Oh! More Things I Know…
✌ There are only 8 shopping days left 'til Christmas in Armenia.
✌ President Biden is superior to the entire Republican field by a factor of 16 quadrillion. Probably higher but my abacus caught fire while I was calculating.
✌ The scariest words in the English language are, “I’m Speaker Mike Johnson and I’m here to help.”
Continued...
✌ No Biden cabinet members have had even a whiff of scandal surrounding them.
✌ There's a little bit of a little bit of all of us in all of us.
✌ Last night my TV said, "Want justice? Call Judge Judy." So I called the number on the screen and said I still want Bush and Cheney prosecuted for war crimes.
✌ How could MAGA Republicans in the House be so stupid?!! Hint: they're MAGA Republicans in the House.
✌ The media fixated on almost every dishonest tweet the previous president posted, even the ones labeling journalists an “enemy of the people,” yet there’s a total media blackout on President Biden’s optimistic and fact-based tweets.
✌ I sold my precious pocket watch so I could afford to buy my partner Michael a set of hair brushes. But unbeknownst to me he sold his precious hair so he could afford to buy me a watch fob. He laughed and said at least we've got each other. I stomped off, slammed the door, and declared Christmas ruined for all future generations.
✌ I remain cautiously optimistic that Kamala Harris will soon bring back the time-honored vice-presidential tradition of shooting a lawyer friend in the face while quail hunting.
✌ If you're not 100% satisfied with Cheers and Jeers, I offer a 100% money-back guarantee. Minus the 110% restocking fee, of course.
And now, our feature presentation...
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Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, December 28, 2023
Note: C&J will post tomorrow evening in the diaries before preparing to endure scorn and ridicule for wearing a tan suit without a flag pin on New Year's Eve, resulting in our spending the entire day Monday in the basement sobbing over humanity's cruelty. But we'll return Tuesday morning both bright-eyed and bushy-tail, thanks to my success in finally drinking the right serum that turns me into a human-squirrel hybrid. If you won’t be here tomorrow, we pre-wish you a safe and happy New Year's weekend.
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3 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til Science Fiction Day/Isaac Asimov's birthday: 5
Days 'til the New Year's Eve Hershey's Kiss Drop in Hershey, Pennsylvania: 3
Increase in retail sales during this holiday season versus last year: 3.1%
Size of President Biden's pay raise for federal workers, the largest since 1980: 5.2%
Estimated percent of Russia's Black Sea Fleet that has been destroyed over the past 4 months: 20%
Time it takes Japan's Moon Sniper lunar lander to circle the moon as it prepares to touch down on the surface on January 19th: 6.4 hours
Date of last day of the year: 123123
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
Another reason why religion and policy make such a bad mix is that religion brings the dread element of certitude into what needs to be a constant process of questioning. In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh quotes a former Defense Department official who served in Bush's first term: "The president is more determined than ever to stay the course. He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage, 'People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.'"
without a shadow of a doubt is both foolish and dangerous. I would be far more reassured if I thought the president were second-guessing every move we make than I am to find out he hasn't a shadow of a doubt. For one thing, it shuts him off from considering alternatives, and boy do we need some alternatives.
So here we sit, watching a great, stinking skein of corruption being fished to the surface of Washington, while the town is simultaneously filled with a great babble about God, prayer and morality. Corruption trails head off in all directions—lobbyists, wives, jobs, perverting intelligence, outing agents for petty revenge—all this and a prayer breakfast every day.
—December 2005
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Puppy Pic of the Day: And the week after Christmas mood, too…
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CHEERS to seeing the planet as half-full. Well, if you put aside for a moment the fact that we missed our chance to save ourselves a loooong time ago, it's worth noting that a handful of optimistic and resourceful humans earned their paychecks this year. Positive News highlights a few of the good news stories of 2023:
☼ The burgeoning medical revolution was a major theme of 2023. “We are seeing a pace of progress that has not been witnessed for 100 years,” Bertalan Meskó, director of the Medical Futurist Institute in Budapest, told Positive News in October.
☼ There were some notable breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer in 2023. A new cervical cancer treatment using cheap, existing drugs was described as “the biggest improvement in outcome in this disease in over 20 years”. Scientists also made a “tremendously exciting” breakthrough in treating prostate cancer. England, meanwhile, approved a drug shown to prevent breast cancer.
Another feel-good story of ‘23: George Santos lost his House seat.
☼ The pay gap between full-time working women and their male counterparts in the US is now narrower than ever, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—but there’s a way to go before parity is reached.
☼ Food experts have cooked up a substitute for one of the world’s most environmentally contentious ingredients: palm oil. Developed using linseed and rapeseed, its makers say it can be made locally at scale, avoiding the deforestation and habitat loss associated with palm oil production in countries including Malaysia and Indonesia.
☼ In a historic referendum that pitted people against big oil, Ecuadorians voted to halt drilling in a protected region of the Amazon in August. … The Amazon breathed a little easier in 2023 following years of rampant deforestation. Analysis by Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit that monitors the rainforest across nine countries, said that deforestation rates are down 55.8% compared to last year.
☼ “The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable. It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’—and the sooner the better for all of us,” said IEA executive director Fatih Birol.
Polite golf clap to everyone who reused, repurposed, and/or recycled in 2023. Well, except for the politicians who did it with their talking points. Ha ha ha ha ha!!!
CHEERS to changing times. On today’s date in 1852, Emma Snodgrass was arrested in Boston for wearing pants. Today she'd be arrested for not wearing them. Discuss.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to Texas. America's 28th State—sorry, I won’t call all y'alls a republic because your heads are big enough as it is—celebrates its 162nd birthday today. Yeah, we remember the Alamo...and also that every governor elected by you since Ann Richards has been all hat and no cattle. (The current one is absolutely psycho.) On the other hand, you're the stomping grounds of Molly Ivins, LBJ, Jim Hightower, Beto O'Rourke, and them gol'durn Castro brothers, and even Dwight Eisenhower spent his first two years there, so points for that, as well as for continuing your ever-so-slow-but-steady march toward purple-state status. In the crock pot this evening: Armadillo stew. But not real armadillos. We only serve tofudillos.
CHEERS to the Great Health Care Stampede of Aught Twenty Three. The deadline passed a couple weeks ago for 2024 Obamacare coverage, and if you're wondering how this year's enrollment went, Charles Gaba (aka brainwrap here at Daily Kos) sums it up in one word: BOOM…
The Biden-Harris Administration announced today that the Affordable Care Act (ACA)Marketplace enrollment continues at a record-breaking pace.
A very busy web site.
As of December 15, 2023, for HealthCare.gov states and December 9, 2023, for State-based Marketplaces, preliminary data projects that over 19 million consumers will enroll in 2024 coverage through the ACA Marketplaces—over 7 million more than when President Biden took office. This includes 15.3 million individuals who have selected a health plan using the HealthCare.gov platform. On December 15 alone, the deadline for coverage starting January 1, 2024, more than 745,000 people selected a Marketplace plan through HealthCare.gov—the largest single day in history. […]
"More than15.3 million people have signed up for Health Insurance Marketplace plans instates that use HealthCare.gov, an impressive 33% increase compared to this time last year,” Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said. “The Marketplace clearly meets an important need in Americans’ lives, making access to health care possible for adults and their children.
In addition to those impressive numbers, there's another sure sign that the Democrats' Affordable Care Act is now entrenched in American society: Republicans have started yelling, "Keep your government hands off our bronze, silver and gold plans!"
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Three years ago in C&J: December 28, 2020
JEERS to keeping track of America’s fugliest numbers. The mighty Covid-19 Wurlitzer plays on with 81 million cases worldwide—over 20 percent of them in the U.S. Our death toll now roughly equals the population of America’s 56th-largest city Honolulu, Hawaii. As for vaccine distribution: it's happening, but it's going slower than expected. Distributors at Pfizer and Moderna say they figured something was up when the Trump White House changed the name of its emergency vaccine effort from Operation Warp Speed to Project Palm Beach Tee Time.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to great moments in chemistry. 112 years ago this week, in 1911, Marie Curie received her second Nobel Prize for her work on radioactive elements:
After Marie and Pierre Curie first discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium, Marie continued to investigate their properties. In 1910 she successfully produced radium as a pure metal, which proved the new element's existence beyond a doubt. She also documented the properties of the radioactive elements and their compounds.
“Would you like a cup of polonium tea with your radium biscuits? I brewed it fresh.”
Radioactive compounds became important as sources of radiation in both scientific experiments and in the field of medicine, where they are used to treat tumors.
The Nobel committee honored Marie "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." You might say she got a glowing review.
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
“During my lifetime I have been so pleased to see a growing awareness of how we must protect the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool as the one home which we all share."
—King Charles III
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