From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...
Mailbag
Dear Americans Who Are Not Rich,
Can't afford health care? Screw you.
Want the food you eat to be safe? How quaint.
Deficit reduction? Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!
Want Social Security to be preserved? You're an idiot.
In foreclosure hell? La la la we can't hear you!
Concerned about the environment? Crybaby.
You want stronger unions? Good luck with that, commie.
Unemployment benefits running out? Quit whining.
Muslim? Latino? Gay? Un-American.
Looking for fresh new ideas? Move to Scandinavia.
Think you can count on us to stimulate job growth? Hell no you can't!
Reproductive freedom? We own your private parts, little lady.
Don’t want the government to default on its debts? Too bad!
Want the rich to be taxed more? In a pig's eye.
Wish we'd put America's interests above our own? Keep dreaming.
Love and Freedom Fries,
The New Republican House Majority
P.S. Like cake? Eat all you want.
Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Note: Crash the Gate!!! (Specifically, the one with all the chocolate behind it.)
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Super Bowl XVVVVVVIIIII: 32
Days `til the Camden Winterfest: 24
Percent of city-dwelling Iraqis who lived in slums in 2003: 20%
Percent who live in slums there today: 53%
(Source: U.N. via Harper's Index)
Number of households that Oprah's new TV network reaches: 80 million
Cost to start the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN): $189 million
(Source: The Portland Press Herald)
Number of times freshman members of Congress will ask senior members of Congress today which way the bathroom is: 750
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 173 (including 5 plagues and 1 Godbunny). Soul Protection Factor 12 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: To say it's amazing how dogs can detect and prevent seizures in people is, I believe, an understatement.
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CHEERS to Madam Speaker. I don’t think John Boehner takes the reins of the House until noontime, so I can still call Nancy Pelosi that. (Although fair warning: if you go to the official Speaker's web site now, you get a faceful of Boehner.) I just want to go on the record in defense of that San Francisco liberal. She passed bills and passed bills and passed bills and passed some more. Bills to reform health care (with a public option, no less!), bills to reform our environmental responsibilities, bills in unabashed support of gay rights. Bills that improved public safety and education. A bill that would've ended the Bush tax cuts on the rich. Hundreds and hundreds of good bills...and a pathetically high number of them were sent to the Senate like cattle headed for the slaughterhouse. She was a good Speaker, an aggressive Speaker, a progressive Speaker, a historic Speaker. And best of all, you know what, kids? She'll be back.
CHEERS (EVENTUALLY, WE HOPE) to saving the republic from itself. The Senate, despite all the lame-duck activity, is broken most days. Republicans are abusing the filibuster the way the protest signs of the teabaggers abuse the English language. Well, today the Senate has one chance, one day, to enact some kind of rules reform that will prevent Republicans from abusing the filibuster. And they've decide to make that one day last a really long time:
It now appears that Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid will resort to the unusual tactic of prolonging the first legislative day of the session until after the Senate returns from its Martin Luther King week recess, giving those involved in the issue more time to work on a compromise.
They're clearly following the Democratic senators' golden rule: "Seize the moment! Tomorrow."
JEERS to scoring a really cheap point. A gaffe-prone tea party candidate gets elected governor of Maine in November (he's taking the oath today). Two months later the state reports that Mainers are gobbling up painkillers at the highest rate in the nation. Therefore the election of a gaffe-prone tea party candidate is causing Mainers to gobble up painkillers at the highest rate in the nation. Hey, post hoc, ergo propter hoc, baby. Best thing I ever learned from Fox News.
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda... GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Answer Man. Gawker asks: Might $300 Million Weapons Contracts to Twenty-Somethings Be a Bad Idea?
Probably.
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda... GONG!!!
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CHEERS to California. The state may be in the shitter financially, but once again they're ahead of the rest of us in the area known as, um...what's it called again?...progress:
The California Energy Commission says Golden State consumers will be the first in the nation to save money under a federal law improving the energy-efficiency standard of light bulbs. The standard outlined in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 says that a 100-watt bulb manufactured on or after a set date must use 28 percent less energy than a traditional 100-watt incandescent light bulb. ... The federal law set adoption of the standard on Jan. 1, 2012, but California was given authority to implement it one year earlier to avoid sales of 10.5 million comparatively inefficient 100-watt bulbs in 2011.
Although, to be honest about it, credit for the switch should really go to Republicans. Their bulbs have been dim for decades.
P.S. I don't know about you, but I'm gonna need at least a month to train myself to stop saying "Galeefoneeeyuh." Thanks, weight lifter guy.
JEERS to waiting at the altar. And in other California news, the apparently-never-ending tussle over the constitutionality of Proposition 8 exhibited a momentary pulse yesterday. The Cliffs Notes summary:
The three-member panel...made its view clear Tuesday: that California's initiative process "would appear to be ill-served" if elected officials could nullify a voter-approved initiative by refusing to defend it. But the judges said they need advice from the California Supreme Court, the final interpreter of state law, on whether sponsors of an initiative can defend it on their own.
If the California justices decide to take up the question, it will add months of delay to a case that was argued before the appeals court on Dec. 6.
And, let's not forget, it's a case based on a vote that was taken two years and two months ago. The gears of justice grind on. Along with our teeth.
CHEERS to Boston bulldogs. Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill---who coined the phrase "All politics is local"---died 17 years ago today at 81. From his New York Times obituary:
He was a large, joyous, generous-spirited man with a bulbous nose, yellowed white hair that flopped over his forehead and an ever-present cigar. He was a rabid sports fan, frequently attending baseball games and boxing matches, a skilled poker player and a devoted but struggling golfer.
To Mr. O'Neill, who spoke of the Democratic Party with near-religious fervor, the party was the one of the cities, the working people, the poor, the needy, the unemployed, the sick and the disinherited. "And no way are we ever going to let them down," he would insist.
Pay your respects here. But don’t tell him that as of today his old job belongs to effete elitist wussy John Boehner---it might kill him all over again.
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Five years ago in C&J: January 5, 2006
JEERS to sellers of bigotry disguised as junk science. "Ex-gay" proponent Charles "Dick" Sacarides is dead at 83. Among his pearls of lunkheadism:
"Gays ascribe their condition to God, but he should not have to take that rap, any more than he should be blamed for the existence of other manmade maladies---like war."
May he be sentenced in the afterlife to an eternity of dry-cleaning our feather boas.
CHEERS to full cooperation. It's easier to do when you've got a 30-year prison sentence hanging over your head, but whatever. Jack Abramoff has been cozying up to investigators for the past year, dropping dirt on his former clients in Congress. Yesterday he officially pleaded guilty, so now---as Pat Buchanan said this morning on Imus---he's ready to "blow up the outhouse at the church picnic." And everyone in America has a front-row seat. Too early to do the wave??
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And just one more...
CHEERS to saving our celluloid. I can't believe that I only saw one movie in an actual theatre last year---The King's Speech. My rating: Four cups of Earl Grey with pinkies up! (This weekend I may take a whack at True Grit, in which the Dude abides rides.) Meanwhile 25 movies from yesteryear have been inducted into the National Film Registry. Several of them---Airplane!, The Pink Panther, Saturday Night Fever, All the President's Men---are mainstream. Others are less known but just as important, such as:
Cry of Jazz (1959)
"Cry of Jazz" is a 34-minute, black-and-white short subject that is now recognized as an early and influential example of African-American independent filmmaking.
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Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967)
This film has evoked comparisons to George Orwell’s "1984" and impressed audiences with its technical inventiveness and cautionary view of a future filled with security cameras and omnipresent scrutiny.
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Let There Be Light (1946)
"Let There Be Light" was blocked from public distribution by the War Department for 35 years because no effort was made during filming to disguise or mask the identities of combat veterans suffering from various forms of psychological trauma. The film provides important historical documentation of the efforts of psychiatric professionals during World War II to care for emotionally wounded veterans and prepare them to return to civilian life.
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Preservation of the Sign Language (1913)
Presented without subtitles, "Preservation" is a two-minute film featuring George Veditz, onetime president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) of the United States, demonstrating in sign language the importance of defending the right of deaf people to sign as opposed to verbalizing their communication.
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A Trip Down Market Street (1906)
"A Trip Down Market Street" is a 13-minute "actuality" film recorded by placing a movie camera on the front of a cable car as is proceeds down San Francisco’s Market Street. ... historian David Kiehn, who examined contemporary newspapers, weather reports and car license plates recorded in the film, later suggested that "A Trip Down Market Street" was likely filmed just a few days before the devastating earthquake on April 18, 1906.
I'm confident that the all-time greatest movie ever---Cats and Dogs---will find itself nestled among the NFR's pantheon of greatness for its message of universal truth in a world gone mad: dogs drool, cats rule.
Have a nice Wednesday. Stay classy. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
"Bill in Portland Maine is very famous and I like his underwear. I have a lot of Calvin Klein underwear at home, maybe I'll show him."
---Cha Du-Ri
Dirty Tackle
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