Cheers and Jeers: Thursday

Oh! More Things I Know:

❧  There are 61 days ‘til the 2023 elections.

❧  As of Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump has never heard of Enrique Tarrio.

❧  Democrats feel your pain. Republicans inflict pain. No Labels wonders why we can’t strike a happy balance between feeling it and inflicting it.

❧  One of the more unexplainable things about the BA.2.86 variant of the Covid virus when you look through a microscope is it wears corduroys.

Continued…

❧  You can tell when you’re in the presence of a “special master” by the sequins on their skin-tight black leather unitards.

❧  Never in my 59 years have I seen such an absolute failure to take the parenting of our children seriously. I’m speaking, of course, of the parents of the children who grew up to be the gullible, violent, soulless, red hat-wearing, right-wing dipshit MAGA cultists.

❧  Scranton lunch-bucket schlub Joe Biden’s approval rating is higher than Donald Trump’s and on par with Ronald Reagan’s at this point in their presidencies…and they were saints chosen by God!

❧  Other than the thousand-year killer floods and thousand-year killer droughts and thousand-year killer heat waves, it’s been a delightfully pleasant summer.

❧  I wish I knew how to get in touch with all the “Proud Boys” terrorists sitting in jail so I could tell them that crying yourself to sleep every night isn’t very MAGA-like.

❧  The worst part for me about fighting in our second Civil War is saddle sores. The second worst part is sucking in a bunch of campfire smoke while playing my plaintive harmonica at dusk.

❧  The bad news: we’re all food for worms. The good news: they tell me that with a little ketchup we ain’t half bad.

And now, our feature presentation…

–

Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, September 7, 2023

Note: NFL season starts today as the Lions play the Chiefs.  I believe that’s your cue to start tap dancing with sparklers. Or something.

–

By the Numbers:

Days ’til the OSIRIS-REx capsule returns with its cargo of asteroid candy: 17

Days ’til the Lewistown Chokecherry Festival in Montana: 2

Number of people who have enrolled in President Joe Biden’s new SAVE repayment plan, which will lower their monthly student loan bills: 4 million

Percent chance that HHS wants DEA to move THC from SKD I to SKD III in the CSA: 100%

Year-over-year increase in heavy truck (more than 14,000 pounds gross vehicle weight) sales: 2%

Estimated number of humans who remained after our species almost went extinct 900,000 years ago, according to research published in the journal Science: 1,280

Number of years the human population stayed roughly that low thereafter: 117,000

–

Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:

What do you mean, you don’t like George W. Bush’s foreign policy?

He’s met twice now with Puddin’ of Russia; he went to the G-8 deal and only one guy got killed; he met with the Popester, a rockin’ guy, and didn’t object that His Holiness was wearin’ some kind of A-rab robe with a Jew-boy hat. Or even that His Holiness kept lookin’ at his shoes while they talked about stemming cell phone research, or something. Karl told George W. he needed the Catholic vote, so Bush called the Popester “Sir.” But he didn’t refer to anyone in Italy as a wop.

So what if Puddin’ liked the sport-fucker? Bush is in way over his head. Foreign policy is where the mule throwed Russell. It’s worse than collectin’ pick-up sticks with your butt cheeks.

—September 2001

–

Puppy Pic of the Day: In Maldon, Australia: Saved!!!!!

–

JEERS to bleach injections at dawn. Guess who’s coming to feast on your tender and tasty internal organs? Yeah…the gift that keeps on giving:

Signs in the U.S. continue to point to a rise in Covid activity as fall approaches.

Hospitalizations are rising. Deaths have ticked up. Wastewater samples are picking up the virus, as are labs across the country.  “Every single one of those things is showing us that we have increased rates of Covid transmission in our communities,” said Jodie Guest, a professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. […]

Other signs of increased Covid activity are easy for the general public to spot. “When you know multiple people who are currently experiencing symptoms of Covid or tested positive of Covid, that’s another great marker to recognize how much of it there is in your community,” Guest said. “We also see Covid tests being absent on their shelves in Walgreens and CVS and other places as well, because people have more transmission right now.”

You know the drill. Mask up, get vaccinated and, above all, whatever you right-wing cousin says to do via email don’t do it!

CHEERS to getting the vermin off the streets. I’m ashamed to admit it, but the MAGA cultists owned this lib (Hi, Bill in Portland Maine, nice to meet ya) in a very specific and infuriating way. Namely, every time I’d see that smug, beefy jerk leader of the Proud Boys terrorist organization on camera spouting his fascist bullshit, my blood pressure would spike. During the reign of #45, he had a free pass to plot whatever violent anti-American activities he pleased. It seemed like the law would never catch up to him (or his stiff-armed loser psychophants). So consider this a top item I can now cross off my bucket list:

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced Tuesday to 22 years in prison for orchestrating his far-right extremist group’s attack on the U.S. Capitol in a failed bid to stop the transfer of presidential power after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

Tarrio’s sentence is the longest so far among more than 1,100 Capitol riot cases, topping the 18-year sentences that Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and one-time Proud Boys leader Ethan Nordean both received after juries convicted them of seditious conspiracy and other charges.

Amazing to think that when he finally walks out of his incarceration hellhole, I’ll probably be dead and buried.  Which is hilarious as hell because I told him I’d be his ride.

JEERS to a very bad bench warmer.  31 years ago this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee opened hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.  He was, of course, the first porn addict with a teabagger-traitor wife to be elevated to the nation’s highest bench. And now we also have the first beer-chugging alleged rapist (Kavanaugh), the first guy to rule that a semi truck driver stranded in frigid cold should freeze to death rather than unhook his disabled trailer and drive to get help (Gorsuch), the first 21st-century Puritan to invoke 13th-century witch hunters to make women second-class citizens (Alito), and the first lady to be officially designated by her People of Praise cult as a “handmaid” (Coney Barrett). Y’know, that’s what I love about this country—our commitment to diversity.

–

BRIEF SANITY BREAK

–

–

END BRIEF SANITY BREAK

–

CHEERS to Republican rhetoricians. I can’t stand former speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s concern-troll smugness on the Sunday shows, but I never jeer someone on their birthday (her 73rd).  She wrote some of Reagan’s most famous lines, and was both an asset to George H.W. Bush (“A kinder, gentler nation”), and a liability (“Read my lips—no new taxes”). But she really shit the bed in 2012 when she exclaimed that Mitt Romney was a lock to defeat President Obama because “all the vibrations are right.”  And her advice on editing is a bit flawed…

Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE.  Of course it’s fresh, we’re on the ocean.  Of course it’s for sale, we’re not giving it away.  Of course it’s here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.

Of course, what Peggy seems to overlook is that fish is also a verb, so the “FISH” sign might cause people to go fishing instead of visiting the shack with the fresh fish sold here, thus causing it to file for bankruptcy and lead to an eventual meltdown in the global seafood market.  And all this time I thought the righties were pro-business.

JEERS to Demolition Derby: Outer Space Edition. When Harry Truman took office following FDR’s death in 1945, he said he felt like “the moon, the stars, and the planets all fell on me.” He said nothing about asteroids, and that should make you afraid—very afraid. If, as Q-Anon suggests, the ghost of Harry Truman is planning to give us hell by hurling an asteroid at us, this could be the week it happens:

Five asteroids, one as large as a house and two each the size of an airplane, will fly past Earth between Sept. 6 and Sept. 12, according to NASA’s Asteroid Watch dashboard. 

Two asteroids will go past Earth on Sept. 8. One, called QC5, has been compared to a plane and will be about 79 feet in size, and the other, named GE, is about the size of a bus, measuring in at approximately 26 feet in size. The airplane-sized asteroid was first observed in 2023, and will be within 2.53 million miles of Earth. The second asteroid was first observed in 2020, and will pass within 3,560,000 miles of the planet.

The second airplane-sized asteroid, QF6, was discovered in 2023 and measures about 68 feet in size. It will pass Earth on Sept. 10. This one will come the closest to the planet, traveling about 1.65 million miles from Earth.

The final expected asteroid will also be the size of a bus and fly by Earth on Sept. 12. 

I wish to make one thing clear now: if the impact cracks open an asteroid and a long-dormant species of alien emerges and makes a beeline for Maine, I pledge to fulfill all my assigned duties as its faithful viceroy, even if it means compromising all my fellow Earthlings. (But I still don’t do windows.)

–

Fifteen years ago in C&J: September 7, 2008

CHEERS to the tube d’ boob.  Just our opinion, but Obama and Biden were cool, crisp and quick-witted yesterday on, respectively, ABC’s Let Me Interrupt You Every Five Seconds with George Stephanopoulos and NBC’s We Miss Tim Russert.  Meanwhile, there’s a full slate of cathode-ray goodness today as Michelle Obama kicks off the new season of Ellen, Keith Olbermann interviews her husband on Countdown, and Rachel Maddow’s new primetime show debuts at 9.  If those don’t float your boat, catch the first in-depth interview with Sarah Palin on cable access channel 2 from 3:15 to 3:16.  AM.

–

And just one more…

CHEERS to the sharpest knife in the media’s drawer. Rhodes Scholar, best-selling author, Emmy and Grammy winner, avid angler, and journalist Rachel Maddow has been hosting her own show on MSNBC for fifteen years as of this week. (Although she’s pared back to Mondays so that she can focus on new projects.)  I try not to engage in pundit worship, but…she’s brilliant, witty and everybody loves her except those Republicans who fear her. “Scary fact-wielding lesbian truth-teller! Run for your lives!”

As much as I despised the Trump horror show, his reign of carnage and chaos brought out the dogged gumshoe in Rachel, who did her damndest to cover as many of his scandals as she could—we give her an A for effort in her quest to become the whack-a-mole champ. Today she focuses, with equal doggedness, on the Biden administration’s efforts to deal with the disasters that were tossed in its lap.

She’s also an entertaining mixologist who whips up a mean libation occasionally. Money quote from half a dozen years back, which sticks a well-placed finger in the GOP’s eye: “I’m undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”

[Shakes head.]  ‘I Like Ike’ is now the rallying cry of the hippies. Who’da thunk it?

Have a nice Thursday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?

–

Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial

I write to lodge an ethics complaint regarding recent public comments by Bill in Portland Maine, which appear to violate several canons of Cheers and Jeers ethics, including standards the Supreme Court has long applied to the kiddie pool.

—Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

–