Oh! More Things I Know…
» Thanks to a new extradition treaty with the underworld, book banners will all end up in hell. God told me this directly.
» This week’s MAGA presidential campaign rollouts will be remembered for two things: technical glitches and vocal cord malfunctions.
» Since conservative white men seem to be committing the vast majority of domestic terrorism in this country, we should deport them all until we find out what the hell is going on.
Continued...
» I love my country so much that I’m all for putting every Trump supporter who took part in the January 6th insurrection in a cage and allowing real Americans to pelt them with rotten tomatoes.
» Drivers: you look silly wearing a life-protecting seat belt in your car while you’re texting and driving.
» With all the the boundaries being pushed by NASA, I've decided to put "Become Asteroid Miner" back on my bucket list.
Also what I know: if this is true, it’s big.
» I’m relieved to know that if we default on our debts members of Congress will still get paid.
» Whenever I sign my name to anything, I use a separate pen for each individual letter. Then I hand the pens out to random people on the street and thank them for their support. If they then want a selfie with me I say fine but it’ll cost you one pen.
» We have a bunch of wild bamboo stalks growing out behind the garage. I'm taking advantage of the situation by converting them into Biden ballots so we can retroactively overturn the 2020 election results in...oh, let’s say Kansas and the Dakotas.
» The right-wing evangelical kooks who criminalize American doctors for performing abortions here have no problem with doctors performing abortions in Israel because they don’t want to rock the Rapture boat.
» Attorney General Merrick Garland will never sing "Let the Eagle Soar." Vice President Kamala Harris will never shoot a lawyer in the face. President Biden will never throw a bottle of ketchup at the wall inside the White House.
» And: Larry Johnson still insists he’s thiiiiis close to releasing that damning Michelle Obama "whitey tape" that he first told us he had possession of in—[checks notes]—2008.
And now, our feature presentation...
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Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, May 25, 2023
Note: Just a quick heads-up that C&J will not appear in the pages of this online supermarket coupon clipper Monday, so that we may commemorate the Memorial Day holiday and also incur our first self-inflicted Jarts wounds of the summer of aught twenty three. Back Tuesday with high praise for the ACA's puncture-wound coverage.
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By the Numbers:
Starts Saturday!!!
Days 'til the start of the 94th Scripps National Spelling Bee: 6
Days 'til Ohio's Taste of Cincinnati: 2
Date on which Trump's 34-count criminal trial will begin in New York: 3/25/24
Percent chance that the Human Rights Campaign has joined the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Florida Immigrant Coalition, and Equality Florida in issuing a travel advisory for Florida because the state has become so unsafe for minorities: 100%
New HIV infections in the U.S. in 2021 according to the CDC, down 12% from 2017 levels: 32,100
Number of miles from Juneau, Alaska to Boston, Massachusetts, the distance a donated human heart traveled in April for a (successful) transplant, the farthest one has ever been couriered: 2,506
Age of Tina Turner when she died this week: 83
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
In a further loony-tunes loop (don't you just love politics?), [Bob] Dole, the old grump, is now casting himself in the role of Sweetness and Light. He wants to Bring Us Together, he says, in the great tradition of the Republican Party.
Sure, the party that ran Sen. Jesse Helms' campaign against Harvey Gantt, the party of the Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater, the race card, the soft-on-crime ploy—that political party.
We are, you recall, setting aside for the nonce (one of my favorite periods of time) the news that My Boy [Pat] Buchanan is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semite—although I should warn M.B.B. that if he doesn't stop this gay-bashing, there'll be no one left to design the uniforms.
The Buchanan presidency now being quite as advanced as the Forbes presidency was just a few weeks ago, I have naturally been savoring the observations made about My Boy Buchanan. My favorite was by television pundit Morton Kondracke (we must give him credit for speaking wryly): "I think something important happened to Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire in 1990 when he discovered that people could be out of work through no fault of their own—at least white people."
We are all grateful for this conversion experience on the road to Damascus—or at any rate, south of Dixville Notch.
—March 1996
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Before that first cup of coffee kicks in…
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CHEERS to anticipation. Hooray! Only one more day 'til the start of the Memorial Day Weekend and then it'll be July 4th and then back-to-school and then Halloween and then the off-year elections and then Thanksgiving and then Christmas 'n Hanukkah 'n Festivus and then "Happy New Year 2024" and then blessed winter and then spring allergies and then Easter and then only one more day 'til the start of the Memorial Day weekend. Oh, the joy of having been around the sun a few times.
JEERS to the whiner-in-chief. Prepare to barf. The leader of the six-member Federalist Society star chamber known as the conservative wing of the Supreme Court spent some time this week complaining about how he has a hard job. He has to make hard decisions! And what's the hardest decision he's ever had to make?
Was it codifying women as second-class citizens? No.
Was it giving religious freaks the power to deny everything from service in a store to care in a hospital? No.
Was it a green light for corporations to pollute the planet in the open and buy politicians in secret? No.
Was it authorizing a blizzard of guns to fall into the hands of right-wing goobers as weapons of terrorism against their fellow citizens? No.
Was it stealing voting rights from minorities? No.
Was it allowing his fellow conservatives on the court to be bought and paid for by Nazi-loving billionaires? No.
No no no no no, a thousand times no. Instead, it was this excruciating decision made after tossing and turning for several sleepless minutes:
Chief Justice John Roberts' toughest call in almost two decades in the job was to order a fence to be erected around the embattled Supreme Court last year after the ruling that rolled back abortion rights was leaked, he said late Tuesday. […]
Focus all your sympathies this morning on poor, poor John Roberts.
“I had no choice but to go ahead and do it,” Roberts said. The fences were put up last May as part of ramped-up security measures following the leak and angry protests about the then-pending abortion ruling.
The saddest part about all this? He had to make the decision to overreact to the prospect of peaceful protesters all on his own, and no one even thought to set up a GoFundMe page in his name to provide comfort in his hour of emotional crisis. No wonder the Supreme Court punishes us little people so often. We are so mean.
CHEERS to the visionaries. 236 years today, the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia with George Washington presiding. They came to blows over their first order of business, but after much quill-stabbing and cane-beating, they finally agreed: We hereby resolve that Cheesesteak shall not be considered Cheesesteak without Cheez Whiz. It was mostly smooth sailing from there.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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JEERS to love among the daffodils lunacy. I can't tell you how the debt ceiling negotiations are going. I simply can't. Mainly because it's devolved into a series of grunts in a caveman language that hasn't twanged humankind's eardrums since…oh, since well before you were born. But I can tell you that China weighed in, and the message they sent is crystal clear no matter what language you speak:
“Tut….”
I believe a deal will be forthcoming. Because you don’t wanna know what happens when they drop the other tut.
JEERS to weather woes. Not meaning to be Debbie Downer or anything, but Atlantic hurricane season starts in seven days. Forecasters at Colorado State University, who seem to be fairly accurate about these things, say we'll likely have to deal with 11-15 named storms, with six hurricanes, two of them “major” between June and November. And in other news, Pat Robertson's latest conversation with God about the gays, feminists and pagans reveals that we can expect 1-3 meteors, 6-8 frog showers and another season of The Masked Singer. Oh, the humanity.
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Ten years ago in C&J: May 25, 2013
CHEERS to getting schooled by your elders. GOP chairman Reince Priebus, blissfully unaware that Americans are seethingly aware that the Republican party has done nothing for this country in years, thinks the three minor (and fading) oopsies facing the Obama administration are exactly what the party needs to crush the president flatter than one of John Boehner's cigarette butts under his heel. But former Senate Majority Leader and '96 presidential contender Bob Dole—who has seen it all—can only shake his head and watch the GOP circle the drain:
“I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors,” Dole said of the GOP, “that says closed for repairs until New Year’s Day next year and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas.”
Dole, 89, said the Senate is “bent really badly” and lamented that in his day, “at least we got our work done.” He also said the filibuster is being abused.
Following Dole's remarks, the chyron operator at Fox News was instructed to start "accidentally" putting a 'D' after his name.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to doing the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs. Today is the 46th anniversary of the release of Star Wars, a movie that had me square in its demographic sights (I was 13 in '77) and hot-wired my brain for the duration of my life.
But enough about Republican cocaine orgies...
First time I saw it I was on a school field trip in Berlin, Germany, and I have to say Darth Vader was scarier when he was speaking German ("Gibt mir die plane, Mädchen, oder Ich will in deine kopf das kopfmitteldammer uberungenscheide gefurhen Schweinhund!!").
It's estimated that over $42 billion has been spent on Star Wars merchandise, and I believe I have half of that in the attic. And now we're in a renaissance of streaming spinoffs like The Mandalorian and Andor that embrace the roots and gritty feel of the original that was nominated for 11 Oscars and won seven. As long as they keep pumpin' 'em out, I'll always be 13, as evidenced by the thought that just popped into my head: May the booger balls be with you.
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
“I read several interesting accounts that you can smell Bill in Portland Maine three kiddie pools away.”
—Jude Law
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