Tuesday Afternoon: 3pm
[Alarms blare as gurney is wheeled into Emergency Room]
Doctor: Code blue! Code blue!
Nurse: What is it, doctor?
Doctor: DHS Secretary Noem has had an allergic reaction!
Nurse: Why, her face is plumped up like a balloon and she's all splotchy and hideous and…
Doctor: That's just her botox and makeup. The allergy is affecting what’s left of her brain, dammit, and we need to act quick!
Nurse: What was she exposed to?
Doctor: Something instantly toxic and destructive to the MAGA skull cavity: a fact.
Nurse: Oh my god. What'll we do???
Doctor: I need TVs wheeled in, tuned to Fox News, surrounding the patient, with the volume turned up to the maximum.
Nurse to other nurses: Move! Move!
Doctor: I need 100ccs of bourbon from Pete Hegseth's mini bar flown in stat!
Life Flight pilot, poking head into ER: I'll be back from the Pentagon in 15 minutes tops!
Doctor: In the meantime, I want a continuous IV drip containing distillations of Ivermectin, apple cider vinegar, horny goat weed, a vial of fecal matter-tainted stream water, and powdered hoof of roadkill.
Nurse: One RFK cocktail coming up!
Doctor: If all this does what it's supposed to do, I think Secretary Noem will be able to walk out of here.
Nurse: By the way, doctor…what was the fact she was exposed to?
Doctor (barely whispering in nurse's ear): Someone in a crowd shouted, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Nurse: Dear god.
Doctor: Dear god indeed, nurse. Dear god indeed.
And now, our feature presentation...
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, June 19, 2025
Note: To receive your coupon good for half-off your next coupon, please send 20 coupons from specially-marked packages of Acme Coupons, along with $50 to cover our pleasantness and courtesy, plus $9.95 for shipping and handling. Coupon not valid with any other offer. Promotion expires the moment we receive your cash. —Mgt.
-
2 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til National Take Your Dog to Work Day: 1
Days 'til Portland Maine's Pride Parade and Festival: 2
Percent of Republican-leaning, non-MAGA voters who oppose the Republicans' budget bill, according to Kaiser Family Foundation polling: 66%
Minimum amount by which ICE is already over budget with more than three months left in the fiscal year: $1 billion
Builder sentiment in May, down two points and the third-gloomiest level since 2012 because of mortgage rates, tariffs, and economic uncertainty: 32
Percent of people who get their news from networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to Reuters: 54%
Time it takes for GM's Corvette ZR1X ‘hypercar’ to go from 0 to 60 mph: 2 seconds
NBA Championship
Oklahoma City leads Indiana 3 games to 2
Game 6 is tonight.
-
Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
I know we all like to figure out whom to blame when something awful happens, but it is not a particularly useful exercise. What we are trying to figure out is how to keep this from happening again.
Whether the teen killers in Colorado were driven berserk by being taught evolutionary theory or were just Bad Seed, I submit to you, as a simple and self-evident proposition, that they could not have injured and killed so many people if they had not had guns.
If they had come into Columbine High School, pointed their index fingers at the kids they didn't like and said, "Bang, bang, you're dead!" not much would have happened as a consequence.
To address a tedious point, it is quite true that no law can assure that guns will not get into the hands of criminals and lunatics. But laws can make it much less likely that they will. The Brady law alone has kept tens of thousands of people with criminal or mental records from buying guns in just a few years.
—June 1999
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: Wakey wakey…
-
JEERS to a world at war. Just to keep us all up to speed, here's C&J's EXCLUSIVE roundup of what the hell is going on:
☠ Russia, with help from North Korea and Iran, is at war with Ukraine, which has help from Europe, the U.S. and democracies in Asia.
☠ Israel, with help from the U.S., is at war with Gaza and Palestine.
☠ Israel, with help from the U.S., is also at war with Iran, which has help from Russia and assorted Arab nations.
☠ Nuclear nations India and Pakistan are goin’ at it.
☠ The federal government of the United States is at war with its own large American cities.
☠ The Department of Health and Human Services of the United States has declared war on the human immune system.
And, as always, Bounty, with help from both Procter and Gamble, is at war with sudden spills. Oh, the humanity.
CHEERS to leveling the playing field. 61 years ago today, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—now extended to protect LGBTQ citizens—was approved by the Senate 73-27 after making it through a 57-day Dixiecrat filibuster:
"One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom," [President Lyndon] Johnson told the nation.
Two weeks later, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
"Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders." The analogy was unmistakable. The president was comparing the work of the Founding Fathers with that of the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King, who was present at the White House signing ceremony, also had no doubts about the significance of the day or about Lyndon Johnson's role in making the civil rights bill law. "It was a great moment," King declared, "something like the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln."
When Johnson signed it he reportedly said, "It is an important gain, but I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." A regular Nostradamus in a Stetson, that guy.
CHEERS to great moments in freedom. And speaking of civil rights, on June 19, 1862—aka ”Juneteenth,” now a federal holiday—slavery was outlawed in the existing and future federal territories. (See a handwritten order recently discovered at the National Archives here.) For such a groundbreaking event, the language was pretty straightforward:
"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the passage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
The good news: that was a long time ago. The bad news: not long enough.
-
BRIEF SANITY BREAK
-
-
END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
-
CHEERS to making it safe to eat Butterballs. 243 years ago this week, Congress approved the bald eagle over the turkey as the U.S. symbol. It was a tough decision, but in the end they decided it just didn't taste as good with mashed taters and cranberry sauce.
CHEERS to a puckin' good time. The NHL hockey season ended this week when the Florida Panthers clobbered the strange foreigners from Edmonton 459 games to 2 to take home the Stanley Cup, with which they will spend the next year using to bail flood waters from their locker room once the governor is done eating pudding out of it with his fingers. (Long story.) I hear the only people more giddy than the Panthers’ fans are the Panthers’ dentists.
-
Ten years ago in C&J: June 19, 2015
CHEERS to a kick in the seat of the Republican pants. The Vatican releases Pope Francis's encyclical on climate change today. Think Progress got a sneak peek Tuesday and here are some juicy popey bits that will drive the right-wingers nuts:
“Science and religion … can enter into an intense and productive dialogue with each other.”
“Never have we mistreated and offended our common home as we have in the last two centuries.”
"Climate change is caused by the enormous consumption of some wealthy nations.”
“The environment is a common patrimony of all humanity and is everyone’s responsibility. Whoever possesses a part of it should merely administer it for the common good."
"it is urgent to develop policy so that in the coming years, we drastically reduce carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gas emissions, by, for example, replacing fossil fuels and developing renewable energy sources.”
I'm not religious, but I'll give that an 'Amen.'
-
And just one more…
JEERS to the Night of A Thousand New Coronavirus Cases. Feel free to skip this—it has to do with "him." But there's no way we can't revisit what happened five years ago this week.
Five years ago this week our COVID death toll stood at 122,000 on its way, thanks to dithering and moronic Republican cult management, to over a million-plus. And what did our face-painted moron-in-chief decide would be a great idea in the middle of all the chaos and death? Of course—a MAGA rally with no mask mandate or social distancing rules because NO ONE TELLS REPUBLICANS WHAT TO DO, THEY TELL YOU WHAT TO DO! Trump flew Air Force One down to Tulsa, having pre-boasted of "a million ticket registrations," only to discover that a few thousand bothered to show up.
Among the few in attendance for Trump's sweaty, nonsensical hour of gaslighting was former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, whom Trump rewarded for joining his merry band by exposing him to COVID and killing him dead. What a friend. Only the best thoughts and prayers, believe me.
All hail the conquering hero.
As a disheveled and depressed Trump slumped across the White House lawn and back to his room for a night of rage-tweeting while the world laughed at his pathetic spectacle, this guy—Mike Brooks—was deemed the smartest one in the arena:
Seven months to the day later, Trump would again slump across the White House lawn, this time to board Marine One as the roundly-defeated twice-impeached (and now tried-and-convicted) ex-president whose approval never came close to 50 percent—even during his “honeymoon period” the second go-round—and who almost died from COVID himself. And we all lived happily ever after. Except for Herman Cain and 1,167,334 other Americans. Oh, and however many we lose to the looming measles and smallpox pandemic. The End.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
C-SPAN Caller Grills Bill in Portland Maine Over Cheers and Jeers Kiddie Pool: ‘Right Now, I Really Don’t Like Splashing With You’
—Mediaite
-
