientist Nobel Prize action yesterday, this time from the physicists' playpen:
[British-born] David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, who are now affiliated with universities in the United States, were honored for breakthroughs [in topology] they made in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Topology is a branch of mathematics that describes properties of objects.
The judges said that there is now hope that “topological materials will be useful for new generations of electronics and superconductors or in future quantum computers.” […]
While most people are familiar with objects in three dimensions, the Nobel laureates analyzed materials so thin they have only two dimensions, or even one.
Among other uses, the scientists say that these super-thin materials can conduct electricity without resistance, and based on their theoretical model the entire New York metro area could keep the lights on by attaching some electrodes to Donald Trump's skin.
CHEERS to Year 5777. Happy New Year---two days late! Rosh Hashanah rolled in Monday, and C&J wishes all of our Jewish readers "Shana Tova!" minus the Times Square ball drop:
The only similarity between the Jewish New Year and the secular one is:
Many people use the New Year as a time to make "resolutions." Likewise, the Jewish New Year is a time to begin looking back at the mistakes of the past year and planning the changes to be made in the new year. …
Rosh Hashana begins a 10 day period, known as Aseret Ymay Tshuva, (Ten Days of Repentance) or Yomim Nora'im (High Holy days).
These ten days that end with Yom Kippur, are a time for Tshuva (repentance), Tefilla (prayer) andTzedaka (charity).
Even though the C&J household is just a run-'o-the-mill lapsed-Episcopalian/lapsed-Catholic train wreck, we still took a moment to blow a ram's horn outside our neighbor's bedroom window at 3am. We figured, why break with our normal routine just because it's Rosh Hashanah?
CHEERS to sacrificing for the common good. On today's date in 1947, Harry Truman became the first president to use TV to address the nation:
Truman requested that Americans not eat beef on Tuesdays, poultry on Thursdays, and a slice of bread each day to save on feed grains as a way of helping folks starving in Europe in the wake of World War II. If President Obama tried that today, he'd be accused by the basket of deplorables of being a Food Nazi trying to starve Grandma of protein and fiber in order to appease whiny foreigners and give an unfair advantage to the arugula growers lobby. I don’t know what's scarier: that I'm such an accurate predictor...or that they're such easy predictees.
-
Ten years ago in C&J: October 5, 2006
JEERS to Jesus's pawns. Ain't It Cool News is the best site on the prestigious internets for movie geeks. One of their readers has a thoughtful review of the most disturbing flick of the year, Jesus Camp, about kids who get brainwashed by the fundamentalist wacko crowd:
Everyone in America is guaranteed a CHOICE to believe whatever they want to believe...and these children have been denied that choice.
Their rights were violated before they even knew what rights were. They've been turned into robots. They've been turned into pawns for a greater religious and political movement.
Don't think that the scene where the kids are goaded into worshipping a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush is anything but worship. Oh sure, they call it "blessing" him, but it's idol worship---which, the last time I checked, was a direct violation of the Ten Commandments.
I swear these people eat bowls of mercury soup for lunch every day.
-
And just one more…
CHEERS to people who don’t suck. Every Friday our C&J poll asks the Daily Kos community, "Who won the week?" It has become such an extraordinary weekly polling event that Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, Quinnipiac and PPP have all named commodes in their washrooms after it. The WWTW poll is a little reminder that all is not lost on the third planet from the sun. And right on schedule, the gold chalice winners for the third quarter of 2016---including five big wins for Hillary Clinton---are ready to take a collective bow. The envelopes, please…
July 1 Women's rights, as the Supreme Court strikes down Texas's anti-abortion law in a ruling that will affect similar laws in 20+ other states
July 8 NASA, for successfully putting the Juno probe into Jupiter's orbit after a 1.8 billion-mile journey
July 15 None (off for Netroots Nation)
July 22 Federal judges in Texas, Wisconsin and Michigan, for ruling against GOP voter suppression laws
July 29 Hillary Clinton: the first woman from a major party to be officially nominated as a candidate for President of the United States
-
August 5 Khizr and Ghazala Khan, for defending their convention remarks and making the pocket U.S. Constitution a bestseller on Amazon
August 12 Hillary Clinton, for poll numbers that suggest November could see her win in a historic landslide victory
August 19 The Justice Department, for announcing the end of privately-run federal prisons
August 26 Hillary Clinton: weathers bogus "health"/"Clinton Foundation" conspiracies just fine; strong polls; Nevada speech tears into Trump's white-supremacy views
-
September 2 The 4 liberal Supreme Court justices, for denying implementation of voter-suppression tactics by North Carolina Republicans in November's election
September 9 The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its allies, after President Obama calls for a pause in the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline pending new environmental assessments
September 16 Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold and Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald for Pulitzer-worthy reporting on Donald Trump's business train wrecks
September 23 Hillary Clinton: regains polling momentum; policy outline to help disabled workers; poised response to NY/NJ/MN attacks get high marks; shows comic chops on "Between Two Ferns"
September 30 Hillary Clinton: trounces Trump in debate #1, gets endorsement of conservative papers Cincinnati Enquirer and Arizona Republic; leads in new battleground state polls
Who will bring home the gold in the fourth quarter? Wild guess: one of them will be smiling real big when she wins on November 8th. Stay tuned!
Have a nice Wednesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Thanks to Cheers and Jeers, kids don’t want to be Bill in Portland Maine anymore.
---The Week
-