From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Fourth Debate Happy Funtime Quiz!
The Democratic presidential candidates are debating tonight (8pm, CNN) at my alma mater Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. (Go, Fighting Cardinals! Beat Capital!) Classing up the front page this morning is our exclusive Debate #4 quiz. Just match the fun fact with the candidate—Yang, Biden, Castro, Klobuchar, Warren, Harris, Sanders, Buttigieg, Gabbard, Steyer, Booker, and O'Rourke. Good luck:
1. Received the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award in 2013.
2. Was preceded as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee by the odious Strom Thurmond, and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by the even more odious Jesse Helms.
3. While attending high school in Montreal, co-founded a six-member dance troupe called "Midnight Magic" that played at senior Community centers.
4. Appeared with Orrin Hatch in the 2015 Parks and Recreation episode "Ms. Ludgate-Dwyer Goes to Washington."
5. Graduated magna cum laude from Yale with a degree in political science, but not before interning for Vice President Walter Mondale.
6. Won first election—mayor—by ten votes.
7. Was guest piano soloist with a symphony orchestra performance that also included guest Ben Folds.
8. Has attended more Netroots Nation conventions than any other 2020 candidate.
9. Father was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
10. Remarked about working for an art mover called Hedley’s Humpers: “We’d have a Picasso or marble or an ancient samurai sword. I can’t believe they trusted us with that stuff.”
11. Studied Latin and Japanese.
12. Is a godparent to a great-granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt.
Answers 1. Gabbard 2. Biden 3. Harris 4. Booker 5. Klobuchar 6. Sanders 7. Buttigieg 8. Warren 9. Steyer 10. O'Rourke 11. Castro 12. Yang
Scoring 1-4 correct: landslide defeat. 5-8 correct: enjoy a dozen doughnuts from Schneider’s Bakery. 9-12 correct: landslide victory
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Note: Portland, Maine has a mayoral election on November 5th, and I'm ready to announce my endorsement. I'm throwing my full support behind the first candidate I see going door to door wearing a top hat. (Add spats and I'll put up a yard sign.)
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Daylight Saving Time ends: 19
Days 'til the Baltimore Craft Beer Festival: 18
Amount of time that the 2020 Democratic candidates have spent discussing the climate crisis during their debates so far this cycle: 43 minutes
Number of previous years when they've talked about the climate crisis longer than that during debates: 0
Number of lung injuries and deaths, respectively, from vaping so far this year: 1,300 / 26
Years Shep Smith worked the anchor desk at Fox News: 23
Rank of Nobel Prize (chemistry) winner Laureate John Goodenough, 97, among the oldest laureates: #1
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Morning calisthenics…
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CHEERS to holiday rebranding. We hope you had a happy Smallpox Awareness Day—aka Columbus Day—yesterday. Here in Maine we celebrated our first-ever statewide Indigenous People’s Day, and what a sight for sore eyes it was to read this proclamation from our new Democratic Governor Janet Mills:
“Maine is home to people from many lands, like those with Italian, French and other ancestries, whose contributions we recognize and cherish. Today, our state takes another step forward in building a brighter, more inclusive future by honoring Maine’s tribal communities.
On Maine’s first indigenous Peoples’ Day, let us pay tribute to those who were the first stewards of this land we call Maine, celebrate their many contributions to our great state and recommit ourselves to fostering a relationship anchored in mutual trust and respect.”
Further south, the president—a twin of our previous governor—acted exactly the way you’d expect a white imperialist dictator-wannabe to act: he failed again to mention anything about Native Americans or indigenous peoples. Aides say his proclamation is the result of a sacrosanct White House policy in effect for the last 33 months: assholery never takes a holiday.
CHEERS to Order in the courts. Since nothing happened on the planet yesterday besides carnage, chaos, confusion, and Columbus Day mattress sales that had savvy consumers "sailing across town to discover HUGE savings," this seems like a good time to review last week's federal court rulings that, like so many before them, are keeping the Trump administration's gears mostly stuck in neutral. These decisions hit him where it really hurts: his tax returns, his wall, and his fever dream of disappearing all the immigrants:
» The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Trump's accounting firm, Mazars USA, to turn over eight years of his corruption-riddled taxes to the House of Representatives.
» Trump's effort to fund his border wall by diverting a bunch of military money—money earmarked for things like military housing, health care and education—under the guise of a "national emergency" is bullshit, ruled Judge David Briones. (Amount of new border wall put up so far, versus sprucing up existing sections: a whopping nine miles.)
» Three judges blocked Trump's effort to tear down the "public charge rule" that gives immigrants who rely on public assistance to obtain legal status. Judge George Daniels calls it "repugnant to the American Dream." Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson says it sounds awfully "arbitrary and capricious" to her, adding, "the harms to children, including U.S. citizen children, from reduced access to medical care, food assistance, and housing support ... will compound over time." And Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton threw Ken Cuccinelli's rewriting of the Statue of Liberty poem ("Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge") back in his face: "Whether one would prefer to see America's borders opened wide and welcoming, or closed because the nation is full, laws—not poetry—govern who may enter."
And in other positive court news, this morning Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was seen in the Supreme Court parking lot bench-pressing her first Tesla.
CHEERS to #2 getting caught up in #1's wake. File this under "Things Joe Biden Never Had To Worry About." When the sitting vice president starts circling his wagons like this, you know all is not right in Executive Branch Land (and you can bet Mother's not happy):
Vice President Mike Pence has beefed up his West Wing communications team as he confronts an accelerating impeachment inquiry into President Trump and an unpredictable 2020 reelection campaign.
Pence is under pressure to answer questions about Trump’s actions and own his role in the administration’s dealings with Ukraine, which are the focus of a widening investigation by Democrats in the House of Representatives. The vice president is simultaneously trying to reassure skeptical voters that Trump can be trusted with a second term. […]
Beyond Democrats' allegations, Trump’s comments and social media posts on the matter, which typically hit without warning, is another issue the vice president is going to have to deal with.
I believe that explains the other thing Pence has been surrounding himself with lately: ACME 2000 Speeding Bus Detectors.
JEERS to America's #1 pubic-hair-on-Coke-cans expert. Twenty-eight years ago today, in 1991, Clarence Thomas was confirmed by the Senate 52 to 48, making him the Supreme Court's first justice with a neatly-cataloged porn collection (#1 on his list: The Adventures of Bad Mama Jama). Today he sits on his fat ass all day, an aging, bitter, bloated pervert who hollers at the world the way Grampa Simpson hollers at clouds. Oh my god—I think that makes him my soulmate.
CHEERS to pomp and circumstance: pre-apocalypse edition. With sixteen days left until Brexit turns the empire into a zombie wasteland, Britain’s parliament reconvened yesterday, but not before putting on a jolly good pre-game show. As a prelude to the Queen’s Speech (entire transcipt: ”He-llooooooooooo!!! Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam!”), the House of Commons put on its traditional display of warning the hoity-toitys not to piss down their back and call it kidney pudding:
What a coincidence. Lady Usher of the Black Rod is Clarence Thomas’s second-favorite porn star.
CHEERS to good advice. Possibly the cutest story in American politics. A hundred and fifty-nine years ago today, in 1860, an eleven year-old girl named Grace Bedell put quill to parchment and suggested to candidate Abraham Lincoln that he might win the election more easily if he dropped the innocent boy-next-door look and whiskered up:
I have yet got four brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.
All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you to but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can.
As they say, the rest is history. By the way, during his presidency—you can look it up—Lincoln went through exactly four score and seven beard combs. Eerie.
P.S. Bedell's letter reminds me that not a single woman was legally able to cast a vote for Lincoln, or any candidate, until Harding in 1920. America: land of the free, home of the slow as molasses.
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Ten years ago in C&J: October 15, 2009
CHEERS to Michael Steele. For giving us the gift of laughter. On TV. In live speeches. On the radio. In print. And even during the unveiling of the new GOP web site. I mean, really: what is it about Republicans and basic technology that makes them come off like two-year-olds supervising a nuclear power plant? I guess their skill set can only go as far as their mindset, which is currently stuck in 1957. But thanks for the laughs, anyway—they’re therapeutic. Maybe for your next act, Mike, you and a bunch of your buddies can ride cows cross-country on a Magical Republican 2010 Resurgence Tour! If you're lucky you might even sign up a Latino!
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And just one more…
CHEERS to snappy answers to simple questions. Lord only knows what questions CNN's moderators will ask tonight at the debate in Westerville. But we do know what questions The Late Show threw at some of the candidates who'll be onstage tonight:
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And since drinking games are as much a part of debates as the debates themselves, here's mine: take a shot every time a candidate says we can't afford to do something, and then take a swig every time a candidate says we can't afford not to do something. Debate starts at 8 ET. See you under the table around 8:15.
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor's open...What are youcheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
“You know, POTUS has become a potty-mouth and children are listening. This is beyond disgraceful. But for him to say the thing that he said about Bill in Portland Maine was so far beyond the pale.”
—Speaker Nancy Pelosi
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