Oh! More Things I Know…
❧ The fastest way to lose your mind is to try and diagram one of Trump’s sentences.
❧ Donald Trump says he knows everything about everything, but when you ask him anything about anything he says he’ll have to get back to you on that.
❧ Every night, all across America, Republicans have premarital sex in freakishly large numbers. It's time we started sticking our noses in their bedrooms to put an end to these immoral acts.
❧ When Republicans defeat Democrats in an election, the media lecture Democrats to compromise with Republicans because “they have a mandate.” When Democrats defeat Republicans in an election, the media lecture Democrats to compromise with Republicans because “they’re hurting and need to be reached out to.”
Also what I know: voters in the 2025 elections opted to repeal all the hurricanes.
❧ If you get your health insurance through healthcare.gov, you have 39 days left to enroll for next year and rob Fort Knox to pay for it.
❧ When insurance companies celebrate record-breaking profits, they're basically saying, "Yay! We denied health care to people better than ever!”
❧ Most people think I work in the nude right up until they catch the glare from my Saran Wrap overalls.
❧ Considering how often they promote themselves as "rugged individualists," it's amazing how devoted Republicans are to marching in lockstep.
❧ Every candidate endorsed by God in the 2025 elections lost.
❧ Never in my 61 years have I seen such an absolute failure to take the parenting of our children seriously. I'm speaking, of course, of the parents who raised the children who grew up to be the gullible, violent, soulless, red hat-wearing, right-wing dipshit adults in this country.
❧ Due to the 2025 Democratic election landslides, Americans have been freed from the tyranny of the “Merry Christmas” yoke around their necks and finally have the freedom to say "Happy Holidays" again.
And now, our feature presentation...
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, November 6, 2025
Note: [Loads fruitcake labeled with the words HAPPY HOLIDAYS into catapult. Launches in direction of Fox News.] It is time. Begun, the War on Christmas has.
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By the Numbers:
9 days!!!
Weeks 'til Thanksgiving: 3
Days 'til the start of Gardens Aglow at the Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor, Maine: 9
Portion of Americans polled by ABC News who say their grocery bill is higher now under Trump than it was a year ago under Biden: 7-in-10
Percent in the same poll who say Trump's tariffs are helping their financial situation: 8%
Rank of the New England Patriots in the AFC East: #1
Age of John Williams, who is now recording his score for his 30th Steven Spielberg movie (an as-yet-unnamed sci-fi flick): 93
Letters in "nurdle," the name of the blob of toothpaste that sits on your brush: 6
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
The colossal ineptitude of Bush's diplomacy, if it can be called that, leading up to the Iraq war was somewhere between ludicrous and nuts. Bullying, bribing, threatening—and these were our allies.
The insanity of our approach to Turkey, one of America's oldest democratic allies in the Middle East, is textbook—to be studied in international relations schools for years. In the name of bringing democracy to Iraq (actually, at the time we never mentioned that as a reason), we threatened to end it in Turkey. Good grief.
The administration's open contempt for the United Nations did us incalculable damage. It wasn't just the ugly, clumsy pre-war "diplomacy," but the petty, vindictive attempts at revenge afterward against those who were right all along. Trying to get Mohammad ElBaradei fired as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency—how small and wrong. Making John Bolton ambassador to the United Nations—oh, please.
—November, 2005
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Puppy Pic of the Day: A bold claim, but I'll allow it…
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CHEERS to the usual drill. The 2025 elections are behind us. And that means it's time for the media to trot out…The Takeaways!!! Let's stick our head inside the magic Google bubble and see how many they came up with this time:
The New York Times: 7 takeaways
NPR: 5 takeaways
Associated Press: 6 takeaways
The Wall Street Journal: 5 takeaways
USA Today: 5 takeaways
The Boston Globe: 3 takeaways
My favorite kind.
The Washington Post: 5 takeaways
ABC News: 6 takeaways
Al Jazeera: 5 takeaways
Reuters: 4 takeaways
NBC News: 6 takeaways
Politico: 7 takeaways
And so on and so forth. But one takeaway lords over all others: Dems rule, MAGAs drool.
CHEERS to blessed silence. Can you hear it? That's the sound of no more campaign ads. Now we can get back to normalcy—ads for drugs, Medicare Advantage plans, reverse mortgages, crypto scams, and penis pills. Yee haw!
CHEERS to the first skinny-guy-with-big-ears president from Illinois. On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Even back then the party had its flamboyant wing. From Joseph Cummins' book Anything for a Vote:
The Republicans held massive rallies and marches several miles long, with hordes of Wide Awakes—Republican faithful who would save the Union—marching with torches and likenesses of "Honest Abe."
People Magazine’s Sexiest Wide Awakes of 1860.
The Wide Awakes wore oilcloth capes and strange black enamel caps to protect themselves from dripping torch oil. In surviving lithographs, they bear a weird resemblance to certain members of the Village People. Boston Republicans organized a rail-splitter's battalion—in homage to Lincoln, every member stood exactly six-feet-four-inches tall. And throughout the campaign, Republican newspapers published countless jokes at [challenger Stephen] Douglas's expense, such as: "Lincoln is like a rail. Douglas is the reverse—rail spelled backwards—liar."
But Republicans got their share of guff, too, as when the New York Herald wrote: "The conduct of the Republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of a small intellect growing smaller." The words were wrong as applied to Lincoln...but, as it turns out, spot-on as applied to the party.
P.S. It's also the 164th anniversary of the day in 1861 when Jefferson Davis was elected to a six-year term as president of the confederacy. True fact: the last two-and-a-half years were the lame-duckiest in the history of lameduckism.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to compassionate conservatism. On November 6, 1986, mediocre President Ronald Reagan did something decent by signing into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act which, among other things, provided amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Or as today's Republicans like to say, "Absolutely nothing happened on this date in 1986 so shut up, shut up, and shut up."
JEERS to the tastiest trial of the century. If you've ever seen one of those notorious videos of a professional soccer player faking an injury in the hammiest way possible, you have all the information you need to know about the validity of a court case involving a D.C. man who Attorney General Pam Bondi says committed the biggest act of vandalism on American soil since Kristi Noem's latest round of plastic surgery:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agent Greg Lairmore testified against a man who threw a sandwich at him on Tuesday, telling the court he “could smell the onions and mustard” as soon as the sandwich hit his chest.
Stop that man and his weapon of mass destruction!
“You could see jurors kind of holding back giggles as video of the sandwich-throwing incident was played a number of different times,” reported WUSA9.
Next week the jury will be put on trial for laughing at Agent Lairmore, who will tearfully describe how he "could smell the schadenfreude" as soon as the chuckles hit his ears. The horror, the horror.
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Ten years ago in C&J: November 6, 2015
JEERS to lame campaign slogans. Jeb Bush unveiled his new theme yesterday: "Jeb Can Fit It!" And in an instant lost 100 percent of America's domestic dog and cat vote.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the lexicon of our lives. Linguistics experts like to say that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can never hurt us. This is true with the exception of words that are forged out of razor-sharp steel letters, dipped in curare, and hurled like throwing stars at the exposed flesh of their victims. Now that we're clear on that technicality, Dictionary.com would like you to meet its new words of 2025. Winning the top prize this year is...um...a number:
67
Some say it means “so-so,” or “maybe this, maybe that,” especially when paired with its signature hand gesture where both palms face up and move alternately up and down. Some youngsters, sensing an opportunity to reliably frustrate their elders, will use it to stand in for a reply to just about any question. (“Hello, darling child, how was school today?” “67!”) A perfectly timed 67 signals that you’re part of an in-group, and if you’re already using its emerging spinoffs six-sendy and 41, you might be even cooler.
Perhaps the most defining feature of 67 is that it’s impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical.
In otjer words, a perfect word for the times in which we live. You can see more of the Class of 2025 here. Speaking agentically as an aura farmer, I prefer to circumvent the broligarchy and their Gen Z stares to welcome recognition for all types of loving couples on the kiss cam, not just a husband and his tradwife. But, y’know, that’s just me.
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
The internet has tilted the scales of skincare once again, this time, in favor of an approach that claims to help achieve a glow from the inside out. There’s one supplement people can’t stop talking about: Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool algae.
—USA Today
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