News from Netroots Nation
Just a quick reminder that the doors to the Netroots Nation convention will open in less than six months. (And I haven’t a thing to wear!) This year we're heading to New Orleans August 2-4 to plan, regroup, network and enjoy the sights in the Big Easy.
In the meantime, the only thing standing in the path of liberal world domination is an agenda, and that's where you come in. NN18 is now soliciting ideas for panels, speakers, training sessions and film screenings. Goddess Mary Rickles has the details...
Our goal is to highlight the work being done by activists and organizations around the country, from national campaigns to local grassroots organizing, as well as to shine a light on what’s happening locally in New Orleans and the surrounding areas.
You can submit on any topic, but here are a few things we’re looking to emphasize this year:
> Panels on the upcoming midterm elections, specifically ones that focus on how to make our government and the progressive movement reflective of the New American Majority
> Conversations that encourage long-term thinking about building grassroots power, especially by centering marginalized voices and supporting local organizing
> Sessions highlighting resistance efforts both nationally and locally
> Trainings that help new activists grow into successful organizers
As always, we ask you to consider inclusivity as well as how your panel will empower others to take what they've heard and use it in their own work. Submissions are reviewed by selection committees, which include peers from around the movement. Plus, the everyone will have a chance to vote on the sessions they like best once the submission period has closed.
There are two webinars to offer help if you need it during the submission process. One is today and the other is March 6, both at 3pm ET. Register for either session by clicking here. register for either session at this link.)
Deadline for submissions is March 14. The link for all the panel submission info is here.
161 days and counting. Not that we're counting. (But we really are.)
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, February 22, 2018
Note: Congratulations! Last night this note got flipped from red to blue! In the interest of full disclosure, it is a multi-colored notepad, and tonight it’ll get flipped from blue to orange. But still!!!
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til daylight saving time starts: 17
Days 'til the Mobile Chocolate Festival in Alabama to support the Penelope House for victims of domestic violence: 9
Percent of voters who want Dreamers to stay in the country and get a pathway to citizenship, according to a Quinnipiac poll: 80%
Percent who believe Trump wants them to be deported: 63%
Percent of respondents in a WaPost-ABC News poll who believe stricter gun laws and better mental health monitoring, respectively, could have prevented the Stoneman Douglas shooting: 58%, 77%
Tons of rock salt produced per year by the American Rock Salt Co. in New York: 4.3 million
Number of London Fashion Week appearances Queen Elizabeth II made before the one she made Tuesday: 0
Current U.S. Olympic Medal Count
Gold: 8 Silver: 7 Bronze: 6
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
Now we've won the war. It's not clear what we've won, but we've definitely won, which is better than losing.
So we take the prisoners we've captured off to our base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and suddenly announce that they are not prisoners of war after all, because this isn't really a war we've been fighting. Therefore the prisoners are "illegal combatants," and we don't have to treat them in accord with the Geneva Convention on POWs.
This is why a lot of people hate us. For the sheer bloody arrogance of having it both ways all the time.
---February, 2002
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Fresh pic of Haley, C&J’s lab-mix: welcome to mud season...
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CHEERS to perspective from the creaky-kneed olden folks. More powerful and heartfelt clarion calls from students yesterday in Florida and across the country. There are too many moments to pick from, so you can go to the twitter hashtag #ParklandStudentsSpeak and check ‘em out at your leisure. It’s been cool hearing them say to us adults, “It’s okay, we got this” with a confidence and laser-like focus that rivals any uprising I can remember. (The Occupy movement that started in Zuccotti Park comes to recent mind.) Over at Esquire, that shaggy old-timer Charles Pierce is optimistic that these kids are going to do real damage to the Republican head-in-the-sand brand. Reason: the kids are actually fighting on their home turf:
[T]he real high comedy has been to watch the conservative intelligentsia embark on a serious fool’s errand---namely, trying to battle with educated teenagers on social media. I mean, don’t any of these people have kids between the ages of 10 and 20? This is like the Redcoats marching back to Boston from Lexington and Concord. They’retaking fire from behind every tree and every stonewall, and they’re getting slaughtered on platforms they’ve probably never heard of.
This may be a sea change in the issue. There’s a natural savvy at work here from kids who have spent the last few years creating communities on their laptops and phones. Now, instead of communities dedicated to TV shows, music, sports, fashion, and who’s zoomin’ who in fourth-period Bio, the communities being created are being created to design ongoing political action on an issue that literally was life and death a week ago.
This is how the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement, got themselves going in the media Stone Age. It can happen faster now, and it can spread around the world, and these kids know that better than anyone else does.
I was thinking about how this student uprising has affected my outlook for our country over the last week, and the best way I can think of to sum it up is: these kids are kryptonite to the gaslighters. They have arrived in the nick of time under the worst of circumstances. On my to-do list this morning: removing the “GET OFF A MY LAWN” signs from the front yard. Yep---all 600.
CHEERS to another canary bitin’ the dust in the GOP coal mine. I really do feel bad for all the canaries Republicans keep sacrificing as they try to get a handle on just how badly they’re going to be destroyed in the midterms on November 6th. With Trump’s approval in the shitter, the generic ballot looking much healthier for Team D (15 point lead in both the House and Senate according to Quinnipiac’s latest), and 36 red-to-blue district flips (both state and federal level) since he was elected, it’s looking like an historic GOP swirlie’s in store. Oh, wait, did I say 36 flips. Silly me…
Breakout the bourbon---Democrats just won their 37th red-to-blue state legislative flip of the cycle. This latest win came in Kentucky, where former state Rep. Linda Belcher…defeated Republican Rebecca Johnson 68-32 percent in the 49th state House District.
This seat went for Donald Trump in a 72-23 landslide in 2016, making Belcher’s win tonight an astonishing 86-point swing. […] If Republicans can’t hold onto seats like this in deep red states like Kentucky, they’re a special kind of screwed in November---at every level of the ballot.
An odd thing to say about the abstinence-only party, but we live in strange times.
JEERS to being a grifter to the end. When Billy Graham, who claimed to preach humility before God, died yesterday, he was squatting on a mountain of money worth at least 25 million dollars. That’s strike one. It took him twenty-odd years to fess up for begging Richard Nixon to do something about the Jews before they destroyed the country. That’s Strike two. And as far as I’m concerned this is Strike three:
The preacher, who met with 12 US Presidents spanning 60 years, preached that homosexuality is “detestable” and “a sinister form of perversion” contributing to the decay of civilization---and the Billy Graham Evangelical Association continues to advocate gay ‘cure’ therapy on its website. [...]
Graham, who claimed in 1993 that AIDS was a “judgement from God,” also used his large political influence to push anti-gay laws---throwing his support behind a 2012 attempt in North Carolina to amend the constitution to define marriage as “between one man and one woman.”
Grifter Graham was 99 when he finally got the call on the red Heaven Phone. If anyone up there can hear me, please email me some pics when he arrives at his designated penthouse. I want to see the look on his face when he discovers his roommates are Harvey Milk, Divine, Paul Lynde, Sgt. Leonard Matlovich and, in the top bunk, Oscar Wilde.
CHEERS to Massachusetts liberals. Ted Kennedy was born 86 years ago today and it goes without saying that we on the left still miss him with vigah. Here’s some classic Ted from 2007: lambasting Republicans for turning down the first increase in the minimum wage in ten years. I love the routine: like a seasoned baseball player he steps up, knocks the dirt off his shoes, goes through his warm-up moves, and then…Thwack! Off he goes. I just love hearing Ted in righteous-bellow mode again…
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Pay your respects here. Today in the Daily Kos cafeteria (of course): Boston cream pies and keep ‘em comin’.
CHEERS to throwing Bibi under the bus. Israeli prime minister and all-around conservative jerk Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t sleeping very well these days. A corruption case is circling his head like a giant buzzard, and now even his biggest fans---“Netanyaheads”---are turning on him:
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is battling for his political career in the face of various corruption allegations, has suffered a potentially devastating blow after a former confidant reportedly agreed to turn state witness.
A week after police recommended the country’s second-longest serving prime minister be indicted for bribery, Israeli press reported that Shlomo Filber would testify against his former boss to avoid jail.
You might call it…a Shlomo-tion train wreck! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!! (If you need me for anything today, you’ll find me hovering over my phone waiting for the Mark Twain Prize committee’s call.)
CHEERS to the Miracle on Ice. We'll file this item under "Up Yours, Putin." Thirty-eight years ago today, on February 22, 1980, the U.S. Olympic hockey team out-skated and outwitted the "unbeatable" Soviet team at Lake Placid, stunning everyone by beating them 4-3. I walked around afterward in a t-shirt with a Russian bear getting knocked in the head by a puck and the caption: "Puck You, Russia!" (I'm still surprised my schoolmarms didn’t have a problem with the thinly-veiled F-bomb.) Thankfully, with maturity and the passage of time, I've traded in that ratty old shirt for a sensible Brooks Brothers button-down. It says "Hey, Remember When We Kicked Your Ass in 1980, Russia? That Was Puckin' Awesome!" Because, y'know, we all have to grow up sometime.
P.S. This just in from the U.S. women’s hockey team in PyeongChang: ”Puck you, Canada! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!” Get that on a shirt, pronto.
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Ten years ago in C&J: February 22, 2008
JEERS to health care, Canadian-style. Y'know, it must really be a boring experience to not have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get basic medical care up north. Show your card, get your care, go home, get better. [yaaaaawn] I don’t know how Kossack grndrush kept his eyes open:
I had my arm surgery yesterday; I was treated wonderfully by all involved. I took a $20 bill with me (along with Health Card) to cover cost of pain meds (and wasn't sure that was adequate, but knew the person picking me up would loan me the rest until I got home). Cost of 30 T3's: $14.35. When you consider the standard dispensing fee here is $9.99, that means the 30 pills themselves cost $4.36. 15 cents each. This shit really works, folks - at 1/2 the per-capita cost of US Health Care. And that was the TOTAL bill. I'll have nothing more to pay for, INCLUDING followup visits and care (I may have to buy some more gauze...).
What he fails to mention: In Canada gauze costs fifty thousand dollars. [2/22/18 Update: grndrush---real name Keith---died of a brain tumor in late 2010. He was one of the earliest and most raucous kiddie pool splashers. And a helluva nice guy. We hope he’s at the Pearly Gates waiting to give Billy Graham a piece of his mind for eternity.]
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And just one more…
CHEERS to morning calisthenics. I’m so glad I ran across this. This happened five years ago today, as First Lady Michelle Obama was promoting her initiative to get We The People (especially kids) to exercise more, which she called “Let’s Move!” This sketch with Jimmy Fallon---The Evolution of Mom Dancing---racked up over 26 million views. It’s too great to let it fall into the cracks of history, so enjoy this encore…
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Following Michelle’s lead, the current First Lady unveiled her own initiative several months ago: “Let’s Move Into the Lincoln Bedroom!”
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:
“Please, for the love of god, shut up.”
---Charlie Pierce
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