From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Good morning.
Americans Against Insecure Billionaires with Tiny Hands PAC is a nationwide coalition of patriots dedicated to exposing the truth about Donald Trump's dangerous tiny baby hands.
We are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. We are right-handers, left-handers, and ambidextrii. We do not agree on everything, but we all come together around the fact that American cannot risk a president with pathetic stubby mouse fingers.
Spring ends and a new season starts today. Happy silly.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, June 20, 2016
Note: Please disregard your original horoscope for today. Due to a rounding error we've determined that your face won’t actually get chewed off by a mob of rabid wombats. The correct horoscope is: "You'll cheer up a friend with a Gumby Pez dispenser." We regret the error. ---Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the general election: 140
Days 'til the UFO Festival in Roswell, New Mexico: 10
Percent chance Microsoft is partnering with marijuana-focused data-tracking software company Kind Financial: 100%
Amount Volkswagen plans to invest in electric vehicles: $11 billion
Number of electric models it plans to release by 2025: 30
Number of people who got shot in the U.S. during last week's 15-hour Senate Democrat filibuster on gun control: 48
Percent of Democrats and Republicans, respectively, who have a negative view of their party in the latest Bloomberg poll: 4%, 28%
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NEW Monday feature: "Meet Me in St. Louis!"
Brought to you by the 2016 Netroots Nation Convention in St. Louis, July 14-17. We'd be shirking our duty to the brew gods if we didn’t mention St. Louis's beer-making history, which got started in 1809. Before long, underground caves were used to keep the suds cool:
The two most successful names in St. Louis brewing also used the natural caves under the city---Lemp and Busch. Adam Lemp used caves for lagering from the beginning, and his son, William, eventually moved the business to a location that would allow him to connect his house to the brewery via a natural cavern. [...]
Of course, caves were not the only reason lager became so popular in St. Louis---more than 45,000 Germans settled there between 1835 and 1860, and they brought with them beer gardens and a taste for lager---certainly a refreshing option in the hot Midwestern summers.
By the time of the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, Anheuser-Busch and Lemp dominated the city; the official catalog of the event noted that St. Louis was home to 'the largest and by far best equipped brewery in the world.' With the advent of the twentieth century, using caves for brewing and storage had gone out of style, and St. Louis became a brewing powerhouse.
One thing that'll never go out of style: drinking beer.
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Puppy Pic of the Day:
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CHEERS to swishing toward Gomorrah. Less than a week after the act of mass murder at the Pulse bar in Orlando, the annual LGBT Pride Parade wound its way through the streets of Portland, Maine (and several other cities) Saturday and our soulmates down south were big in our thoughts. The route was packed as a record 83 groups (versus 72 last year) passed by the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. As we always do, Michael and I---accompanied by Kossacks Simple and Onomastic this year---marched with the local chapter of PFLAG, tossing candy along the way (much to the chagrin of the LGBT Dental Society):
Throngs of spectators lined the parade route up Congress Street and down High Street to the park.
It took the hundreds of marchers and floats 50 minutes to pass through Monument Square while parade-goers cheered loudly, many waving signs denouncing the Orlando shootings, which killed 49 people and injured 53 last Sunday.
As one of three parade marshals, Portland resident Mary Bonauto, a lead attorney in the fight to legalize same-sex marriage before the U.S. Supreme Court, waved a sign that read, “We are in this together” and “Unidos Con Orlando.” The parade’s other two marshals were Portland activists Chris O’Connor and Jill Barkley. Marchers said they would not be deterred by homophobia or any fear generated by the Orlando shootings.
The weather was sunny and 73, but we'd specifically requested that it be sunny and 75. Clearly God hates us.
JEERS to low expectations. Today is supposedly the day that our federal government takes another whack at actually functioning, but only because Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut had to go on a 15-hour post-Orlando-massacre filibuster last week to make it happen. Words to the wise: don’t hold your breath...
Republicans and Democrats have offered four separate proposals to expand background checks on gun buyers and curb gun sales for people on terrorism "watch lists."
But they seem destined to fail because of partisan politics and a requirement that any proposal muster 60 of the 100 votes in the U.S. Senate. […]
About 71 percent of Americans, including eight out of 10 Democrats and nearly six out of 10 Republicans, favor at least moderate regulations and restrictions on guns, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from Monday to Thursday. That was up from 60 percent in late 2013 and late 2014. The gun control issue is deeply divisive and there have been no major restrictions passed since 1994.
In other words, if your hopes are any higher than the sole of your shoe, they're too high.
CHEERS to the thawing season. Summer arrives this evening at 6:34pm ET. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Two months (here, anyway---your summer may include September) of peace, tranquility, and boring news cycles. Right? If only. But for Maine it does bring 60 glorious days of heat after months of shutting ourselves inside, closing all the windows and cranking the furnace up to 11. First item on our agenda this evening when summer gets its solstice on: shutting ourselves inside, closing all the windows, and cranking the AC up to 11.
P.S. Today is the longest day of the year…tomorrow isn't. Mother Nature: master of the headfake.
CHEERS to getting back to the internal war at hand. All eyes are on Great Britain this week in anticipation of Thursday's "Brexit" vote, which I finally figured out means "British Exit"---as in, severing ties with the European Union just because the EU wants to slap a "Really Awful" label on all haggis exports:
Both the "Leave" and "Remain" campaigns, which have been neck-and-neck in the polls, resumed their official activities Sunday with rival rallies in London.
At a "Leave" event at Old Billingsgate, MP and leading "Brexit" advocate Boris Johnson told attendees that Britain was "at its best when we believe in ourselves."
"This is our moment," he said to cheers. […]
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who has led the campaign to remain, wrote an article published in the UK's Sunday Telegraph newspaper in which he warned that a vote for "Brexit" would leave Britain a "permanently poorer country in every sense" and reduce its global influence.
The campaigning took an awful turn late last week when Minister of Parliament Jo Cox---a supporter of remaining in the EU---was murdered in her district by a lunatic who got inspiration from an American neo-Nazi group. When the killer appeared in court, he identified himself as "death to traitors, freedom for Britain." But history will remember him as Dickhead Go McFuckyourself.
CHEERS to Li'l Bubba. Over the weekend Chelsea Clinton gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, Aidan Clinton Mezvinsky:
Mother and son are now resting comfortably in the hospital and will be released soon. During the delivery, helpful Grandpa Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain" a little too close to Chelsea's clenched fist during a particularly nasty contraction. So he's now also resting comfortably in the hospital and will be released soon.
P.S. Aidan's first words after seeing Donald Trump on his hospital room TV screen: "Small hands." Oh, I like him.
CHEERS to that picture that looks like an eagle flew into a window. On June 20, 1782, the Great Seal of the United States was finally adopted by Congress. They sure took their sweet time getting there:
On July 4, 1776, the same day that independence from Great Britain was declared by the thirteen states, the Continental Congress named the first committee to design a Great Seal, or national emblem, for the country.
Similar to other nations, The United States needed an official symbol of sovereignty to formalize and seal (or sign) international treaties and transactions. It took six years, three committees, and the contributions of fourteen men before the Congress finally accepted a design (which included elements proposed by each of the three committees) in 1782.
It has 13 stars, 13 stripes, 13 arrows in the eagle’s talon, 13 letters in the mottos "e pluribus unum" and "annuit coeptis," 52 total letters on it (which is divisible by 13), 13 olive leaves, 13 olives on the branch, 13 levels in the pyramid, and 13 sides showing on the ribbon. But designer Charles Thomson stopped short of including a black cat walking under a ladder. That would've been considered unlucky.
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Ten years ago in C&J: June 20, 2006
JEERS to six month maaaaaania!!! This is getting so silly. TIME magazine columnist Joe Klein hops on the meaningless Iraq timetable bandwagon:
This time, U.S. military sources say, the measure of success is simple: Operation Forward Together, the massive joint military effort launched last week to finally try to secure Baghdad, has to work. If Baghdad isn't stabilized, the war is lost. "I know it's the cliché of the war," an Army counterinsurgency specialist told me last week. "But we'll know in the next six months---and this time, it'll be the last next six months we get."
At least until the next last six months comes along. And by then we'll, like, really mean it.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to a major nailbiter. Oakmont Golf Club in Pennsylvania---a course that appeared to be basically concrete spray-painted green---was the site of exciting U.S. Open golf action yesterday. The winner of the Pabst Blue Ribbon Mega Big Gulp Cup (and a $1.8 million purse, which sounds like a really overpriced purse to me...I probably would've just taken the cash): Dustin Johnson. Once again, officials estimated the number of sober spectators shouting "GET IN DA HOLE!!!!!!" at zero. Next major: the British Open, where all the sand traps have a stiff upper lip.
Meanwhile in hoops action, the winner of NBA Finals game 7 was...[Memo to self: Be sure to Google who won tomorrow morning and add team name here]. It was a really great game, and we send out our congratulations to everyone in...[Memo to self: you forgot to Google it, didn’t you? You really are a terrible, sloppy self, you know that? It was Cleveland, people. Cleveland won. Congratulations, Cleveland. First major win for a sports team there in more than half a century.]...for being home of the champs. You're great!
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
“How do you do a pro-Bill in Portland Maine joke? You can’t.”
---Jay Leno
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