From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
Netroots Nation Auction Update…and a Really Funny Joke!
Netroots Nation Development Director Karen Kolber speak. You listen:
Hard to believe, but our 5th Annual Fall On-line Auction is next month! We're asking you to participate again this year in one of the following ways ...
Donate. Great items make a great auction. If you have collectibles, business or personal services, access to unique events, we need your donation. And if you're associated with an organization or company that is interested in donating an item or service, we're happy to acknowledge them as a sponsor on the auction website as well.
Tell a friend. Do you know someone who would be interested in donating or bidding on an item? Click here to refer a friend so they can be a part of the excitement too!
To donate to the auction (it's easy---I have the intellectual capacity of a three year-old and even I can do it), click click click here here here. They'll ask for some basic info about your utem(s), and then the auction committee (America's real super committee) will contact you by email after they review it.
C&J will be donating items of great awesomeness and exclusivity, so stay tuned for updates. The proceeds, by the way, go to help fund NN 2012 in Providence June 7-10, which early tracking polls indicate has an 89 percent chance of being the best convention ever. (Register here before the price goes up in 9 days.)
And now, a really funny joke.
Today is "Presidential Joke Day," and I thought you'd enjoy this whopper, courtesy of MSNBC's contributing racist/Hitler sympathizer Pat Buchanan. This is from his August 8 birdcage liner, which you can Google if ya like, cuz I ain't linkin' to it:
To see how absurd it is to blame Tea Party Republicans for the downgrading of America’s debt, imagine this scenario: Rep. Ron Paul is speaker of the House, Sen. Rand Paul is majority leader, and Rep. Paul Ryan is president of the United States. Does anyone doubt this trio would restore the U.S credit rating in a New York minute?
If he pops that baby onto a long-play 78rpm acetate disc, he'd have the Grammy Award for Comedy Album of the Year in the bag. (But I'll admit the premise would make a great horror flick.)
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, August 11, 2011
Note: To cure anything that ails you, drink root beer. Lots and lots of root beer. Gallons and gallons and gallons of root beer. As fast as you can! A public service message from the National Root Beer Bottlers Association.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the military's 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy officially expires: 40
Days `til Seattle Hempfest: 8
Current size of the U.S. auto-industry employment force "devoted to fuel-efficient vehicle technologies": 155,000
(Source: UAW, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation report)
Amount senior citizens lost last year to "financial predators and scam artists": $2.9 billion
(Source: Money magazine via The Week)
Decline in "unrestrained deaths" on Colorado roads since police began ticketing drivers for not wearing seat belts in 2002: 56%
(Source: USA Today)
Price some rich guy shelled out a 200 year-old bottle of Chateau d' Yquem, the most ever paid for a bottle of white wine: $117,000
Cost of renting the historic Samford Hall at Auburn University for weddings during, respectively, the spring/summer and fall: $650, $1,000
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
The only people I see in public office trying to address what's wrong with this economy are Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. Reich has been valiantly struggling to get raising the minimum wage on his boss' agenda and coming up with one improvement and suggestion after another on worker training. Kennedy came out with a multi-pronged plan earlier this month to attack what he calls "the quiet Depression," which contains a lot of carrots as well as sticks to get corporations to Do the Right Thing. (Someday even conservatives are going to notice that Ted Kennedy is the most effective senator in Washington: He has a wonderful habit of getting Republicans like Nancy Kassebaum and Orrin Hatch to cosponsor good legislation.) Kennedy's plan covers the Federal Reserve Board, proposes a two-tier corporate tax plan to favor those that treat workers well, closes lots of stinky corporate tax loopholes, puts brakes on mergers and acquisitions, helps small business, helps labor, helps secure pension plans, and more.
---February, 1996
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Puppy Pic of the Day: One more reason why dogs should rule the world…
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FAREWELL to a pair of old-timers who have moved on. My partner Michael's grandmother was born during the William Howard Taft administration, and she witnessed 17 subsequent presidencies. Ruth Hunt was a longtime nurse at St. Mary's Hospital in Saginaw, Michigan…and she took no guff. A Christian conservative with a heart of gold (she spent endless hours as a volunteer) and a live-and-let-live attitude, she rolled with the news that her grandson had finally met his flatulence-prone Prince Charming. We got along great from the start (especially as take-no-prisoners partners during games of Euchre), and she almost always closed her frequent letters to Michael with, "Regards to Bill." Gram was 98---98!!!---and died Tuesday without a pretentious or inauthentic bone in her body. And she loved pooties.
Which brings us to Meteor Blades---aka Tim Lange aka User ID #6---who is very much alive but also very much suddenly-departed from Daily Kos. The good news: it's not for health reasons. The bad news: the imagination reels over what it might be---I hope he's not out robbing banks in a beat-up Studebaker. (Actually, nyceve slipped this into a diary by kos last night: "MB told many of us at NN that he was going to be doing some very significant writing that he was very excited about. This was a guy settling in for the long haul.") It will be very odd around here for awhile not seeing his orange byline dangling above his sharp observations. This morning I can only offer the highest praise I can think of to my online friend: I got educated at the School of Meteor. Eat yer heart out, Yoda.
JEERS to Wall Street's Law of Gravity: what takes a painfully long time to go up must come crashing down in no more than four consecutive trading sessions. SHIT! After the Dow closed down another 49 bajillion points (I rounded up), I called to find out what was left of the meager 401k I'd built up from my last job. Apparently I'm down to six pennies, four marbles, a half-eaten tuna sandwich and the proceeds from Victoria Jackson's comeback tour. But I'm told that if I just ride this out and keep my wits about me, I can expect to retire in twenty years with a cow and two packs of gum. I'm in!!!
JEERS to dumb moves. Speaking of Presidential Joke Day, this was a real-knee-slapper back in the day: on August 11, 1984, during a radio voice test, President Reagan joked: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." (Listen to it here.) The Russians had a good laugh over it...right after they carefully tucked their missiles back in their silos and sucked down a bottle of vodka. Not necessarily in that order.
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Answer Man. Atrios asks: So, who killed the confidence fairy?
Teabaggers.
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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JEERS to not-so-great vanishing acts. I don’t know if things are like this in your town, but here in Portland people are stealing cars a lot more often these days---the numbers for the first half of this year are more than double those from all of last year. Investigators, donning Sherlock Holmes hats and curly pipes, are sensing a pattern:
"The most common vehicle stolen would be the one the keys were left in," said Sgt. Dean Goodale, of the department's Criminal Investigation Division.
("No need to worry---I'm just dashing into this convenience store to buy condoms and beer! Just take a sec! What could go wrong?") And speaking of stealing cars, I'm curious: do you ever call 911 when you hear that ear-splitting WooWooBlatBlatWhooooop known as the car alarm? Me neither. Mainly because I hope someone's actually stealing the thing so we can get back to sleep.
CHEERS to cleaning up after "The war to end all wars." On August 11, 1919, Germany’s Weimar Constitution came into being. It was quite liberal for its time, bestowing more rights than we currently have in this country:
Persons have the right to be notified within a day of their arrest or detention as to the authority and reasons for their detention and be given the opportunity to object. This is equivalent to the principle of habeas corpus in the common law of England and elsewhere.
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A German's home is an asylum and is inviolable.
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Privacy of correspondence, of mail, telegraph, and telephone are inviolable.
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Germans are entitled to free expression of opinion in word, writing, print, image, etc. This right cannot be obstructed by job contract, nor can exercise of this right create a disadvantage. Censorship is prohibited.
Wow. And then Hitler came along and fucked it all up. Anyway, it was signed 92 years ago today by President Friedrich Ebert. He gave it two thumbs up!
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Five years ago in C&J: August 11, 2006
JEERS to Ostrichland USA. Well, this is a lovely sign of our collective national brainpower: A Harris poll shows that half of all Americans still think Iraq had WMDs. On the bright side 92% correctly guessed that our Missile Defense Shield consists of Diet Coke and Menthos. So I suppose all hope is not yet lost.
CHEERS to Randi Rhodes and DKos's own Hunter. For pointing out yesterday that the airline terrorist plot was foiled by British law enforcement, not torture, extraordinary rendition, illegal domestic spying or conventional warfare. Gee, who got slammed for promoting that idea a couple years ago? Oh yeah...John Kerry. And who treated him like a loony traitor for it? Oh yeah...the knuckledragger wing of the Republican party. At the risk of sounding like a broken record: Be safe---vote for Democrats.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to #1. Don’t know if you raised a glass to the internet last weekend or not, but you had good reason to: Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the first web site:
In the past two decades we’ve been given ecommerce and spam, we’ve torn down the music, news, and publishing industries, and we’ve LOLed at more CATS than we can count. We’ve seen empires rise and fall, the dissolution of the line between public and private, and the end of enforceable copyright. We’ve seen new modes of communication drive out unwanted regimes at home and abroad and we’ve heard the endless howl of a million voices calling out at once...
You can see that first web page in all its geeky glory here. On behalf of the porn industry, pootie lovers, and all five million widows of Nigerian foreign ministers who desperately want to give you millions of dollars if you'll just give them your bank account number, the world would like to say to Tim Berners-Lee, the first man on the virtual moon …
[Buffering…]
[Buffering…]
[Buffering…]
…TY! LOLZ!
Have I turned your brain to mush this morning? Excellent. Carry on. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
AP: U.S. to tell Bill in Portland Maine that he must go
---USA Today
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