From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
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Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, May 13, 2019
Note: Today is Monday the 13th. Not as unlucky as Friday the 13th, but still…Monday
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the full "blue moon": 5
Days 'til the Roots and Vines Festival in Yakima, Washington: 5
Percent of voters who do and do not, respectively, back Elizabeth Warren's plan to eliminate student debt for consumers who make under $100K, according to a new Morning Consult-Politico poll: 56%, 27%
Estimated number of families still looking for housing six months after the Camp Fire in California: 1,000
Number of measles cases in Europe during January and February, three times as many as last year according to the World Health Organization: 34,400
Trump's approval in Florida, per the latest Quinnipiac poll, a troublesomely low number for the GOP: 41%
Amount Trump lost in 1987, the year during which his 100% ghost-written book “The Art of the Deal” came out: $42.2 million
Totally Random Baseball Score
Boston Red “Socks” 11 Seattle Mariners 2
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Always there is…one master…and one apprentice. But which is which?
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CHEERS to cracks in the Christian soldiers' armor. Little noticed earlier this month was a tidbit from a new Morning Consult-Politico poll that suggests Donald Trump's performance as a church-going Bible thumper is no longer considered Oscar-caliber among as wide a swath of the faithful as it's been for the last few years. Via email:
White evangelical Protestants played a key role in handing Donald Trump the presidency in 2016 and while data has shown they have stood by the president during his terms, a new poll from Morning Consult suggests their support may not be as solid as it initially appears.
Fifty-five percent of white evangelical Protestants said they preferred to see Trump as the GOP's nominee in the 2020 presidential election when given other options, such as Vice President Mike Pence or any other Republican figures. That's 16 percentage points less than the share of self-identified Republicans who said the same, and a large drop from the 80 percent of white evangelicals who voted for Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton in November 2016.
White evangelicals more than twice as likely as GOP to think Trump has no respect for them: Nearly two in ten (18 percent) white evangelical Protestants also said Trump has no respect for them at all---double the share who said the same of the Republican Party (9 percent).
Happy to see a bump in the number of conservative evangelicals embracing Step 1 of Hypocrites Anonymous: recognition that there's a money changer in the temple getting orange spray-on tan all over the drapes.
JEERS to the cheater-in-chief. Documenting the atrocities perpetrated by the head of the Trump crime family has become a numbing and/or eye-rolling occasion. It follows a predictable pattern these days: atrocity is followed by media normalizing, House committee leaders freaking out (appropriately), and the judicial branch calmly telling him, "That particular atrocity is a no-no, sir." But once in a while the depth of his pettiness is enough to peel back one more layer of spoiled brattiness, exposing a soul that makes even Beelzebub shake his head. Sportswriter Rick Reilly (Commander in Cheat) tees up this sad, sorry story of how Trump was out of town during a members-only golf championship at Mar-a-Lago, but then later spontaneously challenged the actual winner to play six holes to determine who the "real" champion was:
“They get to a hole with a big pond on it. Both [film financier Ted Virtue] and his [11-year-old] son hit the ball on the green, and Trump hits his in the water. By the time they get to the hole, Trump is lining up the kid’s ball. Only now it’s his ball and the caddie has switched it,” Reilly said.
Reilly said Virtue’s son tried to protest, but the president’s caddie said “No, this is the president’s ball; your ball went in the water.” Trump then made the putt and declared himself the club champion, according to Reilly.
The son who tried to stand up to the cheateing president plans to file a formal complaint. Just as soon as he's released from his cage in Gitmo.
CHEERS to the Holy Grail of philately. On May 13, 1918, the first 24-cent stamps featuring the Curtiss Jenny biplane—the aircraft chosen to inaugurate the U.S.'s new air mail service—reached post offices. Collectors heard that some of the stamps—100 by current estimates—could be rare "inverts," so they fanned out to find them. Some were successful in locating one of these:
Today the stamps are worth approximately one bazillion dollars. Or, put another way, slightly less than a year's worth of Goldman Sachs bonuses.
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is a special celebrity edition of The Two Word Answer Man. Mike Allen from Axios asks our guest answerer, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), "You think Congress will get the president's tax returns this year?"
"Oh yeah."
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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JEERS to meddling meddlers. Rudy Giuliani is under fire for planning to fly over to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. He's was roundly criticized for trying to get an investigation opened into the firing of a prosecutor who was looking into connections—which turned up nothing improper or nefarious—between son Hunter Biden and a natural gas company, despite the fact that "a week ago, Giuliani told CNN that he was done looking into the Ukraine matters regarding Biden." According to sources, Giuliani received a much warmer welcome when he changed his plans and spent the weekend visiting his vacation crypt in Romania.
CHEERS to Republican Presidents with a conscience. 112 years ago this week, Teddy Roosevelt spoke at the Governor's Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources. Seriously—he said this in freaking 1907:
"The occasion for the meeting lies in the fact that the natural resources of our country are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.
In the development, the use, and therefore the exhaustion of certain of the natural resources, the progress has been more rapid in the past century and a quarter than during all preceding time of history since the days of primitive man.
All these various uses of our natural resources are so closely connected that they should be coordinated, and should be treated as part of one coherent plan and not in haphazard and piecemeal fashion."
EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler issued a brief statement this morning to mark the occasion: "Teddy who?"
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Ten years ago in C&J: May 13, 2009
JEERS to foot-dragging. And after all that—which is to say, after much ado about absolutely nothing—David Vitter lifted his stupid hold on FEMA Director-in-waiting Craig Fugate's nomination. So now, thanks to the Louisiana senator's silly pissy-pants routine [insert diaper joke here], Fugate has less than three weeks to prepare the agency for the start of the Atlantic hurricane season. Step 1: Find out what Michael Brown did as FEMA head...and then do the exact opposite.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to that giant volleyball in the sky. Last week Jeff Bezos of the somewhat popular Amazon.com web site unveiled his vision for a lunar lander that will be part of his effort to colonize the moon with housing units, business complexes, theme parks, golf courses, and, of course, debtor's prisons for people who end up in the red by overspending at Amazon.com. But first things first…
[T]he company planned to place Blue Moon, laden with several thousand pounds of equipment, at the lunar south pole. That lander would provide the basic infrastructure for future missions. After several robotic journeys to the moon, the stage would be set for the first crewed Blue Origin missions to the lunar surface. […]
Bezos says Shackleton Crater is a strategic destination that was chosen for its resources. The crater receives almost perpetual sunlight, which can be used for solar power. More important, however, the lunar south pole is believed to be home to large deposits of water ice, which can potentially be used for life support or broken down into its constituent elements—hydrogen and oxygen—and repurposed as rocket fuel. For this reason, Bezos said, the lunar lander is fueled by liquid hydrogen so it can be refueled on the surface of the moon.
Among the challenges ahead for the techies working on the Blue Moon lander: achieving enough thrust to get it into space, mapping out the lunar landing area, and assembling the first colonists by getting the House Freedom Caucus to follow a trail of pork rinds in to the cargo bay.
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
"Do we have a constitutional crisis? In my opinion we don’t. We would have a constitutional crisis if Bill in Portland Maine ordered the president or Congress to do something and either of them defied him."
---Andrew Napolitano
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