Mystery Solved
The Late Show did some digging, and found out who hacked into a certain South Dakota governor’s social media accounts...
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Good boy.
And now, our feature presentation...
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, July 11, 2024
Note: Due to unforeseen circumstances, the annual Unforeseen Circumstances Festival has been canceled for the 49th year in a row. Also: the planning meeting for the 50th Unforeseen Circumstances Festival has been postponed because of...well, take a guess.
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By the Numbers:
8 days!!!
Days 'til Ice Cream Day: 10
Days 'til the Copper River Salmon Jam in Alaska: 8
Year-over-year drop in used car prices as of June: 8.9%
Year-over-year drop in lumber prices: 20%
High temperature in Phoenix on Monday, breaking the previous record set in 1985: 118 F
Amount medical students at Johns Hopkins University will now pay for tuition, thanks to a $1 billion fund set up by Bloomberg Philanthropies: $0
Rank of Boise ID, San Francisco CA, and Portland OR on Lawnstarters list of best cities for dog parks: #1, #2, #3
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
The long-awaited and much-heralded Barack Obama did not disappoint, and when you consider the burden of expectation that had been placed on the poor man, that's almost miraculous.
I did not think he was as effective a speaker as Mario Cuomo was in 1984, but at least an A-minus.
He uses a wonderful rhetorical device the late senator from Texas, Ralph Yarborough, had down to perfection—topping one applause line with another, then again and again, until the crowd is roaring with approval. A political star is born, always an exciting moment.
—July 2004, from the Democratic Convention in Boston
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Mid-summer cooldown…
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CHEERS to taming the beast. What's scarier to the American people than al Qaeda, a pork rind shortage, or monsters under the bed? INFLATION AAAAAHHHHHHHH RUN AWAY OR IT WILL EAT YOU!!! So all heads, shoulders, knees, toes, eyes, ears, noses, and mouths will be focused on today's inflation report. I could tell you exactly what it'll say, but that's no fun. Instead, please enjoy this prediction from a random site the Google machine provided:
Consumer prices likely continued to fall in June, if forecasts are correct, keeping inflation on a path toward a level that could give the Federal Reserve confidence to cut interest rates this year.
Ahhhhh!!! Inflation bombs!!!
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report on the Consumer Price Index due Thursday is expected to show that the widely watched measure of inflation rose 3.1% over the year, down from a 3.3% annual increase in May, according to a survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
If the report matches expectations, it would help confirm that inflation has resumed its descent after a worrisome uptick in the first quarter. […] As of Monday, financial markets were pricing in more than a 75% chance that the Fed will cut the rate at its September meeting.
The main thing to watch for when Fed chairman Jerome Powell opens the envelope containing the inflation report: if he throws his top hat in the air and yells "Whoopie!" it's good news. If his monocle fogs up: sell everything and move to Mars.
CHEERS to cleaning up the online town. Stop the presses! It looks like the long arm of the law has finally taken a bold step toward fighting the Russian troll farms that infect social media like a plague with borscht breath:
Federal prosecutors ripped down hundreds of AI-generated phony social media accounts used by Russian operatives to create a "bot farm" that spread lies and pro-Vladimir Putin disinformation in the United States and abroad, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
FBI troll farm harvester chews ‘em up and spits ‘em out.
Many of the electronically-created bots, complete with pictures of smiling clean-cut people, purported to be Americans with names such as "Sue Williamson" and "Ricardo Abbott" who were supposedly taking to social media sites such as X to extoll on Putin's generosity and virtues. […]
Disinformation experts and U.S. officials heralded the crackdown as the first of its kind against state-sponsored AI-powered propaganda.
The operation nabbed over a thousand fake Twitter accounts. Even more amazing, only half of them had been promoted by Elon Musk.
CHEERS to "#6." On July 11, 1767, John Quincy Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts. His presidency was, oh, let's call it a mixed bag. But intellectually he was one of the sharpest pencils in the box, and he followed his White House stint with a remarkable tenure in the U.S. House.
True fact: he’s got Bette Davis eyes.
Adams was also fanatical about that socialist Marxist concept known as "physical fitness," although it once got him in hot (read: cold) water. From Cormac O'Brien's book Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents:
While president, he set time aside virtually every day for a swim in the Potomac—a preoccupation that nearly killed him when, upon rowing with a servant to the far shore with the intent of swimming back, a storm brewed. After their flimsy canoe filled with water and sank, the two only barely made it to the far shore. The servant set off in search of clothing, and JQA waited patiently, sitting naked on the riverbank.
Pay your respects here. But not too loud—his dad's resting three feet away and he gets cranky when you darn kids show up with your hippie hair and boom-boom music.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to Great Moments in Sports. On this date in 1914, Babe Ruth debuted in the major leagues with the Boston Red Sox. We include this bit of trivia to shamelessly remind the world that the Sox are only 8 games behind the Orioles in the AL East on their way to claiming their fifth World Series in 20 years. Anyone who disagrees is guilty of promoting negative energy. You...don’t...want to promote negative energy...do you?
JEERS to the evil that walked among us. For his entire adult life Jimmy Inhofe dedicated his life to making our planet a worse-off place than when he found it. As a politician, notably his nearly 30 years stinking up the U.S. Senate, he poisoned minds with the GOP's patented brand of fear and hate, and made it look so easy, lying like a rug encrusted with cat vomit. But mostly he denied that humans were poisoning the planet and its wafer-thin atmosphere. He was human scum, through and through—a literal conservative without conscience, a misguided, brainwashed know-nothing-by-design who couldn’t swallow enough of his cult's brand of Kool-aid. And now he's dead, to the planet’s relief, at 89. His name and his sorry legacy will melt away faster than a crayon in the Tulsa sun. But, believe it or not, I have a policy of always finding one nice thing to say about the departed, even those whose elevator to the afterlife will be going down, not up. And so, right here and right now, I will reluctantly admit…
That was just about the most perfect snowball I ever done seen.
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Ten years ago in C&J: July 11, 2014
JEERS to Iraqin' in the free world. If I understand this correctly, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, the Republican who hopes to replace Rick Perry as governor, is now hiding his state's chemical weapons of mass destruction from the public. Wow, that's all the justification we needed to invade an entire country a dozen years ago. I guess Halliburton and Koch Industries decided it was time to profit off of war again, but a little closer to home this time. Paging Colin Powell: your vial of baby powder is needed at the United Nations again. We'll also need wicker baskets to hold the sweets and flowers when we're greeted as Texas liberators. And Bush, you stay out of it—we want to win this time.
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And just one more…
JEERS to "Second Amendment remedies." 220 years ago this week, Treasury Secretary, Founding Father and Boy Wonder Alexander Hamilton died after dueling in Weehawken, New Jersey, directly across from Manhattan. With Hamilton mania a seemingly perpetual thing, you're probably expecting me to post some video clip from the 300-Tony-Award-winning Broadway smash. Ha ha, fooled ya. I never miss a valid excuse to opt instead for Michael Bay’s smash hit Advertising-Hall-of-Fame commercial with the killer setup one more time:
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Bwahvo.
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
"People take and justify the use of Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool algae medicinally for a wide range of reasons and ailments. What is supported in the scientific literature is much more limited."
—Gregory Tung, Ph.D.
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