Happy to Oblige. Please Proceed, Sir…
A fight with Trump? He’d have to tie one of his hands behind his back. To keep it fair.
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, September 8, 2020
Note: Gil the Guppy reminds you to always practice proper boating safety.
Remember: Only YOU can prevent unwanted metaphors. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
8 weeks!!!
Weeks 'til the 2020 election: 8
Deadline to apply for the position of Flight Director for NASA missions to the ISS and the moon: 2
Number of protests linked to the Black Lives Matter movement that took place between May 26 through August 22, according to a report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED): 7,750
Number of those BLM protests that had any kind of non-peaceful element to them, which were "largely confined to specific blocks, rather than throughout the city": 220
Percent of Americans polled by CNN who believe Trump's violent response to the peaceful BLM protests has done nothing but inflame tensions: 58%
Incumbent Minnesota Senator Tina Smith (D)'s lead over Jason Lewis (R), according to a new PPP poll (unchanged from their last one): +8
Number of coins the U.S. Mint plans to produce each month for the rest of the year now that it's back up to full capacity: 1.6 billion
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Puppy Pic of the Day: The canine community weighs in on “losers” and “suckers”:
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CHEERS to order in the court. In order to skew the results in favor of—who else?—white conservatives, the Trump administration has ordered the Census Bureau to stop work on their 2020 survey much earlier than scheduled. No one is under any illusions why this is being done, including this judge who isn’t having it:
A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Census Bureau for the time being to stop following a plan that would have had it winding down operations in order to finish the 2020 census at the end of September. The federal judge in San Jose late Saturday issued a temporary restraining order against the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh issued the order after she noted behavior on the part of the Commerce Department lawyer that led her to believe he was lying: his lips were moving. Boom. Nailed it. Cheers and Jeers: your home for quality entertainment.
JEERS to keeping track of America’s fugliest numbers. The mighty Covid-19 Wurlitzer plays on, even through a holiday weekend. While Trump and McConnell continue dithering, the coronavirus national tour marched on (over 27 million cases around the globe now, with over 25% of them in the U.S.). Our Monday tradition of maintaining a benchmark of the awfulness for the C&J historical record continues this fine Tuesday morning, and let’s check the most depressing tote board in the world with all due reluctance as our death toll now equals the population of America’s 129th-largest city Overland Park, Kansas:
20 weeks ago: 764,000 confirmed cases. 40,500 deaths.
10 weeks ago: 2.6 million confirmed cases, 128,000 deaths
6th weekend of golf in a row. Message: he cares.
5 weeks ago: 4.8 million confirmed cases, 158,000 deaths
This morning: 6.5 million confirmed cases, 193,000 deaths
And in other covid news, over the weekend Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris issued a warning about the president's rosy prediction that a vaccine will available by—coincidence of coincidences—election day: "I would not trust Donald Trump." We'll file that under Quotes to Be Chiseled on Wall of Future President Harris Memorial on National Mall.
Happy Rachel-Maddow-Show-ivarsary, Rachel.
CHEERS to the sharpest knife in the media’s drawer. Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow has been hosting her own show on MSNBC for twelve years as of this week. She's brilliant, witty and everybody loves her except those Republicans who fear her. ("Scary fact-wielding lesbian truth-teller! Run for your lives!") As much as I despise the Trump horror show, I have to admit it's brought out the dogged gumshoe in Rachel, who's been relentless in following her prime directive: "Don’t focus on what Trump says…focus on what Trump does." She's also an entertaining mixologist who whips up a mean thirst-quenching libation. Money quote: "I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform." Score one for the hippies.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to breaking out of the bubble. The Biden administration is going to need to strengthen the mental health benefits of the Affordable Care Act to make it easier for the millions of Americans sucked into the conspiracy cult during the Trump administration to rewire their brains to normalcy. Over the weekend the New York Daily News published the account of a young'un who managed to do it, and I expect you'll be seeing more stories like this after January 20th:
By the second half of 2016, [Stephen Ross] was lost in a morass of online conspiracy theories fed to him by algorithms that compounded and reinforced what he saw, he explained. “What really got me freaking out was PizzaGate,” Ross said, referring to the baseless conspiracy theory that asserted Democratic leaders were part of a child trafficking ring connected to a pizza parlor. "I was brainwashed." […]
“I’m pretty smart. I did well in school. Out of 400 kids in my class, I was No. 12. But I did not have good logic skills,” he said. “The second people started shouting at me, ‘This is crazy! You have to be upset!’ I was right there saying, ‘Yes, I’m upset!’”
“What people don’t realize it that their lives are so filled with stress, anxiety and pain when they believe this stuff, and it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said. “They just have to start, one at a time, reaching out to people with different opinions.”
Ross says he's setting up a website that'll list and debunk all the conspiracy theories from sanity sinkholes like Q-Anon and Alex Jones. He's expected to finish sometime in 2098.
JEERS to undeserved free passes. Forty-six years ago today, President Ford committed the unpardonable sin of granting an unconditional pardon to Richard "I am not a crook except when I am" Nixon. He said it was absolutely necessary to help "heal" the country. To this day I still have no idea what that means. I don't remember anyone losing their shit over the Watergate hearings, do you? Everyone I knew pretty much laughed their asses off as he fled with his tail between his legs and an approval rating in the mid-20s.
Gerald Ford showing Americans how to pick their jaw up off the floor after hearing about his pardon of crook Richard Nixon.
Final verdict on the pardon: bad call. The American people were robbed of the opportunity to see that, when the president does what Tricky Dick did, it IS illegal. Bless the late David Frost for coaxing that jaw-dropping nugget out of that creepy crook.
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Fourteen years ago in C&J: September 8, 2006
JEERS to whatzisname (as if anyone cares). A Senate panel said "Naaaah" to renewing John Bolton's license to berate, badger and belittle the U.N. Shortly after he heard the news, he was caught stabbing the Ambassador from Madagascar in the thigh with a pencil. You don't wanna know what he would've done if he'd been in a sour mood.
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And just one more:
CHEERS to an enduring enterprise. One way I've been keeping my sanity during the Trump Plague—which encompasses so much more than the covid pandemic—is a mandatory viewing of an episode of the cheesy, ahead-of-its-time outer space brain candy that is the original Star Trek TV series. Today is the 54th anniversary of the premiere of what creator Gene Roddenberry called "Wagon Train to the Stars." The issues Trek took on—war, peace, technology (for good and evil), racism, gender, greed, and others, all handled so deftly by the writers and cast that Martin Luther King Jr. became a fan—still resonate and make the series eminently watchable in 2020. Here's how William Shatner describes it in his autobiography, Up Till Now:
The general consensus among respected philosophers is that Star Trek was successful and has endured because our stories focused on universal themes—which of necessity took place elsewhere in the universe because they were about subjects that couldn’t be easily tackled by conventional programming. Gene Roddenberry once said that the real mission of the Enterprise was to search for intelligent life on the other side of the television set.
While the grand theme of our five-year mission was always good versus evil, we also did stories about racism, sexism, authoritarianism, class warfare, imperialism, human and parahuman and alien rights, and the insanity of war. Nichelle Nichols and I shared the first interracial kiss on American television—which several southern stations refused to broadcast—although we were compelled to kiss by space aliens controlling our minds.
Today, then, is a good day to review the basics:
All I Need to Know About Life I learned from Star Trek
• Seek out new life and civilizations.
• Non-interference is the Prime Directive.
• Keep your phaser set on stun.
• Humans are highly illogical.
• There's no such thing as a Vulcan death grip.
• Live long and prosper.
• Having is not so pleasing as wanting; it is not logical but it is often true.
• Infinite diversity in infinite combinations (IDIC).
• Tribbles hate Klingons (and Klingons hate Tribbles).
Also: Don’t be the guy in the red shirt. It never ends well.
• Enemies are often invisible—like Romulans, they can be cloaked.
• Don't put all your ranking officers in one shuttlecraft.
• When your logic fails, trust a hunch.
• Insufficient data does not compute.
• If it can't be fixed, just ask Scotty.
• Even in our own world, sometimes we are aliens.
• When going out into the Universe, remember:
"Boldly go where no one has gone before!"
Also: don’t screw around with the transporter—it's not a #!!&$! toy. I realize that now.
Wherever your travels take you, have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Several ‘Unruly’ Kiddie Pool Splashers Sink During the Bill in Portland Maine Rubber Ducky Parade in Cheers and Jeers
—Mediaite
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