From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Me + Haiku = Really Bad Idea
Ryan plucks petals
They love me, they love me not
Boehner holds his breath
Shooter in classroom
Carson springs into action
"Kindergartners! Chaaaaaarge!"
Dems debate issues
Facts, truth, vision, common sense
Trump's verdict: "Snoozer"
Missiles overhead
Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran
Putin calls oopsies
Halloween is nigh
Gonna scare the kids real good
[Ding Dong!] "Jeb!" [Pee flows]
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Note: Portland, Maine has a mayoral election on November 3rd, and I'm ready to announce my endorsement. I'm throwing my full support behind the first candidate I see going door to door wearing a top hat. (Add spats and I'll put up a yard sign.)
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10 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til Bernie Sanders appears on
Ellen:
1
Days 'til the
Philadelphia Cheesesteak Festival:
10
Number of Confederate flag worshippers indicted for violating the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act by traumatizing a black family during a birthday party in Georgia:
15
Tons of small arms dropped by the U.S. into Kurdish militia areas in northern Syria:
45
(Source: The Pentagon)
Average number of vacation days taken by Americans last year, a 35-year low:
16
(Source: FiveThirtyEight)
Amount Dell paid to buy cloud storage company EMC :
$67 billion
Year during which U.S. women with a bachelor's degree surpassed
men with a bachelor's degree:
2014
(Source: Census Bureau)
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 183 (including 3 Occults and a bunch of magic milk buckets). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Bob's buds…
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CHEERS to the party of ideas. Last night the Democratic candidates for president---hell, even including Biden's lonely lectern---made more sense and munched on more substantive ideas in two hours than the Republicans have in 30 years. A few notes from the night:
> Anderson Cooper has morphed into a villain from a DaVinci Code movie. When did that happen?
All in all, a pleasant evening.
> Best line of the night from Bernie as he slammed the Benghazi commission: "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails." Runner up, also from Bernie: "Congress doesn't regulate Wall Street, Wall Street regulates Congress."
> Hillary was smart, tough, prepared and quick on her feet. I guarantee you she wiped a lot of grins off a lot of Republican faces last night.
> I have nothing bad to say about Jim Webb. Mainly because I'm afraid that if I do he'll gut me like a fish.
> There were no holocaust comparisons, no stories about fetus brain harvesting, no grand schemes for a great wall across the Mexican border, and no declarations that the Bible trumps the Constitution. WTF???
> Martin O'Malley had the best closing statement. (And he really really REALLY wants to deliver a green electrical grid by 2050!)
> Lincoln Chafee acts like he should be a U.S. ambassador to a small and very polite island nation in the Pacific.
The worst part about last night: my drinking game was to take a swig every time someone said "the issues that matter." By 11 o'clock I as chuggin' the '87 ripple from the back of the fridge.
Republicans tried to make a dent--and failed.
CHEERS to the sad, lonely end of a sad, lonely partisan road. After promising to "get to the bottom" of the worst, most heinous Planned Parenthood baby-parts-selling scandal in the history of the universe, the committee chaired by "sexy beaver mascot" (Stephen Colbert's words) Jason Chaffetz finally finished reviewing all the "damning" videos, the "damning" documents and the "damning" live testimony. The final verdict is in, and guess how much evil baby parts hawking lawlessness they found? In Chaffetz's words:
“Did we find any wrongdoing? The answer was no.” Boy, oh boy, that word sticks to them like glue.
JEERS to silliness on the campaign trail. Donald Trump was speaking at a No Labels event in New Hampshire Monday and got challenged about his positions on women's issues by someone who turned out to be a pro-pay-equality, pro-choice Jeb Bush campaign volunteer. This raises some serious questions. Like, is Trump really committed to equal treatment for women? And, what's a pro-choice woman doing supporting the virulently-anti-abortion Jeb Bush? And, most perplexing of all: No Labels still exists???
Susan B. gives Grover
a piece of her mind.
JEERS to Democratic brain farts we'd like to forget. 110 years ago today, in 1905, former president Grover Cleveland wrote an article for 'Ladies Home Journal,' opposing women's voting rights. His words:
"We all know how much further women go than men in their social rivalries and jealousies...sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence."
I believe the relative position of his wife's rolling pin that night was right between the eyes.
JEERS to talking to locking and loading in front of the animals. There is literally no place the gun nuts don’t want to take their guns. Schools, churches, hospitals, baseball games, playgrounds, and now not even zoos are safe:
No longer a gun-free zone.
An advocacy group in Texas is singling out zoos under a newly enacted state law allowing complaints about unlawful gun restrictions to be forwarded to the state's attorney general for potential steep fines. Similar efforts have occurred elsewhere, including in Missouri where the St. Louis Zoo went to court to prevent an Ohio man from bringing a gun to the zoo to test its no-weapons policy.
[S]aid Edwin Walker with Texas Law Shield, the group that recently filed complaints against the Houston and Dallas zoos: "I guarantee there's not going to be a license-holder that's going to go to the zoo and shoot a baby giraffe in front of schoolchildren."
Of course not, silly. Gun nuts shoot schoolchildren in front of schoolchildren.
CHEERS to sweet victory. 107 years ago today, on October 14. 1908, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. Last night they advanced to the National League Championship Series after they won against the St. Louis Cardinals 6-4. Hmm…I'm sensing a pattern.
CHEERS to swift veterans. On this date 68 years ago, U.S. Air Force Captain Charles Yeager---still kickin' at 92---rode The X-1 into history as the first person to break the sound barrier---662 freakin' miles an hour:
"Oh, stewardess? This is
fish. I ordered the chicken."
[I]n 1947, the golden age of flight, Yeager was dropped in an experimental rocket-propelled Bell X1 jet from a B-29 bomber at an altitude of 45,000 feet. "That's the only way we could do it," he said.
"It took the British, French and the Soviet Union another five years to find out that trick. It gave us a quantum jump" in aviation advancement, he said.
His wife's first words after Yeager landed: "How come you're never that quick to mow the lawn?"
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Ten years ago in C&J: October 14, 2005
CHEERS to the new anchor on the block. Write this down: Stephen Colbert's new show, The Colbert Report, debuts Monday night on Comedy Central. From the Washington Post:
Colbert says he will draw from the "dazzling hubris" of Bill O'Reilly, along with Sean Hannity and Joe Scarborough, plus "the folksiness of Aaron Brown, the way he mulls the news and loves to chew the words. And the sexiness of Anderson Cooper. Certainly they sell him as attractive." Watching O'Reilly and company inundate viewers with opinions, he says, is like witnessing a spectacle "as natural as a gorilla beating his chest."
(We would add: or throwing their feces at people.) Good luck, Mr. Colbert---we'll be watching you veeeery carefully.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to a foliage-free fall. Chances are your heart was in your throat three years ago today when Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian daredevil who never met a law of gravity he didn’t love, headed 24 miles up to the fringe of space in a giant balloon…and then jumped:
What followed was a plunge reaching a speed of 843 mph that had millions of viewers pearl-clutching and sweating bullets of uncertainty bordering on panic, but all ended well when the charismatic hero used his smarts and competence to inject confidence into the situation, avoiding a crash and landing in the winner's circle as cheers of victory drowned out the naysayers who had prematurely written his epitaph. It was a good day for Baumgartner. It was an even better day for political and financial-sector metaphors.
Have a nice Wednesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
"I always felt there was something a little hollow about Cheers and Jeers, you know?”
---Keith Richards
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