Cheers & Jeers is a participation trophy-winning weekday post from the state of Maine.
Democratic Debate Happy Time Fun Quiz
Big debate down South Carolina-way tonight. (Details below.) For today’s quiz, just match the candidate (Buttigieg, Biden, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer, Warren, or Bloomberg) with the fun fact to which they belong. Answers below the fold. Good luck…
1. Won Time magazine's Person of the Year readers' poll in 2015
2. The only candidate in the field to be elected as a county attorney
3. Life's mission was forever altered after a hike in the Adirondacks with environmentalist Bill McKibbon
Continued…
4. "Go-to meal" and favorite food is pasta
5. Lived in a dorm room previously occupied by Horatio Alger and President Ulysses Grant's son (Ulysses, Jr., aka “Buck”)
6. Earned a science degree in speech pathology and audiology
7. Is a licensed pilot who flies his own Dassault Falcon jet and Agusta SPA A109s helicopter
Answers: 1. Sanders 2. Klobuchar 3. Steyer 4. Biden 5. Buttigieg 6. Warren 7. Bloomberg
Scoring: 1-2 correct = DINO! 3-6 correct = Precinct Captain material. 7 correct = Pick your cabinet position, it’s yours.
And now, our feature presentation...
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Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Note: A Mardi Gras reminder to bite down really hard into any piece of pastry offered to you today, so that you can relish the scrumptious taste and texture. Sure, it may contain a plastic, ceramic or titanium Baby Jesus that’ll split one or more of your teeth down to the root. But the odds of that are relatively small. Relatively. Anyway, enjoy! —American Association of Unscrupulous Dentists
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By the Numbers:
Weeks 'til Super Tuesday: 1
Days 'til the Atlanta Beer, Bourbon & BBQ Festival: 4
Percent chance that Greyhound has officially stopped allowing ICE Nazis to board their buses to harass and detain passengers: 100%
Amount Wells Fargo is paying in fines for creating fake accounts using actual customers' data: $3 billion
Portion of Americans who say they've kicked in to a crowdfunding pot to help someone who was struggling to pay medical bills, according to CBS News: 1-in-5
Number of soccer matches Cristiano Ronaldo has competed in as of last weekend: 1,000
Number of goals blocked by Zamboni driver Dave Ayres, 42, when he was called in to tend goal for the Carolina Hurricanes (who won 6-3 against the Toronto Maple Leafs) after the team's two goalies had to bail due to injuries: 8-out-of-10
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Menagerie à trois…
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CHEERS to the "Rumble in the Palmetto State Jungle." That's what the history books will be calling tonight's Democratic debate at the Gaillard Center, and since I coined it I'll become rich and famous and take you all on champagne flights to exotic lands in my dirigible Hindenburg II. And since Tom Steyer passed some kind of DNC polling threshold over the weekend, he'll join last week's squad—Biden, Warren, Sanders, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and El Bloombito—behind a lectern. What to watch for:
Does Warren go after Bloomberg or Trump?
Does Biden go after Bloomberg or Bernie?
Does Klobuchar kick Buttigieg in the ass or punch him in the sack?
Will Steyer wear his Scotch Thanksgiving-Day-turkey-carving tie or his Scotch Christmas-Day-roast-beef carving tie?
Will Bernie be Bernie, Bernie, or Bernie?
How many pundits will later complain that the candidates didn’t talk about stuff they weren't asked about?
Will Chris Matthews compare Bernie's campaign to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia…or Mao's invasion of mainland China?
The debate airs on CBS and BET starting at 8ET, with the usual top-notch liveblogging here by the Daily Kos Elections Team. May the sharpest dagger win.
CHEERS and JEERS to women in the news. Smiles across America yesterday as former movie producer Harvey Weinstein, the walking epitome of Hollywood's chauvinist "f*ck me or you'll never work in this town again" power trippers, was found guilty of rape and will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, but not before he has to go through another rape trial in California. And tears across America yesterday in memory of Katherine Johnson, one of the African-American "hidden figures" who helped build our space program from the ground up by making sure the astronauts who had "the right stuff" had the right data:
Johnson began working at NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1953 at the Langley Laboratory in Virginia.
She said her greatest contribution to space exploration was making "the calculations that helped sync Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module." In other words, helping to put men on the moon in 1969. […]
She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s 1961 mission Freedom 7, which was America’s first human spaceflight, according to NASA. She was also known for work that greatly contributed to the first American orbital spaceflight, piloted by John Glenn. She also worked on both the space shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite programs, in addition to authoring or coauthoring 26 research reports.
She lived a good long life to 101. And deserved every day of it.
CHEERS to current events. One of the stupidest, most backward-looking decisions Maine's previous governor, Teapiglican Paul LePage, ever made was telling a Scottish clean energy company to take its imminent billion-dollar investment in offshore wind power and go back where they came from. LePage spent the rest of his reign of error trying (and failing) to install oil rigs off the coast of Maine. But now there's a new Democratic governor in power, and she's going back to Scotland to mend fences:
The trip is aimed at sharing knowledge and contacts in a region that boasts the greatest amount of installed offshore wind capacity in the world, the first commercial-scale floating wind turbines and an even larger floating wind project under construction. […]
“I want to convey to them that our state is deeply interested in embracing offshore wind as part of our effort to create jobs, diversify and strengthen our economy, create a sustainable source of clean energy, and fight climate change,” she said.
LePage was instrumental in prompting the Norwegian energy conglomerate formerly called Statoil to abandon plans in 2013 for a floating wind demonstration project off the Maine coast. The 30-megawatt, five-turbine project, called Hywind, eventually was built off Scotland in 2017.
This is a prime example of what happens when a right-winger gets into power. They spend all their time standing athwart history yelling "Stop," progress grinds to a halt, bridges are burned, money and jobs go elsewhere, residents are smothered with disinformation, and the climate spends that much more time crumbling instead of healing. And this same foot-dragging happens on issue after issue, from civil rights to health care. And why do they do it? I dunno. My best guess: undiagnosed mad cow.
CHEERS to being a fly on the wall. One can only imagine what really happened on February 25, 1793, when George Washington held his first cabinet meeting at his estate at Mount Vernon. But one thing is certain: Hamilton was convinced that Jefferson's mother wore combat boots, and Jefferson was positive that Hamilton would be best served by irrigating his nose with a rubber hose. I believe the president sent them both to bed without supper.
CHEERS to Mardi Gras! Nothing but decadence and gluttony on the schedule today as Americans celebrate the religious observance of, um, decadence and gluttony? (I'm a bit behind in my Bible studies—47 years to be precise.) As I understand it, if I display some boobs you'll throw me some beads. Right? Okay then, check out these babies:
I'd like my beads to be made out of trillion-dollar platinum coins, please.
JEERS to chaos in Canuckistan. I know the Nevada caucus sucked up most of the oxygen on the planet, so you may have missed the hot weekend action on the cold, hard ice in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Canadian curler Kerri Einarson won the prestigious Scotties Tournament of Hearts championship, and her home province of Manitoba went absolutely berserk because they're now tied with Saskatchewan for the most number of victories ever (11). I just hope the win isn't followed with out-of-control rioting like what happened two years ago when Manitoban Jennifer Jones won her 6th curling win. WARNING: this is not at all suitable for children or people with sensitivities to graphic scenes of destruction:
I blame the Molson.
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Ten years ago in C&J: February 25, 2010
JEERS to me for what I'm about to say: [sigh] "Get well soon, Dick Cheney." The American war criminal careened to the hospital in his 1933 Pierce-Arrow yesterday because his heart was apparently in some discomfort and he had to go there to replenish its feeder with some fresh souls of the damned. He's expected to live happily—that is to say, bitterly—ever after, thanks to his gold-plated government-funded socialist healthcare plan. In fact, we hear he's much improved already. This morning at breakfast he smashed a grapefruit into his lawyer's face.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to Deep Thoughts...by Jack Handey. Like Stephen Wright, he can cram more beautiful, bizarre absurdity into a sentence or two than most people can in a thousand. His books, which I've dog-eared to death, have a place of honor on my bookshelf. Without further ado, here are a few of our favorite Deep Thoughts to celebrate his 71st birthday:
» Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mankind." Basically, it's made up of two separate words—"mank" and "ind." What do these words mean ? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.
» For mad scientists who keep brains in jars, here's a tip: Why not add a slice of lemon to each jar, for freshness.
» I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they chose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas.
» If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did."
» I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you're having a good idea but it's just eggs hatching.
» Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess was why several of us died of tuberculosis.
» I hope they never find out that lightning has a lot of vitamins in it, because do you hide from it or not.
» If you're in a boxing match, try not to let the other guy's glove touch your lips, because you don't know where that glove has been.
Have a deep Tuesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Splashing with Bill in Portland Maine can make it difficult to get a date in Daily Kos: Report
—Raw Story
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