Daily Kos Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund
Daily Kos Hurricane Irma Relief Fund
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From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
A Slight Revision
Among my private papers destined for display in the Bill in Portland Maine Library and Mop Closet is a ragged piece of construction paper on which is scrawled my attempt at age 7 (circa March, 1972, below) to write out the words to our National Anthem. It's virtually illegible today, so I've transcribed it below to mark today’s 203rd anniversary of the day Francis Scott Key wrote it. Please stand, sit, go down on one knee, raise your fist, or just wing it, and join me in our annual tradition of singing the, um…
Star Bangled Baner
Oh say can you see by the dons early light
What so proudleeree haild at the twilited flashed gleaming.
Were galenntlee sareeming.
And the rockets gleenly of bombs bursting in air
Came our thru our thru the fight that are flag was still there
O say gotslan stare spangled banner ye whenne
Forb the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pour my spellchecker a stiff drink.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold…[Swoosh!] Right now! [Gong!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, September 14, 2017
Note: This is for you circa February 9, 2021 at---[Checks time machine]---3:02pm: “Gesundheit.”
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By the Numbers
Days ‘til the Cassini space probe ends it all by diving into Saturn: 1
Days ‘til the Pittsburgh Pieroggi Fest: 10
Reduction in uncompensated care among states that have expanded Medicaid under the ACA: 40%
Number of states (NY, PA, CA, MD, VT) that are suing the Trump administration to keep stricter penalties for carmakers who violate fuel-efficiency standards: 5
Percent tax that would be levied on Maine marijuana sales, under a new draft bill out this week: 20%
Number of girls aged 17 or younger who were married in Ohio between 2000 and 2015: 4,400
Amount Patty Jenkins will get to direct the sequel to Wonder Woman: $7 million - $9 million
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
It is a fact that the Clinton administration set some tough policies on wetlands, and it is a fact that the Bush administration repealed those policies---ordering federal agencies to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands.
Last year, four environmental groups cooperated on a joint report showing the Bush administration's policies had allowed developers to drain thousands of acres of wetlands.
Does this mean we should blame Bush for the fact that New Orleans is underwater?
No, but it means we can blame Bush when a Class 3 or Class 2 hurricane puts New Orleans under. At this point, it is a matter of making a bad situation worse, of failing to observe the First Rule of Holes (when you're in one, stop digging).
---September 2005
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Rainbow butt
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CHEERS to sweating the small stuff. Harvey and Irma relief operations are going about as well as can be expected. Slow but sure, with some returning to find things relatively intact while others come home to find no there there, and infrastructure crews putting their pieces back together. But amid the misery are reasons to smile---from the $44 million brought in by Tuesday night’s all-star telethon to the chainsaw-wielding nun (we now know her name: meet Sister Margaret Ann). Also: lots of animal rescue stories, like this one that saved a bale (yes, I looked it up) of sea turtles. Click…
Mitch McConnell says he’s looking forward to meeting them at the next family reunion.
JEERS to our NRA world. Just in case you were wondering, the answer is yes, massacres are still happening in America because gun ownership and the lack of oversight thereof is still happening. Here’s the Texas story you didn’t see on the nightly news:
An officer responding to a report of shots fired at about 8 p.m. Sunday confronted the suspected shooter and opened fire, killing the suspect. Police then found the nine gunshot victims---seven were dead, some in the home and some in the backyard.
The victims had gathered at the home for a cookout and had planned to watch football, Rushin said. Rushin said the officer who responded heard gunshots, saw victims down and "knew instantly what was going on."
I believe an eighth person has died since. Meanwhile, as I was writing this, police swarmed a high school in Washington state, where a shooter killed one and injured three. It’s Wayne LaPierre’s world…we just duck and cover in it.
P.S. Speaking of unspeakable carnage, yesterday the august, deliberative, and supposed-to-be-smarter-than-the-orcs-in-the-House half of the legislative branch took a vote to continue the 9/11-inspired Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), giving Trump free rein to continue waging unfettered war in the Middle East. Like handing a match to a toddler holding a stick of TNT.
CHEERS to the ultimate spin machine. Don’t forget to hug your hard drive---this week marks the the 61st birthday of the IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), the first computer to ship with a hard drive:
The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks--each of them a pizza-size 24 inches--was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies ofElvis Presley's "Hound Dog."
"It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running," recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-'50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims was the very first unit delivered by IBM."It really turned the tide [in the Information Age]," he says.
Here’s the original promotional film for it. “Another business service of tomorrow made possible today by IBM...”
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And now let's all say Happy Birthday to the hard-workin' hard drive: "01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01000010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001" And a 00010001 to grow an inch.
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Answer Man. Atrios asks: “How does a man like Ted Cruz manage to step over all of the other not charismatic cretins to become a senator for Texas? I get that you just gotta have a pulse and an R next to your name to win the general election, but Ted Cruz managed to beat all of the other Rs with a pulse to get there somehow. How did that happen?”
Beelzebub.
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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CHEERS to the fly in the ointment. The ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation got busted this week for trying to get Democrats and “mainstream” Republicans (yeah, like those exist anymore) eliminated from Trump’s sham “voter integrity commission” when it was formed earlier this year. They apparently didn’t want anything to stand in the way of making Bullshit Mountain even higher. Thankfully they failed, because the Democrats on the commission are acting as their own “commission within the commission.” Exhibit A: the commission is setting its sights on New Hampshire, with evil chairman Kris Kobach targeting “illegal” student voters with out-of-state driver’s licenses as the reason Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton. But commission member and Maine’s Democratic Secretary of State Matt Dunlap is having none of it:
[Dunlap called] Kobach’s comments “reckless.”
“There’s utterly no connectivity between motor vehicle law and election law. Primarily, you have a right to vote. Driving is a privilege,” he said.
“Making this equation that somehow people not updating their driver’s licenses is indicative of voter fraud would be almost as absurd as saying if you have cash in your wallet that’s proof that you robbed a bank.”
Please. Don’t give Jeff Sessions any ideas.
JEERS to getting Second Amendmented. On this date in 1901, our 25th president, William McKinley, died from an assassin’s bullet at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. A couple years back, Ohioans and conservatives in general went nuts when President Obama granted native Alaskans their wish to revert Mount McKinley back to its original name, Denali. A popular question asked by proponents of the move was, "What did McKinley do that was so great he warranted his own iconic mountain?" I had to think for a bit, but I managed to come up with a doozy: he picked a helluva vice president.
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Ten years ago in C&J: September 14, 2007...
JEERS to a very bumpy flight. Bush’s head of the FAA, Marion Blakey, is stepping down today. BusinessWeek's verdict? She sucked:
[I]t's clear she failed. Almost everything about flying is worse than when she arrived. Greater are the risks, the passenger headaches, and the costs in lost productivity. Almost everyone has a horror story about missed connections, lost baggage, and wasted hours on the tarmac. More than 909,000 flights were late through June of this year, twice the level of 2002.
Her last official act today: booking train tickets for the trip home.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to bulldogs on screen. As 2017 starts lurching towards its merciful end, Oscar bait starts rolling off the Hollywood assembly lines. One flick I’m looking forward to that’s generating buzz---especially for its star---is Darkest Hour, a retelling of Winston Churchill’s ascension to prime minister and his handling of the ton of bricks that came down on Britain in 1940. As Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian writes: “Gary Oldman carries off a tremendous performance here, and it’s impossible not to enjoy it.” See for yourself:
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True fact: a rogue band of pirates in the Atlantic joined the cause against the Nazis when they heard Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them...” speech. They said it was their finest “Arrrrrr!”
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
Get out of the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool at least once every 30 minutes. Failure to do so may shorten your life, study finds
---Los Angeles Times
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