From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...
Correspondin'
Dear GOP Candidates for Congress,
A big "Howdy Do!" from the great Republic of Texas. Laura and I are doing fine, beatin' the heat with lots of the air conditionizer and gettin' ready to roll out the book that bechronicles my greatest decisions as Chief of the Commanders.
But other than that and cleanin' up Barney's poop, it's really quiet here in Preston Hollow. Too quiet. Really, really quiet. It's a little surprising considering I left several answerable-machine messages with each one of you and no one's called me back. I even had my phone checked by the phone service guy because it hadn’t rung in months. (I gave him one of my special nicknames: he's an older guy so I call him "Papa Phoner.")
So that's why I'm writing you now. Since you're running on my record in the midterms, I want you to know that I'm available to go out for you and do some good old-fashioned stumpifying on your behalf. I may be a little older and greyer, but I can still give a rootin' tootin' barnburner. I'll scare 'em up real good, I promise. Oceans don’t protect us; You're either with us or against us; Bring it on; Significant quantities of uranium from Africa; I'll play all my greatest foreign-policy hits and then I'll bedazzle 'em with the awesome things I did for the economy. By the time I say God Bless America they'll be droolin' like Pablum's doggie.
The only thing I ask is that, as usual, you screen out anyone who disagrees with me, and send 'em to the Free Speech Zone in the next county. Also I'd like a little bowl of pork rinds and a bottled water in my greening room.
Just let me know when you'd like me to come out and do some electionizing for ya. My calendar is completely clear. I just need an hour or two of noticization so I can shower and shave and hike up my shitkickers.
Really. Anytime. Just call me. Or use the email. Or the Facebooks. I've already got an overnight bag packed and waitin' by the door. If I don’t hear from ya I'll just pick some lucky candidate names out of my Stetson and show up spontanisciously. I can't wait to see the look on your face!
Sincerely,
George W. Bush
43rd President
Also an Awesome and Available Speaker
P.S. Unfortunately, Laura can’t join me. She's busier than my document shredders on January 19th, 2009. People call her night and day and she's booked solid right through her 80th birthday. But, again, and I can't emphasize this enough: I am totally free. Wide open. Seriously. Someone call me.
Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Note: Soylent Orange is Cheez-Its! For god's sake tell the people so they'll know---Soylent Orange is Cheez-Its!!!!!!
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Yom Kippur: 59
Days `til the Bangor State Fair: 10
Length of time Barack Obama has been president as of today: 1½ years
Vatican budget deficit in 2009, despite a 9% increase in donations: $5.2 million
(Source: Time)
Rank of Habitat for Humanity among largest homebuilders in the U.S.: #8
(Source: Builder Magazine via The Week)
Percent of respondents to a USA Today-TravelAdvisor.com survey who say their last flight was "Excellent on all counts": 44%
Percent who said, "I'll never fly that airline again": 8%
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Tuesday Words of Wisdom from the Right-wing Blogosphere:
But MAObama - I do not believe in the incompetence theory - ideologically wants capitalism destroyed, so that a socialist "planned" economy can be imposed by D.C.
---Commenter asosiuss at RedState
All together now: One...two...three... [Yawn]
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Puppy Pic of the Day: "A shot 'o bourbon for me and some fresh hay for mah steed. And make it snappy."
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CHEERS to teaching a young Democrat an old Democrat's tricks. This afternoon West Virginian Carte Goodwin will be sworn in as the "placeholder" senator until a special election can be held to elect Robert Byrd's successor. And if I may be so bold as to point out to a certain junior senator from Massachusetts: Mistuh Brown, suh, I do declare you, suh, are no longer the hunkiest member in the upper chamber of the legislative branch. (Memo to Kossack TrapperSF: Post his gams as a Daily Calf and there's a C-note in it for ya.) Immediately afterward, the Senate will try for a fourth---fourth!!!---time to pass an extension of unemployment benefits, and with Senator Goodwin on board it should end up a huge Democratic victory...and a real sigh of relief for a couple million struggling Americans. Helluva debut, kid.
CHEERS to meta fights when they're not on Daily Kos. Could there be anything more thoroughly enjoyable than plopping down in an Adirondack chair on the porch with an ice-cold strawberry daiquiri and watching the teabaggers beat their brains out over whether or not they embrace racism? One side says absolutely not, while the other side says sure, why not. Just in case anyone on the "pro" side has forgotten the modern-day justification for inferiorizing the scary black people, blogger goddess Digby posted this handy guide last year to keep the teabaggers up to date:
1955 - They are an inferior race
1965 - They are lazy workers
1975 - They make old white customers uncomfortable
1985 - Affirmative action means their diplomas are bogus
1995 - They are a litigation risk for discrimination
2009 - They are racists who discriminate against white people
We present the above as a public service to our conflicted neighbors with the tri-cornered hats and "Don’t Tread on Me" tattooed on their tuckus. Because there's nothing more embarrassing than chanting "Black people are lazy!" when everyone else is chanting "Blacks are racist against white people!" Not quite as heinous as, say, sipping your Earl Grey without extending your pinky, but enough to attract some seriously dirty looks nonetheless.
JEERS to Big Brother. I'm talkin', like, Big Big Big BIG Brother. Another Pulitzer Prize is likely in the bag for Washington Post reporter Dana Priest (and co-writer William Arkin), who says that the government's surveillance operation has gotten so big, powerful, clumsy, invasive and secretive that they may be making America less safe. You're wrong, Bill. Everything is perfectly fine. We're not too powerful or invasive. Really. You don't need to worry. On second thought, everything's fine and we don't need to worry. Go about your business. Tell ya what, let's just go about our business. This appears to be a..a...um... Non-story. ...non-story.
CHEERS to "One Small Step for...Whooooaaaa!!! Um, can I have a do-over?" Forty-one years ago today, at 10:56 pm eastern time, John Kennedy's vision to have a man on the Moon by decade's end was realized when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on a heavenly body not named Earth. One of the great but unheralded stories from July 20, 1969 was recounted in the underrated movie, "The Dish," which chronicles the role the Parkes Observatory in Australia played in broadcasting the iconic images from the moon. This scene---which includes a glimpse of Cronkite's exuberance during the moonwalk---reminds us of how the world was united in awe that day. In the C&J cafeteria today: all the free Tang you can drink.
JEERS to false equivalence. I don’t tear too many editorials apart anymore, but I'm willing to make an exception here and there. Last Friday I almost urped up some of my otherwise splendid Chinese-buffet lunch when I read this comparison of Republican and Democratic reaction to the financial regulation bill in USA Today:
To hear those on the right, the measure is an attack on business and a vast overreach. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, compared it to "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon." To some on the left, it is a feeble gesture because it does not carve up big banks like Christmas hams and feed them to the poor.
"And feed them to the poor?" Who exactly is saying that? No one, that's who. Typical media equivocation: you can dig up instances of real Republican wankery all the livelong day, but to make an "equal" Democratic comparison you more often than not have to make shit up. But at least they make an important point, though perhaps not the point they intended to make:
Hard as it may be to believe, not long ago it was possible for Congress to pass significant measures on a more-or-less bipartisan basis. The 2001 Bush tax cuts garnered 12 Democratic votes in the Senate. The Iraq invasion authorization got 29. The No Child Left Behind law got 42. The new Medicare drug benefit got 11. And the bank bailout, known as TARP, got 39.
To USA Today, it's a valid argument about polarization. To me, it says that Democrats are more likely to vote for shitty, deficit-growing, destructive and millionaire-favoring legislation proposed by Republicans than Republicans are for good, deficit-neutral, morally-sound, middle-class-centric legislation proposed by Democrats. And this is why we drink before noon.
CHEERS to proving the critics wrong...yet again. Oh, mercy me! The stimulus is a bust! It doesn’t work! All that money flushed down the drain! Oh, sturm! Oh, drang! Oh, yeah? With all due respect, bite me:
A $9.1 million federal stimulus grant awarded to a Barre company to create electric car parts will save or create more than 100 Vermont jobs and help the U.S. become a leader in the clean energy economy, a White House official said Friday.
With the $9.1 million grant, SB Electronics Inc. is expanding, building a 53,000-square-foot plant to build capacitors for electric vehicles. Before it got the grant, the company planned to build its plant in China.
"Now we have this great American company that's going to manufacture state-of-the-art electric drive components right here in America," said Jessica Maher, a staff member of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, who toured the Barre company on Friday with Gov. Jim Douglas.
Great American company. Great American components. Great American jobs. Great American stimulus success story (and there are many more like it). Great American black eye for the whiny conservative American whiners.
CHEERS to extreme brevity. Federal Express shortened its name from 14 letters to five: FedEx. Kentucky Fried Chicken morphed from 20 into three: KFC. But this takes the cake: the YMCA is downsizing its existing four-letter acronym to one: "Y." I thought the group that would be angriest would be the Christian conservatives---after all, one of the casualties is the letter C, which stands for you-know-what. But I was just a tad off-base:
"We are deeply dismayed by today's announcement from the YMCA that they feel a name change and a rebranding are in order after 166 years," the Village People's publicist says in a statement. "Some things remain iconic and while we admire the organization for the work they do, we still can't help but wonder Y."
Everybody: It's fun to stay at the Y Y Y Y...! Yeah, okay, that's gonna take some getting used to.
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Five years ago in C&J: July 20, 2005---The Roberts Nomination:
JEERS to John Roberts. Bush picks a 50 year-old white male elitist D.C.-insider millionaire country-clubber who will probably allow corporate and fundy Christian tentacles to slither further inside government, will oppose reproductive rights, and smack down minorities...all with boyish charm. David Souter this ain't.
JEERS to John Roberts' case record. From what I've read, you could fit it inside a thimble. No wonder Bush likes him so much.
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And just one more...
CHEERS and JEERS to Barack at 18. Yup, as of today, President Obama has been on the job for 18 months---aka 3 turbulent Friedman Units. So...how's he doing? Here's my scorecard, based n the latest POTUS-Billy conference in the principal's office:
The Good: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act - Re-authorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program - Efforts to help save the American auto industry that seem to be paying off a bit – Expanding hate crimes legislation to include the GLBT community - Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan - The Cairo speech and outreach to the international community – Significant health insurance reform that will act as a foundation that can be improved upon - Keeping his paws off Iran during the election upheaval - Honoring the timeline for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq's major cities – Financial regulation reform - House passes a climate-change bill and the Senate may soon follow - Bagging a whole bunch of high-ranking al Qaeda and Taliban masterminds – Appointing women and minorities to judicial positions at a faster rate than any of his predecessors - Hillary - Allowing federal funding of stem cell research - Taking a pragmatic stand on the Israel/Palestine conflict - His sense of humor, energy and optimism and fluency in the language that his predecessor could never master: English - Securing $20 billion as a downpayment from BP – Higher approval ratings than Reagan or Clinton had at the 18-month mark - A stimulus package that helped prevent Great Depression II.
The Bad: A stimulus package that isn’t helping prevent the Great Lingering and Democratic Party Damaging Recession of '08-??? - Foot-dragging on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell despite huge support for doing so - Refusal to investigate documented lawbreaking and war crimes by the previous administration - Not delivering the Executive Branch transparency as promised - Tossing the public option overboard way, way, way too early - Worrying too much about the deficit - Spending too much time pitching woo to Republicans who have no intention of reciprocating - Taking his base for granted - Horrible underestimation of the unemployment situation – Rahm, Geithner, Salazar - Turning a mostly-deaf ear to progressive economists - Slow-on-the-trigger response to the Gulf disaster - No end in sight to our military presence in Afghanistan.
Obama still frequently opts to stand in the middle of the road where, as Jim Hightower says, there's "nothing but yellow stripes and dead armadillos." Republicans, meanwhile, proudly stand a thousand yards away from the right-hand lane among the tumbleweeds, wielding far greater power than they should under the current composition of Congress. No doubt it's partly because our party is more ideologically-fragmented than the other side and the Senate procedure known as "cloture" is a progress-killer, but it's frustrating nonetheless. At the same time, historians have already pegged Obama as the 15th-best president, and that ain't exactly chopped liver. C&J's verdict: too early to tell. Meet me back here in another Friedman Unit and we'll compare notes again.
Have a nice Tuesday, and remember: Meaasure twice, cut once. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
You may think that I'm about to sneer, but I found the ticky-tacky, hocus-pocus foolishness of Cheers and Jeers appealing in a turn-off-your-frontal-lobes way.
---Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
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