Late Night Snark: Rogues Gallery Edition
"I have never been more grateful for the president's pettiness and stupidity. Because today he was stupidly petty enough to save us from a very smart warmonger. I'm talking about National Security Adviser and last-walrus-on-the-beach-without-a-mate John Bolton. Another Trumpling bites the dumpling of dirt. Trump goes through staffers like a high 17-year-old goes through Little Debbie Swiss Rolls."
—Stephen Colbert
"You have to appreciate the irony of John Bolton being taken out by a preemptive strike."
—Seth Meyers
"Donald Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David three days before 9/11. Next month he's taking al Qaeda to Six Flags."
—Jimmy Kimmel
"If you want to make your own Boris Johnson at home, the recipe is simple: boil one clown."
—John Oliver
“'Bitterly clung to power for over 3 decades.' I can't believe Robert Mugabe stole my obituary.”
—Conan O'Brien
Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Friday, September 13, 2019
Note: Today is Friday the 13th. We trust you feared the unknown responsibly. If, however, you encountered a black cat or walked under a ladder, eat a stick of this and you’ll be right as rain:
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You're welcome. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Talk Like A Pirate Day: 6
Days ‘til ¡Globalquerque!: 7
Number of poor families in housing supervised by the Department of Housing and Urban Development: 4.6 million
Size of the House bill to install carbon monoxide detectors in all public housing that was passed this week: $300 million
Percent of Texas registered voters who say they definitely will and definitely will not, respectively, vote for Trump next year, according to a Quinnipiac poll: 35%, 48%
Amount Michael Bloomberg's philanthropic group is spending over three years to lobby for a ban on flavored e-cigarettes: $160 million
Opening date of the 43,000-square-foot Starbucks in Chicago, the chain's largest, which will employ 200 people: 11/15/19
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Weekend agenda…
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CHEERS to brevity. I watched the Democratic primary debate in Houston (properly pronounced HOW-stone) last night, and am now the proud owner of several notebooks filled with my instant reactions to the event. If you'd like to read them all, please send me a self-addressed, stamped crate that can hold 300 pounds of notebooks, along with $1 million for processing and handling. Or, if you'd just like the free CliffsNotes version, you cheap bastard, here you go:
Warren: If your drinking game was to take a swig every time she said "Let's be clear," you're still passed out on your couch. Also: when she becomes president, a new wing will have to be built onto the White House to hold all the "tools in the toolbox" she says she'll be using to solve our nation's problems. (The socket wrench set alone will take up an entire wall.)
Biden: Brilliantly referenced the humble "record player," fully aware—unlike all the snickering pundits who slammed him as "out of touch grandpa cranking his Victrola"—that vinyl is making a big comeback, especially with the younger generation. Bonus: no blood eye, thus avoiding a Carrie-like moment on national TV.
Castro: He was fine. Fine. No problems. Can we move on now?
Booker: On fire. And if you haven't watched the documentary Street Fight, you're missing a huge chunk of both his back-story and his appeal.
O'Rourke: Also on fire. His "Hell yes!" moment on a mandatory assault rifle buyback is one for the debate Hall of Fame.
Harris: Reminded the rest of the field that, hey guys, we're going up against the worst president in American history, so whaddya say we point that out occasionally? Coined best new Trump nickname during Wizard of Oz analogy: "...a really small dude."
Klobuchar: After being the first to say "Houston, we have a problem," Houston-area ophthalmologist offices were flooded with acute eye-rolling injuries.
Yang: In his opening statement he offered $120,000 to buy off ten people. Or as Donald Trump calls it: one porn star.
Buttigieg: As usual, smart and engaging. Random thought: in a sign of how seriously he's being taken, no one has trouble pronouncing his name anymore.
Bernie Sanders: Sorry, I couldn’t hear a word he said.
That was fun. (Seriously, it was. Great field.) Up next is debate #4 on October 15th in Ohio—at my alma mater Otterbein University!!!—that will herald the arrival of the field's first billionaire in the form of impeachment drum-banger Tom Steyer. It'll be the first debate in American political history with a percussion section.
CHEERS to the ultimate spin machine. Don’t forget to hug your hard drive—today marks the 63rd birthday of the IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), the first computer to ship with a hard drive:
The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks--each of them a pizza-size 24 inches--was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."
"It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running," recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-'50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims was the very first unit delivered by IBM." It really turned the tide [in the Information Age]," he says.
Here’s the original promotional film for it. “Another business service of tomorrow made possible today by IBM...”
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And now let's all say Happy Birthday to the hard-workin' hard drive: "01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01000010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001" And a 00010001 to grow an inch.
CHEERS to nailing the sucker to the wall. BOOM! goes the Nadler-o-mite!!! Yesterday morning at the stroke of 8, the House Judiciary Committee did the deed. And now the fuse is lit, the clock is ticking, the die is cast, the fat lady is preparing to sing, and the chickens are coming home to roost. Cockadoodle-doo, motherf*cker:
The House Judiciary Committee took a big step Thursday morning in its ongoing investigation into whether to recommend the filing of articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, passing a resolution that set procedures and rules for future impeachment investigation hearings. […]
"Some call this process an impeachment inquiry. Some call it an impeachment investigation. There is no legal difference between these terms, and I no longer care to argue about the nomenclature," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.,said in his opening statement Thursday.
Next week Nadler will begin holding hearings on “corruption, obstruction, and abuse of power" that will "go well beyond the four corners of the Mueller report." Trump's lawyers, meanwhile, will begin holding late night defense-prep meetings that go well beyond the four corners of a Jack Daniel's bottle.
JEERS to getting Second Amendmented. On this date in 1901, our 25th president, William McKinley, died from an assassin’s bullet at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. A few years back, Ohioans and conservatives in general went nuts when President Obama granted native Alaskans their wish to revert Mount McKinley back to its original name, Denali. A popular question asked by proponents of the move was, "What did McKinley do that was so great he warranted his own iconic mountain?" I had to think for a bit, but I managed to come up with one: he picked a helluva vice president.
CHEERS to home vegetation. Some random TV notes for a relatively quiet weekend ahead. No one knows what the “Friday night news dump” will be tonight, but we know that Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell will be on it like glue on MSNBC.
Then on HBO's Real Time, Bill Maher talks with Michael Moore, Krystal Ball, Michael Steele, Bari Weiss, and Fernand Amandi. New home video releases include John Wick 3 and the live-action version of Aladdin. The baseball schedule is here and the NFL schedule (yeah, it's that time again) is here. On 60 Minutes: China's role in fentanyl overdoses, and a portrait of artist Mark Bradford. If you're a fan of Olympic skater and Dancing with the Stars champ Adam Rippon, his clan is facing off against the Terry Bradshaw family Sunday at 8 on Celebrity Family Feud. And John Oliver follows up last week's excellent primer on the filibuster (and why it should be ditched) with another deep dive of something that should, but isn't, and why.
Now here's your Sunday morning lineup:
Meet the Press: 2020 candidates Sen. Cory Booker and Beto “Hell, Yes” O’Rourke. And, because MTP has to have at least one genocidal maniac on every week: Liz Cheney.
CNN's State of the Union: Democratic 2020 candidates Mayor Pete and Andrew Yang; Sen. Rand Paul (R-Moscow Mitch’s state).
This Week: 2020 candidates Mayor Pete and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN); Ted Cruz.
Face the Nation: Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN); Condosleazy Rice; former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power; CBS climate expert Jeff Berardelli.
Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: House Judiciary Committee member Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI). Center for American progress president Neera Tanden.
Happy viewing!
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Ten years ago in C&J: September 13, 2009
JEERS to sleeping at the switch. The SEC inspector general is out with a new report detailing what went wrong during the sixteen-year span of ineffective probes into the Bernie Madoff empire. It's 477 pages long and consists of the word "everything" repeated over and over. They should make the bunglers write it a thousand times on a school chalkboard.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the last Lone Star State governor to have more than two brain cells to rub together. Former governor, and recovered alcoholic, Ann Richards—whose reelection campaign was thwarted in part by Karl Rove's smear tactics ("I'm not saying she's a lesbian, but…")—died thirteen years ago today, dammit. Age 73. Born during the depression just outside of Waco, she mulled her epitaph back in '95:
"I did not want my tombstone to read, 'She kept a really clean house.' I think I'd like them to remember me by saying, 'She opened government to everyone.'"
As the snippet of her 1991 inaugural address engraved her headstone shows, she got her wish. (Although it must be said that her record on the death penalty, while not nearly as sadistic or prolific as her successors', is the worst of the few blots on her record.) Molly Ivins and Richards became close friends—you can read Molly's tribute here. In January, 1995 she wrote this after Richards lost to George W. Whatsizface:
Richards said in a farewell interview with the press corps that if she'd known she was going to be a one-term governor, she would have "raised more hell."
I wish she had.
But these are relatively minor quibbles with what is, overall, a distinguished record. My political memory of Texas goes back to Allan Shivers,and I know that in that time we have not had a governor who worked nearly as hard as Ann Richards. Who was nearly as gracious as Richards. Who made more good appointments than Richards. Who set a higher standard of honesty than Richards. [...]
What our notoriously weak governors actually do is set a tone for the state. So let it be recorded that for four brief shining years, Ann Richards gave the joint some class.
Good on ya, Annie.
I don’t know how Ann would react to the news that, for the first time in a generation,Texas has apparently swung so far back to the left that half a dozen Democrats would beat the sitting Republican president if the election were held today. But I bet it would include a few well-timed "Yee-haws."
Oh, and there’s a full “micro harvest” moon tonight. Please take a moment to get your butt in the back yard, look up, think of Neil Armstrong, and give it a wink—it’s the law. Then go have a great weekend. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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