Hispanic Federation Fund for Puerto Rico Relief Link
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From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Just a Quick Reminder
Since Trump has slashed the budget for promoting the ACA’s federal exchange enrollment period, it’s up to us freedom fighter guerrilla blogger liberators to pass the word through, among other things, our resistance tunnels and short-wave crystal radios and courier squirrels. My 2017 Shirtless Rex Tillerson fan calendar says we’re rapidly approaching the start date. So pass the word as best you can. I’ll start:
Oh, and Facebook? I read a suggestion somewhere that, to make up in a teensy way for letting your site become Russia Propaganda Central during the election, you could run a major, free, platform-wide campaign promoting the ACA enrollment dates. I like that idea. You should do it.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold…
Update: In our poll we inadvertently misidentified Roy Moore’s challenger. He is, of course, Doug Jones. I blame my parents for the error. They told me not to grow up to be an idiot, knowing full well I’d rebel and do the opposite.
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, October 19, 2017
Note: Today is Evaluate Yourself Day. For best results, grade on a curve.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til daylight saving time ends: 17
Days 'til the Arkansas Cornbread Festival in Little Rock: 2
Percent of men in the latest Gallup survey who approve of the job that Trump is doing: 42%
Percent of women who approve of the job Trump is doing: 29%
Number of senior Trump advisers or cabinet members or nominees who have gone down in flames so far, including Pennsylvania Rep. Tom Marino who withdrew his nomination to be drug czar: 20
Degrees by which the first half of October has been warmer than average in Portland, Maine: 6
Percent chance Tom Petty’s memorial service was held at the same place---the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, CA---where his Traveling Wilbury’s band mate George Harrison’s was: 100%
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MLB Championship Playoffs
Dodgers lead the Cubs 3 games to 1
Yankees lead the Astros 3 games to 2
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is dead set against allowing two specific methods of birth control---Depo-Provera and IUDs---because he claims they are abortifacients. Great---here's a party so sensitive to local control that it doesn't want to tell school districts to hire desperately needed teachers, but it's willing to tell women what kind of birth control they can use. Since many women can't take the pill for assorted health reasons, how about we leave this up to the women and their doctors?
Coburn's other problem is that he wants health insurance companies to be able to refuse to cover birth control on moral grounds. Both chambers of Congress have already passed amendments to allow health plans with religious affiliations to decline to cover birth control if they want to. Coburn insists that "moral" as well as religious grounds be included. This caused Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., to observe that health plans base their decisions about what to offer on profits, not morals.
Solution? Tell Coburn to go soak his head, and the rest of you do the right thing.
---October 15, 1998
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Oops!
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CHEERS to #TheResistance: courtroom edition. When Trump finally gets booted from office (one way or another), he’s gonna leave behind a pile of splintered gavels that belonged to judges who had to deal in one way or another with his incompetence and malignant narcissism. Here are a few of the cases in various stages of judginess that he has some direct or indirect connection to:
» Muslim travel ban 3.0: DENIED! A judge in Hawaii and another in Maryland told Trump he’s a racist jerk and to go pound sand.
» AGs in 18 states are suing the Trump administration for violating the Affordable Care Act---which is, lest we forget, a law---by shutting off the cost-sharing payments that make health insurance affordable to people who use the federal exchanges.
» A federal judge has ordered the public release of all White House documents related to Trump’s justification for destroying the DACA program that allows Dreamers to remain in the U.S.---the only country they’ve ever known. Fearless prediction: their rationale will be as credible as Trump’s golf scorecard.
> Remember when everyone ran to their dictionaries in January to look up “emoluments,” which are constitutionally-forbidden gifts or payments to the president from foreign governments? A federal lawsuit was launched yesterday in New York by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) that could finally put this into the spotlight again and maybe bust Lord Dampnut bigly.
> Trump’s favorite “very fine people”---neo-Nazis and Klansman terrorists---are being taken to court in Charlottesville by Integrity First for America for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and other statutes.
May the best liberals win.
JEERS to cold comfort. By now you know about Trump’s “condolence” call---made only after public pressure forced him to finally acknowledge that four servicemembers were killed in the line of duty in Niger---to the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, in which he used the ever-so-Rumsfeldian phrase, “He knew what he was getting into.” That’s bad enough. But yesterday morning on Morning Joe, Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who was with Myeshia Johnson when she took Trump’s call, revealed this additional nugget that says so much about just how deeply he cares:
Co-host Willie Geist: Congresswoman Wilson joins us now from Miami. She recounted that phone conversation to reporters yesterday, saying the president told the fallen soldier's widow that her husband "knew what he signed up for but I guess it still hurts." Congresswoman...if you could just recap what exactly happened yesterday. You're in the car with Ms. Johnson there. The president calls. It goes up on speakerphone and what did you hear from the president?
Rep.Frederica Wilson (D-FL): Well, exactly what you said. But that's not the worst part. She was crying the whole time and when she hung up the phone she looked at me and said: "he didn't even remember his name." That's the hurting part.
One name that deserves to be forgotten as soon as possible after he’s gone: Trump.
JEERS to the Big Dump. On October 19, 1987---on Saint Ronald Reagan's watch---stocks plunged 508 points amid panicky selling. They called it "Black Monday." The lowlights as they unfolded:
10:30 AM With 140 million shares traded, the Dow is down 101 points, to 2145.
11:45 AM A brief turnaround gives traders a flicker of hope as the Dow regains 95 points in a half-hour.
1 PM As rumors spread about a NYSE shutdown, the Dow plunges 100 points in the next hour.
2:15 PM With the Dow down 300 points, an investor outside the NYSE screams, "Down with Reagan! Down with MBAs! Down with yuppies!"
4 PM The NYSE closes. Chairman John Phelan says it was the closest thing to a "financial meltdown" that he had ever seen.
The percentage decline (22.6%) was actually worse than the crash of 1929. Thank god we learned our lesson and, through sensible legislation, never had to experience anything like that again. Attaboy, Congress!
JEERS to rude surprises. Canadian citizen Joshua Boyle was just rescued from the clutches of a herd of Taliban goons in Afghanistan after five years in captivity. And then he found out to his horror that his captives weren’t torturing him by making up the worst story imaginable, they were actually torturing him with the cold, hard truth…
[Boyle] said he initially didn't believe his kidnappers when they told him Donald Trump was president of the United States.
“It didn’t enter my mind that he was being serious,” Joshua Boyle said in a recent interview with the Toronto Star.
Boyle and his family are now going through extensive therapy to deal with the severity of the trauma they experienced. And they’re also getting some to deal with being held captive for five years by the Taliban.
JEERS to embarrassing confessions. I have no problem admitting that I feast year-round on candy corn. I can acknowledge publicly that I was a “college Republican” who supported Reagan. While on a school field trip to then-West Berlin in 1978 I farted in the Reichstag and blamed it on a classmate who was then catapulted into East Berlin. And, yes, I sleep in Jar Jar Binks jammies. But this is by far the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever had to unnecessarily admit to the country, the planet, the universe, and the Pantheon of the Gods: I agree with my despicable governor, Paul LePage…
Gov. Paul LePage came out forcefully against the York County casino ballot question Tuesday, calling Question 1 “another case of big-money, out-of-state interests using Maine voters to get a sweet deal.”
“It’s a phony deal for Maine,” LePage said in his weekly radio address. “Supporters of Question 1 are using a bait-and-switch tactic that has nothing to do with funding schools or creating jobs. Their promises of boosting our economy are overblown.”
He’s right! And the pro-casino side is blanketing the media with sunshine-and-unicorn ads that talk about everything BUT the damn casino, which is the brainchild of a single out-of-state grifter who will end up building it and then flipping it to make millions for himself. Promising to fund our kids’ education with Grandma’s gambling losses is shitty policy, and I hope my fellow Mainers vote “Fuck NO” on November 7th. Then on November 8th I can finally ask my neurologist to isolate the brain cells storing my agreement with LePage---and vaporize them.
CHEERS to wars worth fighting. On October 19, 1781, British General Lord Cornwallis (or, rather, a representative of his---Benny Hill, I believe) surrendered to Washington's Continental Army outside of Yorktown, effectively ending our War of Independence. The surrender agreement contained the first recorded use of the phrase "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!!!" (Full disclosure: Lafayette's idea.)
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Ten years ago in C&J: October 19, 2007
CHEERS to the "Silver Tsunami." The first baby boomer---a retired New Jersey teacher---has applied for Social Security retirement benefits. Starting in January, 10,000 fellow boomers a day will apply for their monthly checks from what has become the most successful anti-poverty program for seniors ever. And the best part is that the government has managed the Social Security trust fund responsibly, so there are absolutely no worries about raising taxes or cutting benefits to keep it fully funded! And you're staring at me why???
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And just one more…
CHEERS to foresight. Can you imagine being able to go back 32 years and gobble up the very first internet domain names like a kid in a candy store, so you could sell ‘em for a princely fortune? This would've been your only competition for URLs back then, including the top 10:
- Create date Domain name
1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM
Mommy, hindsight hurts.
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:
The day has finally arrived: as of now, Lucasfilm has decided that the people can be permitted to learn the hallowed, official title of the upcoming Cheers and Jeers origin story. No longer will we refer to the film as “The Cheers and Jeers Movie,” “The Cheers and Jeers Spin-Off,” or “Candy Corn Boy with Underwear On His Head”---finally, it has a name, a real name, one that encapsulates the joy this is bound to give millions of fans across the blogosphere. Are you ready? The movie is officially titled . . . Kiddie Pool: A Cheers and Jeers Story.
---Vanity Fair
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