From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
"It's A Festivus Miracle!"
Today is the magical holiday known as Festivus. In accordance with tradition, I submit part of my 2014 list for the Airing of Grievances. The following have disappointed me over the past year:
• Those in the traditional media who gave us another year of their "both sides do it" and "some say" journalism shtick that generates more heat than light. On the one hand, you're hacks. On the other hand... Oops, we're out of time so we'll have to leave it there.
• The science deniers, who accomplish for the advancement of civilization with a Bible and ignorance what a baby accomplishes with a diaper and creamed corn.
• Dick Cheney, who never met a cat he didn’t want to kick.
• Texting drivers. Oh, you have no idea.
• President Barack Obama, for failing to solve all of the problems in the world with a stroke of his pen, despite the unanimous backing of Congress, the public and every foreign country. (It's like he wants us to fail.)
• Wall Street barons, for being walking stereotypes of greedy bastards.
• Democrats who don’t campaign as Democrats.
• God, for not coming down here and straightening out this mess of a planet. She's dating another universe, isn’t she?
• The fates that took from us Maya Angelou, Mike Nichols, Joe Cocker, Pete Seeger, Robin Williams, Harold Ramis, Joan Rivers, Jimmy Ruffin, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the thousands of victims of gun violence.
• Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy, for hanging a giant "RULINGS FOR SALE" sign in front of the Supreme Court.
To them and the other 455 on my list (down from last year's 482) I say...
"I GOT A LOT OF PROBLEMS WITH YOU PEOPLE!"
If you're not able to join C&J tomorrow evening for our live nudeblogging, have a super, great and awesome The Holidays. Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Note: Here's the schedule for the rest of the week:
Tomorrow EVENING: Join us around 8pm ET for A Very Special C&J Christmas Eve Bean Supper and Conspiracy Theory Nudeblogging. It's a moment to sit on wooden benches and reflect on all the blessings of the season loudly, drunkenly, pungently and with no regard for the neighbors.
Thursday and Friday: No C&J.
And next week: A Very Special Look Back at 2014 with special guests: nipple tassles twirling in opposite directions.
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18 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til Martin Luther King, Jr. Day:
27
Days 'til the
Ice Cold Beer Fest in Minocqua, Wisconsin:
18
Number of murders in 1993 and 2013, respectively, according to FBI data:
24,526 / 14,196
Chart positions of
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and
White Christmas on this date in 1952:
#1, #2, #3
Percent chance that 12/23 is one of the three deadliest days of the year for pedestrians:
100%
(Source: Parade)
Min. weight of the gingerbread White House:
300 lbs.
(Source:
The real White House)
Expected high temperature in Portland, Maine on Christmas Day, which would set a new record:
55°
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Tuesday Words of Wisdom from the Right-wing Blogosphere:
Triple play from World Net Daily commenters re: Dish Network pulling Fox News:
Dish Network = Tyranny = Obamacare
---Sharknado
How Soviet of Dish Network! Millions may be pissed off enough to unsubscribe and switch to cable service.
---Durabo
Get yourself educated! People who subscribe to satellite do so because they don't have ACCESS to cable. Man, you city dwelling sheep are STUPID!
---Looking4Sanity
All together now: 1…2…3…
Classy!
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Puppy Pic of the Day: One year later….
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DOUBLE CHEERS to people who work on Christmas eve and Christmas day. Police, fire, medical, electric, media, national security, rum distilleries...you know who you are. If you're not getting at least double pay and comp time, your employer should get a one-way ticket to a quail-hunting junket with Dick Cheney. (Or at least a one-way trip to Dallas to scoop dog poop with Dubya...or is that too cruel?)
JEERS to the un-logic of the gun nut mind. Two police officers get assassinated in New York City, and before the bodies are cold the NRA-loving lunatic fringe opens a line of attack blaming the deaths on those crazy black protesters and that crazy black president and that crazy mayor with the black kid. Perhaps they should be looking into a mirror when they point those fingers…
They just don’t care, is all.
CHEERS to a setback for the crazy God Squad. Cue the wailing and garment rending from the right-wingers…a federal judge says that North Carolina's mandatory ultrasound law violates the Constitution:
Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote that the law goes far beyond what most states have done to ensure that a woman gives informed consent to an abortion. … The North Carolina law would have required abortion providers to display and describe the ultrasound even if the woman refused to look and listen---a mandate that the court found particularly troublesome.
"The most serious deviation from standard practice is requiring the physician to display an image and provide an explanation and medical description to a woman who has through ear and eye covering rendered herself temporarily deaf and blind," Wilkinson wrote.
Yeah. Something about surrendering two of your senses, under duress, to the government as a requirement for pursuing a personal medical decision strikes me as cruel and unusual punishment. Didn't the CIA just get busted for doing that?
"Ho Ho Ho!"
JEERS to ye jolly old fireball. We pulled this nugget off the Internets so it must be true: "To deliver his gifts in one night, Santa would have to make 822.6 visits per second, sleighing at 3,000 times the speed of sound. At that speed, Santa and his reindeer would burst into flame instantaneously." And yet...Santa
does make his 822 visits per second, and
does travel at 3,000 times the speed of sound, and he
does deliver his gifts in one night, and he has
not self-combusted. In fact, every year he gets
tracked by NORAD. So someone owes Santa---and the world---an apology. How do I lodge a complaint with the internet?
CHEERS to Chicago-style diplomacy. It goes like this: North Korea pulls a knife, Obama pulls a gun. North Korea sends the online servers of a movie studio to the hospital, Obama sends North Korea's online servers to the morgue:
Oops. Did we do that?
The reclusive country's state-run Internet has been down "hard" for about three hours, according to Dyn Research earlier this afternoon, which monitors the state of the Internet around the globe. "I haven't seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in [North Korea] before," Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research told the website NorthKoreaTech.org. "Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently."
"And what did you do on your vacation Mr. President?" "Oh, golfed, read, enjoyed my family, ate some shave ice, shut down North Korea's internet…pretty quiet."
CHEERS to great breakthroughs. On December 23, 1947, John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor in New Jersey (and later won the Nobel Prize in physics for their feat). It originally was a relatively big old thing, but today they're as small as a single atom. To put that in perspective, it's the equivalent of all the good Republican ideas for dealing with the income inequality, climate change and health care combined. Except bigger.
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Five years ago in C&J: December 23, 2009
JEERS to vetting bells. Oh great. Just when you thought all the Bush ineptitude had been exposed, here comes another bit of fun: a government report says that during his administration the CDC apparently got a little loosey goosey with conflicts of interest:
The report looked at how well the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked for and dealt with conflicts among about 250 scientific experts who served on 17 advisory panels in 2007. ... Almost none of the 250 advisers that year properly or completely filled out forms in which they were required to state potential conflicts of interest, according to the report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General.
It'll take a while to untangle all the connections, but for now CDC officials say Americans should no longer refer to the 2007 publications "Arsenic: It's What's For Dinner," "Feeling Down? Let GlaxoSmithKlein Be Your Little Medicine Cabinet Buddy," and "Buy Lysol Now or Germs Will Eat Your Face."
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And just one more…
JEERS to getting sabotaged by your own team. Sorry to break it to ya, O'Reilly, Hannity, Palin and you other "beakons" (to use the official Dan Quayle spelling) of freedom. As much as you want to blame the crazy liberals for killing CHRISTmas, the stone-cold truth is, you got stabbed in the back by one of your own. From 2004:
2004 blasphemy
While President Bush was re-elected last month in an election victory many attributed to an outpouring of support by evangelical Christians impressed with his candid outspokenness about his faith, some Americans notice the White House website lacks even a single mention of Jesus, whose birth is celebrated by hundreds of millions worldwide Dec. 25. [...]
The official White House site proclaims this as the “Season of Merriment and Melody” – not the birth of the Savior of the world. ... the baby Jesus is virtually invisible
Shocking! And this from
2005:
2005 tyranny
The official season's greetings card being sent out by the [Bush] White House on behalf of the president and first lady is stirring up controversy. CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante reports that the reason is because the card never uses the word "Christmas," in deference to other holidays celebrated at this time of year, such as Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year's Day. [...]
"It's a Christmas card," says William Donohue, president of The Catholic League. "What's wrong with the president of the United States, who's a practicing Christian, from saying 'Merry Christmas' in his Christmas card?" [...] "The president of the United States, we thought, is one of us," Donohue says.
Face it, Fox. The War on Christmas was an inside job. You got played by a guy who now paints self-portraits in the shower. Victory and ticker-tape parade denied. But good luck next year!
If you're on the road or in the air today, safe travels. If not, then safe not traveling. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Study: Cheers and Jeers Kiddie Pool Bubbles Might Be Helpful For Future Power-Generation
---GeekInfinite
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