From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE
What Made Trump Look Like an Even Bigger Jackass in June
Last month's contribution to Bullshit Mountain…
The moon
Meghan Markle
London's mayor
The Prince of Whales
Christian booksellers
The D-Day proclamation
Dead Ayatollah Khomeini
His sniveling, evil son-in-law
His new adversary: Fox News
His former Secretary of state
His former campaign manager
The pastor of McLean Bible Church
The terrorist wearing the wardrobe
His knowledge of pending legislation
His brand-new, already ex-border czar
World Cup soccer star Megan Rapinoe
His abusive former acting Defense Secretary
The bond market's evaporated "Trump bump"
His love affair with the Butcher of Saudi Arabia
His love affair with the Butcher of North Korea
Ruthless gangster and MAGA fan Whitey Bulger
The Laffer Curve he traveled through time to study
Bibi's gift of a "Trump Heights" town that doesn’t exist
Sorry about the smell.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, July 1, 2019
Note: Due to scheduled maintenance on the space-time continuum, please allow a few extra nanoseconds on your way to work this morning. We regret the inconvenience. —Foreman Gary
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Trump ruins the July 4th holiday for everybody: 3
Days 'til the Hopkins Raspberry Festival in Minnesota: 12
Increase in Google search activity for Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, respectively, after Thursday night's debate: 500%, 300%
Amount by which Democrats are favored over Trump among all voters in Florida(!!!), Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, according to a new PPP survey: 9 points
Amount by which independent voters favor Democrats over Trump: 23 points
Percent chance that the mastermind in the David "Big Papi" shooting has been arrested: 100%
The last year that the Arapahoe Basin Ski Area in Colorado was open on the fourth of July, as it'll be this year: 2011
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Horsing around...
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CHEERS to July! Welcome to the month that starts Act II of 2019 after an intermission lasting exactly zero seconds. America turns 243 Thursday (but thanks to the Republican coup-in-progress, we don’t look a day under 500) and Canada turns 152.
It's also National Baked Beans Month and National Ice Cream Month, and on the 11th we'll be celebrating something called Feest van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap (Translation: "The takeover of the planet by horny squirrels with grenade launchers"), followed by the official start—with a few thousand progressive friends—of the Netroots Nation convention in Philadelphia. Vacations—for those lucky enough to be able to take them—are a welcome respite. The full moon—aka a “buck moon”—happens on the 16th, followed one interminable day later by…Mueller Time!!! And speaking of full moons, the second week of July is Nude Recreation Week. Plus: the midsummer box office heats up with The Lion King, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Spiderman: Far from Home, and yet another Fast and Furious sequel. (In fairness, the last one was pretty damn good.) And as of the 19th there will only be five months 'til Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker with a Gentle Assist from His Little Blue Pill. And by the time the month is over, we’ll have only a year and a half left of the Trump administration. I believe I speak on behalf of all Americans with functioning brains when I say: fly, July, fly.
CHEERS to progressive icons finally getting their close-up. As Molly Ivins would say: "Rejoice, beloveds!" For the last few years director Janice Engel and her producers poured their heart and soul into making a kick-ass documentary about the life of the legendary columnist, civil liberties advocate, and thorn in George W. Bush's side. It previewed to rave reviews on the festival circuit, and now it's goin' big, baby…BIG I tells ya!
Magnolia Pictures has acquired North American rights to the Sundance documentary Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins, an ode to the firebrand journalist whose blistering political wit made her an outsized legend in the Lone Star State. Magnolia is eyeing a theatrical release by year’s end for the film, which hits plenty of the hot-button media issues in the ramping 2020 presidential race. […]
The film’s synopsis frames Ivins’ story with call-to-action language: “She knew the Bill of Rights was in peril, and said ‘polarizing people is a good way to win an election and a good way to wreck a country.’ Molly’s words have proved prescient. Now it’s up to us to raise hell!” … Forty percent of Raise Hell profits will be split between the ACLU and The Texas Observer, the Austin-based news outlet. […]
Magnolia President Eamonn Bowles said the documentary is much like the best work of Ivins: inherently topical and relentlessly engaging. “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins is a hugely entertaining film about a larger-than-life journalist whose voice is as timely as ever,” Bowles said. “Janice Engel has crafted a wonderful, big-hearted tribute.”
The Cheers and Jeers community played a supporting role in the production by helping Janice reach her Kickstarter fundraising goal to get the project properly launched four years ago. And on behalf of all of us I'd just like to say that I'll formally thank you all when I (presumably) join her onstage to accept the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature next year. Memo to the orchestra conductor: try and play me off and I'll put my pet python Fluffy down your shorts.
CHEERS and JEERS to gettin' outta Dodge. Triple-A ("Motto: Three times more A’s than the leading A") is out with its July 4th weekend holiday traffic prediction. Nearly 49 million people will be trying to get to their vacation destination at exactly the same time and at exactly the same place as you. That's up from last year. The details:
The vast majority of travelers—41.4 million—will hit the road, the most on record for the holiday and 4.3% more than last year.
3.96 million people will take to the skies, the highest number on record and 5.3% more than last year. Travel by trains, buses and cruise ships will increase by 0.6% to 3.55 million passengers.
“Gas prices are, on average, 17 cents cheaper than Memorial Day weekend, which is welcome news for motorists hitting the road to celebrate the July Fourth holiday,” said AAA gas price expert Jeanette Casselano. “More so, summer gas prices are poised to continue dropping even lower in coming weeks.”
Triple-A also predicts that it will rescue 367,000 motorists during the July 4th holiday week. For reasons that will eventually be traced back to blind devotion to their GPS instructions, half of them will be rescued from lakes, trees, and quicksand.
CHEERS to the turning point. 156 years ago today, on July 1, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg began, marking the high-water mark of the nasty old slavery advocates. (For the record, Maine won the war for the Union, although we hate to love to brag about it, because we're modest.) In a show of magnanimity—because, hey, what's a little tyranny between friends—I bought the South a gift today, on account of I thought it was fitting for the occasion. It's an actual “Hour of Glory” Robert E. Lee cuckoo clock:
Instead of a cuckoo, a little toy cannon goes off every hour. Who knew treason could be so whimsical?
CHEERS to blowin' this popsicle stand. While most of the nation's attention is focused on the announcement of a probe being sent to Saturn's biggest moon Biggestmoonus, NASA's preparations for the next evolution in manned space travel continue tomorrow morning around 7am ET with a critical safety test that'll allow the astronauts to get back to terra firma alive if something goes wrong during the launch:
"During the 3-minute test, the spacecraft, with a fully functional launch abort system, will climb to an altitude of about 6 miles, traveling at more than 1,000 miles per hour," NASA officials wrote in a description of the test, which is known as Ascent-Abort 2. "At that point, the system’s powerful abort motor will fire, pulling Orion away from the booster."
Tuesday's test is important because NASA is expecting big things from Orion: The capsule will help agency astronauts get to the moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations. […] NASA is targeting 2022 for the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion, a lunar flyby mission called Artemis 2.
When the religious right heard there would be aborting going on, they immediately damned NASA to hell and filed a lawsuit. The judge is still in chambers trying to control an acute case of the giggles.
CHEERS to our favorite constitutional monarchy! Happy birthday, Canada! As America prepares to celebrate the violent upheaval and protracted war with Britain that led to our own "Brexit," our neighbors to the north are commemorating the cool, calm, and civilized "union of the British North America provinces in a federation under the name of Canada [on] July 1st."
Awesome whoooooo!!! We luv ya Canada! (Disclaimer: But not your tar sands.) Don't get too crazy tonight, Hosers---you could tear a rotator cuff politely waving at your neighbors.
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Ten years ago in C&J: July 1, 2009
JEERS to financial whiplash. After years of being told by "experts" that we're spending too much and saving too little, Americans are now being told they're saving too much and spending too little:
The bigger Social Security benefits pushed incomes up 1.4 percent in May, the biggest gain in a year. Yet it did not cause a similar jump in spending. Consumer spending rose only 0.3 percent. Instead, Americans used their government windfalls mainly to boost savings. The personal savings rate, which was hovering near zero in early 2008, soared to 6.9 percent in May. That was a 1.3 percentage-point gain from April and the highest rate since 1993.
By the way, we're also talking too much and humping too little. Let's work on that, shall we?
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And just one more...
CHEERS to ending every week on a high note. Every Friday our C&J poll asks, "Who won the week?" We do our best to round up ten or eleven representative samples of the people who make us feel a little mushy-gushy and remind us that all is not lost just yet. Thanks to your smarts and good sense, the Class of the Second Quarter of 2019 is a good-lookin' bunch, with Robert Mueller and his report (over which he’ll testify on the 17th) dominating the endorphin rushes. As we head into the holiday celebrating our chaotic birth, it’s good to know that, 243 years later, do-gooders still walk among us. The envelopes, please…
April 5 The members of Team Mueller who told the media that the evidence against Trump on obstruction is more "alarming and significant" than AG Bill Barr's letter states
April 12 The scientists—with special shout-out to algorithm genius Dr. Katie Bouman---who turned earth into a giant camera and took the first-ever photo of a black hole
April 19 Team Mueller, for producing a report that proves that President Trump is a crook, guilty of, at minimum, obstruction of justice
April 26 The Kansas Supreme Court, which ruled that a woman's right to end a pregnancy is protected by the state constitution
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May 3 The Washington Post, for breaking the story about the existence of a letter written by Robert Mueller about his report that exposed AG Bill Barr as a perjurer
May 10 The 800+ former federal prosecutors who signed on to an op-ed asserting that Trump would definitely be indicted for obstruction of justice if he wasn't president
May 17 Judge Emmet Sullivan, who ordered the section of the Mueller report related to Michael Flynn's criminal case to be unredacted and made public
May 24 Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for responding to Trump's tantrum and making him look dumb, weak, and desperate
May 31 Special counsel Robert Mueller, for his unambiguous message to Congress: Russia cyber-attacked America, Trump obstructed justice, Barr lied, and the impeachment-inquiry ball is in your court
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June 7 The thousands of Trump protesters, including the Baby Trump Blimp, who made his London stay inhospitable
June 14 Jon Stewart, for raking Republicans over the coals after tromping up to Capitol Hill again to get funding for 9/11 first responders' health care
June 21 The 2 million Hong Kong protesters who took to the streets against a proposed extradition law and got the government to apologize and back down
June 28 The Democratic 2020 candidates, for showing over the course of two debates that they're more qualified to be president than Trump
Who will our gold-star winners be in the third quarter? That’s for you to decide.
Have a tolerable Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
"Hey guys, you know what, America does not want to witness a food fight. They want to know how we're going to put Cheers and Jeers on their computer."
---Sen. Kamala Harris
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