From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Only >>> 9 <<< Weeks 'til Netroots Nation
63 days and counting 'til the July 11-13 convention in Philadelphia. A few tidbits and links to know:
► Training sessions have been announced and, as usual, they're top-notch. Click here to see the full list, including moderators.
► Mary Rickles announced a pair of events for NN19 attendees that are happening July 10th, the day before the convention starts:
Works in Progress founder Robyn Swirling will lead a half day training on sexual and gender-based harassment in work and other shared spaces. Topics include legal standards, intervention techniques, and Best Practices for creating workplace cultures and movement spaces free from sexual and gender-based harassment. Click here for more info.
EMILY's List Women’s Pre-conference brings together women’s movement leaders from across the progressive spectrum, focusing on ensuring that more women step up to leadership positions and that they are adequately supported. Click here for more info.
► You know you've made it when Vox does an explainer on you. Last summer Matt Yglesias posted a succinct history of the convention that originally sprang from the Daily Kos community (we hate to brag...but we will), and is now "a marquee progressive activist event that [is] bigger than any one blog." Read it here.
► This may sound far-fetched, but I swear it's not fake news: Philadelphia makes beer, and I'm told it's pretty darn tasty. Check out the top picks according to Eater Philadelphia.
► Registration info is here. Hotels info is here.
► Follow Netroots Nation via Facebook here and Twitter here.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned for the announcement of keynoters and other fun stuff in future Thursday updates. Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, May 9, 2019
Note: Lint screens will fly at half staff today for National Lost Sock Memorial Day. They left us too early, darn them.
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til Mother's Day: 3
Days 'til the official 2018 season opening of Funtown-Splashtown USA in Saco, Maine: 2
Percent of registered voters who favor and oppose, respectively, a universal health care system in America, according to a new Monmouth University poll: 58%, 37%
Percent of Americans, according to the new NBC News-WSJ poll, who favor abolishing the electoral college and moving to a popular-vote system for presidential elections: 53%
Number of these five states—WI, MI, IA, AZ and PA—in which Trump is at or under 45% approval in the latest Morning Consult-Politico poll: 5
Percent chance that the Trump administration is planning to let debt collectors harass you non-stop with texts and emails, and allow 7 harassment phone calls a week: 100%
Lyft's financial loss in the first quarter of 2019, half of which was due to Gary in HR swiping the company credit card and buying the Hope Diamond for his lady: $1.14 billion
-
Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
From here in the have-no-mercy-liberals-camp, the political weather continues delightful. What could be more fun that watching Republicans turn on one another, snapping and snarling, throwing left hooks, right jabs, and mud pies? Splendid doings.
From a strategic point of view, I suppose I should want House Speaker Newt Gingrich to stay where he is, considering that he is both hateful and incompetent. But I must admit to a mild case of Greater Good here: I'd really like for America to see Gingrich in its rear view mirror, because I think he's a nasty piece of work who has brought American politics even lower than it would otherwise go. It's a good-of-the-nation moment.
The same might be said for our Texans in the House leadership, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay. Personally, I've always wondered what it says about Republicans that those two were chosen for leadership positions in the first place. Armey is an ideologue of no noticeable political skill, and DeLay has been so clumsy and heavy-handed in his abuse of power that it's been painful to watch, whether you're for him or against him.
---November, 1998
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: All the candidates' pets…
-
CHEERS to another leak in the dam. I believe it was Princess Leia who famously said to Grand Moff Tarkin, "The tighter you squeeze, the easier it's going to be to get Trump's tax information and splash it all over the front page of The New York Times." Lo and behold, Tuesday night the newspaper we hate except for those "Times" when we love it dropped an investigatory anvil on Trump's giant, misshapen head, revealing a fact not even the most cynical among us expected: the electoral college voted to install the guy who is literally the worst businessman in America:
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income taxreturns. […]
In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. […] The 10-year total: $1.17 billion in losses.
Mr.Trump was able to lose all that money without facing the usual consequences---such as a steep drop in his standard of living---in part because most of it belonged to others, to the banks and bond investors who had supplied the cash to fuel his acquisitions. And as The Times’s earlier investigation showed, Mr.Trump secretly leaned on his father’s wealth to continue living like a winner.
But before we all continue pointing and laughing, a word to the wise: let he or she among us who hasn't lost half a billion dollars in personal business holdings over a two-year period cast the first stone. I call dibs!
JEERS to God's little perv. On the same day Donald Trump was confirmed to be the worst living spawn of an unscrupulous businessman in America, Jerry Falwell, Jr. was confirmed as the worst spawn of an unscrupulous televangelist minister. According to now-jailed Michael Cohen ("Locked him up! Locked him up!"), Falwell had photos of his kinky and un-Christian-like sexytime sessions taken, presumably so he could masturbate to them later, before his nappy time. Cohen says he still has one of the pics, and I'm told this may be it:
To be fair, C&J reached out to the Christian right's poster child for all things pure and holy, and we were told it's just a family friend. We report, you decide.
-
-
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Facepalm Answer Man. CNN asks: How black will the royal baby be?
[Facepalm]
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
-
-
JEERS to America: land of the guns, home of the gun nuts.
What happens in the wake of the gun violence in Newtown Aurora Binghamton Tuscon Santa Barbara Charleston Lafayette Roseburg Kalamazoo Orlando Alexandria Las Vegas Parkland Benton Pittsburgh Thousand Oaks Aurora Poway etcetera etcetera etcetera Highlands Ranch, Colorado (1 killed, 8 wounded at a school by a couple of good guys with guns right up until they became bad guys with guns) is depressingly predictable: The community will grieve. Gun control advocates will wisely suggest that this might be a good time to review our federal and state firearms policies so that our nation's shameful record of gun violence might be improved upon. The president and his minions will blame Democrats for the carnage and urge every living soul and their pets to arm themselves to the teeth, and insist it's "too soon" to talk about gun control as they continue scaring politicians into looking the other way by informing them that, "We'll be scoring you on your response." Like I said, predictable. Depressingly.
CHEERS to fluid situations. This week in 1863, traitor General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson died of pneumonia after one of his own fellow traitors shot him a week earlier in a battle at Chancellorsville during the war he joined to destroy the United States of America in order to preserve ownership of human beings possessing skin pigmentation different from his own.
True fact: he would've survived longer, but Jefferson Davis’s newly-signed Rebelcare health insurance plan considered pneumonia a pre-existing condition, and the high-risk pool his insurer plopped Jackson into had already run out of money. Sadly, the bake sale table that J.E.B. Stuart and Robert E. Lee set up to raise funds for his surgery was turned into splinters by a Union cannonball, leaving only Mrs.Beauregard's lemon tarts, which were far too mushy and sour and only brought in 3 cents. And that's why you read C&J: we bring history to life.
CHEERS to recycling on steroids. Interesting news from the world of applied chemistry. Seems scientists were working on a superior form of flubber when they accidentally misplaced a cosine on their chalkboard and came up with an endlessly-recyclable form of plastic. Our ocean dwellers will be especially happy to hear the news, reports Gizmodo:
“Most plastics were never made to be recycled,” said lead author Peter Christensen, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, in a statement. “But we have discovered a new way to assemble plastics that takes recycling into consideration from a molecular perspective.” [...]
[18,000-word paragraph with complicated chemistry wurdz deleted. ---BiPM]
The researchers’ hope is that this new plastic material could come to replace various plastics that can’t be recycled currently because of how they’re created: those in shoes or phone cases, for instance. […]
Not only is it exciting; it’s necessary. Plastics are now everywhere, from the bottom of the ocean to remote mountaintops. We don’t yet know what this means for our health, but we know that they’re killing our birds and marine life that mistake them for food. And right now, wildlife needs all the help it can get.
Even Fox News is excited about the development. They say this could add months to the life of their anchors' faces.
-
Ten years ago in C&J: May 9, 2009
JEERS to 44's near-brush with impeachment. When history closes its books on the Obama administration—all 12 years of it (I'll explain that later)—it will note that his greatness was secured when, in May of 2009, he survived Dijonmustardgate with little more than an accidental, gravity-defying dollop of the precious condiment on his tie. But, man, the Senate Culinary Committee hearings were brutal.
-
And just one more…
CHEERS to the "King of Paper Engineering." I hate to break the news to you, but we still have to wait---[Counts on all 225 fingers and toes]---225 days until the premiere of Star Wars Episode IX: Kylo Ren Short-sheets the Beds at the Shady Pines Home for Aging Jedi. But a couple months before that, we can get our galaxy-far-far-away fix in a cool new book called Star Wars: The Ultimate Pop-Up Galaxy by the aforementioned paper engineering king Matthew Reinhart. But this ain’t no ordinary pop-up book. It comes "…in a dynamic 360-degree format that enables the action to be viewed from all sides; the book also opens up to form a displayable 3D diorama of the entire saga." In other words, it's a groundbreaking (or should I say ground-popping Ha Ha Ha!) work of art. Have a look:
-
Release date: October 8th. I'm really looking forward to it, with one caveat: if Han doesn't shoot first in Mr. Reinhart's pop-up cantina scene, he may wake up one morning and find a bantha head in his bed. Sorry, but I take my originalism very seriously.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-
Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
The chemicals in the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool seep into your bloodstream after just one day, FDA says
---USA Today
-