Bullshit Mountain cont’d
Eric the LesserGoodyear TiresGolden showersMount RushmoreThe dial on his TVHis younger brotherJoe Biden’s bike rideHis Minnesota speechPre-existing conditionsThe Jerusalem embassyFact-checker Daniel DaleThe QAnon numbskull cultHuffPost reporter S.V. DateHis low, low convention ratingsThe current wife who hates himThe Manhattan District Attorney
This is only the tip of the assberg. The rest can be seen at the bottom of today’s column. If you get bored with all the winning before then, feel free to skip it and donate a few bucks to your favorite Democratic candidate instead. And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, September 1, 2020
Note: Due to circumstances beyond our control, the C&J pharmacy is no longer selling our new miracle Covid-19 cure known as—[Checks notes]—ingestible dynamite capsules. We have no further comment at this time. Please refer all inquiries to our attorney’s attorneys’ attorneys. Have a nice day. —C&J Legal Dept.
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By the Numbers:
9 weeks!!!
Weeks ’til the general election: 9
Trump’s favorability rating just before and just after his cult convention, respectively, according to ABC News/Ipsos polling: 32%, 31%
Biden’s favorability rating just before and just after the Democratic convention, respectively: 40%, 46%
Current favorability of Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, respectively, in the same poll: 31%, 43%
Jobless claims last week: 1 million
Amount it’ll cost you to watch the new live version of Mulan in the premier section of Disney+: $30
Year during which The New York Times began publishing TV listings, a feature that it discontinued last Sunday: 1939
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Puppy Pic of the Day: He’ll use the same pic for his driver’s license…
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CHEERS to September. Even though we’re still plenty locked down due to the Trump Plague—which will claim its 200,000th victim this month—there’s still a lot to keep our masked mouths agape over the next 30 days. Congress straggles back to work to issue lots of sternly-worded letters after a month off. (#1 item on the Republican agenda: whatever Vladimir Putin and/or Q-Anon and/or the twitter feed of dead guy Herman Cain decrees.) It’s Hunger Action Month, Cat Month, Suicide Prevention Month, and Sewing Month. (How’s that for variety?) Joe Biden maintains his lead in the polls as the United States Postal Service is fashioned into a fine-tuned election-stealer to make those polls meaningless. And for what it’s worth the first Biden-Trump debate is the 29th at Ohio’s Covid Western Reserve University. But first there’s a little primary election to tend to today in Massachusetts, where the Kennedy dynasty, via Joe III, is challenging incumbent Sen. Ed Markey for his U.S. Senate seat.
Early voting starts this month in some states. Keep track at Vote.org.
More kids go back to school, followed shortly after by the same kids un-going-back to school when covid rears its head in the classrooms and hallways. 9/11 turns nineteen. Shoppers jam online stores looking for the perfect Autumnal Equinox and Mexican Independence Day gifts. (“A pair of socks? You shouldn’t have.”) New England gets insanely beautiful as summer turns to fall. Full “Corn, Fruit, Barley, and Hungry Ghost” moon is tomorrow and Rosh Hashanah starts the 18th. The rescheduled Kentucky Derby gets run this Saturday. Oh, and as a special bonus this month we get five Infrastructure Weeks!
Jimmy Kimmel hosts the Emmys on the 20th (Game of Thrones is expected to win everything just out of habit), followed by the season 24 premiere of South Park. In theaters this month: Covid-19. And I feel confident enough in my awesome psychic ability to make the following prediction: for another month Trump will remain a corrupt, white-supremacist-enabling narcissist hellbent on killing as many Americans as possible with his favorite weapons: a virus that makes you drown in your own lung fluid and bullets from the barrels of vigilantes and their allies the cops. What can I say? It’s a gift.
CHEERS to surviving the swamp. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s new book comes out today. It’s called Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady, and it’s just the latest inner-circle tell-all to hit bookstore shelves and e-readers. Wolkoff was an adviser and friend of America’s most shitbaggy first lady. There’s plenty of dishing in it (and she reportedly has tapes to back it up) that will be batted aside, but also some dirt that might produce a bit of flop sweat inside the Trump crime syndicate:
[S]he’s still “working with investigators” to dig into potential financial crimes committed in connection with Donald Trump’s inauguration in early 2017. […]
Fidel wore it better.
In late 2016, she started working for the Trump team, first as a senior adviser to help”produce” Trump’s inauguration and then, after the inauguration, as an unpaid adviser to Melania Trump.
Propelled at least in part by later comments from Winston Wolkoff about her time working on the inauguration, local and federal investigators began scrutinizing millions of dollars in allegedly excessive and inexplicable expenditures.
“I’m working with three different prosecutors, and it’s taken over my life,” she told ABC News, referring to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York and local attorneys general in New Jersey and Washington, D.C.
Yes. Only three different prosecutors and three different state AG’s offices. Or as it’s known in Trump Land: a smaller case.
CHEERS to historic ringy-dingies. Happy Emma Nutt Day! On this date in 1878, the first female telephone operator in the U.S.—the aforementioned Mrs. Nutt—started working for the Telephone Dispatch Company of Boston. She was brought in after the existing operators—a bunch of male telegraph tappers who turned into snotty unhelpful little twits when they started talking to actual people—were fired. And on tomorrow’s date in 1878 they used those skills to form the first Time Warner Cable customer service call center.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to order in the court. It’s become the mantra of the Trump years: if you want to hear good news from the government, look to the courts. And this morning we seal a trio of recent LGBT-related decisions in the C&J time capsule along with a few pounds of glitter to confound the archaeologists who discover it:
Trans health protections A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s rollback of an Obama-era regulation prohibiting discrimination in health care against patients who are transgender, a day before it was set to go into effect. U.S. District Court Judge Frederic Block found that the planned rollback, which was announced in June, violates the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that extended federal civil rights law to gay, lesbian and transgender workers.
Equality for same-sex parents A federal court in Georgia ruled that the U.S.government must recognize the citizenship since birth of Simone Mize-Gregg, who was born two years ago to a married same-sex couple, and issue her a passport. … [T]he State Department considered children born abroad to married same-sex couples to be born out of wedlock and denied birthright citizenship to them,saying citizenship at birth requires a biological relationship with both parents—even though it does not seek proof of this for opposite-sex couples.
Trans students A federal appellate court ruled that public schools cannot prohibit transgender students from using the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity. The 2-1 decision, issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, cited Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s landmark opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, reasoning that such policies violated federal sex discrimination laws and the U.S. Constitution.
I don’t know whether it’s a sign of the apocalypse or the arrival of our benevolent sparkle pony overlords, but knowing that Neil Freaking Gorsuch’s out-of-nowhere Bostock ruling is going to stymie the homophobes for the foreseeable future is…….weird. (But no grand marshal spot in any pride parades next year, bub. Not ‘til you drop and give us twenty. Jazz hands.)
JEERS to the War to End All Wars to End All Wars. 81 years ago today, on September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II. The U.S. wouldn’t officially enter the fray for another two years, but when we did we kicked Fuhrer butt. Today we salute all our veterans who fought the real Axis of Evil…and also a special Luftwaffe vet who unwittingly helped shorten the war by months:
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Hey, I have an idea. Let’s not do it again, shall we?
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Ten years ago in C&J: September 1, 2010
CHEERS to peace on earth. Yesterday President Obama corralled the heavy hitters of the Middle East—Netanyahu of Israel, Abbas of Palestine, Abdullah II of Jordan and Mubarak of Egypt—for a closed-door meeting. Sources say they came to a major agreement early on: white chips are a dollar, blue chips are five dollars, red chips are ten dollars, ante is two bucks, one-eyed jacks are wild, and this scotch is uncommonly smooth. Today: laser tag.
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And just one more…
JEERS to more of Mr. Maniac’s manure. As promised, here’s the bottom half of this month’s record-breaking list of people and things that made Trump look like an even bigger jackass in August:
His sister’s secretly-recorded rantThis pissed-off Pennsylvania judgeHis idiot White House trade adviserHis Puerto Rico-for-Greenland trade ideaHis ghoul son-in-law’s Covid-19 “success”His covid bedside manner: “It is what it is”The 1918 pandemic that ended World War IIHis arrested former chief campaign strategistThe lawsuit by one of his alleged rape victimsThis dirt-dishing Republican DHS chief-of-staffThis snake oil peddler and his bogus covid “cure”The “2 week” health-care plan deadline he missedAnd in New Hampshire: too many middle fingers to count
Sorry about the smell. It goes with the territory. Five more months and the fumigation trucks will arrive in force.
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor’s open…What are youcheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
”Bill in Portland Maine has a long-lost twin. The two spent their childhoods collecting the passing debris in the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool. We can’t see this twin. Wherever it is, it broke away with our chlorination machine eons ago.”
—LiveScience
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