From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
A Pause in the Mayhem
I admit it. I have written things on this blog that have been unkind to Republicans.
Twice, in fact, according to my memory. I called them "poopyheads" in 2006, and "Super Duper Pooper Scooperheads" in 2009. In hindsight, I regret my tone.
At the end of the day, we must remember that, sink or swim, we're all playing in the same sandbox. It's a small world after all. Some people say it's a small small small small world. To atone for my incivility, yesterday I reached across the aisle. Or, more accurately, across the blogosphere.
As we occasionally do when events call for a smidgeon of calm in the storm, C&J donned its chiffon tri-corn hat and slipped under the right-wing blogosphere's barb-wire silly-string perimeter in search of common ground. We searched high and low, side-to-side and even diagonally for comments on right-wing blogs that perhaps---perhaps---we can all agree on. I'm pleased to say that we were successful, and we're happy to post these deep and abiding truths from the blogobunkers of our conservative fellow Americans:
I suppose we need some good news. We don’t get much these days.
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I like watching a good football game myself.
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You should be prepared to hurl your lunch.
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I really do wonder how some of these people got so rich.
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I honestly cannot tell you how disgusted I am with the House Republicans today.
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I hate Ramen. Waaay too salty. And they aren't filling at all.
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WE THE PEOPLE have the right to FIRE our “representatives” if they fail to do what WE THE PEOPLE have hired them for.
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I heard my first Lady Gaga song about a month ago.
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It's time to stop horsing around.
Indeed. And Amen. It should be noted, however, that conservative bloggers haven't reached out to our side like I did to theirs. And that's okay. They can't help it if they're a bunch of great big [Redacted...with love] heads.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Note: Today's C&J is paired with a 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild Jeroboam. Please deposit $144,000 and then place your glass under your little USB hole thingy.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the first pre-season NFL games: 15
Days `til the Machias Wild Blueberry Festival in Maine: 24
Approximate percent of American households who don’t have a land-line phone: 30%
Percent who didn’t have one in 2008: 14%
(Source: The Washington Post via The Week)
Percent of all adults worldwide who have a "headache disorder" such as migraine or tension headaches: 47%
(Source: World Health Organization)
Cost of the new complex that Dow Chemical wants to build…in Saudi Arabia: $20 billion
Year during which United States Steel last turned a profit, as it just did in the second quarter of this year: 2008
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 182 (including 6 Climates and 1 spicy Bible class). Soul Protection Factor 30 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Every dog has its day. But today this one gets his own stamp. (1895 photo here.)
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CHEERS to post blame-game analysis. Shortly after the news broke about the Oslo terrorist, America's right-wing media machine sprang into action and fingered the culprit: a scary brown Muslim, probably from a scary brown country. Turns out that the guy who unleashed the horror was actually a white Danish Islamophobe who was sweet on nutty American right-wing blogs. You might call that kind of media mistake indefensible, but Stephen Colbert found a way to turn their rush-to-judgment asses into save-our-asses-aid:
"Some say that these false reports of Muslim involvement were a widespread failure of the media. I say that by going with their guts, these journalists were able to get the story that they wanted and scoop reality! And even if there was a rush to judgment, we must not repeat that mistake by rushing to accuracy. Just because the confessed murderer is a blond, blue-eyed Norwegian-born anti-Muslim crusader, doesn’t mean he's not a swarthy ululating Middle Eastern madman. …
To my fellow journalistic gun-jumpers, I will now write all the headlines for the rest of the year: BAD THING HAPPENS SOMEPLACE. MUSLIMS INVOLVED. Now we can put our journalistic energies where they’re needed: writing the retractions."
On page 23C. In very small print.
JEERS to the continuing distraction from job creation. This is Day 6 of our daily updates on the debt crisis. Here's the latest, courtesy of special guest blogger, The Rude Pundit:
Let's say that we came up with a pledge, one that we wanted all members of Congress to sign, one that would liberate them, but one that demanded something from them.
The pledge could go something like this:
"I, __, pledge to the taxpayers of the __ district of the state of ___ and to the American people that I will: ONE, kick Grover Norquist in the balls whenever he is within kicking range; and TWO, freely vote my conscience on tax raises and cuts, dependent on the reality of economic circumstance, unshackled from bullshit pledges (except this one)."
Then, in this fantasy world we're concocting, whenever Grover Norquist walked up to a member of Congress to lobby them on his mad "never-ever, no-how, no-matter-what, you-better-not raise taxes" pledge, that member of Congress could say, "Sorry, Grover. Signed another pledge first," and kick him in the balls.
Join us tomorrow when we'll have some awesome discounts on steel-toed shoes.
CHEERS to the end of the end. It was all over for Tricky Dick on July 27, 1974, thanks to a 27-11 vote by the House Judiciary Committee to adopt the first of three articles of impeachment against President Nixon who, said ABC News's Tom Jarrell at the time, was "presumably still in his swim trunks" while on vacation in California when he heard the news. (Now there's a lovely early-morning visual for ya.) Meanwhile, then-VP Gerald Ford just couldn’t help but play a little game of up-is-downism:
Ford: It's interesting that every Democrat on the committee---north and south---voted for the article. ... It tends to make it a partisan issue.
Reporter: Even if one-third of Republicans voted for it?
Ford: Well, the fact that every one of the Democrats voted for it, I think, uh, lends credence that it's a partisan issue, even though some Republicans have deviated.
...said the Republican who later unilaterally exonerated the Republican crook. But, hey, what's a little hypocrisy among friends?
JEERS to the infrastructure crumblers. Thanks a lot, House Republicans. Because they smell an opportunity to further weaken transportation unions, they've cut off funding for the FAA, idling 4,000 workers in the process. The partial shutdown affects a host of construction projects that will cause disruptions on the use of various control towers and runways. (Not affected: world's worst pilot Senator James Inhofe, who never met a closed runway he couldn’t illegally land on.) One group of weasels you won’t hear complaining too loudly is the airline industry itself. This is so Gordon Gekko:
Airlines are tossing consumers aside and grabbing the benefit of lower federal taxes on travel tickets. By Saturday night, nearly all the major U.S. airlines had raised fares to offset taxes that expired the night before.
That means instead of passing along the savings, the airlines are pocketing the money while customers pay the same amount as before. … The expiring taxes can total $25 or more on a typical $300 round-trip ticket. They died after midnight Friday night when Congress failed to pass legislation to keep the Federal Aviation Administration running.
Shared sacrifice in action. To quote Nancy Pelosi: "We get the sacrifice, they get the wealth." Have a nice flight. Enjoy your microscopic pretzel.
JEERS to hounding the wrong guy. Fifteen years ago today, in 1996, domestic right-wing terrorist nut Eric Rudolph detonated a pipe bomb at the Summer Olympic games in Atlanta. The blast killed one person and injured over a hundred more, but it could've been worse if security guard Richard Jewell hadn’t found the bomb and tried to move people out of harm's way. The hero was later pilloried in the press and by the late-night gaggle (Leno called him the "Una-doofus") when it became known that the FBI considered him a suspect. Then, when his name was officially cleared, they moved on and dumped his reputation by the side of the road like a rodent carcass. Wikipedia reminds us of what the media should've learned:
Jewell's case became an example of the damage that can be done by reporting based on unreliable or incomplete information...
Mr. Lesson From The Past, meet Mr. ADD.
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C&J Flashback: 2004 Democratic Convention---July 27
Speakers include:
Sen. Tom Daschle
Howard Dean
Teresa Heinz Kerry
Sen. Ted Kennedy
Barack Obama, U.S. Senate candidate (DON'T miss him!)
Ron Reagan
CHEERS to Night One. Carter, Gore and the Clintons hit the perfect pitch, offering a multitude of reasons to boot Bush without going rabid. Our favorite quote of the night, from Gore: "And let's make sure that this time every vote is counted. Let's make sure that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president, and that this president is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court." P.S.---bonus points for a more tactful smooch with Tipper this time around.
CHEERS to Blogging by the Numbers. Steve Gilliard sheds light on how to be a blogger at a convention. It's a great read. C&J adds: 9) Avoid garlic breath 10) Bring clean socks 11) Call your mother.
CHEERS to bad judgment gone good. USA Today hires Ann Coulter to write daily DNC convention column, then deems it unprintable. Says Coulter: "Apparently no one at USA Today had ever read Ann Coulter before." Lucky ducks.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to two-by-fours for freedom and justice! We've got a little saying around here, widely credited to Darlene at the laundromat across the street: "Good fences make good neighbors." This is mostly true. Around our apartment building we have a few fences that separate us from the various homes around us, and we get along fine with our neighbors. But a while back a credit union bought the building catty-corner to us, and they did a bunch of landscaping and whatnot and…long story short…they ripped out a chain-link fence and replaced it with a beautiful new wood one that had a slightly smaller footprint, which left a gap between it and another fence, so people could now slip through and take a short-cut to the next block. No one abused the privilege until a couple weeks ago when, behind our garage, which is next to the new short-cut path, this dog shit appears! And it wasn't Molly, our chocolate lab's dog shit, because I clean hers up with…out…fail. No, this shit belonged to someone else's dog. The next day: more dog shit. And the next day: more dog shit. Someone was actually taking the short-cut into our yard, letting their dog shit, and then leaving---literally, a shitty neighbor. So enough was enough. Saturday I closed off the short-cut by nailing up a makeshift fence consisting of the most clumsily-assembled bits of scrap wood within a hundred miles. They're jagged and splintery and paint-splotched, and there's a minimum of eight nails in each end of each scrap, half of them bent crazily at 90-degree angles---and rusty. It looks like it was put up by an angry lunatic with one tooth in his head and a keen ear for invaders. So, anyway, it worked. No more dog shit. Problem solved, peace restored, all is right with the world again. Moral of the story: don't knock the shitty fences---they make good neighbors, too.
Have a nice Wednesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
"Bill in Portland Maine lives in a make-believe world, where down is up, up is down, candy is a vegetable, and vegetables are candy.”
---Gov. Martin O'Malley (D-MD)
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