From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
Our Blogging Continues After This Message…
Attention billionaires!
Are you looking for a convenient way to celebrate Easter while also protecting your precious financial assets? If so, here's good news! Now you can arrange a one-on-one consultation with The Onepercenter Bunny!
"Your golden eggs are safe
with me, trust fund baby."
That's right. The Onepercenter Bunny---your fluffy and confidential partner in asset relocation! This crafty little lagomorph knows just where to stash the eggs in your financial basket. Barbados, the Bahamas, the Caymans, the British Virgin Islands. And don’t forget those nifty little lock boxes in---yodelayheehoo!---Switzerland!
The Onepercenter Bunny will hide your wealth in the safest tax havens so you can keep more of it for the things that matter to you most: buying politicians and duping the most gullible commoners into voting against their self-interest so you can make even more money for the Onepercenter Bunny to hide. It's win-win!
Let the socialist, entitlement-obsessed Easter Bunny re-distribute his silly eggs among the moocher class. With the Onepercenter Bunny in your corner, you'll be saying: "Hippity Hoppity ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching I just bought out the entire egg industry and got Congress to repeal all the egg industry safety laws!"
To contact the Onepercenter Bunny, just make an outrageous statement that gets splashed across the media about how billionaires in America are the real victims of oppression. We'll be in touch.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, April 2, 2015
Note: Thanks to everyone who chipped in to buy the Easter Bunny a fuzzy Kevlar bodysuit and matching helmet. Hopefully this will prevent the kind of accident that happened last year when he got grazed in the tuchus by a stand-your-ground nut. Together, we made a difference!
-
9 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til Free Ice Cream Cone Day at
Ben and Jerry's:
12
Days 'til the
Heavy Seas Island Jam in Baltimore:
9
Amount Lufthansa's insurers are setting aside for costs related to Germanwings crash:
$300 million
(Source: The Week)
January-to-January increase in home prices:
4.6%
(Source: Standard & Poor's)
U.S. Cider sales in 2011 and 2014, respectively:
$78 million, $470 million
(Source: Nielsen Research)
Year that Peeps were introduced nationally:
1958
Odds of being killed by falling out of bed:
1-in-2,000,000
(Source: The internet, which I'm fond of reading)
-
Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
The shame for journalism is that it has always been so easy to expose those few "scientific" voices claiming there is nothing to global warming. When the money for "scientific research" on such a subject comes from oil companies, skepticism is required.
Instead, many "journalists" let the bullies on the right cow us with the "liberal media" nonsense and reported there was "a debate" over global warming. There was no debate. The only question is how fast it's happening. And the answer that keeps coming up is "faster than we thought. And still faster."
---April, 2006
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: saved!!!
-
CHEERS to throwin' the bums out. Hey, looka this! It turns out that if you prick ISIS it actually bleeds:
I hope they didn't damage the monument
to the shoe thrown at Bush in '08.
The month-long operation to recapture Tikrit has been the biggest launched yet by the government against IS. It stalled for a time, but was given fresh momentum when the US-led coalition began air strikes last week.
The army says it regards Tikrit's recapture as a key stage before it tries to retake Iraq's second city, Mosul, and drive IS out of the country altogether.
Prime Minister al-Abadi traveled to Tikrit and raised the Iraqi flag in victory. But he stopped short of putting up a
Mission Accomplished banner because, "Only a total freaking idiot would do that."
JEERS to breaking what wasn't broke. Chris Christie's plan to privatize everything in his state so he can funnel tons of money to his private-sector cronies is proceeding right on schedule. The latest buddies to hit the lottery are literally the ones running the lottery:
For Christie's buddies,
it's a dream come true.
-
When Chris Christie privatized New Jersey's lottery two years ago, he said its new overseers would "modernize and maximize" the games. Instead, a lottery once ranked among the nation's top performers is now lagging for the second straight year, trailing its state income targets by $64 million seven months into the current fiscal year. Meanwhile, the company running it has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire lobbyists and a public relations firm with close ties to the governor. […]
"Missing the mark so badly with all of these proven methods for generating lottery revenues is like spitting and missing the floor," said John Kindt, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois who studies gambling policy and has been critical of lottery privatization.
When asked how he intends to clean up this mess and all the others he's created over the last five years, Christie said, "I don’t know---that's the Democrats' job."
CHEERS to Charles Hall. He patented a cheap way to process aluminum 126 years ago today. And made the world safe for paranoids everywhere. Remember, bunker dwellers: shiny side out!
JEERS to that one time I agreed with Tony Perkins. In the wake of Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson's refusal to sign the Freedom To Discriminate Against Gays bill, the Family Research Council's chief nattering nabob tweeted:
As it turns out, I've had Perkins' last five words above tattooed on my hiney for years. I don’t know if that's just a coincidence or not, but I do know one thing: time to get some window blinds.
Generic graphics ROCK!!!
CHEERS to big balls, little balls, balls balls balls! After a wild March of ups and downs and smiles and frowns, your NCAA Fabulous Four
men's matchups are: Wisconsin vs. Kentucky (a repeat of last year) and Michigan State vs. Duke. They'll play Saturday and whittle the field down to two. Same with the
Women's Division Sunday as Connecticut takes on Maryland and Notre Dame faces South Carolina. Not many people know this, but I tried to compete on the court in school. Didn’t work out too well. The basketball kept breaking my badminton racquet.
CHEERS to human endurance. The world's oldest person, Misao Okawa of Japan, has passed on. The cause of death was listed as an acute case of being 117.
CHEERS to double-digit leads. Via Polling Report comes these fresh numbers from the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll that don’t mean a whole lot but are still pretty to look at:
In graph form.
The way the Republicans in Congress are doing their job:
Approve 27%
Disapprove 68%
The way the Democrats in Congress are doing their job:
Approve 38%
Disapprove 57%
At least it gives us bragging rights. Our side gets an F. Their side gets an F-minus.
-
Ten years ago in C&J: April 2, 2005
JEERS to scaring people away. USA Today reports that the weak dollar is doing little to attract tourists to America: The story here. Gee...you spend four years re-tooling your country to be a war-loving, gun-, God- and gas-obsessed land of arrogance and those crazy foreigners just turn on ya.
-
And just one more…
CHEERS to the winners who walk among us. Every Friday our C&J poll asks, "Who won the week?" We always try to round up a representative sample of the people and events that spark feelings of optimism in the Kossack bosom. With the first quarter of the year behind us, here are the victors for January through March of 2015, as diverse a bunch as we've ever seen:
Jan. 9 The anonymous Ferguson grand juror in the Michael Brown murder case who's suing county prosecutor Bob McCulloch to get his/her lifetime gag order lifted so he/she can talk about it publicly
Jan. 16 The millions who spoke out and marched for freedom of speech after the Charlie Hebdo murders, and created such demand for the new issue that a 5 million run was necessary
Jan. 23 President Obama: SOTU address is equal parts idealism, realism and swagger ("I know because I won both times" = classic.) Bonus points for 1st SOTU acknowledging the transgender community.
Jan. 30 Loretta Lynch, who ran rings around the Republican brats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on her way to likely confirmation as Attorney General
Winners each get to spend ten minutes with
this trophy I found in our neighbor's garage.
-
Feb. 6 FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, for protecting net neutrality by announcing that the internet will be regulated like a utility. Also: John Oliver and the grassroots movement that persuaded Wheeler to change his mind.
Feb. 13 Claudia Klein Felske, a 2010 Wisconsin Teacher of the Year, who publicly called out Gov. Scott Walker for lying about her to score political points in his war on public school teachers
Feb. 20 President Obama: "Countering Violent Extremism" summit; designates three new National Monuments; Obamacare signups head toward 12 million; loves America more than Rudy Giuliani by a factor of infinity
Feb. 27 FCC Commissioners Tom Wheeler, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel, for voting to regulate the internet as a utility, thus ensuring net neutrality
March 6 de facto Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for showing John Boehner how to get a clean Homeland Security funding bill passed and save Amtrak
March 13 President Obama: Selma speech, signs Student Aid Bill of Rights, hangs out with Jimmy Kimmel while Republicans eat themselves alive
March 20 Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D), for signing into law a measure in which everyone who gets a driver's license is automatically registered to vote
March 27 Little League pitching sensation Mo'ne Davis, for her response to being called a derogatory slur by a Bloomsbury University baseball player: "Everyone makes mistakes and everyone deserves a second chance.”
I gotta say, for a site that regularly gets bashed by the so-called "purists" who say we hate President Obama, he sure does win a lot. In fact, he seems to be having quite a winning year at the creaky old Great Orange Satan. Curious, dat.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
“Go after Bill in Portland Maine with a knife and fork.”
---Bruce C. Bridgman
-