From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
Like Sands Through the Hourglass…
With less than 72 hours to go before the chopped-in-half-by-sabotage-mad-Republicans ACA signup deadline passes, the last President of the United States to not head up a mafia-style crime syndicate is here with a reminder: you have until Saturday to get your ass covered...
As the pillar of truth, decency, and real American values says above, many people can get covered for only $50-$100 a month, and that ain't bad. So if you need coverage, get coverage. If ya got coverage, help yourself…
It’s okay. Obamacare also covers type-2 diabetes.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Note: Bring a Torch, Jeannette Isabella was written in the 17th century, yet it clearly refers to a modern-day British flashlight. That can mean only one thing: whoever wrote it had time travel powers. And suddenly I have many questions.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Festivus, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and 2019: 11, 13, 14, 20
Days 'til the Ugly Sweater Party at the Samuel Adams Brewery in Boston: 9
Minimum factor by which Fed Chair Jerome Powell says unemployment in Trump country---i.e. the poorest rural counties---surpassed the national average last year: 2x
Estimated number of adults in America who have seen a close family member go to jail, according to USA Today: 113 million
Percent of Meet the Press's panel discussions that are dominated by conservatives and liberals, respectively, according to Media Matters: 48%, 9%
Amount paid at auction for a 1954 Albert Einstein letter in which he refers to God as "nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses"and The Bible as "honorable but still primitive legends": $2.9 million
Average cost of a real and an artificial War on Christmas Tree in America last year, respectively: $75, $107
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 183 (including 4 Marks of the Beast and 1 Jerry Falwell, Jr. Pool Boy and Aching-Bunion Massager). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: In Paradise, California, Madison the guard dog remains on duty…
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CHEERS to KO'ing the dotard. I don’t watch any TV until lunch, and then I toggle back and forth between The People's Court and Andrea Mitchell Reports. Usually I spend more time with the former because the latter is such a snooze. But not yesterday! During a commercial break I flipped over to MSNBC and saw Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi loudly tag-teaming Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the Oval Office. In a nutshell, Bottomless Pinocchio kept shouting lies about his mythical border wall, and then rhetorically punched himself in the face by agreeing that any government shutdown over border security would be known throughout the land as "the Trump shutdown." Meanwhile, Chuck and Nancy rained blows on Lord Dampnut with facts, reason, and almost surgically-targeted flashes of anger. (Pence said nothing, opting instead to quietly pee his pants and pray for Mother to come rescue him from all the incivility.) Andrea Mitchell's one-word response after the smoke cleared: "Well." Or, if you prefer a slightly deeper analysis, Jennifer Rubin nails it rather well:
It is not clear how Trump could have appeared any more irrational and unhinged. (If he thinks the military can build the wall, why shut down the government?) The video of him declaring his desire to shut down the government will be played over and over again should he get his wish. Good luck convincing the American people that the Democrats, who control nothing and advocated keeping the government open, are at fault. […]
In some ways, a shutdown at the end of 2018 would put an exclamation point on one of the worst years in memory for Republicans. The president is under investigation in multiple venues. Republicans lost 40 seats and with them the House majority. Indeed that number might be 41 thanks to substantial evidence of election fraud by Republicans in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. Legislatively, Republicans have accomplished next to nothing this year. If they shut down the government, they’ll wind up confirming that the party of Trump is not only unethical but also incompetent and dysfunctional. Christmas sure came early for Democrats.
Thanks, Santa. Way better than a BB gun.
CHEERS to Christmas morning, Part II. "On the fifth day of Christmas Judge Pauley gave M.C.: FIVE YEARS IN JAIL!" That's my guess, anyway, and we'll find out soon enough when court convenes in the Southern District of New York. This morning Trump crime family syndicate "fixer" Michael Cohen will stand before a judge who likes to make an example out of corrupt-as-f*ck attorneys like him, and learn how much time he'll be spending in a snazzy orange jumpsuit behind bars. It'll be a fitting end to the criminal career of a two-bit sleazebag, and also another critical step closer to nailing his former boss. But one thing's for sure: he won’t come close to getting the sentence that was handed down yesterday to Tiki Torch Goebbels…
White nationalist James Alex Fields Jr. on Tuesday was sentenced to life in prison, plus 419 years, after being convicted of murdering anti-racism protester Heather Heyer during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
Fields, a 21-year-old Ohio native, received his life sentence just days after being convicted of first-degree murder for the vehicular rampage, which killed Heyer, 32, and injured dozens of other people protesting against the white-nationalist rally.
The rise of the Fourth Reich will be slightly delayed. Please adjust your schedules accordingly.
JEERS to the most activist activist judges ever. On December 12, 2000---in between rounds of strip poker---the Supreme Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court ruling that said, Hey, maybe we should, like, count all the votes or something:
In a brazen act of deceit, the five-justice majority issuing the Court's per curiam decision knowingly misrepresented December 12 as Florida's chosen deadline for completing the vote count. They held that Florida law allowed no time to count the remaining 175,000 votes: [...]
This overt misrepresentation of Florida election law flabbergasted members of the legal profession from coast to coast. These same justices who on so many prior occasions had championed the rights of states had now casually and willfully nullified Florida law.
But at least President George W. Bush fulfilled his promise to restore dignity and competence back to the government. Yay. Squeaky Playskool gavels for everyone!
P.S. Whaddyabet that our first Chief Justice, John Jay, is spinning in his grave, knowing that the above abuse of judicial power was exercised on his birthday? Pay your respects, and sympathies, here.
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Answer Man. Tim O’Brien at Bloomberg asks: Would You Want to Be Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff?
No.
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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JEERS to fake views. Lest we forget (and we won't), the repeal of President Obama's landmark net neutrality rules was absolutely smothered in lies and deception on the part of smug, smarmy FCC commissioner Ajit Pai. For one thing, he downplayed the overwhelming public support for net neutrality by claiming evidence to the contrary. And now we know that evidence was courtesy of Mother Russia:
The Justice Department is investigating possible criminal activity linked to millions of fake or duplicated messages---many from Russian email addresses---sent to the Federal Communications Commission opposing net neutrality, Buzzfeed reported Saturday. Of the 22 million messages sent last year to the FCC website, nearly 21 million were bots, organized campaigns or fakes, including many using stolen identities, according to a Stanford University study. […]
Of the total estimated 800,000 unique comments sent, 99.7 percent supported net neutrality and opposed a controversial push by the Trump administration’s commission head Ajit Pai to terminate net neutrality. Pai recently admitted that Russia meddled in the system and acknowledged that 500,000 of the suspect comments were linked to Russian emails. […]
[Republicans at] the FCC stonewalled requests by the media---and the New York state attorney general---to release information concerning the fake messages.
It's never a good look when you gain a reputation for clamming up while working at an agency that literally has the word "communication" in its name. Fortunately there's a lawsuit filed by The New York Times that may force them to make a sound. Wild guess: the first syllable will be "Wah."
CHEERS to the biggest star on the U.S. map. On December 12, 1800, Washington, D.C. was established as the capital of the United States. During those early days, everyone---the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court---was packed into the north wing of the Capitol building like sardines. They later moved into their own spaces because, well, the place was starting to smell like sardines.
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Ten years ago in C&J: December 12, 2008
CHEERS to the doubters. I know this sounds weird, but congrats to the global warming skeptics. Because of them, the real scientists around the world worked extra hard to prove global warming is real. As a result, the debate is over, over, over, and done:
Last year, [Rajendra] Pachauri's IPCC, which collected the work of more than 2,000 scientists, said climate change is "unequivocal, is already happening, and is caused by human activity." ...
"The skeptics are doing a good job because they are making us present ironclad proof," said Lawrence E. Buja, a climate change researcher for the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. But since that battle is over, he said scientists need to move on and look at the detailed impact of climate change.
Serendipitously, shutting the skeptics' mouths has reduced noxious emissions in this country by ten percent. It'd be twenty if we could figure out how to shut the other end, too. (Super Glue?)
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And just one more…
CHEERS to nature's fabulous light show. If you're up late tonight or tomorrow night and you have a desire to feel small and insignificant, here's something you'll love: the Geminid meteor shower is putting on a show…
The Geminid meteor shower – always a highlight of the meteor year – will peak around the mornings of December 13 and 14, 2018. The Geminids are a very reliable shower if you watch at the peak time of night (centered on about 2 a.m. for all parts of the globe) and if you watch in a dark sky. The meteors tend to be bold, white and quick. This shower favors Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, but it’s visible from the Southern Hemisphere, too. The curious rock comet called 3200 Phaethon is the parent body of this shower.
On a dark night, near the peak, you can often catch 50 or more meteors per hour.
Be aware that meteors often come in spurts, interspersed with lulls.
They say you'll need twenty minutes or so of staring into total darkness before your eyes get properly adjusted. Or, to speed up the process, you can just spend 30 seconds staring into Mitch McConnell’s soul.
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
Orrin Hatch Reacts to reading Cheers and Jeers: ‘I Don’t Care.’
---Mediaite
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