A Few Words from Some of March’s Birthday Kids
“Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism.”
—Cesar Chavez
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
—James Madison
"My favorite line belongs to an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston. Flo Kennedy and I were in the back seat talking about Flo’s book, Abortion Rap, and the driver turned around and said, 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.' I wish I’d gotten her name so we could attribute it to her.”
—Gloria Steinem
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."
—Albert Einstein
The birthday Speaker Emeritus says it all without saying a word.
"Nixon is the kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a fifteen-foot rope."
—Eugene McCarthy [Also applies to every Republican in 2025]
"When I was 40 and looking at 60, it seemed like a thousand miles away. But 62 feels like a week and a half away from 80. I must now get on with those things I always talked about doing but put off."
—Harry Belafonte, who lived to be 96
"When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court], and I say, ‘When there are nine,’ people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that."
—Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“We’re at the tipping point, we haven’t got time to wait 30 years and argue about a few billion dollars. Burying your head in the sand another instant about global warming and the destruction of the planet is suicide for all of us.”
—William Shatner, 94, following his 2021 Blue Origin space flight
"If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic."
—Edward Albee
“Who hasn’t had a weight issue? If not the body, certainly the big head.”
—Aretha Franklin
If you celebrated or have yet to celebrate a birthday in March, we wish you many blessings on your camels. And now, our feature presentation…
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Note: If you have a military secret, leave a military secret. If you need a military secret, take a military secret.
—Seen on coffee can stuffed with military secrets at the entrance to the Pentagon
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By the Numbers:
3 days!!!
Days 'til elections in Canada: 33
Days 'til the International Rum Festival in Puerto Rico: 3
Percent by which firearm-related deaths among children and teenagers in the United States have risen since 2019: 50%
Drop in Tesla's share of European electric car sales in the first two months of 2025, according to JATO Dynamics: 58%
Percent of the 100,000 Germans surveyed who said they would no longer buy a Tesla: 94%
Year-over-year increase in U.S. air travel: 2.6%
Age of former Massachusetts first lady Kitty Dukakis when she died Friday: 88
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 181 (including 5 acts of rampant immorality and 2 Madame Tussauds rejects). Soul Protection Factor 8 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Happy mud season to all who celebrate…
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JEERS to spilling very sensitive beans. As the Trump administration gets rocked on its heel lifts over the Signalchatgate scandal, we at C&J would urge calm in the face of this storm. After all, there have been many security "oopsies" throughout the millennia. For example, who can forget this embarrassing moment from World War II?
"We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall conduct an amphibious assault on the shores of Normandy, France with 240,000 men at around 0600 on June 6th,1944, following a massive aerial and naval bombardment—code name "Overlord"—but not before we have dropped paratroopers behind enemies lines at midnight, and you can follow all of the operational communications action on short-wave channel 22 using the password "Crumpet Piccadilly Seven-One-Five." The Huns will never see it coming, ho ho, ha ha, that I can assure you. Oh, and also: we shall never surrender."
—Winston Churchill, 4 June 1940
Boy, he never heard the end of that, I can tell you!
JEERS to the Great Promise Breaker. He said inflation would go down, along with egg prices, on Day One. He promised that even the threat of tariffs would make the rest of the world quake in its economic booties and then something something something would happen and cure all our money ails quickly and beautifully and perfectly. And the American people gazed up at the President of the United States, standing so valiantly atop his granite pedestal, and rendered their verdict on Trumponomics:
Consumer attitudes worsened in March as President Donald Trump's tariffs set off a market rout and warnings of a possible recession, The Conference Board survey data on Tuesday showed. Sentiment worsened more than economists expected. […]
You’re gonna be seeing this graphic a lot over the next four years. Get used to it.
The fresh data on consumer sentiment arrives a week before the onset of additional U.S. tariffs, indicating potential fear of further escalation in an ongoing global trade war. … Speaking at a press conference in Washington, D.C., last Wednesday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell faulted tariffs for a "good part" of recent inflation.
And we all lived in cardboard boxes next to empty cans of cat food happily ever after. The End.
CHEERS to makin' up and makin' nice. Forty-six years ago today, on March 26, 1979, Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat signed a historic peace agreement that is still holding up today:
The Egypt-Israel peace treaty was a direct result of the Camp David Peace Accords, signed in September 1978. President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later that year.
Took ‘em three hours to get their hands untwisted.
Under the accords, Israel agreed to withdraw troops from the Sinai Peninsula in return for Egypt's recognition of the state of Israel. Palestinians were also granted the right to some self-determination.
Said Sadat of Democratic mediator President Jimmy Carter, who left us last year at 100: "[He is] the man who performed the miracle. Without exaggeration, what he did constitutes one of the greatest achievements of our time." Yeah, we're kinda fond of him ourselves.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to words of wisdom on green energy from…a mining tycoon??? I'd never heard of Australian iron ore mining company Fortescue before. But I have now, and CEO Andrew Forrest gets a gold star (or should that be a green star?) for tut-tutting the fossil fuel giants and their desire to throttle back on clean energy development despite what the rest of us want:
“I’ve always found that the customer is always right, which is why we’re going renewable and moving away from oil and gas because our customers are saying, ‘we want energy but not at any cost, and if you can give us green energy at the same price as dirty [energy] then we are going to buy green every day.’ That’s my job, and that’s Fortescue’s job,” Forrest told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.
What customers want.
“You’ve got data centers popping up all over Europe and they want green energy if they can get it. They’ll take dirty if they can’t, sure. That’s Exxon Mobil’s and Total’s argument: ‘Well, we’re just doing what the customers want.’
Actually, you’re not. Your customers want green energy. [If the] oil and gas [industry] doesn’t want to supply green energy, guess what? Fortescue will.”
An excellent shot across dirty-energy’s bow. Well, with one caveat: if I ever find myself having to tank up the Honda with vegemite, all bets are off.
CHEERS to locking up the bad guy. As the Federal Bureau of Investigating Things That Hurt Elon Musk's Feelings—formerly known as the FBI—ramps up its campaign of intimidation and harassment of patriotic Tesla protesters, an evildoer was caught at one of the dealerships in Florida. Take that, protesters! There's a new sheriff in town and his name is…um, it appears to be Mud:
A man was arrested and charged with assault, accused of driving his car toward a crowd of people protesting outside a Florida Tesla dealership and narrowly avoiding them, authorities said.
He woulda hit some of ‘em, too, if only the Cybertruck he was driving had been able to scale the two-inch curb.
Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office said deputies went to a planned protest Saturday at a West Palm Beach dealership, where suspect Andrew Dutil drove onto the curb and slowly toward the protesters. There were no injuries. […]
On his Facebook account, Dutil appeared to have shared content supporting President Donald Trump, including a video depicting Trump and Vice President JD Vance in a "The Dukes of Hazzard" parody video as "The Dukes of Maga."
As of this morning, you can just call Mr. Dutil "The Duke of Cell Block C."
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Ten years ago in C&J: March 26, 2015
CHEERS to a victory for veterans. You stick your neck out for America, you should get post-military health care that doesn’t make you travel to the ends of the earth for it. So hooray for this:
Responding to pressure from Congress and veterans groups, the Department of Veterans Affairs is relaxing a rule that makes it hard for some veterans in rural areas to prove they live at least 40 miles from a VA health site. The change comes amid complaints from lawmakers and advocates who say the VA's current policy has prevented thousands of veterans from taking advantage of a new law intended to allow veterans in remote areas to gain access to federally paid medical care from local doctors.
The VA said it will now measure the 40-mile trip by driving miles as calculated by Google maps or other sites, rather than as the crow flies, as currently interpreted. The rule change is expected to roughly double the number of eligible veterans.
That's another item crossed off the must-do list for making VA operations more efficient and less calcified. Next item that will help the organization immensely: get us the hell out of all the war zones.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the best science officer in the galaxy. This guy:
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Happy 94th birthday, Leonard Nimoy, wherever you are. (And Happy Leonard Nimoy Day in Boston.) We could really use some of your logic down here right about now.
Have a happy humpday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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