From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Quick C&J Fundraiser Update
We’re in the home stretch---one more day and then I’ll stop pestering you. To everyone who’s contributed so far, thank you for supporting my blogger performance art, which began in 2003 and will end in 2025 when I pee “fin” into a snowbank in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Oops…spoiler alert!)
To persuade you to chip in if you haven’t yet, I decided to employ the marketing experts who write the subject lines for those political fundraising emails you get all the time. I figure, hey, they work for candidates, so why not Cheers and Jeers? Here’s what they came up with:
C&J is under attack!
Did you see the lies they’re telling about C&J?
Bill’s opponent will do ANYTHING to stop him!
It’s over
We’re doomed
Time for Bill in Portland to start packing up his stuff?
As swamp swells, GOP tries to pull plug on C&J kiddie pool!
We’re close to blowing this!
NEWS: Bill needs $3 now or he’ll step off ledge!
UPDATE: Scratch that---he was just feeding the squirrels
Bill in Portland Maine down to last can of cat food!
Drunk in the gutter!
Only option left: robbing banks?
Somehow I thought that was going to be a little more, I dunno, positive. But they’re the experts, so I assume you’ve been duly persuaded to help fund us for another year. Here are the various options via PayPal and snail mail:
One time contribution: click here
$5 monthly contribution: click here
$10 monthly contribution: click here
$20 monthly contribution: click here
To send a donation via snail mail, the address is:
Bill Harnsberger, 16 Pitt Street, Portland, ME, 04103
If you're already a C&J monthly subscriber and you want to continue, you don’t have to do anything except remember to redeem your special C&J first-class upgrade the next time you charter our C&J blimp.
Thanks again, all. Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, January 11, 2018
Note: In the interest of full disclosure, here’s the entire transcript of my recent closed-door appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee:
“Mr. In Portland Maine, do you now or have you ever…”
“BOOGER!”
“Thank you. This committee is adjourned.”
Let the chips fall where they may.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Phil Murphy (D) gets inaugurated as governor of New Jersey, thus ending the Chris Christie era: 5
Days 'til the Sundance Film Festival: 7
Number of House Republican retirements announced so far: 30
Year the last Boeing 747 (Delta 9771) to be retired from service, which happened last week, went into service (for Pan Am): 1970
New Hampshire House vote to send a recreational pot bill to the Ways and Means Committee: 207 yea, 139 nay
Percent of Iowans who would rather see public services strengthened than their own taxes go down, according to a PPP poll: 58%
Customer satisfaction rating for Apple AirPods, which sold out over the holidays and have become a bona fide hit for the company, according to The Ringer: 98%
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
[F]or the true connoisseur of the ludicrous, few things can match the upcoming trial of Oprah Winfrey in Amarillo on charges of libeling cows.
It was embarrassing enough when the Legislature passed the veggie libel law, outlawing the disparagement of Texas agricultural products. In what I thought was a flight of fancy at the time, I warned that Big George Bush could be nailed for his well-known disparagement of broccoli. But even I never contemplated anything as nightmarishly, pluperfectly, outrageously silly as suing Oprah for announcing that she wouldn't eat hamburgers any more.
Assorted spokespersons for cows have been on television swearing up and down that Winfrey's remark has cost ranchers millions, rendered many destitute and homeless, driven men from their ancestral ranches, broken men, and caused the sale of beef to plummet to nothing. (If true, why haven't prices dropped? I just paid $3.49 a pound for stew meat the other day.) All because Winfrey said she wouldn't eat hamburgers anymore. In the Panhandle, where Winfrey will enjoy her taste of Texas justice, there are bumper stickers reading, "The Only Mad Cow Around Is Oprah."
---January 1998
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Puppy Pic of the Day: This year’s Puppy Bowl lineup
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CHEERS to starting off the day with a swirlie. Even if everything else on this planet is going to hell, at least NASA is here to regularly remind us that we’re part of a universe stuffed to the gills with things that make us go “Freakin’ Ooh” and “Freakin’ Ahh.” Case in point: this pic of Jupiter’s clouds taken by the Juno probe a few weeks ago from a mere 8,300 miles above the planet. Heref, shift your brain into neutral and marvel at it for as long as you like:
[Looks at watch] Okay, ten seconds should be enough. On to nuclear war!
JEERS to nuclear war! Maybe it’s just a goofy personal preference on my part, but I think dropping bombs that create mushroom clouds that incinerate hundreds of thousands of innocent people and level cities should not be part of the human experience. Unfortunately our current president, whose brain is fueled by McDonald’s cheeseburger grease and the aspartame of twenty daily Diet Cokes (now in 5 new dotard-friendly flavors), is looking for an excuse to let loose a nuke or ten. And, God bless ‘em, the folks at the Centers for Disease Control want to make the experience of watching your town go up in flames as happy and non-disruptive as possible, which is why they’re putting on a nuclear annihilation survival workshop next Tuesday. Isn’t that sweet? Here’s a preview:
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Please note: if the bombs drop before Tuesday, the workshop will be rescheduled in the afterlife. Light refreshments will be served. (I hear God’s homemade brownies are to re-die for.)
JEERS to border insecurity. Despite the fact that illegal immigration is not a significant problem, Trump still wants his big, beautiful wall. He wants us to pay for it. He considers it the one and only thing that will keep the “bad hombres” out. It is his obsession. It is his white (well, okay, brown) whale. It is the grand prize his “Trump That B*tch” t-shirt-wearing orcs are demanding. And in exchange for a wall with a giant “T” on it, he’s willing to sacrifice actual border security:
[To pay for the wall,] the Trump administration would cut or delay funding for border surveillance, radar technology, patrol boats and customs agents in its upcoming spending plan to curb illegal immigration---all proven security measures that officials and experts have said are more effective than building a wall along the Mexican border. […]
Nor would a wall stop illegal immigration, other experts said. Data from the Department of Homeland Security and research groups like the New York-based Center for Migration Studies show that most undocumented immigrants now simply overstay legally obtained short-term visas---and did not sneak across the border. “So unless the wall is 35,000 feet high, it's not going to do much to stop those overstaying these visas,” said Robert Warren, a fellow at the Center for Migration Studies who has worked on immigration issues for Republican and Democratic presidents.
And in other news, the president of Acme 35,000 Foot Walls is resting comfortably after suffering oh-my-god-we-may-finally-score-a-client-related heart palpitations.
CHEERS to the not-so-artful dodger. Happy 258th birthday to Alexander Hamilton. He was one of our country's youngest Founding Fathers, but he wasn't very good at avoiding controversy (adultery, skullduggery in the 1800 election) or ye olde musket ball. And here's something for the pootie diaries:
People today still name their tomcats after Alexander Hamilton in deference to his infamous many extramarital affairs. Martha Washington was the first as she named her large carousing tomcat 'Hamilton.'
Pay your respects here. Or just pull out a ten-spot and pat his head.
CHEERS to overdue departures. Hallelujah! Wednesday, January 10th will go down as a great day in the history of the United States: Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) is quitting. He was the epitome of the rich, smarmy, serial-lying, Kool-aid-drinking Republican who snorted Jack Daniels out his nose every time someone reminded him that his job was serving the public. He was robotically evil, always wearing an expression on his face that said, “Eh,fuck you.” Exhibit A from 2014: this exchange with Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings…
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Issa and the stink that surrounds him won’t actually leave Congress until his term ends a year from now, so I won’t write the lengthy farewell diatribe I’d like to just yet. For now I’ll just bid him a robotic, “Eh, fuck you.”
JEERS to Camp Sunshine. My, how time flies when your captors are in your cell flushing your Quran down the toilet. Today marks the 16th anniversary of the grand opening of the gulag at Gitmo, a facility that President Obama and Democrats have wanted to shutter for a decade but couldn’t because Republicans are too scared of housing the inmates (most of whom were turned in for handsome rewards in Afghanistan and were never charged with anything) in U.S. maximum-security prisons. So how are the wheels of military justice turning over a decade and a half later? Guess…
The military tribunals at Guantanamo have yet to prosecute anyone accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, the very reason the center was created, and the Trump administration is facing the realization that the criminal system is a much quicker route for the prosecution of extremists.
Currently only 41 men remain at Guantanamo and as many as six of them are on hunger strike in protest at their many years of incarceration without charge. The oldest prisoner at the detention facility, 70-year-old Saifullah Paracha, told Newsweek in November that life at the center had become a new hell for prisoners under the Trump administration.
But not today! To celebrate Gitmo’s anniversary, all the inmates will get a double-hosedown and sixteen tiny candles in their swill.
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Ten years ago in C&J: January 11, 2008
CHEERS to more proof of evolution. Well, bless my buttons! It turns out that, like Senator David Vitter, monkeys like to visit Ye Olde Whorehouse, too:
[O]ne of humanity's oldest professions may be even older than we thought: In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates "paid"for sexual access to females---and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up.
Now you know why their slogan is: "What goes on in the jungles of Kalimantan Tengah stays in the jungles of Kalimantan Tengah."
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And just one more…
CHEERS to Texans with 'Tude. One of the great pleasures of stomping around Austin in 97-bazillion-degree heat with the Netroots Nation hooligans ten years ago was the chance to meet liberal activist, populist and rabble-rouser Jim Hightower, of whom Molly Ivins said: "If Will Rogers and Mother Jones had a baby, Jim Hightower would be that rambunctious child---mad as hell, with a sense of humor." Darn fine writer, too, who had Trump’s number ten months ago:
It's time to face up to the obvious: The president of the United States is deranged. […]
Trump has bloated spectacularly since entering the White House, where he's had a disastrous start. He chose a cabinet and staff mostly made up of ideological quacks, incompetents and Wall Street grifters. Yet, buoyed by his explosive ego, the president pronounced his start historic: "I don't think there's ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we've done."
Sadly, he's right. For example, they made a reckless, autocratic and unconstitutional attempt to ban millions of Muslim immigrants from our land. They embarrassed America with a hasty, failed and deadly military raid in Yemen. They had to ax the kook he chose to be his national security advisor. They've even apparently been caught colluding with Russian meddlers in our politics.
Some record!
But nothing beats his signature line, which every candidate running in a midterm race should tattoo on the inside of their eyelids: "There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos." Happy 75th birthday, sir. And many blessings on your Stetson.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Samantha Bee is really sorry. On Monday, the "Full Frontal" host announced an "Apology Race" in which her team "will travel the globe to apologize for every garbage thing Bill in Portland Maine does."
---CNN
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