From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
I have nothing to say About Netroots Nation 2019. Except...
» This was the largest (3,700+ attendees, not including those with single-day passes) and most demographically- and ethnically-diverse Netroots convention in its 14-year history. Stop what you're doing for a sec and put your hands together for the organizers and army of volunteers—many, if not most, of them members of the Daily Kos community—who make it all run like joyful clockwork.
» Leadership of the Daily Kos Elections Team panel was handed off to Jeff Singer, as he and his cohorts (Claire Low, Arjun Jaikumar, Lala Wu, Stephen Wolf) returned for a tour de force of encyclopedic knowledge on races running the gamut from federal to state to municipal, up to and including all the state Supreme Courts. Their consensus for 2020: cautiously optimistic, and they'll fight you on that position to their last breath, bub.
» PolitiFact rates this claim TRUE:
» Best one-liner, by Washington Governor and 2020 candidate Jay Inslee: "Wind turbines don’t cause cancer, they cause jobs." Runner-up by Elizabeth Warren: “Donald Trump might be able to look the other way [at border agents and their bosses who commit crimes against immigrants], but President Elizabeth Warren will not.”
» I was hangin’ out with my new BFF Joy Reid when a frustrated Black Lives Matter supporter (@rialipstick) came out of a keynote session with a plea for white speakers to stop leaning almost exclusively on the words of one famous black person: “We need y’all to do more than quote Martin Luther King.” I’m off to a good start because I just did. She does make a good point.
» Daily Kos’s TrueBlueMajority led a Lights for Liberty candlelight vigil outside the convention center Friday night:
» The Daily Kos/C&J kickoff event at Aqimero, organized by goddess Neeta Lind (aka navajo) was mobbed as usual. Several hug-related injuries were reported, most of them severe. No one complained.
» You can watch a boatload of the 2019 speakers and panels at the Netroots Nation Facebook page here.
» Next stop: Denver!
Good to be back. Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Scheduling Note: Howdy. Happy to be home again, and thanks for the ticker tape parade (using 100% recycled paper made from 130 weeks of never-used Trump administration infrastructure week brochures). This'll be a brief pit stop, though, as later today our bloated carcass will be hauled up the hill in the family ox cart to our ophthalmologist for Round 2 of cataract surgery.
So no column tomorrow, but we'll return on Thursday and, to make up for our slackery, publish 50 years of consecutive C&Js without a break. (I can't wait to see the look on all your faces when I publish the last ten from the afterlife.) Thanks for keeping the barbarian Kossacks from ransacking the kiddie pool of its precious bodily fluids. Which reminds me, I should probably put some water in it before the next unannounced health inspection. ---Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til CNN conducts its lottery to see which Democratic candidates will vie on which night for the July 30/31 debate in Detroit: 2
Days 'til the Sequim Lavender Festival in Washington: 3
Number of states challenging the Trump administration on its attempt to reverse mileage standards by U.S. automakers: 23
Percent chance Morgan Stanley projects the weakest year out of the last six are ahead for global stocks: 100%
Head-to-head match-up of Team USA women's soccer co-captain Megan Rapinoe and Donald Trump, according to a new PPP poll: 42%-41%
Average driving range of BMW's first mass-produced electric Mini Cooper on a single charge: 146 to 168 miles
Age of weird human being Ross Perot when he died last week: 89
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Puppy Pic of the Day: "Pet the kitty…"
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CHEERS to local pushback. As we were clackity-clacking home on the Acela Express Sunday morning we learned what Trump had suddenly changed his reelection campaign slogan (via tweet, of course) from "Keep America Great" to "Go Back To Where You Came From." While Republicans mostly stood by silently or took to twitter to whitesplain how, technically speaking, the sitting President of the United States had stayed juuuust this side of outright racism, everyone else condemned his sick brain and vowed to drag twenty new people to the polls next year. In addition to Saturday's Lights for Liberty vigils around Maine, Portland held one Sunday in support of our 200+ asylum seekers who started their new lives here a few weeks ago.
“We are here to say, ‘Not in our city,'” said Hamdia Ahmed, a local activist and aid worker who helped plan the rally.
Referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that the Trump administration planned to carry out in larger U.S. cities Sunday, she shouted through a PA system, “In our city, immigrants are welcome, and ICE is not.” […]
City Councilor Pious Ali recalled how he came to the U.S. from Ghana in 2010. His first job in Portland was in an Italian restaurant whose owner came out from behind the counter one night to offer Ali a drink. “No thanks,” Ali said, explaining that he is Muslim. “Ah,” the owner said. “We are cousins. I’m Jewish.”
Ali said he couldn’t think of a welcome more quintessentially American. Now, he said, “We are standing here to show another group of immigrants that they are welcome and this is home to them.”
Meanwhile, two out of our four federal delegates to Congress weighed in properly:
"The President’s tweets were designed to divide and incite, rather than unite Americans toward a common goal. The remarks are beneath the office he holds and the nation he leads.”
---Sen. Angus King (I-ME)
"I’m proud to serve in the most diverse Congress in our history. President Trump’s attempts to dehumanize duly elected lawmakers simply because they do not look like him is a lesson in how not to lead a democracy."
---My congresswoman Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME)
As for Sen. Susan Collins, she pulled out her game of Moderate Twister, gave the spinner a whirl, and landed on "Left hand, right hand, left foot & right foot on Both Sides Do It." This morning EMTs are still trying to untangle her limbs from Chuck Todd's.
CHEERS to lighting one helluva candle. Today is the 50th anniversary of the liftoff of Apollo 11. Cronkite's understatement: "Oh, boy, What a moment." Watch it on the wayback machine. It’s just as thrilling all these years later...
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The mission would fulfill a vision set forth by President John F. Kennedy eight years earlier to put a man on the moon before decade's end, and would climax with Neil Armstrong's immortal words four days later: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for...Mmmm! Hey, everybody, it’s cheddar!"
P.S. Look up tonight to see the Half Blood Thunder Full Moon. Then think of Neil and give it a wink. It’s the law.
CHEERS to dodging a bullet. If we'd had our Netroots convention at last year's location at this year's time, it would've been slightly different weatherwise. Instead of hazy, hot and humid, it would've been hazy, hot and hurricaney, thanks to tropical storm Barry. Fortunately, the worst-case scenario didn’t play out, and Katrina 2.0 was narrowly avoided:
The storm’s disorganization spared most of the New Orleans metro area from serious damage and never dropped the massive rainfall totals that had been feared elsewhere in the state. That left Barry’s effects confined to essentially minor clean-up in New Orleans and most other areas, some spots of flooding in coastal parishes, and lingering outages that saw more than 120,000 utility customers around the state without power through Sunday. […]
The unprecedented need to fight a river flood while a hurricane bore down on the area caused officials to shut all the Mississippi River’s floodgates while preparing for a storm, something that had never been needed before. But the river rose earlier and more moderately than expected, falling 3 feet short of the height of most of the lowest levees. […] “We’re beyond lucky we were spared,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Sunday. “As those bands moved closer to New Orleans, they seemed to just go around us.”
Even luckier: they avoided a visit from Trump and his new agency: Paper Towel Force.
CHEERS to pleasant foreign-relations surprises. Forty-eight years ago today this week, in 1971, President Nixon caused a stir when he announced he was leavin' on a jet plane to visit China wearing nothing but argyle socks and a cape. His mission: "To find the golden bedpan of the Yangtze and use it to smite my enemies." Fortunately Pat was there to postpone the trip until he sobered up.
CHEERS to bucking the Prime directive. Yesterday was "Prime Day" at online retail behemoth Amazon.com. I have no idea what that means but I assume it boils down to 24 hours of "cheap shit sold cheaper." (Am I close?) It was the perfect time for employees to again make us aware of how sweat-shoppy the company is. Gold stars (and hopefully higher wages and more break time) to the workers in Minneapolis—home of the 2011 Netroots Nation convention—for hitting the picket line. Their chant: “We work, we sweat, Amazon workers need a rest!”
[T]he action in Minnesota is the first major strike of workers in the United States during the company’s annual Prime Day event. […]
The strike is part of the workers’ continued push on Amazon to “provide safe and reliable jobs, increase respect and opportunities for advancement for the predominantly East African workforce, protect the right to organize and advocate for better working conditions, and to demand concrete action from Amazon to address critical issues like climate change,” the organizers said in a statement.
The AFL-CIO also released a video Monday showing solidarity with the workers. “They’re working under insane deadlines, often in unsafe conditions,” AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasury Liz Schuler said in the video.
On the downside, thanks to the strike the pair of stretchy pants I ordered from Amazon yesterday---the ones that say "CAUTION: This Butt Don’t Beep When It Backs Up" in sparkle glitter---will arrive, according to my phone, 16 minutes late. My one-star review will melt steel.
JEERS to Vatican vitriol. 814 years ago this week, in 1205, Pope Innocent III decreed that Jews would be doomed to perpetual servitude and subjugation because they killed Jesus. His pronouncement was immediately followed by: "Ow! Who threw that?!!"
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Ten years ago in C&J: July 16, 2009
CHEERS to more magic. After a months-long delay, Warner Bros. finally released their latest celluloid ATM, Harry Potter and the Cold-Blooded Toxic Asset Peddlers. The reviews are mostly boffo. SPOILER ALERT!!! Hogwarts defaults on their subprime mortgage and Dumbledore ends up forcing the kids to beg for spare change at teabagger rallies. Meanwhile a recently-unemployed Lord Voldemort applies for a hosting gig at Fox News and is rejected because his resume is "impressive on the evil, but a little light on the crazy." Bring your hankies.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the best Fartaroundville in America. Talk about living up to your reputation. Maine's official nickname is "Vacationland." At no other time do we live up that reputation than in the summer, and in virtually no other way do we achieve that living-up-to than via the tum-tum-tummy. So we're all a-blush over last week's declaration by bon appétit magazine writer and newbie to our state Adam Rapoport that "Maine is the Best-Ever Vacation Spot." He and his family ate to their heart's content on everything from lobster to Beal's ice cream—which is easier than ever to do now that we no longer have Governor Paul LePage spoiling everyone's appetite—and also learned a valuable life lesson:
It was almost the perfect family vacation. But as anyone who’s ever been on a family vacation knows, those don’t exist. Just as we were set to jet home from Portland, we got word that our flight was delayed. And delayed again. Cue the thunderstorms. And delayed again. And eventually cancelled. Cue the 8 p.m. rental car and six-hour drive back to NYC.
Cue my friend Jason Gay (longtime New Englander) DM’ing me: “Who flies to Maine?”
Lesson learned. Next summer we drive
If you're driving in Maine find your rear window being pelted with stale candy corn, it means I'm right behind you and accelerator's on the right.
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
“The crap Bill in Portland Maine thinks of is unbelievable.”
—Donald Trump
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