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Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, September 5, 2019
Note: Today's note walked out due to a particularly nasty subject-verb disagreement. We regret the inconvenience. If it’s any consolation, the adverbs are really, truly, graciously, honestly, wonderfully, blessedly, and assuredly still here.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the Democratic debate in Houston: 7
Days 'til the New Jersey Taco Festival at the Sussex County Fairgrounds: 2
Average age of the founders of the fastest start-up companies between 2007 and 2014 at the time of their creation: 45
Average price of daycare for infants in the U.S.: $770 a month
Number of weekends the Hong Kong protesters have taken to the streets: 13
Number of Kmarts left in Maine, both of which have been slated to close: 2
Cost of the American flag purchased at Sears that was planted on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin: $5.50
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
My favorite factoid gathered by the 15,000 underutilized reporters in Philadelphia is that the opening gavel of the Republican National Convention was "acoustically enhanced" by a sound engineer to sound "better than real." Yup.
Of course, everybody noticed that there were more black faces on the stage than in the audience, but that's nothing.
At the 1972 Republican convention, there was an Ethnic Night party at which I saw John Volpe, the Italian-American secretary of transportation, doing the frug while a Chinese girl sang "Never on Sunday" in Yiddish. Is this a great country or what? Except the Republicans have proved yet again the tragic truth that White People Can't Clap On Beat. Or is it just Republicans?
By the way, one quarter of the Republican delegates are millionaires, and fewer than 10 percent of them make less than $50,000 a year.
—August, 2000
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Puppy Pic of the Day: C&J’s rescue lab-mix took one look at Ivanka’s new fashion statement and started barking, “Plagiarist! Plagiarist!” This is Haley four years ago on the way to the Badgley Mischka fashion show...
Her lawsuit will be filed by noon.
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CHEERS to a step in the right direction. If the damn state and federal legislatures aren’t going to do anything to curb gun violence, then once again it'll be left up to the business community. For example, Kroger stores are now banning customers from carrying weapons in their stores. And this is even bigger:
Walmart said Tuesday it would discontinue the sale of handgun ammunition. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer also said it would ask shoppers not to openly carry firearms in its stores, even in states that allow doing so.
The announcements come in the wake of three mass shootings in the last month, including one that took place at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. Prior to the El Paso shooting, which left 22 people dead, a Walmart employee who had been suspended shot and killed two co-workers in the Mississippi store where he worked on July 30. […]
“We know these decisions will inconvenience some of our customers, and we hope they will understand,” McMillon said.
So now if someone wants to commit a mass murder, they'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: by buying all the customers hot dogs from the Walmart food counter and denying them the Lipitor chaser.
CHEERS to bad timing. Funny thing about summer. Everything slows to a crawl, people go on vacation, institutions throttle back, Congress adjourns. Ironically, in the heat of the season, Americans tend to chill. But now our institutions are getting back in the groove, and for Donald Trump that means warnings are being posted throughout the White House signaling the imminent approach of Hurricane Litigation:
[N]umerous investigations and lawsuits concerning the president and his associates seem to have dropped off the political radar. But they are still going—and could affect the result of the next election.
Trump has done his best to stonewall many of these matters, particularly those before Congress, by litigating almost every demand for testimony and other evidence. That strategy of maximum resistance could backfire.
That’s because the string could well run out on many of Trump’s defenses in the coming months, and the investigations—and accompanying revelations—could accelerate immediately before Election Day 2020, making Trump’s misconduct a renewed focus of public attention as voters prepare to go to the polls.
Among the charges, according to The Daily Beast: obstruction of justice, financial corruption, influence peddling, defamation, pardon dangling, and profiteering off the presidency. Plus, of course, the pee tape oops I've said too much.
CHEERS to far-from-conventional conventions. On September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress assembled at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia:
It was held because the colonists were very upset about the Intolerable Acts and the taxes. The Intolerable Acts were punishments that King George III put on the colonies. He put them on so the colonists would feel sorry about dumping tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.
Of course, the opposite happened. We got royally pissed, revolted, formed our own country, and then thrived and prospered until we started coming apart at the seams thanks to the efforts of...the Tea Party. George, you sneaky bastard.
JEERS to the ups and downs of the job. The world held its collective breath and prayed Saturday when Pope Francis got stuck in an elevator. Only after considerable effort were they able to free him using the “jaws of eternal life” after he’d been stranded inside the claustrophobic capsule with dwindling oxygen levels for 25 minutes. "Foiled again," fumed Benedict, who is now back in his workshop working on plan C.
CHEERS to winning a war on terrorism. On September 5, 1996, Muslim extremist Ramzi Yousef and two other thugs who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (and planned to blow up some U.S. airliners), were sent to tiny, windowless cells for the rest of eternity. But...but...how could that be? I mean, using law-enforcement to crack the case and arrest the evildoers instead of using bunker busters and declaring World War III and opening a gulag at Gitmo for enemy combatants? I gotta lie down...this is blowing my tiny chickenhawk mind.
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Ten years ago in C&J: September 5, 2009
CHEERS to replenishing them thar petri dishes. There were so many outrages during the Bush administration that it's sometimes easy to forget how thoroughly he tried to starve scientific research. Well, under President Obama and Democrats in Congress, that GOP hooliganism (great word—please use it often) is swiftly getting reversed, says Parade:
[T]he long drought in federal funding has been interrupted by a sudden downpour.
Last winter, Congress voted to raise the NIH’s budget by 3.2% and passed the federal economic stimulus package, which will pump an additional $10.4 billion into the NIH’s various institutes and centers. President Obama has asked Congress to bring the NIH’s budget slightly higher, to $31 billion for fiscal 2010, which begins Oct. 1.
[T]he President has asked Congress to approve $6 billion for cancer research alone—part of a strategy to double funding in this area over the next eight years. Along with many other scientists, Yannelli and Hirschowitz scrambled earlier this summer to update a proposal to the NIH, in hopes that some of the stimulus dollars will now become available to fund their lung-cancer vaccine research.
But not everyone's happy. John McCain's push for a Department of Bone Saw Management got the ax. His proposal just didn’t have enough teeth.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to simple solutions to stubborn problems. One of the unkept promises dogging President Trump is the one where he assured us—going back as far as 2015—that his big, beautiful border wall would be paid for with Mexican pesos. He only has fourteen months to keep his word or watch his reelection chances circle the drain. (Unless he builds a wall around the drain, but that's a different campaign promise.) I think I have the solution. In fact, I know I have the solution. But before I let the razor wire out of the bag, as it were, it's worth revisiting this segment from Adam Ruins Everything, in which we get a bird's-eye view of just how unnecessary, wasteful, and ineffective a border wall is in the first place:
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But if he must have his border wall and pay for it with Mexican money, here's how he can do it: send Tiffany to Mexico with suitcases full of dollars, get them converted to suitcases full of pesos, and come back with all that Mexican money to pay for the wall. Ta-daaa!!! Now, I know what you’re thinking as you absorb this bit of Einsteinian brilliance that no one’s ever thought of before, and all I can say in response is this: if drafted I will not run, if nominated I will not accept, and if elected I will not serve.
Oh, and NFL season starts tonight as da Packers play da Bears. I believe that's your cue to start tap dancing with sparklers. Or something. 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
Cheers and Jeers Candidate Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Appear to Know What a Kiddie Pool Is
—Mediaite
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