From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
A Slight Revision
Among my private papers destined for display in the Bill in Portland Maine Library and Mop Closet is a ragged piece of construction paper on which is scrawled my attempt at age 7 (circa March, 1972, below) to write out the words to our National Anthem. It's virtually illegible today, so I've transcribed it below to mark today’s 205th anniversary of the day Francis Scott Key completed it. Please stand, sit, take a knee (any knee will do), raise your fist, or just wing it, and join me in our annual tradition of singing the, um…
Star Bangled Baner
Oh say can you see by the dons early light
What so proudleeree haild at the twilited flashed gleaming.
Were galenntlee sareeming.
And the rockets gleenly of bombs bursting in air
Came our thru our thru the fight
that are flag was still there
O say gotslan stare spangled banner ye whenne
Forb the land of the free and the home of the brave.
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Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pour my spellchecker a stiff drink.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, September 16, 2019
Note: After consultation with our panel of experts, my committee recommends passing a strict voter butt-photo ID law. Please sign on the dotted line, drop trou, have a seat on the copier, and press the green button.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til autumn: 7
Days ‘til the 18th annual Route 66 Mother Road Festival in Springfield, Illinois: 11
Rank of Biden, Warren, and Booker among candidates who got the most talk time at Thursday night's debate: #1, #2, #3
Rank of Klobuchar, O'Rourke, and Yang: #8, #9, #10
Drop in the number of children covered by health insurance between 2017 and 2018, according to new Census Bureau numbers: 500,000
Percent chance that the biggest drop in uninsured kids happened in the south, according to FiveThirtyEight: 100%
Date on which Baltimore Oriole Jonathan Villar hit home run 6,106, breaking the Major League Baseball record for most homers among all teams in a single season: 9/11/19
Totally Random NFL Score
New England 43 Miami 0
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Puppy Pic of the Day: How to tell when your editor thinks your article's done…
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CHEERS to antici-pay-ay-ay-tion. What's more suspenseful than watching the Vatican smokestack for signs of a new pope or waiting for the text "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away" to appear on-screen at the premiere of a new Star Wars movie? These days it's waiting for Congressman and Conscience-of-America John Lewis (D-GA) to announce that he supports the impeachment of Donald Trump. And word is, he's getting closer:
Despite his silence, advocates for Trump's removal see the civil rights icon—a man Democrats describe as the conscience of their caucus—as a singularly powerful potential ally, one of the last publicly undecided lawmakers who could change the calculus inside the Democratic caucus. And Lewis himself says an announcement on impeachment is almost at hand.
"My time is growing near," the Georgia lawmaker told reporters this week. He added, "I’ve never been supportive of this so-called president. Before he was inaugurated I said he was not legitimate. So I have some very strong feelings."
[L]awmakers and aides privately described Lewis as one of the pivotal decision-makers on the subject. His outsize influence among members of the Congressional Black Caucus and among House progressives—dozens of whom have remained silent on a potential impeachment inquiry—could bring many of them on board.
146 Democrats are already on board as the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation ramps up this week. While we wait for Congressman Lewis to decide the right moment to hop on the bandwagon, I was gonna suggest that nobody make any sudden moves so we don’t scare him. But then I remembered that, after what he's been through, nothing scares John. So let’s go with Plan B: warm pillow, plate of cookies, exfoliating foot rub, and gentle pleading.
CHEERS and JEERS to mixed messages. The Census Bureau released its annual poverty report last week, and there's good news and bad news and more bad news:
Good news: The official poverty rate in 2018 was 11.8%, a decrease of 0.5 percentage points from 2017. This is the fourth consecutive annual decline in the national poverty rate. In 2018, for the first time in 11 years, the official poverty rate was significantly lower than 2007, the year before the most recent recession.
Bad news: Median household income was not statistically different from the 2017 median, and the official poverty rate decreased 0.5 percentage points from 2017.
Median household income was $63,179 in 2018, not statistically different from the 2017 median, following three consecutive years of annual increases.
More bad news: The rate and number of people without health insurance increased from 7.9%, or 25.6 million, in 2017 to 8.5%, or 27.5 million, in 2018.
Democrats have a plan to cut the poverty rate in half with steps that include increasing the minimum wage, preserving the food stamp program, offering free tuition at community colleges, extending unemployment insurance, and creating robust public works programs to improve the jobs picture. Not to be outdone, Republicans have their own plan to cut the poverty rate to zero in one step: eliminate the Census Bureau's annual poverty report.
JEERS to stupid God tricks. Over the weekend, while you were sleeping, an asteroid (2000 QW7) the size of Russia plowed into Earth, instantly turning soil, water and our magma core to dust, but not before all carbon-based life forms were transmogrified into glitter. (Figure that one out, Einstein.) Suspecting this was going to happen, the Good Lord hired Microsoft to store a backup "Blue Marble" in the Cloud—updated in real time—that could instantaneously replace the old one if necessary. So as you rise and shine and wipe the sleepies out of your eyes, take a moment to realize that you're a perfect copy—thoughts, feelings, aches, pains, and everything else—of who you were just before the meteor did its dirty work. With one minor exception, thanks to Milt in Coding Bay J-7: you have a new tentacle. Keep an eye on your email—they've got a patch in the works.
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Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
This is another edition of The One Word Answer Man. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch asks: "Do you really want me to rule the country?"
No!!!
Now back to Cheers and Jeers.
Gong! Gong!! BuddaBuddaBudda… GONG!!!
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CHEERS to order in the courts. We can't win 'em all, but here's a trio of decisions against, respectively, Fox News, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump—all peas from the same toxic pod—that help us maintain our faith in the American judicial system:
Seth Rich murder A federal appeals court Friday reinstated a lawsuit against Fox News and two other defendants over its coverage of the death of Seth Rich, a 27-year-old Democratic Party aide who was murdered in July 2016. …[A Fox News] story reported that Rich had been linked to the leak of thousands of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks and suggested his death might be related to the release of those emails. The police department in Washington, D.C., believes Rich's shooting death was the result of a botched robbery.
Sandy Hook "conspiracy" Conspiracy theorist and lawsuit magnet Alex Jones lost another legal battle last week when a court struck down an appeal related to a defamation lawsuit against him and his fearmongering website Infowars. Infowars and Jones are defendants in a lawsuit brought by Neil Heslin, the father of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, who was one of 20 children and six adults killed when a gunman stormed Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. In the years since the shooting, Heslin and other Sandy Hook parents have received death threats and online harassment from followers of Jones’ Infowars website, which over the years has repeatedly claimed the shooting was a hoax and the parents are “crisis actors."
Emoluments suit A federal appeals panel in New York voted 2-1 Friday to let a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Donald Trump's failure to divest from his businesses to move forward. […] Judge Pierre Leval wrote for the majority, "Plaintiffs have plausibly pleaded that the President’s ownership of hospitality businesses that compete with them will induce government patrons of the hospitality industry to favor Trump businesses over those of the Plaintiffs so as to secure favorable governmental action from the President and Executive branch."
Trump responded to them predictably by insult-tweeting and calling them names in front of his staff. The judges resisted the temptation to respond in kind, mostly on account of they're no longer in middle school.
CHEERS to memorable moments in attempted comedy. Fifty-one years ago today, in 1968, Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh-In and uttered the immortal words: "Sock it to me???" Here's the whole segment for context:
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I wish we had gotten the chance to sock it to him after the crook quit in '74. Thanks a lot, Gerald.
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Ten years ago in C&J: September 16, 2009
CHEERS to Barack the Enforcer. Two stories that suggest #44 is kicking #43's ass when it comes to defeatin' the evildoers. First, he sent a missile down the gullet of a high-level al Qaeda leader in Somalia. But he's also taking a bite out of Islamic extremism just by...not being George W. Bush:
Arabs and Muslims' more positive feelings toward the new U.S. president are believed to have helped deflate al-Qaida's anti-American rhetoric, which found a receptive audience during the administration of former President George W. Bush, who was widely resented in the region. ...
Evan Kohlman, a terrorism expert at globalterroralert.com, said al-Qaida appears to have been unable to come up with a way to confront the popularity of the new U.S. president.
Obama has pursued a policy of seeking better ties with Arabs and Muslims, giving a landmark speech in Cairo in June, moving to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and taking a somewhat harder stance on Israel in the peace process.
Soft power. What a concept.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to fall at the flickers. Now that summer—in all its sweaty, mosquito-plagued, dark-socks-with-white-shorts ghastliness—is nearly over, it's time to look ahead to sweet, sweet autumn, when the arguing next-door neighbors finally shut their windows, the leaves explode in a fireworks-display of color, and a slate of movies that are actually worth watching hits theaters. Quartzy has a super roundup of the cream of the crop here. One that I'm glad got made is The Report, which chronicles one of the hundreds of reasons why the George W. Bush presidency was such a spectacular failure: his CIA torture program that hocked a massive loogey on the sacrosanct Geneva conventions. I'm at the point where I'll watch Adam Driver read the phone book, and it looks like he's at his laser-focused best here as Daniel Jones, who works for Senator Dianne Feinstein (just give Annette Bening the supporting actress Oscar already) and is tasked with getting to the bottom of the sordid coverup. Looks like a great bureaucratic whodunit in the style of All the President's Men:
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Opens November 15th. Wild guess: Bush wishes it wouldn't.
Oh, and today is "Collect Rocks Day." Or, as Senator Tom Cotton calls it, "Replace Your Old Brains With New Ones Day." 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
"Cheers and Jeers is such a harmless and charming confection that it becomes possible to suppress one's inner socialist for the duration."
—Paul Whitington, The Irish Independent
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