From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Finding A Needle in a Haystack
Believe it or not, there are people (Hi!) who actually wanted to hear Hillary Clinton's Tuesday address at the United Nations about the No Ceilings project, which describes itself this way:
In 1995, at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, leaders from governments and civil society around the world came together and committed to ensuring that women and girls have the opportunity to participate fully in all aspects of life.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of that moment. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the No Ceilings initiative of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation have joined forces to gather data and analyze the gains made for women and girls over the last two decades, as well as the gaps that remain.
I set out to find Clinton's speech online, and---no surprise---ran into a buzz saw of Google results that provided nothing but proof that the media is mostly made up of slimeballs who only cared about what she had to say about her email account while at State. So a C&J hat tip to Dana Liebelson and Amanda Terkel at HuffPo for noticing the same media blackout and rounding up the full video. You
can watch Clinton's excellent and important remarks here.
And now a fearless pledge before I head downstairs: If the Republican presidential candidates ever get together and have a serious discussion during the 2016 campaign about the state of human rights for women and girls around the world, I'll buy you a beer. Or a Learjet. Your choice.
Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Friday, March 13, 2015
Note: Today is Friday the 13th. If you suddenly get the sense that your life is in danger, just press the cloaking device on your Apple Watch, which will be available for purchase on April 24th.
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7 days!!!
Days 'til the election in Israel:
4
Days 'til the 2015
Latin Food Fest in Los Angeles:
7
Percent of U.S. households that now subscribe to a video streaming service:
40%
(Source: Nielsen)
Percent of American households that have a gun, the lowest level on record:
32%
(Source: General Social Survey)
Percent chance that the spike in assault weapon and ammo purchases reflects a deep NRA-fueled paranoid psychosis on the part of a small group of right-wingers, many of whom will accidentally shoot themselves or others because they failed to follow basic gun safety rules:
100%
(Source: Me)
Cost
to buy the first three days of transcript from the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev:
$1,600
Percent chance that March was named for the Roman god Mars, who is most famous for inventing the Snickers bar:
100%
(Source: Zeus)
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Smiley
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CHEERS to the proof in the pudding. Yesterday the F.C.C. released its net neutrality rules. As far as I'm concerned, this is the money quote:
Woo hoo!!! Suck it, telcos.
“Because the record overwhelmingly supports adopting rules and demonstrates that three specific practices invariably harm the open Internet---blocking, throttling and Paid Prioritization---this order bans each of these, applying the same rules to both fixed and mobile broadband Internet access service."
Corporate America has been allowed to kick, gouge, and stomp We The People into the mud for so long that this kind of unequivocal protection for something so essential in our lives almost doesn't feel real. But there it is. This time Lucy held the football and we
actually got to kick the fucking thing. Right through the goal posts. We should do this more often.
CHEERS to the GREAT STATE OF MAINE!!! We told Massachusetts to kiss our hineys 195 years ago Sunday, after which we declared our independence and became America's 23rd state:
The Maine coon cat is the
official state pootie. It chases
cars and sometimes eats them.
Mainers had begun campaigning for statehood in the years following the Revolution. The Massachusetts legislature finally consented in 1819. What no one in either Massachusetts or Maine foresaw, however, was that Maine's quest for statehood would become entangled in the most divisive issue in American history---slavery. Most Mainers supported abolition. They were dismayed that their admission to the Union was linked to the admission of Missouri as a slave state. This controversial "Missouri Compromise" preserved---for a few more decades---the delicate balance between pro- and anti-slavery forces in the U.S. Congress.
Today we're ruled by a slime-fisted teabagger who is so gaffe-prone that he has to call in staff members to stick their feet in his mouth. Then again, we're the first state in the country to approve marriage equality by a citizen vote independent of the legislature, our scenery will lower your stress level in mere minutes, our lobster melts in your mouth, and the Amtrak Downeaster train that runs from Brunswick to Boston has been a huge success. Come on up and see us once the roads are passable sometime in June. The black flies would love to have you for dinner.
P.S. On this date in 1877, Chester Greenwood of Farmington, Maine got his patent for a new device called "earmufflers." Normal people wear them to keep out the cold. Conservatives wear them to keep out facts.
CHEERS to going crazy irrational!!! Let's hear it for secular holidays! Yaaay!!! Tomorrow is 3/14, and at 1:59:26 (am and pm, I presume) the world will erupt in slide-rule giddyness for Pi Day:
The first calculation of pi was done by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. Archimedes approximated the area of a circle by using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the areas of two regular polygons: the polygon inscribed within the circle and the polygon within which the circle was circumscribed. Since the actual area of the circle lies between the areas of the inscribed and circumscribed polygons, the areas of the polygons gave upper and lower bounds for the area of the circle. Archimedes knew that he had not found the value of pi but only an approximation within those limits. In this way, Archimedes showed that pi is between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71.
Among other things, pi is comes in handy when you need to distract mysterious entities who have hijacked your starship (and boy, do we miss you, Nimoy):
I always sucked at math (and dear god I hope that doesn't mean I'm somehow related to Karl Rove), so I think I'll stick with regular pie tomorrow, thanks. With 3.1415926 scoops of ice cream.
ISIS sure kicks up a lot
of dust when they flee.
to evildoers running for their mamas. A couple positive developments on a pair of war fronts. An effective, if unusual, alliance of Iran and the United States is helping Iraq
boot the pimple-faced ISIS nitwits from Tikrit and other cities. Some crowds are openly praising the teamwork of Sunni and Shia to get the job done. And in Niger a minimum of 500 Boko Haram (or, as GOP Congressman Paul Gosar calls them,
"Boca Raton") terrorists are
now discovering that "paradise" is nothing more than a hastily dug hole in the ground that'll be covered up and forgotten. Although we would add that some words will be spoken over their final resting place. I believe those words are "Buh bye."
CHEERS to the little planet that got demoted. As the NASA spacecraft Dawn (on this week's winners poll) circles the dwarf planet Ceres, another one---the New Horizons probe---is on its way to Pluto, which was publicly introduced as a full-fledged planet to the world 85 years ago today. Unable to handle the fame that followed, the ball of rock and ice with the eccentric orbit ended up on the drunken-party circuit and was publicly downsized:
The New Horisons probe.
Huhhuhhuh...I said probe.
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That happened in 2006, a few months after New Horizons launched and about a year before Dawn did, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, the organization that is in charge of classifying and naming celestial objects. The I.A.U. defines a dwarf planet according to four criteria: it must orbit the sun, it must be spherical, it must not be a satellite of another planet, and it must not have “cleared the neighborhood” of other objects of comparable size. […]
It makes no practical difference, of course, what we call Pluto and Ceres, just as it makes no practical difference whether Australia is the biggest island or the smallest continent. Both are believed to be leftovers of a population of thousands of smallish, roundish objects that mostly collected together to form larger ones---Mars, Jupiter, Earth, and the rest.
And speaking of places where the air is thin and dominated by wobbly objects full of rocks, did any more letters get sent from the Republican Senate conference room today?
30 years??? I'm old.
to home vegetation. It may be a bit warmer outside, but the teevee still beckons. On HBO's
Real Time, Bill Maher talks with Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, Sean Penn, Sharyl Attkisson, Arianna Huffington and Tom Rogan. Not much in the way of
DVD releases, but there's a five-disc 50th anniversary release of
The Sound of Music and the 30th anniversary restoration of
The Breakfast Club. SNL is a rerun. The NBA schedule
is here and the NHL schedule
is here. (The Bruins will leave the Penguins crying in their herring Ha Ha Ha!) Art imitates life Sunday on
Madam Secretary as Tea Leoni rushes to Iran to prevent neocon skullduggery. And later that night on HBO's
Last Week Tonight, John Oliver comes one more episode closer to Emmy glory.
Now here's your Sunday morning lineup. Please hold your applause until Trey Gowdy offers a plausible explanation for why he has a snake nose. (Note: comparisons to Lord Voldemort aren’t acceptable because that's totally mean-spirited and will surely hurt Voldemort's feelings):
Barney's new book is
called "Frank." How droll.
This Week: Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) on Ferguson; former senator Jim Webb (D-VA); roundtable with pundits who plan to prove their serious journalism bona fides by sitting around drinking gin and throwing darts at a poster of Hillary Clinton; Bassem Youssef aka “Egypt’s Jon Stewart”; and don’t be surprised if John McCain shows up to declare war on Iran.
Face the Nation: The author of that infamous Iran letter, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), gets a tongue bath from Bob Schieffer; Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) on the latest Secret Service clown show; All things SAE, Ferguson and Selma with NAACP president Cornell William Brooks, NAACP Legal Defense Fund president Sherrilyn Ifill and, for balance, the ghost of Edmund Pettus.
CNN's State of the Union: Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) comes out of his shell to defend his signature on the letter asking Iran to conspire with Senate Republicans to bring down President Obama. That should be fun.
Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: Hearts will go thumpa-thwumpa as BANZAI BENGHAZI!!! committee chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) announces that he plans to issue a subpoena for all of Hillary Clinton's precious bodily fluids, while Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) tells him to go home and sober up; Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) defends his membership in the #47Traitors Club, while Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) wins the debate without saying a word.
Happy viewing!
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Ten years ago in C&J: March 13, 2005
JEERS to Marcus Welby, D.M. (Deadly Medic). A new Harvard Medical School study finds that older doctors are more likely to provide lower-quality medical care, expose patients to greater risks, and follow outdated treatment standards. If your doc sticks a tongue-depressor up your butt and asks you to "Say Ahhh," it may be time to shop around.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to "Q." Composing and producing legend---like, the kind of legend that other legends look at and say, "Okay, now he's a legend"---Quincy Jones turns 82 tomorrow. Our favorite Q-tune is his junky-tonk theme for Sanford and Son and if you want to release some waterworks just go revisit his score for The Color Purple. For pop thrills there's Thriller. But for sheer mojo-rejuvenating goodness, no playlist should be without Soul Bossa Nova. Special shoutout to the memory of bebop trumpet legend Clark Terry, who died late last month and helps make this appearance on Letterman totally excellent:
Have a groovy weekend. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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