>>> 1 <<< Week ‘til Netroots Nation ‘21
This year's in-person convention in D.C., co-sponsored by Daily Kos, didn’t pan out thanks to the pandemic, so the big event is happening online again this year. With a week to go, we're posting the latest info below the fold with the links you need to get registered and ready.
C'mon down.
Continued...
Netroots Nation 2021: Just the Facts, Ma’am
★ Over 60 panels and training sessions are set to go, on issues like voter suppression, the GOP war on women, tackling white supremacy, and which brand of handcuffs are best when the time comes to haul the Trump family off to jail.
★ Some of the keynoters include Sen. Tina Smith, Rep. Mondaire Jones, Rep. Raul Grijalva, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Wisconsin Lt. Gov, Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, and state Attorneys General Keith Ellison (MN), Dana Nessel (MI), Josh Stein (NC) and Maura Healey (MA). More will be announced soon.
★ There will be opportunities to collaborate and socialize, including virtual coffee meetups, happy hours, and even a morning yoga session led by MoveOn's Reggie Hubbard.
★ Saturday at noon ET, The Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead is back at Netroots with a special sneak peak of her no-holds-barred feminist comedy talk show Feminist Buzzkills Live! Along with co-hosts Moji Alawode-El and Marie Khan, this weekly YouTube show breaks down the news from patriarchy’s evil trilogy of misogyny, white supremacy and anti-abortion extremism.
★ Adam B's annual Pub Quiz is happening Thursday, October 7, at 7pm ET. You can form your own team or join an existing one.
★ Everyone who registers will receive an official NN21 T-shirt.
★ To participate virtually: you’ll use their mobile or desktop app and website (they’ll send you login instructions).
★ You can check out the FAQ page on Virtual NN21 here.
★ Yes! Scholarships are available. For details click here.
★ To secure your online access to the event just click here and register.
★ You can also follow Netroots Nation on Twitter here and on the evil Facebook here.
We’re gonna miss D.C. But it’s cool that, with no travel or lodging restrictions this year, a lot more people will be able to participate. Plus, since it’s Zoom we won’t have to wear pants. And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, September 30, 2021
Note: Just a heads-up that there will be no C&J on Monday, as we will be attending a gallivanting training seminar. Back Tuesday with a certificate of completion and a bad case of windburn. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Election Day '21: 33
Days 'til the New England Cannabis Convention in Portland, Maine: 16
Share of Hispanic and Black adults in the U.S. who have received a vaccine dose, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation: 73%, 70%
Share of white adults who have taken the vaccine: 71%
Factor by which a child born in 2021 will live through more heat waves, wildfires, and droughts/crop failures than their grandparents, according to the journal Science: 7x, 2x, 3x
Amount Ford says it’s spending in Tennessee and Kentucky to build electric vehicle plants and batteries: $11.4 billion
Surge in the price of natural gas over the last 12 months, according to CNN: 180%
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
Jimmy Carter needs no defense from me. The man is enough to give Christianity a good name. Following the Christian doctrine of works as well as faith, he has done immeasurable good in the world, and no mean-spirited attack from a petty pundit [like Bob Novak] can diminish him.
The only reason I bother to note Novak's nastiness is because it left such a bad taste with me. I was traveling on the West Coast that day, and all through the airports and in cabs and hotels, people were saying to one another with real pleasure: "Jimmy Carter got the Nobel Peace Prize. Isn't that nice?" A genuine piece of good news in a world with little of it lately.
Even the right-wing Wall Street Journal managed a negative editorial on what it feels are the inadequacies of Carter's approach without demeaning the man or his accomplishments.
The implicit criticism of President Bush in the Nobel Committee's selection (made explicit by the chairman) should not detract from this recognition of how long and how hard Jimmy Carter has worked for peace and human rights. I think he is an invaluable asset to the nation. Like Nelson Mandela, he has unique stature, and wherever he goes to help with an election or to try to work out a problem, he is welcomed and listened to. In this season when the dogs of pre-emptive war are running loose, it is good to hear Carter pointing out the obvious: that we would be better off working with the rest of the world to disarm Saddam Hussein rather than annihilating his whole country.
—October 2002
(Jimmy turns 97 tomorrow)
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Officer Leo is on the beat…
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CHEERS to today's message from the Minister of Democratic Propaganda. Since there is no Democratic Party Minister of Propaganda, I decided this week to claim the title until such time that I am stabbed to death in the bathtub by the next person who wants to be the Minister of Democratic Propaganda more than me. So listen up all you lefty lemmings:
The House is voting today by the widest of margins to approve the massive and spectacular Build Back Better Bill and its companion, the Build Back Even Betterer Bill. The American people will rejoice and proclaim that President Joseph R. Biden deserves the Nobel prizes in both peace and economics. And he will win them both!
Simultaneously, all drought conditions in the United States will—repeat, will—be immediately brought to an abrupt end by the sudden torrent of tears gushing out of the red, swollen eyes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Kevin McCarthy, and their cranium-corroded, covid-coddling cultists.
Greta Thunberg will declare this a glorious day for the planet.
Be a good American. Print copies of this in 100-point font and distribute freely.
JEERS to red state blues. Twenty-two months into a killer pandemic that could've been vanquished last spring, the question on everyone's mind these days is: who are the biggest covidiots in the land who continue to act like selfish assholes by doing everything to contain the spread of Covid-19 except those things that would actually contain it? I'm glad you asked! This is from David Leonhardt's Monday New York Times morning email, with a generous assist from Daily Kos community member brainwrap (aka Charles Gaba). Caution: be prepared to be overcome with Blank Stare Syndrome as nothing below surprises you in the slightest...
Because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness, Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America. […]
Some left-leaning communities—like many suburbs of New York, San Francisco and Washington, as well as much of New England—have such high vaccination rates that even the unvaccinated are partly protected by the low number of cases. Conservative communities, on the other hand, have been walloped by the highly contagious Delta variant. […]
What distinguishes the U.S.is a conservative party—the Republican Party—that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility.
By the time the midterm campaign season swings into high gear, the herd will be so thinned that Republican politicians will be able to meet with each of their voters one-on-one. (I just hope they're prepared for the dirty looks they'll get when they politely refuse their constituents’ offers of fresh-baked ivermectin muffins.)
CHEERS to the day John McCain realized he'd made a terrible, awful, horrible, no-good mistake. Who can forget September 30, 2008, when Katie Couric tossed the softest of softballs to vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who whiffed once…twice…and three times she's out:
Katie Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this---to stay informed and to understand the world?
Sarah Palin: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media...
Couric: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years…
Couric: Can you name any of them?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.
The freaky part? Subscriptions to I Have A Vast Variety Of Sources Where We Get Our News Digest tripled overnight.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to the land of the rising sun star. I was so preoccupied by the elections in Germany that I totally missed how they're now in the process of picking a new prime minister in Japan. Apparently they've got Yoshihide Suga's replacement lined up, but not without some palace intrigue:
In an unusually suspenseful race for leadership of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, Kishida, 64, a former foreign minister, defeated Taro Kono, the minister in charge of Covid-19 vaccines, in a runoff vote. Lawmakers in Parliament, which is controlled by the LDP, are expected to vote on a new prime minister on Monday. [Fumio] Kishida, 64, will be Japan’s 100th prime minister since it adopted a cabinet system in 1885.
Kono, 58, had by far the most support in public polls despite a slow start to the country’s vaccination campaign. But party elders preferred Kishida over Kono, said Jeff Kingston, a professor of history and Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo. … [A] win by Kishida, whom he described as “the opposite of dynamic,” could be damaging if the party is seen as overruling popular opinion. “It makes the LDP look like the party of smoke-filled rooms, which it is, but they’re trying to modernize their image a little bit,” Kingston said.
When he takes over, we should probably keep Kishida from speaking to the new German guy for a while. Just to be safe.
CHEERS to great inventions. On September 30, 1846, Boston dentist William Morton used ether as an anesthesia for the first time. It worked really well. But he had even better success the next day when he used it on the patient.
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Ten years ago in C&J: September 30, 2011
CHEERS to Extreme Makeover: Washington Monument Edition. Did you hear about that member of the "difficult-access rappelling team" who was scurrying around the top of America's favorite phallic symbol yesterday? Holy mackeral. That was just a preview. Today the rest of the team will rappel up and down the structure to assess the damage from last month's earthquake. King Kong issued a brief statement from his retirement village: "Good luck. And watch out for biplanes."
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the return of the late-night king. Don’t get too excited…he's only doing two shows a month, and you gotta fork over some coin to Tim Cook at Apple+ if you want to watch it. (Though I’m guessing excerpts will fly around Twitter and You Tube like confetti.) But it's Jon Stewart, for cryin' out loud, and it's great to see he's back tackling current hot-button issues (veterans and essential workers for startersd), if more seriously this time around:
I’m not a young man. My career began on a show on MTV where I think the first character I introduced was called Butt Crack Guy. It was the one where we showed how the censors operated at MTV by how much butt crack on this one individual we could use. And that’s obviously a part of me, too, but you hope that your career is an ongoing evolution.
I guess what I’m saying is, there will be moments of Butt Crack Guy in this, but I also like the idea of exposing these systems as a whole and trying to look at, like, “How the fuck is this system incentivized where there are so many people getting just jammed at the bottom of it?”
Here's a preview of The Problem with Jon Stewart, the first episode of which dropped today:
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Welcome back. Lord knows we need all the watchdogs we can get.
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
GOP’s Tom Cotton Gets Schooled After Asking Gen. Milley: “Why Haven’t You Splashed in the Cheers and Jeers Kiddie Pool?”
—Raw Story
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