From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Energize An Ally Tuesday
It's 2019. No Democrat running for public office should ever be so extreme that they have to come out and make a statement like, "That Ku Klux Klan guy David Duke is endorsing me? Oh, goodness, that's terrible. And Steve Bannon, too? I'm so embarrassed. Why, oh why, would they do that? I can't imagine."
And yet we have ourselves a candidate, running for both reelection to Congress and the presidency(!) who has the full backing of Duke and Bannon, along with a laundry list of blood-boiling transgressions neatly cataloged by Daily Kos Elections director David Nir over the weekend. According to the latest polling by PPP, her constituents are not impressed.
Fortunately, there's a primary challenger whose record isn't stained with controversy and questionable alliances. Lt. Colonel Kai Kahele comes from the Daniel Akaka-Daniel Inouye wing of the Democratic party, and can bring that sensibility back to Hawaii's 2nd District:
State Sen. Kai Kahele is a combat pilot in the Air National Guard who's flown missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and ran a nonprofit serving rural Native Hawaiian families. Most importantly, he's a solid progressive who backs Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. [...]
"I think of my own daughters and your children and the Hawaiʻi of the future they will grow up in. We want the brightest future for them. We want them to have a secure job sustained by a strong and thriving economy. We want them to grow up in a safe community, and a clean environment. We want them to be able to attend outstanding public schools and have access to quality healthcare when they need it. We want them to be able to walk in our ohia forests, swim in our oceans rich with marine life and see the Hawaiʻi that we have seen through our eyes.”
Daily Kos has officially endorsed Kai Kahele for Congress, and this morning C&J is happy to put him in this week's "Energize An Ally" spotlight. I'm making what I believe is my first donation to a candidate from Hawai'i. If you feel so inclined, you can toss in a few bucks via the DK ActBlue page here. Hopefully next year we’ll be able to say “Yippee-Kai-Yay.” Right after we say “Tulsi-ya-later.”
Official campaign site here. Follow Kai on Twitter here and on evil Facebook here.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Note: Today is National Nut Day. So tonight, help yourself to the bowl of pistachios, almonds, walnuts, filberts, and Pompeos.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Halloween: 9
Days 'til the North Carolina Cotton Festival in Dunn: 11
Percent of Minnesotans who believe Trump is abusing the power of the presidency, according to a new Star Tribune poll: 56%
Percent in the same poll who consider him a bald-faced liar: 61%
Value of the Trump tariffs slapped on European imports that went into effect Friday: $7.5 billion
Size of the tariff increases on Italian cheese, French wine, Spanish olives, and single-malt Scotch (wherever the hell that stuff comes from): 25%
Rank of Pennywise, "witch," and Spiderman among the top Halloween costumes this year, according to Google Trends: #1, #2, #3
Random Monday Night Football Score
New England 33 NY Jets 0
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Walkie time…
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CHEERS to the fight at the end of the tunnel. The impeachment train is still barreling toward a head-on collision with President Trump, and it's starting to feel like it's making its last turn before plowing through the Oval Office windows. With a revolving door of credible witnesses spilling the beans for hours at a time, coupled with a White House defense team that couldn’t find a light switch in a lamp factory, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi are focusing like a laser on one goal: making the charges so airtight in the House that it'll be hard not to convict in the Senate. NBC News' Heidi Przybyla has an excellent summary of where things stand. You should read it all, but here's a snip if you're pressed for time:
House Democrats are zeroing in on a framework for their impeachment case against President Donald Trump that will center on a simple “abuse of power” narrative involving the president's actions regarding Ukraine, according to multiple people familiar with the deliberations. […]
Neal Katyal, a former acting U.S. solicitor general and NBC News contributor, said that legally and politically, a sweeping impeachment article charging “abuse of power” with regard to Ukraine was "exactly correct. The phrase captures the central evils of what Trump did in Ukraine," Katyal said, "and keeps the story focused there, and not on distracting sideshows.” […]
House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, (D-CA), said the next phase of the impeachment process will likely be open hearings where evidence is presented to the public and the full House. […] The House investigation has resulted in a flood of new information in recent weeks, including evidence that suggests Trump pushed aside the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, so that a team of his political appointees…could pressure the Ukrainian government to create a corruption narrative, and possible charges, against the Bidens.
But wait, there's more: CNN reports that a speedy conclusion might not be possible because "each witness has so far provided more leads for investigators to chase down, including new names to potentially interview or seek documents from." Translation: swamp waters runs deep.
CHEERS to dirty fucking hippies: Ottawa Edition. Voters in Canada took to the polls yesterday (though 4.7 million voted in advance, roughly 1-in-5 eligible voters, and an increase of 29% from 2015) in our northern neighbor's closely-watched national elections. While the U.S. is busy suppressing the vote, Canada added 1,100 polling stations and extended early-voting hours. And at the end of the day we had a victor. For the foreseeable future, the conservatives will remain the back-benchers as liberal Justin Trudeau continues undoing the damage inflicted by Stephen Harper:
Global News is projecting a Liberal minority government.
The Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, will head back to Parliament for a second consecutive term as the governing party, although they’ll need to negotiate support from at least one other party in order to pass any legislation while they are in office.
Neither the Liberals nor Conservatives are projected to hit the 170-seat threshold needed for a majority government as polls were counted on Monday night.
But Global News is projecting the Liberals will hold the plurality of seats in the House of Commons.
Whew!!! Trudeau will begin his second term shortly after pledging his allegiance to the Queen of England and then taking the oath of office on a stack of Celine Dion's greatest hits.
CHEERS to "Likud-ing" your wounds. Speaking of international elections, here's a little unfinished business from Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu is hanging on by his fingernails in the hopes of staying in power just long enough to change a few laws that would keep him out of jail. If he can't stitch together a new government out of various factions in the Knesset, he'll have to give rival Benny Ganz a shot. If Ganz pulls it off, Bibi will no longer be prime minister and thus open himself up to a trial on corruption charges. So let's see how that's going:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that he could not form a new government after President Reuven Rivlin asked him to try in the wake of a deadlocked election.
Netanyahu's decision to cut short his efforts leaves the country's political future—and his own—uncertain. The opportunity to form a stable government will now likely fall to his rival Benny Gantz, who leads the main opposition Blue and White party.
If all goes well, the Blue and White party will leave Bibi's political reputation—wait for it—black and blue! (Yes! Boom! Took me six hours to think of that but I nailed it.)
JEERS to another hold-your-breath-moment in American history. Okay, now this was a real crisis: on October 22, 1962 President Kennedy informed the world that the Soviet Union was building secret missile bases in Cuba:
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He ordered our military to quarantine Cuba until Soviet premier Khrushchev agreed to shut 'em down. Kennedy negotiated his way through the melee without establishing a color-coded terror alert system, telling us to go shopping, abandoning our allies, or invading a country that had nothing to do with the crisis at hand. And to think he called himself a leader.
CHEERS and JEERS to Ma Nature's 2019/2020 playbook. We've heard from the Farmer's Almanac, the Old Farmer's Almanac, the New Farmer's Almanac, and the Almanac of Farmers Neither Old Nor New But Stuck Somewhere In The Middle. Now it's time for the NOAA to guess what winter will bring to the US of A this season. Their Climate Prediction Center's latest forecast, based on a months-long analyses of moss on trees, fuzz on wooly worms, and sweaters on local TV morning show meteorologists, is shaping up to be a mild, El Nino- and La Nina-free one:
Wetter-than-average conditions: Alaska and Hawaii, along with portions of the Northern Plains, Upper Mississippi Valley, the Great Lakes and parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
Drier-than-average conditions: Louisiana, parts of Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma as well areas of northern and central California.
Above-average temperatures: Alaska and Hawaii, with more modest probabilities for above-average temperatures spanning large parts of the remaining lower 48 from the West across the South and up the eastern seaboard.
Below-average temperatures: No part of the U.S. is favored to have below-average temperatures this winter.
As usual, some predictions are harder to make than others. For example, there's a zero-percent chance of knowing actual snowfall amounts this far out, but there's a 100 percent chance of knowing that climate-change deniers will scream "Global cooling!" every time a flake sticks to the pavement. C&J recommends you start assembling your winter management kit now: shovel, ice-melt pellets, blankets, candles, and earplugs.
CHEERS to the world's most lovable knucklehead. Moe and Larry had their pluses, but The Three Stooges (not to be confused with the “Three Amigos” caught up in the Ukraine scandal) weren't worth a poke in the eyes without Curly, aka Jerome Howard. He was hilarious while interacting with his co-stooges, but I think he was funniest during his more intimate solo comic moments, where he focused like a laser on getting a Moe-assigned task, like, say, stuffing a turkey, done perfectly...wrong. Enjoy:
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Happy 116th birthday, Curly, wherever you are. And N'yuck N'yuck to your brother and Larry.
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Ten years ago in C&J: October 22, 2009
CHEERS to October 22, 2009. A date the GLBT community won’t forget. For the first time in, like, ever, the president is poised to sign a bill that will officially expand the 1968 hate crimes law to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans. Says PFLAG about the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act:
The historic passage of this bill marks the first time that sexual orientation and gender identity have been included as protected categories in federal law.
"PFLAG is proud of the members of the Senate who supported this important bill," said PFLAG National Executive Director Jody Huckaby. "As we know, crimes against LGBT people have long been among the most violent and most numerous, and our loved ones have gone too long without protections afforded to other citizens. This bill is a tremendous step forward, but it is only a single step and there are many more to take, including passing ENDA to give LGBT workers more of the rights that their co-workers already enjoy."
Naturally, the conserva-religious Chicken Littles are predicting that they'll be forced to install disco balls in church and make their flock wear assless chaps on Sunday because of the law. To which I can only respond: gee, they say that like it's a bad thing.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to historic moments in previewery. You know how rare it is to experience a day on which an official trailer for a new Star Wars flick gets released (assuming two trailers for each one)? Let's do the math: 15,122 days (Star Wars: A New Hope came out 41 years and 147 days ago) divided by 9 movies = only one day out of every 1,680. Yesterday was one of those coveted days, and it didn’t disappoint:
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Thankfully we don’t have to wait 1,680 days for Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker to arrive, but a mere 61. May the Force be strong with this one.
Oh, and congrats to Kossack, C&J splasher, and Grammy-winning keyboardist extraordinaire John Hobbs, who gets inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame today as a member of the Nashville A-Team. For maximum press coverage, I highly recommend accepting the award while streaking across the stage. (You can trust me, I’m a PR consultant as of—[looks at watch]—5 seconds ago.) Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Twitter pointed and laughed this morning after another glaring typo from President Donald Trump‘s Twitter feed, referring to Defense Secretary Mark Esper as “Bill in Portland Maine.”
—Mediaite
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