From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...
Coffee? Tea? Nah...Snark:
"Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is still in the hospital with a serious medical condition. Castro said that a half century of Communist rule seemed like a good idea right up until the point he was rushed to the hospital in a '55 Oldsmobile."
---Conan O'Brien
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"President Bush has rejected calls for an immediate cease-fire [in Lebanon] on the grounds that he'd prefer a "sustainable" cease-fire. It makes sense. He doesn't want the killing to stop until he's sure it will stop. So there will be more killing until the president's convinced that there will be no more killing. Or everyone else runs out of people."
---Jon Stewart
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"President Bush had his annual medical exam this week. The doctors said the president remains in excellent health and is fit for duty. In fact, so fit today the National Guard called and said, `So how about serving your time now?'.
---Jay Leno
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Yes, Keith Olbermann certainly did take O'Reilly and Geraldo behind the 7-11 last night for a good whuppin'. Watch it here.
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And finally, the game everyone's been waiting for: Bush Backrub! Work those fingers... Work those fingers!
Have a great weekend. Me, I'll be aging. Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Friday, August 4, 2006
Note: C&J will not appear in these pages next Tuesday or Wednesday. Should Ned Lamont carry the day on Tuesday, however, we shall stop by to participate in the low-key, sober, and introspective acknowledgement of his victory. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go pick out my lampshade hat.
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By the Numbers:
Days `til the Connecticut primary: 4
Days `til Real Time with Bill Maher returns to HBO: 21
Number of divorces in Iraq over the past two years: 301,446
Percent change in the Iraq divorce rate over the past two years: +100%
Percent of Soap Box Derby World Championship competitors who were girls in 1971: 2%
Percent who were girls this year: 45%
(Source for the above 4 items: The Week magazine)
And from the Department of No-Land Security:
Days the color-coded federal terror alert system has been in place: 1,600
Days spent at terror alert level Blue or Green: 0
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Your Puppy Pic of the Day: "Oh, bad hound dog! Very very BAD hound dog!"
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CHEERS to new candidate same as the old candidate. An appeals court has ruled that Tom "Cut And Run" DeLay has to stay on the ballot in Texas. As Kos said yesterday, "DeLay will now have to move back to Texas to run for his old seat, and be forced to explain to his district's voters why he was so eager to abandon them for the life of the lobbyist in the DC suburbs." I may even contribute 50¢ to his campaign just for the pleasure of watching this.
JEERS to hiding your constitution-shredding activities. The "Justice" Department says it'll drop a cluster of bunker busters on Maine if our Public Utilities Commission proceeds with an investigation into whether or not Verizon illegally gave customers' records to the NSA (Kennebunkport, of course, will be spared):
"Verizon may have broken the law, and the Department of Justice is overstepping its bounds in trying to intimidate the state PUC from investigating the potential violation," said Shenna Bellows, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union. "And I do think it sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent for the federal government to threaten to sue the state, (which is) merely doing its job."
Memo to Alberto Gonzales: Back off or we'll cease shipments of lobster to your country club.
CHEERS to doing the right thing. Last night, by a vote of 56 to 42, the Senate said "No, Dammit!" to a toxic minimum wage bill that included the "poison pill" estate tax repeal. Republicans, claiming they've outfoxed Democrats, can now run around during their campaigns saying, "Look! They voted down yer minimum wage hike!" In reality, they've "outfoxed" millions of poor people who haven't seen a minimum-wage increase in nearly a decade. In other news, D.C. sanitation crews spent 6 hours last night cleaning up a mysterious proliferation of champagne bottles along K Street.
CHEERS to the birthday girl. Helen Thomas---the take-no-prisoners journalist who was respected by Presidents Kennedy through Clinton before she was dissed by President Bush---is 86 today. She's the White House press corps' version of the energizer bunny. Or as Tony Snow calls her: the boil on my butt.
UH OH to the Slacker-in-Chief. President Bush starts summer vacation in Crawford. Disaster of some kind soon to follow. Film at 11.
JEERS to unethical reportage. Lovely---Americablog catches NewsMax shilling for a "miracle supplement" right in the middle of a news story. This calls for an immediate investigation into blogger ethics.
CHEERS to stirring the hive. eBay president Meg Whitman sent out an email to all 6 gazillion members of the auction site, issuing a call-to-arms over "net neutrality:"
The phone and cable companies now control more than 95% of all Internet access. These large corporations are spending millions of dollars to promote legislation that would allow them to divide the Internet into a two-tiered system. The top tier would be a "Pay-to-Play" high-speed toll-road restricted to only the largest companies that can afford to pay high fees for preferential access to the Net. The bottom tier---the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road.
The power belongs with Internet users, not the big phone and cable companies. Let's use that power to send as many messages as possible to our elected officials in Washington. Please join me by clicking here right now to send a message to your representatives in Congress before it is too late.
By the way, the current high bid for her original hand-signed memo is up to $3.92. But I'm prepared to go higher...are you???
CHEERS to blogouflage. This is pretty cool---a program that lets you disguise your web-surfing activity at work by making any site look like a simple Word document. And just to keep it truly authentic, it freezes up every 20 minutes.
BIG JEERS to the pootie police. Among the charms of the Hemingway House in C&J's vacation spot, Key West, are the gentle six-toed cats that have roamed the grounds freely since the 1930s (and still get to take naps on Papa's bed). So, of course, George Bush's USDA now insists that the caretakers must throw them in cages:
"What they're comparing the Hemingway house to is a circus or a zoo because there are cats on the premises," Cara Higgins, the home's attorney, said Friday. "This is not a traveling circus. These cats have been on the premises forever." ... Caging the cats, some of which are 19 years old or older, would traumatize them ... "We don't know why the USDA got involved in this." she said.
Remember, kids: when you think "USDA," think United States Department of Assholes.
JEERS to star-toting slowpokes. A recap of the brilliance from our top generals yesterday: "Let's see...bombs, death, carnage, kidnappings, high unemployment, no electricity, Shia fighting Sunni... We think---and this is only a thought, mind you---we think Iraq might be headed toward a civil war." Let me guess: the next six months will be crucial. God, I hope these guys are making minimum wage.
CHEERS to Ned Lamont. This will be C&J's final comment on the Connecticut primary. Actually, it's a quote from the movie Hoosiers that sums up why I believe it's time for millionaire lawyer Joe Lieberman to go:
"There's two kinds of dumb: The man who gets naked and runs down the street barking at the moon...and the man who does that in my living room. One you can kinda accept. The other you're sorta forced to deal with."
Seriously. He was standing naked in my living room last night. Singing Oklahoma. The dog's gonna be in therapy for months.
P.S. One final final thought: if all politics is local, how come so many pundits and other assorted blowhards keep insisting that a Lamont win will be the DEATH!!! of the Democratic party nationwide? Silly.
CHEERS to smart war management. 145 years ago tomorrow, in 1861, President Lincoln signed into law the first federal income tax. He felt it was fiscally responsible because we were in the middle of a civil war. How twisted is it that Bush would call such a man today a tax-and-spend liberal?
CH'CHING! to that throbbing economy. Retail sales were up 3½ percent last month. I wonder if the $987 billion home movie theatre I charged at Tweeter had anything to do with it?
CHEERS to the movie event of the year. Just when we need a mindless comedy (besides the Lieberman campaign), Will Farrell's Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby opens today to great reviews. (Be sure to check out Rickybobby.com.) The only time we'll ever stop laughing over his kids' names---"Walker" and "Texas Ranger"---is when we're dead.
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One Year Ago in C&J: August 4, 2005:
JEERS to the cost of the war. Thanks to Kossack Scott Fanetti for making us aware of this depressing online counter: the monetary cost of the war in Iraq. Coincidentally, it also reflects the number of people who now realize the whole thing was bullshit from the start.
CHEERS to putting Rove in his place. In case it hasn't sunk in yet, Karl...!!!!
If someone like Karl Rove had betrayed my station chief while I was undercover in the Soviet Union, I would have been imprisoned or shot and my identity denied by our government. Rove's betrayal of [Joseph] Wilson's wife is a despicable act of treason. Every contact she had is now in danger. Rove deserves imprisonment at best and no compassion or mercy for endangering the lives of our agents abroad. The intelligence business is a dangerous game and has no place for political hacks seeking revenge against someone who doesn't toe the party line.
Name Withheld---Letter to Newsweek
Rove: Resign.
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And just one more...
CHEERS to my August 5 Birthday Posse. Neil Armstrong. Director John Huston. Patrick Ewing. The Elephant Man. I wonder how they'll react when the male stripper jumps out of our cake?
Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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