From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
We now join the Trump impeachment inquiry already in progress…
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Ain’t gravity a kick.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Note: To prevent house fires, be sure you rake your rugs and carpets every day. We do it over here and that's why we don’t even need a fire department. Cheers! —Sven, President of Scandinavia
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Election day 2020: 363
Days 'til the Sykesville Craft Beer Festival in Maryland: 3
Points by which Hillary Clinton beat Trump in Washington State in 2016: 16
Points by which Warren, Biden, and Sanders, respectively, are leading Trump in the latest PPP poll: 23 / 22 / 21
Percent of California's forests that are owned and managed by federal agencies: 57% (33 million acres)
Date of the start of the National Governors Association's summer meeting, which will be held here in Portland, Maine: 8/5/20
Rank of Seattle, San Francisco and Washington DC among U.S. cities with the best transportation systems, according to WalletHub: #1, #2, #3
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 183 (including 3 gogs and 1 Middle East U.S. troop withdrawal to facilitate the End Times). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: A+ Head tilt…
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CHEERS to a pleasant day at the polls. How sad that so many people think off-year elections are inconsequential, boring affairs. Not true!!! There was plenty of drama around the country yesterday at the state and local level to keep nerves a' janglin' and eyes a'glued to the updates by the Daily Kos Elections Team (“The Best In The Business!"). David Nir and crew have tons of analysis on the front page, but here are some results that caught C&J's eye:
Virginia The state legislature turned blue, blue, blue. Get ready, Virginny, you're about to get some good shit done right there yonder in the former capital of the C*nfederacy. Item #1: Pass the ERA already.
» Trans Delegate Danica Roem won reelection. Funny how people look beyond your gender identity when you fulfill your campaign promises.
» Juli Briskman, the woman who flipped Trump the bird on her bike when his motorcade drove past, won her race for Board of Supervisors in Virginia's Loudoun Algonkian District.
» Shelly Simonds, who lost last time in House District 94 after the winner was chosen by drawing a name out of a fishbowl when the race ended in a tie, definitively defeated her GOP opponent this time. Revenge…dish…cold.
Kentucky "Beshear wins the World Series! Beshear wins the Super Bowl! Beshear wins the Masters! Beshear wins the World Cup! Beshear wins the Stanley Cup! Beshear wins the EGOT! Beshear wins every single motherf*cking marble!" Since Trump’s a master of projection, I predict tomorrow he’ll tweet that Bevin was a weak candidate because the only thing he did all day was sleep late, watch TV, tweet, golf, and eat cheeseburgers.
Maine History was made here in Portland, as Kate Snyder becomes the first woman mayor in the history of Maine’s largest city.
Indiana Democrats won the city council majority in Columbus, Indiana, hometown of VP Pence and Congressman Pence, for the first time in 38 years.
That's not to minimize the races we lost. In fact, we should take our rage and frustration and channel it into concrete steps as we prepare for our next major fight against conservatives. Which, of course, is the 2019 War on Christmas. Remember our rallying cry of doom: "Happy Holidays!"
P.S. A C&J Exclusive:
CHEERS to 1040 reasons why a Florida man should be nervous. Tick…Tock…Tick…Tock… Tick Tock Tick Tock Ticktockticktockticktock…Boom! American gangster and betrayer-of-America Donald J. Trump thought he could drag out legal proceedings to prevent the one thing from happening that he fears most like a dog: the unsealing of his tax returns by "the proper authorities." The legal actions against him so far have indeed been slow as molasses, to his advantage. But this week he got a double shot of bad news that, we hear, prompted him to order a lackey to throw a chair across the room in anger:
A federal appeals court has ruled that President Donald Trump’s accounting firm Mazars must turn over his tax returns to New York prosecutors.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that, as president, he was immune from criminal investigation―a claim the three-judge appeals panel rejected. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. is pursuing the returns as part of an investigation into the Trump Organization’s role in buying the silence of two women who say they had affairs with Trump. […] In October, a federal judge dismissed Trump’s lawyers’ assertion of presidential immunity as an “extraordinary”claim.
Aha! But Trump's legal team is appealing to the Supreme Court, which could tie things up for…for…not very long. And that's not coming from me, despite my decades of non-experience in the weeds of the judicial field. No, that's coming from none other than Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, who says those tax returns could be popped open before Christmas:
First, the appeals court ruled against Trump’s argument that he was immune from criminal prosecution, because the case wasn’t a criminal prosecution.
[Instead] it’s an investigation into payments by the Trump Organization to adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom said they had affairs with the president and were paid to keep quiet.
“No one is immune from the government investigating their behavior,” Napolitano said in a clip posted online by Raw Story. The appeals court also ruled that the subpoena doesn’t place any burden on Trump as president because it’s not aimed at him. It’s directed at his accounting firm.
And guess who gets first crack at fairly, impartially, and jurisprudentiousially kicking Trump in the nuts? Tee hee—Ruth Bader Freakin' Ginsburg. And it's gonna hurt—we hear she's up to 250 pounds on the Nautilus squats machine.
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."
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 158th 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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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Answer Man. Over at Mediaite, Caleb Ecarma asks: Did Morning Joe Avoid Covering Trump’s Florida Residency Tax Dodge Because Scarborough Did the Same Thing?
Probably.
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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CHEERS to grown-up words. Monday afternoon we learned that the fossil fuel industry had (presumably) ordered the Trump administration to formally uncouple our country's participation in the Paris Climate Accord so that they could buy a few more years worth of making mega-profits by selling fossil fuels at the planet's expense. Two things: 1) we'll rejoin the accord—which is, sadly, largely symbolic anyway—in January 2021 at the direction of our new Democratic president, and 2) a ton of states will continue abiding by the accord's goals anyway, and it's just one more reason why I love our new Democratic governor Janet Mills:
That is so inspiring that I'm prepared to make my own announcement: as of today, I'm cutting my own personal atmosphere-harming emissions to zero percent. If you hear a muffled explosion today, just send flowers to the Rose-Wiggan Funeral Home. And please know that I only suffered for a few seconds.
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."
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Ten years ago in C&J: November 6, 2009
CHEERS to gittin' er done. The House is running circles around the Senate on healthcare reform. They just secured the endorsement of the AARP, which may add the momentum they need to take an actual vote this weekend:
An endorsement from the seniors' lobby was critical when then-President George W. Bush pushed the Medicare prescription drug benefit through a closely divided Congress in 2003. House Democratic leaders are hoping it will work the same political magic for them as they strive to deliver on President Barack Obama's signature issue. An announcement from the 40-million member group is expected Thursday, said officials with knowledge of the group's decision. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the endorsement is not official yet.
Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann will serve Red Bull and Xanax muffins to the teabagger rabble who will join her inside the Capitol to protest health care one more time before it becomes law and they discover that they really, really, like it. Their rally will last approximately thirty seconds before they get distracted by how cool it is to "throw" their voices from one side to the other, using the rotunda's unique acoustic configuration. Just as the Founders intended.
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And just one more…
JEERS to product misplacement. As mentioned in our "By the Numbers" section above, Portland Maine snagged the National Governors Association convention next summer, which is really awesome because it's a great place for a convention that size and they're going to have a ton of fun—as everyone does—seeing the sights along the southern Maine coast. (I guarantee there’ll be a gubernatorial caravan heading up Freeport-way to ransack L.L. Bean.) But, sorry to say, the pre-buzz is off to a terrible, and I mean terrible start. It pains me to even post this, but I must for posterity. This is the visual fanfare with which they chose to announce the event:
That's not a Portland-area lighthouse, of which we have seven, including the spectacular George Washington-commissioned Portland Head Light, from which to choose. Neither is it a Maine lighthouse. Hell, it's not even an American lighthouse. It looks like it may be a beacon from the United Kingdom. But as a former marketing guru and current American lighthouse aficionado, I can tell you what it definitely is: a sloppy, slap-dash effort by the NGA's social media desk that thinks no one will notice the image connected to a beloved American coastal city is false, bogus, inappropriate and, dare I say it, treasonous, for reasons I visually describe in my rage-fueled twitter thread here. I call upon all good and patriotic Americans reading these words to demand that the National Governors Association change the image immediately. Hopefully, with enough pressure, they'll see the light as they're eating their—wait for it—eggs and beacon.
UPDATE: Jeez, you people work fast. Thank you, NGA. Ain’t she purty...
That’s what I call a towering achievement.
Have a happy humpday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Looks like Seb Gorka's unrepentant love of Cheers and Jeers got him banned from You Tube
—Mediaite
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