From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Ho Ho Ho---It's Late Night Snark:
So thoughtful.
"President Obama lit the national Christmas tree. Or as Fox News reported it: 'OBAMA INSULTS ISRAEL.'"
---Seth Meyers
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"The U.S. Census Bureau says that, by the year 2043, white people will be in the minority in the United States. By that time, the country will be 15 percent black, 31 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent Republican."
---Jay Leno
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Good Things About the Mayan Apocalypse: After the Mayan apocalypse, there will be no more commercials that feature talking mucus. Thanks, Mayan apocalypse!
---Late Show with David Letterman
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"Today House Speaker John Boehner struck back with his plan to cut spending by demanding Obama come up with Boehner's plan to cut spending."
---Stephen Colbert
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"Last week a group of chefs baked the world’s largest pizza, which is gluten-free and contains 9,000 pounds of cheese. Or as Americans put it: You had me at ‘world’s largest pizza,' you lost me at ‘gluten-free,' and then you won me back with '9,000 pounds of cheese.'"
---Jimmy Fallon
And four years ago this month, we got a glimpse into the post-presidency plans of this human wrecking ball:
Clip of ABC News' Charles Gibson: You're only 62. Is there one more thing you really want to achieve?
George W. Bush: Um... That's interesting question. Wouldn't it be interesting for baby boomers not to retire in, y'know, nice places, but to retire during their retirement to go, y'know, help people deal with malaria or AIDS? I'm not suggesting that's what I'm gonna do. It is the kind of thing that intrigues me.
Jon Stewart: That's like walking up to a homeless guy and going, "Hey, imagine if I just gave you thousands of dollars...I bet that would totally change your life! Intriguing to think about, isn’t it? All right, See ya later!"
Face…meet palm.
Whatever you’re drinkin', I'm buyin'. Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Friday, December 21, 2012
Note: Here's the schedule for the next week:
Tonight: No C&J unless it happens via immaculate conception. (UPDATE: It's a MIRACLE!)
Monday evening: Join us for A Very Special C&J Christmas Eve Bean Supper and Nudeblogging, plus the Sharing of the Conspiracy Theories
Tuesday & Wednesday: A Very Special Two Days Off
Thursday & Friday: Part 1 and II of A Very Special Look Back at 2012
Please join us. C&J will be a winter wonderland of frosted window panes, icicles, snowmen and chilled beverages. Mainly because we forgot to take FINAL NOTICE seriously on our heating bill.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Christmas: 4
Days 'til the start of the month-long Skagit Eagle Festival in Concrete, Rockport and Marblemount, Washington: 16
Amount of time Santa can spend at each household in order to reach 2.5 billion of them in time for Christmas: 34 microseconds
Speed at which his reindeer have to fly: 3,604 miles per second
How quickly his sleigh would burst into flames based on the air resistance encountered at such speed: 4 milliseconds
(Source: Engineering firm Sweco via The Week)
Percent chance that the World Darts Championship winner will be the first 2013 world champion of any sport when crowned on Jan. 1: 100%
Prize money the champion will take home: $321,000
(Source: The New York Times)
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Friday Joe Lieberman Wanker Walk Countdown:
Chris Murphy replaces Joe Lieberman in the United States Senate in 13 days.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Gods walk among us. On four legs.
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CHEERS and JEERS to wearing white way after Labor Day. Autumn ended this morning at 6:12 ET, and was replaced with the season popularly known as "#!@*%!! winter!" It's coming in more lionish (tornadoes in the south, and a pain-in-the-ass winter storm in the midwest and east) than lambish. It's also the shortest and darkest day of the year, so at least we can look forward to teeny tiny slivers of extra light from now through late June. And now, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, here it is: your Moment of Stonehenge:
Warning: Don't look directly at this or you'll melt. --Mgt.
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JEERS to God's little tin-eared soldier. As we remember the victims on this, the one-weekiversary of the Newtown massacre, let us also remind ourselves of the universal truth under which we all live:
Newt Gingrich is a dick. He claims that, because we are
"driving God out of secular life," God is retaliating by allowing crazies with guns to shoot up schools and churches and theatres and Lord knows where he'll send us our next bullet-riddled message that we've lost our way. (In
a gospel church, God?
Really?!!) That kind of thinking, of course, is a self-evident lie. Unlike, say
Newt Gingrich is a dick, which is a self-evident truth.
P.S. I'd tell you what was said during NRA head Skeletar LaPierre's press conference today, but there was no press conference...just a 45-minute infomercial for guns. Thanks, but I'll pass. I own a dog who farts on command.
CHEERS to birth-of-bad-bills control. Hooray---Plan B worked exactly as advertised: it prevented a big mistake from happening. John Boehner's end-run around the fiscal cliff ended poorly last night. Rachel Maddow called it "motion without meaning." Or, as Charles Pierce noted at Esquire:
Christmas dinner at
the Boehner Mansion.
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What happened to John Boehner last night, when the feral children put Boehner's balls inside a Christmas pinata and invited themselves to take a whack, couldn't have happened to a nicer fellow. Boehner himself chose to be king of the dipwads. …
He couldn't get the votes because he couldn't budge enough Republicans to support a tax increase in the upper .01 percent of taxpayers. … He couldn't do it because he is a Republican pretending to be a fanatic who went hat in hand to a bunch of fanatics pretending to be Republicans.
But Boehner may have said it best himself
yesterday before he flamed out so spectacularly: "After today, Senate Democrats and the White House are going to have to act on this measure." Our pleasure: [
ker-FLUSH!!]
CHEERS to the Meeting of the Titans. 71 years ago tomorrow---two weeks after America was attacked at Pearl Harbor---President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington, D.C. (the Arcadia Conference) to plot their strategy against Germany and Japan. They came up with the following ten-point plan:
Barack Obama would be more popular
if he spoke in front of a bank of huge
microphones like Roosevelt did.
1. Declare war on Canada.
2. Send too few troops to the field of battle.
3. Let lawless private mercenaries do much of the heavy lifting.
4. Allow companies formerly run by the vice president to win no-bid contracts and rake in obscene profits while providing shitty services.
5. Ask for no sacrifice from the people and tell them to go shopping instead.
6. Don't give the troops the equipment they need to win battles and protect themselves.
7. Taunt the enemy by telling them to "Bring it on!"
8. Botch the reconstruction.
9. Cut taxes at the same time---twice!
10. Leave office in disgrace six years later having failed to finish the job, and leave it to your successor to clean up the mess.
Thank god they both sobered up.
No one could be that dumb.
JEERS to bad spelling. On December 21, 1989, Vice President Dan "Potatoe Head" Quayle sent out 30,000 Christmas cards that said: "May our nation continue to be the beakon of hope to the world." Really:
My spellchecker didn't even flag the word when I typed it---I just got a pop-up box that said, "You're shitting me. Please tell me you're shitting me."
CHEERS to home vegetation. So, yeah, this is, like, the kind of weekend tailor-made for couch potatoe'ing (I use the official Quayle dictionary spelling). You won’t be able to swing a cat without hitting some kind of holiday programming, for starters, including tonight's Christmas in Washington on TNT and tomorrow's 50th Anniversary showing of the first-ever animated holiday special, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (voiced by the late, great Jim Backus). The NFL schedule is here. (The Patriots will de-fang the Jacksonville Jaguars---Ha Ha Ha!!!) New DVD releases include Clint Eastwood talking to an empty baseball field in Trouble with the Curve and the pointless remake of Total Recall. (AICN's full list is here.) On 60 Minutes: Adele, Rodriguez and Taylor Swift opine on whether or not there's such a thing as too much cowbell.
Don’t forget to check out the best weekend morning shows: Up! With Chris Hayes (Glenn Greenwald will be on) and Melissa Harris-Perry. And here's your Sunday morning lineup, starting with a doozy:
NRA's Wayne LaPierre
will be on 'Meet the Press.'
Meet the Press: NRA President Wayne LaPierre will dodge answering simple questions with direct answers, deflect blame, obfuscate, lie and sneer. Then David Gregory will thank him for his time and say "we'll have to leave it there" even though he really doesn’t have to leave anything there because he could easily skip the damn beltway pundit roundtable (does anybody care what Harold Ford has to say anymore?) and continue grilling LaPierre until he gets straight answers about the organization's atrocious record and policies. Oh well. Plus Sens. Chuck Schumer and Lindsay Graham. Edgy booking!!!
This Week: NRA flack Asa Hutchinson; Brady Center's Sarah Brady; Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN); roundtable with Cory Booker, Peggy Noonan, Katrina Vanden Hueval, Grover Norquist and Matt Dowd.
Face the Nation: NRA President David Keene; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA); Sen. Jim DeMint's equally loopy replacement, Tim Scott (R-SC); Ben Affleck talks about his east Congo initiative.
CNN's State of the Union: Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH) and Mick Mulvaney (R-SC); Sen. Joe Lieberman takes his swan dive sings his swan song; NRA flack Asa Hutchinson; roundtable with Susan Page, Ron Brownstein, and Michael Duffy.
Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: Far-right Christian grifter Rick Warren hawks his books for profit (but, of course, no religious representative from the left will be on); Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY); roundtable with Kirsten Powers, Juan Williams, Bill Kristol and Laura Ingraham.
Happy viewing!
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Four years ago in C&J: December 21, 2008
FAREWELL to a nasty but very effective nemesis. Heritage Foundation founder and conservative hero Paul Weyrich is dead at 66. His contribution to civil discourse:
Weyrich delivers a speech
to the Heritage Foundation.
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More than any person, perhaps excluding President Ronald Reagan, whom he attacked as insufficiently conservative, Weyrich stitched the religious, social-issue voters into the secular fabric of the Republican Party. He co-founded the Washington-based Heritage Foundation in 1973 as a counterbalance to the liberal Brookings Institution and launched what became an influential network of conservative think tanks and talk radio shows that contributed to the culture wars of the past three decades.
I hate to speak ill of the departed, so let me see if I can say something nice. Um... Ah! He was a big fan of
trains! Oh wait, no...he tried to abolish Amtrak. Damn, this is hard.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to making a curmudgeonly noise. Sunday is the magical holiday known as Festivus. In accordance with tradition, I submit my list for the Airing of Grievances. The following have disappointed me over the past year:
• The cowardly rich people who try to buy elections with unlimited donations but without revealing their identities.
• Pragmatic purists who pretend to be purist pragmatists, purist pragmatists who pretend to be pragmatic purists, and pie that pretends to be cake. You know who you are!
• The traditional media, for another year of quoting politicians, "experts" and spokespeople without asking the fundamental question: "Are they speaking the truth, or am I being played for a sucker?" Too many times the answer is: Like a Charms Blow Pop.
• President Barack Obama, for messing around with Social Security during the fiscal curb talks.
• Wall Street barons, for maintaining their greedy, greedy ways and not even having the decency to pick the confetti out of their hair and the caviar out of their teeth before they tell us how grateful we should be for their awesomeness.
• Teabaggers, for achieving with ignorance and viciousness what a two-year-old achieves with creamed corn and a diaper.
• Compromises that only seem to extract concessions from the left.
• Whoever felt it was necessary to take from us this year: Whitney Houston, Andy Griffith, Dave Brubeck, Senator Daniel Inouye, Phyllis Diller, Levon Helm, George McGovern, Donna Summer, Dick Clark, Ernie Borgnine, Nora Ephron, Ray Bradbury, Maurice Sendak, the guy who invented the TV remote, and the thousands of victims of gun violence.
• Anyone who claims dinosaurs transported biblical characters over the river and through the woods to Grandma's house five thousand years ago. (Everyone knows it was six thousand, dummy!)
• God, as always, for not coming down here and straightening out this mess of a planet. (I think she's sleeping with another universe.)
To them and all the rest of the Worst Persons In The World I say...
"I GOT A LOT OF PROBLEMS WITH YOU PEOPLE!"
No problems with you, though. Have a super, great, awesome holiday weekend. If you're going over the river and through the woods, make sure your saddle is cinched up good and tight and you got your compass in your vest pocket. Safe travels. Floor's open... What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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