From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
And Now Today's Comforting Words
From the personal attorney of the President of the United States Sunday morning...
"Truth isn't truth!"
...and John Oliver Sunday night:
“At this rate, Trump is going to wind up behind bars with Giuliani visiting him and saying, ‘Don’t worry, Donald: Prison isn’t prison.’”
They’ll be here all week.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, August 20, 2018
Note: And now here's Gary at the Breaking News Desk with the latest weekend development in the Mueller investigation: "Drip, drip, drip…"
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the midterm elections: 78
Days 'til Maine's Blue Hill Fair: 10
Estimated number of overdose deaths in Trump's America last year, up 10 percent from the previous year, according to the CDC: 72,300
Rank of Nebraska, North Carolina, New Jersey and Maine among states with the highest overdose death rate: #1, #2, #3, #6
Size of the current lead Democratic nominee Tony Evers has over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the latest PPP poll: 5 points (49%-44%)
Number of presidential inaugurations at which Aretha Franklin performed: 3
Year the spitball was banned from major league baseball: 1934
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Federal law enforcement is using some weird ankle tether technology these days…
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CHEERS to fun with numbers. FiveThirtyEight is out with its first House pickup forecast for the 2018 midterms. You can look at all the pretty graphs and charts here, but more important is the companion "Five Takeaways" article that goes with it. The big picture looks pretty good. But, to coin a phrase in those banner ads you love to hate, "Number 2 will SHOCK you…"
> "A broad consensus of indicators point toward Democrats performing well."
> "But if you had to pinpoint the exact districts that Democrats should hope to win to gain 23 seats and take the House majority, you’d have a pretty hard time. We have only 215 seats rated as favoring Democrats---“lean Democrat” or stronger---which is fewer than the 218 they need to take the House. Nonetheless, Democrats are favored to win the majority if current conditions hold because they’ll have a bunch of opportunities, even as underdogs, to win those extra seats."
> Incumbents---especially Republican incumbents---are really vulnerable.
> "Potential Democratic gains are broad-based, across all regions of the country."
> Because of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, "Democrats would need to win the popular vote by about 5 percentage points in order to become favorites to win the majority of seats in the House."
Nate Silver gives Democrats a 75.3 percent chance of taking back the House. Or as I like to call it, a 100 percent chance that I'll believe Nate's 75.3 percent chance only when I wake up on November 7th to find the streets flooded with Republican tears.
CHEERS to order in the court. Sure, we lose a few. But we win a lot, especially in lower courts. Here's a trio of decisions that'll put a hearty squeak in yer gavel…
Decision 1 TransCanada's long-gestating Keystone XL tar sands pipeline was dealt another setback after a federal judge in Montana ruled Wednesday that the Trump State Department must conduct a robust environmental review of the alternative pipeline route through Nebraska. U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris sided with environmentalists, landowners and tribal plaintiffs in their challenge to the Trump administration. […] Joye Braun, of the Wakpa Waste Camp at the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, said in a statement: "This is a huge step to once again shut down this zombie pipeline that threatens water, our homelands, and our treaty territory.”
Decision 2 A federal judge in Baltimore rejected the Trump administration’s request to shield information it employed when deciding to ban transgender people from the U.S. military. […] ACLU lawyer Josh Block said the decision means the administration must set forth its “actual reasons” for the ban. “It is difficult to believe that concerns about fitness and deployability changed so dramatically in such a short time,” Block said in an interview. It suggests they may have been a pretext for a discriminatory purpose."
Decision 3 A federal judge has extended a freeze on deporting families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border, giving a reprieve to hundreds of children and their parents to remain in the United States. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said in his order Thursday that “hasty” deportation of children after reunification with their parents would deprive them of their right to seek asylum. The judge’s order did not specify a date for when the reprieve would end. … He said claims of people persecuted in their homelands should at least be heard.
Meanwhile, the jury in the Paul Manafort trial continues its deliberations this morning. While no one's sure which way they're leaning, they've already reached at least one verdict: juror #7 is guilty of Hollywood movie cliché abuse. (Yeah, yeah, Manafort stole the quart of strawberries. We get it, ha ha.)
CHEERS to statesmen who make us proud to be part of Club Democrat. True fact: state law requires every Mainer to either say "Happy birthday" to former Maine senator George Mitchell, who turns 85 today, or be banished to a life of misery in New Hampshire. So: Happy Birthday Mr. Former Senate Majority Leader! (And a damn good one, especially compared to that piece of Kentucky traitor filth currently stinking up his the office.) After spending 14 years in the Senate, he brokered peace in Northern Ireland, headed up an investigation of steroid use in baseball, tried his best to thread the Middle East peace needle, and a few years ago year helped resolve issues relating to working conditions in Bangladesh's garment industry. Last week Mitchell was asked if he could broker peace between those who prefer the toilet paper to hang over the roll and those who prefer that it hang under the roll. The response: "Dammit, man, I'm a negotiator not a miracle worker."
CHEERS to hitting your mark. Polite golf clap to the nerds at NASA as the Parker Solar Probe---now completely hoisting the middle finger at all posted speed limits by flooring it to 39,000 mph---is passing its first tests with “flying” colors (pun intended and you watch it's gonna win me a Pulitzer):
For example, the spacecraft deployed its high-gain antenna, which it uses to communicate with Earth, a day after liftoff.
Also, on Aug. 13, the Parker Solar Probe powered up one of its four instrument suites---the one known as the Fields Experiment.
In addition, the probe has been using its thrusters to reduce momentum, an activity designed to stabilize its flight profile, NASA officials said.
"Parker Solar Probe is operating as designed, and we are progressing through our commissioning activities," mission project manager Andy Driesman, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement.
Another good sign: the spacecraft got the first punch on its frequent-prober card at the 2.9 million-mile Cinnabon. Nine more revolutions and the Churro Swirl Sandwich is on the house.
CHEERS to do-gooders of yore. As part of his War on Poverty, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act 54 years ago today. It included funds for vocational training, establishment of a domestic version of the Peace Corps, and community action programs. Or as modern-day Republicans call them: Bleh, Feh and Ick.
JEERS to comeuppansssssss. Down yonder beyond the briar patch in Middlesboro, Kentucky is a Christian church where the faithful gather to speak in tongues, foam at the mouth, and, completing the trifecta, handle poisonous snakes. In a new documentary called My Life Inside: The Snake Church, we see Pastor Cody Coots (whose daddy died at 42 from, yup, snake handling) swinging around a rattlesnake, who didn't very much appreciate feeling like it was on the world's worst Tilt-A-Whirl. So it informed ol' Coots that it wanted off the ride by biting him in the ear. If you want to see the devil take its pound of flesh, forward to the 10:30 mark. But the story has a happy ending: the snake was treated for idiot-pastor poisoning and will make a full recovery.
P.S. in other wacky Bible-thumpin' news, last week supporters of the Satanic Temple hauled a statue of Baphomet out to the Arkansas State House to protest the installment of a Ten Commandments monument there. Baphomet, you may recall, is a grotesque winged creature with the face of a goat. When he heard about it, Senator Tom Cotton said, "How dare you use my likeness without my permission!"
CHEERS to #23. Happy birthday to Benjamin Harrison, born on August 20, 1833 in North Bend, Ohio. As president from 1889 to 1893, he was the filling in the Grover Cleveland sandwich. And what a party animal! From Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O'Brien:
[I]n person the staunchly Presbyterian president was a virtual corpse.
Chilly, frigid, frosty---words like these were routinely used to describe the unpleasant experience of meeting privately with the man. [...]
Senator Thomas Platt was the one who coined the moniker "White House Iceberg." As Platt explained, "Inside the Executive Mansion, in his reception of those who solicited official appointments, [Harrison] was as glacial as a Siberian stripped of his furs. During and after an interview, if one could secure it, one felt even in torrid weather like pulling on his winter flannels, galoshes, overcoat, mittens and earflaps." Even Harrison's handshake was a flop, likened to "a wilted petunia."
Like Mike Pence. Minus the charm.
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Ten years ago in C&J: August 20, 2008
CHEERS to the new kid on the teevee. If you want some more background info about Rachel Maddow as she prepares to host her own show on MSNBC, here ya go. Some interesting factoids:
>> She doesn't own a TV
>> Her dad was a captain in the Air Force during the Vietnam War
>> She once held a job cleaning buckets for a baked bean factory
>> During her first radio gig she sometimes had to put on a calculator costume and make appearances at a car dealership
>> She got her Bachelor's degree at Stanford and her doctorate at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship
>> She's a "defense policy wonk"
>> Fox News tried to book her once...to talk about the critical issue of the Madonna/Britney Spears kiss at the MTV Video Music Awards.
Oh, and she's also an Aries which, according to The Wikipedia, means she's "assertive, brave, energetic, kind, action-oriented, intelligent, individualistic, independent, impulsive, full of strength, competitive, eager, straightforward, forceful, headstrong, pioneering, a leader, focused on the present and freedom-loving, and an expert in kicking Pat Buchanan in the balls." Scary accurate.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the put-down of put-downs. Oh, that crazy August of '09, when town hall meetings got so boisterous---with birther bullshit and teabaggers demanding the government do the exact things that would make the economy even worse---that they dominated the news, and security was often forced to step in to protect congress members from deranged loons who were egged on by the conservative media empire. But out of the wankery came a hero from the left who actually won a town hall skirmish: former Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who gave a Nazi-card-playing Lyndon LaRouche supporter something to cry in her strudel about when she trashed the Democrats’ effort to upgrade America's broken health insurance system:
"When you ask me that question, I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: on what planet do you spend most of your time?"
Responded Jon Stewart later that night: "Apparently a planet where a mixed-race president and a gay Jew qualify as Nazis." And that's why, to commemorate that epic moment, C&J officially recognizes this as Barney Badass Frank Week. Saaaaalute!
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Elon Musk: Tesla could produce a $25,000 Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool in around 3 years
---CNBC
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