From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
What Made Trump Look Like A Bigger Fool in July
In the shape of Bullshit Mountain…
His wall
Rick Perry
His thumbs
His own son
Police chiefs
Morning Joe
John Podesta
Internet taxes
His scheduler
The Boy Scouts
His press office
His dumb brain
His chief of staff
Rick Perry again
His own daughter
This disabled child
His personal lawyer
His favorite pollster
$12 health insurance
His Interior secretary
His sense of direction
44 secretaries of state
The Keystone XL pipeline
His communications director
But Obama once chewed gum.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, August 2, 2017
Note: Dear former Trump White House officials: please stop flooding our offices with resumes. You're clogging our fax machine. Thx. ---Dancing with the Stars
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Barack Obama's birthday: 2
Days 'til the Illinois Beer Festival: 17
Trump approval in Texas, Michigan, North Carolina and Florida, according to Gallup: 42%
Percent of Americans who believe transgender Americans should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll: 58%
Number of annual deaths attributed to tobacco use in the U.S.: 480,000
Length of time you can safely leave food out during a picnic, according to WebMD: 2 hours (1 hour if the temp is 90 or above)
Number of amendments Republicans were allowed to introduce during the creation of Obamacare, versus zero amendments Democrats were allowed to introduce during the creation of Trumpcare: 188
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Mid-week Rapture Index:
182 (including 3 false Christs and 5 false starts). Soul Protection Factor 12 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: The latest transformations collection…
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CHEERS to dissension in the ranks. Everyone who helped beat back the Republican money grab posing as a health care bill is right to be on edge about the possibility that Mitch McConnell might try and revive it. The bill is still sitting on the Senate calendar like an unexploded grenade, and the chamber is still officially in session. But being the doe-eyed optimists that we are, C&J has found a nugget of good news from none other than the ancient hard-line senator from Utah:
U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said on Monday that senators for now are too divided to keep working on healthcare overhaul legislation and that he and other senior Republicans will take that message to the White House.
President Donald Trump has been urging lawmakers not to drop the matter, despite a series of failed votes last week. “There’s just too much animosity and we’re too divided on healthcare, “Hatch said in an interview with Reuters. […]
Asked who would relay the message to the Trump administration, Hatch laughed and said, “I’m going to be one who does that,” adding that he expected Republican leaders of the House and Senate, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, would do so, too.
And this just in from the headline desk: Finishing Touches Complete on Oval Office Trap Door Above New White House Alligator Tank. Bad timing, guys.
CHEERS to tying up some loose ends. Remember that time in 2014 when New Jersey governor Chris Christie took a leading role in the Republican effort to scare the shit out of everyone by escalating the phony Ebola crisis, including quarantining Doctors Without Borders nurse Kaci Hickox for three days in an unheated garage at Newark Airport even though she showed no symptoms? That was a real asshole move, and Hickox sued the state over her treatment. Late last week the suit was settled, and New Jersey is being forced to behave itself if something like this ever happens again:
In exchange for dismissal of the complaint filed in federal court in Newark, Gov. Chris Christie’s administration agreed to new rules that will guarantee quarantine only occurs after exposure to the Ebola virus when medically necessary, the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Hickox, said in a news release Friday.[…]
“We’ve achieved what was needed: procedures that will ensure that no one will have to go through what I experienced in New Jersey, and that no one will be quarantined unless it is medically necessary to do so,” Kaci Hickox, who now lives in Oregon, said in the ACLU news release. “The settlement upholds the principles and values of liberty and due process.
The suit would've been settled faster, but Christie's gang needed extra time to look up "liberty" and "due process" in the dictionary.
JEERS to assholery repeating itself. Why do we need strong regulations that protect consumers from the banking industry? Because without them they'll just keep on rip-rip-ripping us off:
Analysts are angry over the latest Wells Fargo scandal where hundreds of thousands of the bank's customers were overcharged. … The article cited a 60-page internal report, which revealed more than 800,000 of Wells Fargo's auto loan customers were charged for car insurance they did not need.
Wells Fargo estimated the mistaken auto insurance sales would cost the bank $80 million in damages. Piper Jaffray said the true cost is likely understated. "We believe the full cost may be significantly higher and weigh on the risk premium the market will place on shares," Piper Jaffray analyst Kevin Barker wrote in a note to clients Friday entitled "Here we go again?"[…]
In September, Wells Fargo reached a $185 million settlement with regulators over creating what the bank then said could be as many as 2.1 million accounts in customer names without their permission.
There ain't a vat of boiling oil big enough.
CHEERS to great inventions. On August 2, 1887,Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received a patent for barbed wire. Or as Steve Bannon calls it: gift wrap.
CHEERS to giving 'no' for an answer. Believe it or not, there are a handful of Democrats on Trump's sham "election integrity" commission that's being chaired by America's #1 minority vote suppressor, Kris Kobach. (Remember what this is about: the commission was formed because Trump falsely claimed three million votes---the margin by which Hillary beat him in the popular vote---were fraudulent, so now he has to maintain the ruse at all costs.) One of those Dems is Maine's secretary of state Matt Dunlap. He's a good guy, and I suspect he's staying on the commission as an active voice of opposition. To that end, he just disobedienced himself again, and we say rah rah…
Dunlap said he will reject a second request for the data from the commission’s vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who promised last week that the data would be held in confidence at the federal level. […]
“I think it is safe to say I’m probably not going to release anything until we get a better idea of the confidentiality piece and what the commission’s goal is going to be exactly,” Dunlap said on Monday.
One of four Democrats who serve on the president’s 12-member advisory commission, Dunlap said his office has been inundated with phone calls and emails from voters urging him to protect their privacy.
As long as the Dems on the commission stay feisty and rebellious, the damage will likely be minimized. So far I'm encouraged. They've all swapped out the jellybeans they keep on their desk to munch on during the day to chocolate-covered rusty nails.
JEERS to a first-class slacker. On August 2, 1923, Warren Harding's heart went kerflooey and he died with his boots on in a San Francisco hotel at the ripe young age of 58. Although he won his 1920 election in a landslide and was very popular while in office, his legacy quickly tarnished. In their book Rating the Presidents, William Ridings Jr. and Stuart McIver (along with 719 historians) rank Harding dead last. But once the current occupant of the White House finally leaves and bumps Harding up to #44 on the list, they won’t have to tweak their conclusions much to fit Lord Dampnut:
Participants in the Ridings-McIver Presidential poll agree overwhelmingly that Harding deserves low marks for his poor performance in every category.
His best rating, for the Political Skill category, apparently for his impressive election margin, was only thirty-eighth. He was ranked our worst president in the Leadership and Appointments category and next to last in the Accomplishments and Crisis Management and the Character and Integrity categories. Descriptive comments include such remarks as "out of his depth" and “over his head."
The presidency demands a person versed in and interested in the great domestic and foreign issues of the time. Alas, Harding was interested mainly in poker, bootleg bourbon, and willing women. He was, sadly, just a small-town politician, an average man in a job that demanded far more than an average man could deliver, or as poll participants describe him, "an amiable fool, incompetent, inept, corrupt, immoral."
On the upside, he had normal-size hands, wasn’t a slumlord, and didn’t abuse his twitter account.
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Nine years ago in C&J: August 2, 2008
CHEERS to the return of the Jedi. Notorious, mysterious, studious and gregarious, blogger Billmon used to be a daily must-read before his Whiskey Bar blog went dark. So the blogosphere was all atwitter yesterday when he poked his head into Daily Kos to post back-to-back diaries. Tragically the second one was only three lines long so I had to ban him permanently for violating the rules. But, man, it was great to see him again, wasn't it!
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the cranky old scribe. I can't say I've read much Gore Vidal (my loss, I admit), but I know he gave conservatives fits and his Sassoon line of hair care products is top notch, so that's good enough for me. I was reminded over the weekend that he died five years ago, so that's reason enough to wrap up today’s C&J by tossing out a smattering of vital Vidal:
"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."
[On George W. Bush, in 2002, not foreseeing the rise of Trump:] "Mark my words. He will leave office the most unpopular president in history."
"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country---and we haven't seen them since."
"A good deed never goes unpunished."
"You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country."
"Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon."
"The Republican Party is fundamentally crooked and might well be outlawed one of these days."
His lips to God's ears. And I hope Bill Buckley's within earshot.
Have a happy humpday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Cheers and Jeers is boldly bad, yes, but also boldly boring.
---Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice
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