From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
Two Things Previous Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) Never Did
1) Improve health care for a single Mainer. But under Democrat Gov. Janet Mills, that’s changing big-time with Medicaid expansion and now this...
2) Laugh at anything but crude jokes and the misfortune of others. Gov. Mills don’t have time for that. She’s too busy laughing with kids. And baby bears...
There are approximately 287 other beneficial or otherwise positive things “Trump’s Mini-me” LePage never did that Janet Mills is now happily doing for our state after only two months in office. You should plan a visit. You’ll love it up here now. We’re back to normal.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, March 21, 2019
Note: Please press and hold your thumb [---> here <---] until we say you can remove it. Trust us, it’s all part of our new push to build a brighter tomorrow. You...do...want to help us build a brighter tomorrow, don’t you? Then quit whining and keep your damn thumb there until we say stop. My god what is WRONG with you? Think of the children! ---Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Easter: 31
Days 'til the USA Science and Engineering Festival in DC: 4
Percent of Americans surveyed by CNN who say Trump respects the rule of law: 40%
Percent who believe he's "honest and trustworthy": 34%
Number of post-partum depression drugs that were available to women before the FDA approved Zulresso this week: 0
Amount Lyft lost in 2018, its seventh straight year of losses in its seven year history: $1 billion
Dates of this summer’s Woodstock 50, whose lineup was just announced: 8/16-18
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
At this point, the administration would probably be delighted if it could find the WMDs the Reagan administration gave Saddam Hussein. At least it could point to some WMDs. [...]
You don't have to be an expert on WMDs in the Middle East to know that when the administration starts spreading the word that "it wouldn't really make any difference if there were WMDs or not," it's worried about not finding any. [...]
Maybe the American people can be brainwashed into forgetting why we supposedly went to war. Near as I can tell, our national memory span is down to about two weeks, and the media have been spectacularly unskeptical on this issue. But the rest of the world is not going to forget that WMDs were our primary reason for an unprovoked, pre-emptive war.
---April 2003, one month after Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq sixteen years ago this week. No WMDs were ever found.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: And the most popular puppy names of 2019 are…
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CHEERS to smiles for miles. The giddy goblins who put together the annual list of the happiest countries on earth have released their latest list.You can already surmise that the cranky old US of A, whose Founding Fathers only gave us the right to pursue happiness as opposed to actually having it, did not come in first place. Nor did we come in second place. Or third. Or fourth.Or…oh, screw it, this is taking too long:
On Wednesday, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, an initiative of the United Nations, released its well-respected “World Happiness Report,” and, once again, Finland tops the list.
The report ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be, according to their own evaluations of their lives.
Finland is followed, in order, by Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada and Austria. These are countries that “consistently” rank in the top 10, the report notes.
Among the reasons posited for why Nordic countries often predominate at the list include good work-life balance, generous parental leave and other policies helpful to parents, and lots of time spent in nature.
And where does the United States fall on the happiness list? We quite literally fell from 18th place to 19th. Upon hearing about the report (because he never reads), President Trump vowed to take decisive action by changing our national motto from “E pluribus unum” to “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”
JEERS to another fine mess. Have you seen the footage of the massive chemical storage-tank blaze in Houston that sent a huge (because, in Texas, if it ain't huge ya ain't doin' it right) ribbon of black smoke across the city for the better part of a week? Mmmm….you can smell the vapors through your screen:
Well, thanks to a specialty firefighting crew that had to be brought in from Louisiana, the fire's finally out. The future is predictable: cleanup crews will continue running around in their white hazmat suits looking like the henchmen of a James Bond villain with their clipboards looking busy. Their supervisors will point at things and make frowny faces while their PR flacks talk about how they're working on making cleanups like this even more efficient in the future with technology that they never seem to be able to describe and which never seems to get built. And the final report on the damage to the public’s health as a result of the disaster will, guaranteed, be worse than originally forecast. But hey...if you're looking for some free chemical sludge, come on down and take all ya want!
CHEERS to the Nailbiter Heard Round the World. Ah, yes…I remember it like it was just 3,285 days ago. On March 21, 2010, after a huge amount of debate, committee hearings, number-crunching and input from the entire health care and insurance industry, the Nancy Pelosi-led House passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
And what a collection of moments we saw...from blue dog Bart Stupak's grandstanding over abortion, to the late John Dingell showing off his historic Medicare gavel, to the House leadership locking arms and walking through a canopy of teabaggers like the protagonists of The Wizard of Oz skipping down the yellow brick road, to the hecklers that created "mass hysteria" (Barney Frank's words), and finally the moment that nobody wanted to arrive because they were all having so much darn fun: the 219-212 vote shortly before midnight. There was still work to do in the Senate, but this was nothing less than historic. A little over a year ago Republicans failed in their attempt to destroy it (though they succeeded in stripping out the mandate in their daylight robbery posing as a middle-class tax cut), claiming that the ACA was killing the insurance industry and the public hated it, none of which is true. And as Martin Longman points out at Washington Monthly, the GOP's fire-breathing rhetoric is doing nothing but biting them in the ass:
The Republican dilemma is that they hate the only solution that would approximate what they actually want. They hate it because President Obama signed it into law. They hate it because they’ve lied about this law nonstop for more than a decade and those lies are very internalized.
The result is that they’ve boxed themselves out of the health care debate. They really want to be defending the Affordable Care Act or something nearly identical to it. They want to defend this kind of system because they very much prefer it to the “national-monopoly provision on the British-Canadian model.” But they can’t really defend the status quo because they told everyone that the status quo was a Marxist-Leninist takeover of the American economy.
Today Democrats will mark the occasion with quiet reflection on a job well done, a commitment to expand and improve it, and the satisfaction of knowing signups and savings are still robust. Republicans will mark the occasion by gnawing the bark off a tree.
CHEERS to ordering another lectern for the debate stage. In yet another sign of our party's diversity, we now have our first Asian-American in the 2020 Democratic primary field. Let's check out his vitals, shall we?
Venture for America Founder Andrew Yang
Hails from: New York
Age on inauguration day 2021: 46
Primary campaign theme: "Humanity First"
Official website: Yang2020.com (Probably the most detailed of all the candidates)
Education: B.A. in business from Brown. JD from Columbia Law School.
Strengths: proposes a $1,000 "universal basic income" (aka "Freedom Dividend") for every American adult as reparations for robots stealing all our jobs. Backs Medicare-for-all and progressive immigration policy. Likes creative names for initiatives, like "The Legion of Builders and Destroyers" for his infrastructure plan. Pro-LGBTQ and believes women should be in control of their reproductive-health decisions. Dynamic speaker.
Weaknesses: At the moment one of the least-known candidates with relatively miniscule support. No political experience. For some reason gets support from alt-righters, and you bet your ass that’s gonna need some explanation.
Baby-kissing ability, based on latest reviews on Toddler Yelp: 8.6/10
Andrew joins Kamala, Pete, Beto, Cory, Wayne, Marianne, Elizabeth, Bernie, Tulsi, Julian, John H., Andrew, Kirsten, Jay, Amy, and John D. in the quest to follow in the footsteps of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, FDR and Barack Obama. But not before encasing the footsteps of Donald Trump in cement and throwing them off a pier.
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S P E C I A L N O T I C E
Name: Miles Uv Razorwire
Birth date: November 19, 2018
Weight: 55 pounds per roll x thousands of rolls
Description: Metallic, sharp, blades fit most Gillette razors but not Atra ones.
Last seen before thieves stole it: Strung willy-nilly all over sections of border wall on the orders of President Trump.
If spotted: Please lasso carefully and drag behind your pickup to the nearest Homeland Security Office.
Additional instructions: If you do find it, please don’t tell anyone. This is really embarrassing.
Director of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen
E N D S P E C I A L N O T I C E
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JEERS to how far we've fallen. On March 21, 1790, Thomas Jefferson reported to President Washington as America's first Secretary of State, during which he grappled with weighty and complex issues related to the debt, foreign affairs and the location of the new U.S. Capitol. This week Donald Trump's second Secretary of State in less than two years held a conference call with a bunch of right-wing religious wackos to plan for The Rapture, refusing to release a transcript of the call or even divulge who was on it, but not before being labeled a "butt boy" for a "wannabe dictator." I had a punchline all set to go for this item, but it just walked out onto our roof and jumped.
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Ten years ago in C&J: March 21, 2009
CHEERS to CNN's angry old man, Jack Cafferty. For articulating exactly the way I feel about the guy we helped put into the White House:
What a welcome change to feel like someone is running the country instead of running it into the ground. President Obama has done more in eight weeks than George W. Bush did in eight years---unless you include starting a couple of wars.
While the armchair quarterbacks second guess the new president, he gets up every day and does things, lots of things. Whether it's creating commissions for women and girls, ordering the investigation of President Bush's use of signing statements, or jamming a huge stimulus package through Congress, the man is working his tail off. And he seems to be loving every minute of it. It's almost as though our president was born to do exactly what he's doing. He's leading, and boy, is that refreshing.
Yesterday we were treated to two examples of what leadership looks like: the president took responsibility for the AIG mess, and then moderated a clear-eyed, funny, instructional, hope-filled and not-pre-screened town hall meeting. And it finally hit me: we not only have a grownup in charge, we have a teacher at the helm. How cool is that?
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And just one more…
CHEERS to a happy Persian New Year! File this under "Thanks, Obama." It was #44's annual Nowruz greeting (and the right-wing freakout that always followed) to the Iranian people (including Iranian-Americans) that made me aware of the holiday, and it's a tradition I'm happy to continue. I still enjoy revisiting the column Firoozeh Dumas wrote in The New York Times a couple years back, who suggests this is an especially good time to pause and send out positive vibes to our Iranian-rooted planet-mates:
Every immigrant group has given something to this country,and we Iranians are here to present you, dear America, with Nowruz. Here is a holiday that asks only one thing of you---to have hope. It has been around for thousands of years.
There is no controversy associated with Nowruz. No indigenous people were displaced, no wars were fought, and no one died for us to have this celebration. […]
So America, please find an Iranian and, for a moment, forget about the headlines that divide us. Ask about Nowruz. You will probably be offered homemade baklava or a chickpea cookie. Please do try the chickpea cookies. They may sound strange to you, but rum balls didn’t sound all that good to me, either. And while you are wondering why the cookies melt so quickly in your mouth (it’s the chickpea flour), let’s talk. You might be surprised to find out that we have more in common than you think. That should give us all hope.
And now, without further ado: [Fires glitter cannon.] "Nowruzetan Pirooz!" And many blessings on your goldfish.
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
"I was never a fan of Cheers and Jeers and I never will be.”
---Donald Trump
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