Margaret and Helen cont’d
Your selfishness is killing people. You don’t deserve our votes. You don’t deserve to breathe the same air we breathe. In your America 200,000 people are dead and it didn’t have to be that way. In your America children are rioting in the streets begging for justice and it didn’t have to be that way. In your America whites are told to fear blacks and blacks are told that equality isn’t a right but rather a reward for good behavior. […]
Happiness is a loaded battleship captained by elderly Democrats on scooters.
To be clear, it is Trump’s America. It is not Barack Obama or Joe Biden’s America. YOU are the President. YOU. Donald J. Trump. HEY SIRI. WHO IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES? ALEXA. WHO IS THE 45TH PRESIDENT? […]
Go back to your castle in the sky, Mr. Trump. Go back to your palace in Florida. Go back to your nice life with your pretty wife and your perfect children. Go back and please take Rudy, Mitch, Lindsey, Marco, Mike, and the rest of them with you. Go now so the healing can begin.
This great nation of ours will survive you, Mr. Trump. But as God as my witness, I pray that your Presidency doesn’t survive us this November. I mean it. Really.
Read the whole thing here, and also the magnum opus they posted a day earlier. Welcome back, ladies. Remind me never to cross you.
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Monday, August 31, 2020
Note: In the interest of transparency, and before it shows up on some secret video, here’s the complete transcript of my remarks at my $50,000-a-plate fundraiser over the weekend: “Hi. I’m hungry. Let’s eat.” After that it’s mostly orgy moans and complaints about losing the bread cube in the molten-cheese vat again while Jerry Falwell Jr. just sat there and watched, god he’s so lazy. Grrr.
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By the Numbers:
6 days to turn over the goods to a judge or face the guillotine.
Days ’til postmaster Louis DeJoy has to turn over documents about mail slowdowns to Chief Judge Stanley Bastian of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington: 6
Percent of Australians, Germans, and Canadians, respectively, polled by Pew Research who say their government has done a good job handling the coronavirus crisis: 94%, 88%, 88%
Percent of Americans who approve: 47%
Ratings for Biden’s and Trump’s acceptance speeches, respectively, on night 4 of their conventions airing on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Murdoch’s GOP State TV: 17.5 / 14.1
Percent chance that a robocall featuring Don Trump Jr. is targeting Republicans to vote by mail: 100%
Percent of NBA arenas that will be turned into voting locations this fall, per the NBA: 100%
Age of Scooby Doo creator Joe Ruby when he died last week: 87
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Puppy Pic of the Day: House hippo…
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CHEERS to turning off the waterworks. Louisiana and Texas caught the nasty brunt of H20 mega-bomb windbag Laura late last week. The storm’s long gone, but the damage remains and it’s gonna be a big cleanup operation:
“Hurricane Laura is the fifth strongest storm to make landfall in the United States in recorded history and the first in memory to maintain major hurricane strength as it traveled through Louisiana, bringing catastrophic destruction to many parishes,” [Louisiana Gov. John Bel] Edwards said in a statement. He said at a news conference that Laura was “the strongest storm to ever hit Louisiana.”
Another first: this guy sang hurricane updates in opera. His high C shattered many camera lenses.
An estimated 8,000 homes were possibly destroyed in the two states, and more than 14,000 people sought shelter from the Red Cross and other agencies, the Red Cross said. Edwards said more than 3,000 people in Louisiana found shelter in hotels. As of early Friday evening 485,192 utility customers were without power in Louisiana; in Texas that figure was 106,801.
As emergency crews, relief agencies, volunteers from far & wide, good Samaritans and, perfunctorily, Trump’s feds continue working 24/7 to keep victims (and their pets) safe, housed and fed, the rest of us can help out. Daily Kos has created an Act Blue page with a menu of A+ organizations that you can donate to with a few clicks. You’ll find it here. Among the services provided that most people don’t think about: diaper banks. Very important. As a former flood victim myself, I know how important protective headgear is during a crisis.
JEERS to keeping track of America’s fugliest numbers. The mighty Covid-19 Wurlitzer plays on. While Trump and McConnell continue dithering, the coronavirus national tour marches on (over 25 million cases around the globe now, with over 25% of them in the U.S.). Our Monday tradition of maintaining a benchmark of the awfulness for the C&J historical record continues, and let’s check the most depressing tote board in the world with all due reluctance as our death toll now equals the population of America’s 135th-largest city Shreveport, Louisiana:
20 weeks ago: 560,000 confirmed cases. 22,600 deaths.
10 weeks ago: 2.4 million confirmed cases. 123,000 deaths.
5 weeks ago: 4.3 million confirmed cases, 150,000 deaths
This morning: 6 million confirmed cases, 187,000 deaths
And to show just how a) careless people continue to be and b) insidious the virus is, a cautionary tale from way up north in Bumfuck, Maine, where an innocent wedding in Millinocket (Pop. 4,200) has resulted in over 120 covid cases because everyone did everything wrong. Message to America: don’t do that.
CHEERS to “One ringy dingy…Two ringy dingy…” Fifty-seven years ago this week, a hotline was set up between Moscow and D.C. for the purpose of keeping the superpowers in constant contact during emergencies. It worked really well. In fact we hear an elderly aide to Khrushchev is still shuffling around Red Square looking for Amanda Hugginkiss.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to today’s edition of Well That’s Good to Know! Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Pentagon:
The U.S. armed forces will have no role in carrying out the election process or resolving a disputed vote, the top U.S. military officer told Congress in comments released Friday. … “I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military, ”Milley said in written responses to several questions posed by two Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee.
This has been today’s edition of Well That’s Good to Know!
CHEERS to seeing things close-up. On this date in 1842, the U.S. Naval Observatory was created by an act of Congress. (What? Congress actually did something useful? Ma, fetch the smelling salts.) Their first weekly report was brief: “We see London. We see France. We see President Tyler’s underpants! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!” Now you know why he scowled so much.
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Ten years ago in C&J: August 31, 2010
JEERS to D.C. dreamers. Yesterday on Hardball, I couldn’t believe my ears when Newsweek’s Howard Fineman asserted that if Barack Obama had just joined a D.C. church when he became president, none of the birther stuff would’ve happened.
Oh, how my ears don’t miss this guy.
Then, Chris Matthews later chimed in to suggest that Obama should be fighting the birther smears more forcefully. Never mind the fact that the president has more important things on his plate than worrying about bullshit spam emails flying across the internet or tabloid headlines. (Yes, Matthews actually held up a copy of the supermarket tabloid The Globe with the headline “Obama is a Muslim,” and said that Obama needs to fight back—against The Globe!) Then they all agreed that the White House is “allowing this to happen.”
How wonderful to know, via “liberal” MSNBC, that there’s now a religious litmus test one must pass to be president: you must wear your religion on your sleeve, and it must pass muster with the birthers. Somebody pass me whatever the boys in the bubble are smokin’—that must be some good shit.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to magic moments in malodorousness. Anyone who reads C&J regularly, besides having questionable taste in reading material, knows that I go cuckoo for corpse flowers (aka Amorphophallus titanum). And just in time for the Labor Day weekend, good ol’ Stinkypants is preparing to open a can of odorama at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. There’s a method to its malodorousness, according to How Stuff Works:
Why does the corpse flower smell so terrible? To attract insects of course.
Because Titan Arum plants are located so far apart from one another and bloom so infrequently, they need to attract as much insect attention as possible to ensure pollination.
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The corpse flower uses its smell to attract sweat bees and beetles looking for a prime location to lay their eggs. By crawling all over the plant, these insects play a vital role in pollinating the Titan Arum.
I was going to compare the smell to the air around the White House during last week’s Trump cult rally. But that wouldn’t be fair. To the corpse flower.
Have a tolerable Monday. See ya next month. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
“There’s a boy called Bill in Portland Maine who has a post called ‘Cheers and Jeers’ and he’s about 22, he’s from America, and he’s the only person in Daily Kos to actually write the post without anybody else. Everybody else there’s four or five writers. It’s nice to see someone splash in a proper kiddie pool.”
—Elton John
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