From the Note Pad of Senator Susan Collins (R-ME):
Things I Shall Claim To Be Troubled By,
Disappointed In, and/or Concerned About This Week
My party's war on the Affordable Care Act
My party's war on Social Security
My party's war on the poor
The acrimony and the tone
The love white-supremacist terrorists have for my party
Alligators in the sewers
My party's denial of the human-caused climate crisis
My party’s war on women and people of color
My party's belief that Russia should determine who wins our elections
The fries I got with my lobster roll when I asked for slaw
My party's tolerance of rapists and sexual predators
That recurring dream where I get swallowed by a giant salmon
My party's fanatical devotion to lying and gaslighting
The missing brooch I just sat on
— — —
Things I Shall Actually Be Troubled By,
Disappointed In, and/or Concerned About This Week
My collapsing poll numbers and reelection chances
I think she should take a few decades off to sort this all out at the top of a mountain in Tibet. January 2021 would be the perfect time to start.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, August 19, 2019
Note: Daily Kos cap-and-trade rules are now in effect: if you don't like the drink you have in your hand, cap it and trade it for someone else's.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the special election in NC's 9th district: 22
Days `til the Bumbershoot 2019 Music and Arts Festival in Seattle: 11
Number of Democratic primary candidates still in the race with the departure of John Hickenlooper last Thursday: 23
Points by which Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris would beat Trump by if the election were held today, according to the latest Fox News poll: 12, 9, 7, 6
Number of times Trump has visited his properties at taxpayer expense during his presidency: 362
Decline in government tax examiners since 2010: 1/3
Totally Random NFL Score
New England Patriots 22 Tennessee Titans 17
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Taking in a matinee…
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CHEERS to the new Queen of the Hill. Having already made a series of his trademark gaffes that, should he become the Democratic nominee, will haunt him throughout the general election campaign, Joe Biden's perch atop the primary polls is starting to look a little wobbly. And that's not me saying that, it's the folks who are literally betting on it:
Elizabeth Warren has overtaken Joe Biden as favorite to win the Democratic Party's 2020 primary, according to a leading British bookmaker. Biden, a former U.S. vice president and senator for Delaware, is leading the polls, but has generated headlines recently for repeated gaffes, a foible of his. […]
The bookmaker Ladbrokes said it now has Warren at 9/4 favorite to win the Democratic nomination in 2020. Biden slipped to 11/4. Joint third are Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent socialist, and the party's California Senator Kamala Harris. Both are on 6/1.
Then again…
Despite their polling at low single digits, and even zero in some surveys, bettors are still putting money behind entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
There are still 168 days 'til the Iowa caucus. So take this story and five bucks and go buy yourself a nice cuppa Joe. Just ask the barista for the "Second Place Special." Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.
CHEERS to humanity at its best. Margarie Reckard was one of the victims shot and killed in El Paso by a member of Terrorists for Trump. She and her husband, Tony Basco, were a couple who had fallen through society's cracks, down on their luck but devoted to each other through thick and thin. Margarie was the last of the 22 victims to be buried, and Tony's fear that no one would show up to her funeral Friday proved to be unfounded. In addition to receiving floral arrangements from around the world…
…at least 850 people came to pay their respects, at times forming a line down the street more than a block long. […]
CNN’s Gary Tuchman told Anderson Cooper, while reporting from the funeral:
“[T]here are 500 people inside right now. This is the line, the waiting line people trying to get in. … None of these people know Tony personally but in this line you’re looking at, I have counted over 400 people waiting to try to get in.
“We spent the day with Tony yesterday. He’s such a nice man,” Tuchman added. “When he walked in today and looked at me he said ‘I can’t believe there really are this many people here.'
Very moving. Now let's pass some anti-terrorism laws with enough teeth that future Tonys won’t have to bury their Marjories because it's easier to buy an assault weapon than it is to buy a used lawn dart. Also too: fuck the NRA.
CHEERS to people with the greatest first name on the planet. Happy Birthday and "many blessings on your camels" to Bill Clinton, who turns 73 today. Some Clintonian fun facts:
✓ Clinton is one of 8 left-handed presidents. With lefty predecessors Bush I and Reagan, America was led by southpaw presidents from 1981 to 2001.
✓ In 1996, President Clinton became the first Democrat to be elected to a second term since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936. (16 years later Obama became the second.)
✓ He’s the only president who’s a Rhodes Scholar.
✓ Clinton was 16 when he shook hands with President John F. Kennedy in 1963, just four months before Kennedy’s death. Clinton later said he “muscled” his way through the line to meet JFK at the Boys Nation event.
✓ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech so impressed a teenaged Clinton that he memorized the entire speech right after it was given.
In his plus column: brash, charming, scary intelligent, beat Bush (and Dole and Perot), humiliated Gingrich, made the economy hum, is an effective surrogate for Democrats up and down the ballot, busy humanitarian, won the Bosnian campaign, and tore Romney apart piece by robotic piece at the 2012 Charlotte Democratic convention. In the negative column: DOMA, DADT, DLC, Monica, repeal of Glass-Steagall, knew Jeffrey Epstein, NAFTA, and I hear he reed-synched his sax solo on Arsenio. On the whole? Proud he has a "D" after his name. That's our Bubba.
CHEERS to Donny's folly. Well, you can't say he didn't try. After wooing our neighbors off to the northeast with a fine assortment of cheeseburgers and Diet Cokes, and assuring Americans that Mexico would pay for the deal, Greenland has issued a formal response to President Trump's attempt to buy their fine island nation, as exemplified by the New York Daily News riffing on their classic 1975 headline:
Bored with all the winning yet?
JEERS to activist judges. On August 19, 1692, four innocent men and an innocent woman were hanged on Gallows Hill for "practicing witchcraft" in Salem, Massachusetts. To this day Dick Cheney is outraged by what happened back then. He doesn’t think they were waterboarded nearly long enough.
CHEERS to today's edition of Lady, You Said A Mouthful.
The 90-year-old grandmother of Rep. Rashida Tlaib ripped President Trump for his comments about her controversial granddaughter’s off-again visit to the Land of Milk and Honey.
“Trump tells me I should be happy Rashida is not coming—May God ruin him.”
This has been today's edition of Lady, You Said A Mouthful.
CHEERS to the first frequent flyer. Today is Orville Wright's 148th birthday. He was the one at the controls in 1903 during the first heavier-than-air, machine-powered flight.
The trip was uncomfortable, expensive, delayed for hours, and the only free snacks were the ones he brought on board himself. Thanks to advances in technology, today's passengers enjoy air travel that's uncomfortable, expensive, delayed for hours, and the only free snacks we get are the ones we bring ourselves. But at least today we can get up and go pee.
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Ten years ago in C&J: August 19, 2009
JEERS to catching Paul Krugman in a LIE!!! He ain't wrong but once in a blue moon, but we got the bearded one's balls in a vise this morning. (Er...forgive me for the blue language. I'll say an extra Hail Mary at mass tonight.) On Monday, the New York Times columnist wrote a must-read on health care in industrialized nations, and made a crack about the ancestral teat from which my Swiss forebears suckled:
Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain—or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland—which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.
Oh, hardy har har. I laughed so hard I could barely finish whittling my cuckoo clock. Well, yesterday, Krugman popped out of his liberal lair long enough to post this mea culpa before fleeing his Princeton pleasure palace:
Correspondents assure me that the Swiss don’t wear lederhosen. OK, they’re yodeling holey-cheese eaters.
Yeah, cheese-eaters who now make a Swiss Army Knife that has a taser in it. Can't wait to try it out. What's cab fare from Portland to New Jersey these days?
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And just one more…
CHEERS to the put-down of put-downs. Oh, that crazy August of '09, when town hall meetings got so boisterous—with birther bullshit and teabaggers demanding the government do the exact things that would make the economy even worse—that they dominated the news, and security was often forced to step in to protect congress members from deranged loons who were egged on by the conservative media empire. But out of the wankery came a hero from the left who actually won a town hall skirmish: former Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank gave a Nazi-card-playing Lyndon LaRouche supporter something to cry in her strudel about when she trashed the Democrats’ effort to upgrade America's broken health insurance system:
"When you ask me that question, I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: on what planet do you spend most of your time?”
Responded Jon Stewart later that night: "Apparently a planet where a mixed-race president and a gay Jew qualify as Nazis." And that's why, to commemorate that epic moment, C&J officially designates August 19 as Don’t Argue With A Dining Room Table Day. Please drink responsibly.
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
“Bill in Portland Maine's gonna get out of the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool. He’ll likely get out by March of 2020. It’s gonna become very clear that it’s impossible for him to float.”
—Anthony Scaramucci
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