From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Mid-week Musical Interlude
The MTV Video Music Awards air Monday night. (I forget which network. Sorry.) One of the categories is called "Video for Good"—originally called "Song with a Message"—which honors videos chosen specifically for their role as a platform for positive messaging. This year's nominees:
Halsey: Nightmare (Women's empowerment)
The Killers, directed by Spike Lee: Land of the Free (Immigration/Freedom/Diversity)
Jamie N Commons, Skylar Grey, Gallant: Runaway Train (Missing/Runaway kids)
John Legend: Preach (Minority oppression)
Taylor Swift: You Need to Calm Down (LGBTQ, The Equality Act)
And the entry raising awareness of climate change and conservation is the eminently hummable, not-safe-for-work ditty Earth by Lil Dicky and an all-star cast behind the animation. Enjoy…
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There’s my earworm for the day.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, August 21, 2019
C&J Scheduling Note: No C&J tomorrow as I'll be getting knocked out with some awesome drugs in preparation for an upper GI endoscopy with bonus colonoscopy, to be followed by juice and animal crackers, total amnesia during the ride home, a sandwich I'll have no memory of eating, and then a five hour nap. We'll be back on Friday for our usual west coast-friendly C&J around 4:30PT/7:30ET. Today in the C&J cafeteria: our once-a-year chicken broth, popsicles, and Milk of Magnesia all-you-can-slurp buffet. That’s some good chow right there. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Women's Equality Day: 5
Days 'til Maine's Blue Hill Fair: 8
Public approval of the way Trump is handling the epidemic of white-supremacist mass shootings, according to a new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll: 36%
Estimated number of people who turned out to protest in Hong Kong over the weekend: 1.7 million
Number of people who showed up for racist Rep. Steve King's (R-IA) most recent town hall meeting: 2
Number of revolutions around the sun that the SpaceX "starman" in the Tesla roadster recently completed: 1
Rank of Gerlach, Nevada among the darkest towns in America, according to The World Atlas of Light Pollution: #1
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 184 (including 5 plagues and some some coded tweets sent by Rep. Maxine Waters that are secretly activating Satan’s pastors). Soul Protection Factor 666 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: No fancy title or explanation needed. It's just a puppy being a puppy.
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CHEERS to Joevertising. Yesterday in C&J we took Democratic front-runner Joe Biden to task for his still-ridiculous claims that a) he was effective in getting laws and judicial confirmations through the Senate on behalf of President Obama and b) Senate Republicans will work with him as soon as he takes office because they'll no longer be "intimidated" by Trump. Maybe he's trying a strategy of matching Trump whopper-for-whopper, I dunno. But at least his marketing team is running strong out of the gate. Here's a campaign ad with a great opening line, lots of good imagery, and a conclusion that's a welcome towel-snap at "erratic, vicious, bullying" Trump:
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The unmistakable message this sends to Trump reelection headquarters: campaign manager Putin has his work cut out for him.
JEERS to the backtracker-in-chief. Water is to wet as heat is to warm as the current sitting president is to habitual do-nothing promise breaking. While virtually the entire country demands anti-gun-massacre laws be passed with all due haste, POTUS apparently has more important cheeseburgers to eat and Fox Newses to watch:
Donald Trump has already started to pump the brakes on his support for background checks legislation the likes of which, he said, “we’ve never had before.”
“He’s started to move on,” a White House official conceded, adding that they haven’t heard the president discussing the topic in recent days with the same urgency or frequency that punctuated the immediate aftermath of the high-profile shootings. […]
That Trump’s attention span drifted elsewhere before Congress could even reconvene to debate gun control reform was hardly a surprise. The president has promised to tackle background checks before, only to drop the idea once the mass shooting that precipitated his apparent interest faded from the news cycle.
Lest you think he's not doing anything about gun violence, there is a bit of good news. Trump just ordered Ivanka to order Jared to order Mick Mulvaney to order Stephen Miller to order Bill Barr to order the nearest underling to top off the U.S. Strategic Thoughts and Prayers Reserve. Message: they care.
CHEERS to securing macadamia nuts for the Homeland. Sixty years ago, on August 21, 1959, President Eisenhower—whose moderate views would prompt teabagger comparisons to Hitler if he was around today, which would be weird considering he defeated Hitler—signed an executive order proclaiming Hawaii as America's 50th state, unwittingly setting the stage for a secret plot by scalawags to, three years later, import a Kenyan-born baby in swaddling clothes to take over the Executive Branch in 2009 and kill all our old people with death panels. (That happened, right?)
Even though Cokie Roberts may tut-tut you for being too much of a "foreign, exotic place," Hawaii, C&J luvs ya just the way you are. Tonight we celebrate with some tiny bubbles in the wine, and later maybe a few more in the tub.
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is a special celebrity edition of The One Word Answer Man. Conan O'Brien, intervening after the recent display of the president’s shitty real estate deal-making skills, asks: “Denmark, I’m ready to sweeten the deal. There’s a couple of ways we could do it. We could do a straight trade. Greenland for Florida, okay?”
Okay!
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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CHEERS and JEERS to dolluhs and centses. It's a well-known fact that C&J attracts amazing and savvy world citizens of excellent taste in reading material, and that includes award-winning economists who count on us to keep them informed of the latest business headlines. So let's put on our green eyeshades and take a quick spin around the moneyverse and see what the hell's goin' on in the land of Wallet World:
$ Target to introduce grocery brand amid competition
$ Signs of recession worry Trump
$ White House insists fundamentals of U.S. economy are "very strong"
$ Expect a recession by 2021, say 74% of experts surveyed
$ White House eyeing payroll tax cut to reverse weakening economy
$ Hong Kong spends billions to avert recession
$ Dick's Sporting Goods to consider ending gun sales
$ Domino's is stockpiling pizza ingredients in Britain
$ The Winklevoss twins may work with Facebook again.
$ U.S. kids quitting sports amid rising costs, inequality
$ Juul raises $325 million despite health concerns
$ States consider "right to repair" laws allowing electronics to be fixed without voiding warranty
Oh, and Greenland had to tell Trump again: "We're not for sale." And you'll probably have to say it a few dozen more times. Grandpa's a little slow.
JEERS to the little man in the big codpiece. Just a quick reminder of what happened thirteen years ago today when George W. Bush was finally backed so far into a corner that he finally had to admit that one of his central justifications for war—that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the attacks on 9/11—had been spun out of thin air:
President Bush: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.
Reporter: What did Iraq have to do with that?
President Bush: What did Iraq have to do with what?
Reporter: The attack on the World Trade Center.
President Bush: Nothing!!!
Now that we've cleared that up for the twelfth year in a row, we now return you to our regularly scheduled GOP terror porn, courtesy of Mr. Truth Isn’t Truth:
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Everybody safely cowering under the bed now? Good. Moving on…
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Ten years ago in C&J: August 21, 2009
CHEERS and JEERS to Purple Finger Thursday. The Afghan people are bravely turning out to the polls today, and we hope they make it through without any boom-booms or bang-bangs. They'll either pick Hamid Karzai again to be their country's corrupt, greasy-palmed president for five years...or they'll pick someone else to be their corrupt, greasy-palmed president for five years. SPOILER ALERT: the winner is corrupt and greasy-palmed. (The suspense was killing me.)
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And just one more...
CHEERS to the birthday pootie. Ten years ago today, Michael and I visited our local shelter to adopt a feline fuzzball, and we chose the one that was kind enough to recognize that our ankles weren't hambones to be gnawed on. We named her "Fantom" because she has a black "mask" across her face and loves to skulk around in the basement. Fantom is a petite thing as cats go, a tiny tortie weighing in at around six pounds with stubby li’l legs.
She's pretty much in the middle of the Sociability Scale: says hello half the time, says goodbye half the time. But over the past couple of years, since my twin (and victorious) bouts with cancer, she's become downright nurse-like, and there isn’t a night that goes by now where she doesn’t come to bed with me and lay across my legs for ten minutes or so before padding off to guard the house from her living room chair. It's been, as they say, a rewarding bonding experience.
Otherwise, her days are filled with typical cativities: eat, sleep, drink out of the faucet, have stare-downs with squirrels on the porch roof (they know she'll never catch them, let alone do any damage if she does, so they've basically adopted her as their beloved Aunt Scowlypuss), teach our dog Haley who's boss, de-wing houseflies, purr when skritched, fill out petitions to impeach Trump, and turn down any food not topped with beluga caviar. So today the world will once again prostrate itself at the altar of Fancy Feast to wish Fantom another Happy Barfday. With the possible exception of the patients down at the Housefly Wing Reattachment Clinic and Convalescence Center.
Have a happy humpday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
In the summer of 2015, when Smithsonian research zoologist Anna Phillips and other scientists were standing in the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool, letting leeches latch onto their bare legs or gathering them up in nets from muddy pond bottoms, they didn’t realize that some of the bloodsuckers they’d collected belonged to an entirely new species. But in a just-published paper in the Journal of Parasitology, Phillips and her colleagues report that a previously unknown leech species, Macrobdella Swooshus Gongus, is the first to be discovered in a kiddie pool in more than 40 years.
—Smithsonian magazine
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