The Week Ahead
Monday You are here. Friday is down there. Here's a shovel. Start digging.
After a weekend of fierce closed-door debate inside the heavily unguarded situation room at Mar-a-Lago, the president officially brands the conflict with Iran “The Big Beautiful Boom Boom.”
Tuesday The latest small business optimism index is released. As usual, there's not much optimism among the smallest businesses, mostly because people keep accidentally stepping on them.
The House isn’t in session the rest of the week because it’s their spring break. Democrats return to their districts to hold town hall meetings and touch base on their constituents’ concerns, like affordability, ICE raids, and the Iran War. Republicans return to lower their district’s IQ.
Also Wednesday: whoever turned these clocks ahead at 2am Sunday sobers up and tries again.
Wednesday To facilitate smooth shipments of oil and natural gas from the Middle East to the rest of the world during the war, President Trump demands that Panama build an extension of their canal to the Strait of Hormuz, and that Mexico pay for it.
A school in New York is evacuated after RFK Jr. launches his latest MAHA school lunch initiative by dumping a six-week-old bison roadkill carcass in the middle of the cafeteria and gurgling through a bullhorn: “Okay, kids, dig in. It’s protein time!”
Thursday Happy Reminder That The Sitting President is A Convicted Felon And Major Suspect In A Pedophile Sex Trafficking Operation Day to all who vow to see him rot in prison.
Kristi Noem shows up as Wonder Woman at a meeting of the Shield of the Americas, and demands to know what all these people in suits on the dais have done with all the other Avengers, oblivious to the fact that Wonder Woman isn’t an Avenger. God, she’s so STUPID!
Friday (the 13th) In an annual sign of spring, most of the buzzards return to Hinckley, Ohio. The rest continue circling the dining room at Mar-A-Lago.
The University of Michigan’s latest consumer sentiment index is released. America's sentiment registers an downtick from "impetuous" to "goutish." (It's a weird index.)
Plus lots of the usual blah blah blah and boom boom boom 'cause we never run out of that.
And now, our feature presentation…
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, March 9, 2026
Note: Time it takes for a Venus flytrap to close: 100 milliseconds. Approximate number of days it takes one to digest a trapped insect: 10. I'm noting these scientific facts in case the Trump White House scrubs them from the archives of scientific knowledge. Vive la resistance. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
4 days!!!
Days 'til the next nationwide No Kings protests: 19
Days 'til the annual Ostrich Festival in Chandler, Arizona: 4
Jobs created during the final 13 months of Joe Biden's presidency: 1,400,000
Number created during the first 13 months of Trump's second term: 198,000
Americans polled by Gallup who say the U.S. should not take action in international crises without the backing of its allies, versus 27% who are fine with going it alone: 65%
Last year's lobster haul in Maine, down from 86 million pounds in 2024: 79 million pounds
Maine's all-time record haul, achieved in 2016: 132.6 million pounds
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Puppy Pic of the Day: If you want to get a sense of how fast time flies, get a puppy and watch how quick (s)he grows up. Our rescue lab mix Haley—a fine import from Macon, Georgia and our current senior C&J editor—joined our family 13 years ago yesterday. This morning we “paws” a moment to post a pic of the old gal, as happy as always…
She bids a hearty “woof” to her favorite C&J splashers.
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JEERS to clumsy me. Gosh, I was all set to talk about the latest developments in the Iran War—the unnecessary carnage and chaos, lack of planning, indifference to the U.S. deaths of 175 Iranian school kids, the devastating economic impacts, and so forth—but it was so much horrible information at once that I've contracted a temporary case of stress blindness. So I'm just going to paste here what I copied, and I hope it's my Iran War summary:
The Department of Justice on Thursday released three previously withheld FBI interview reports from 2019 related to a woman who made uncorroborated allegations that she was abused by Donald Trump in the 1980s, when she was a minor. […]
In her second interview with federal investigators, she claimed that Epstein once took her to either New York or New Jersey where he introduced to Trump when she was between the ages of 13 and 15 years old. According to the report, she claimed Trump abused her during that trip. […]
“[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” the presentation says. “In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” The victim would have been “approximately 13-15 years old when this occurred,” according to the presentation. The alleged assault took place in the early-mid 1980s, and the same woman also claimed to be an Epstein victim. (Source)
So that's what’s happening in Iran. More updates just as soon as my vision returns.
CHEERS to #1. In their landmark book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout write:
The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in. … it's better to be first than it is to be better. It's much easier to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone you have a better product than the one that did not get there first.
The leading brand in any category is almost always the first brand in the prospect's mind. ... You can demonstrate the law of leadership by asking yourself two questions: 1) What's the name of the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Charles Lindbergh, right? 2) What’s the name of the second person to fly across the Atlantic? Not so easy an answer, is it?
Which brings us to Kristi Noem, who secured her place in history Friday by becoming the first cabinet member of the second Trump administration to be fired for displeasing the Mad King. By golly, I'll never forget that!!!
CHEERS to great moments in wingnut walloping. 72 years ago today, on March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow took Ann Coulter's pin-up idol, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the cleaners over his Communist witch hunt. His fab-o wrap-up could serve as a middle-finger salute to McCarthy's modern-day Wisconsin doppelganger “Moscow Ron” Johnson:
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"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
Senator McCarthy was the ideological right-winger who thought he could bully and bluster his way to power and glory by ruining innocent people’s lives, but ended up ruining his own by getting censured in the Senate and then dying in a cloud of booze and morphine at age 48. Karma’s a what, again?
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to shuttle diplomacy. 172 years ago this week, in 1854, U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry finally reached Japan during his second trip there. His perilous efforts on the high seas were well rewarded: he came back with the Kanagawa treaty and a runner-up trophy from the karaoke finals.
CHEERS and JEERS to conflicting conclusions. The February numbers from the Bureau of Workin' Stiffs came out Friday. The Big, Beautiful Trump economy lost 92,000 jobs and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent. Or, if you were watching Newsmax:
So booooo to the February jobs numbers. And also: hooray?
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Twenty years ago in C&J: March 9, 2006
CHEERS to sinking the S.S. Dubya. It's over—Dubai Ports World says it's turning over our port operations to an "American entity," adding one more miserable failure to the record of our 30-something-percent president. But we're not breathing easy just yet—Port Management for Dummies just rose to #1 at Amazon.com.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the brilliance of the Billeh mind. Did you remember to turn your clocks ahead an hour Sunday morning? I did. But being sick and tired of going through this pointless exercise every year, I did more than that. Thanks to the divine confluence of my maturity, wisdom, and advanced knowledge of the workings of the space-time continuum, I did something that no human has ever dared attempt. I turned my clocks ahead 25 hours, eliminating the need to do it ever again until—[checks watch]—2051. So y’all have fun with your little annual ritual from here on out. While you’re fussing and fiddling with your Rolexes and Timexes and Bulovas, I’ll be sitting in a wingback chair in my high-tech mountaintop lair enjoying a daquiri watching the madness. Oh, that reminds me: can I borrow a few billion dollars? I need to buy a mountaintop lair by next March. No crypto, please.
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
“I’m old enough to remember when Bill in Portland Maine used to splash in the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool in his little hooker outfits."
—Laura Loomer
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