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Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday [1]
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Date: 2023-03-21
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Note: You are a liar, a thief and a traitor! Update: No, wait, sorry...that's Beth in my knitting class. Never mind.
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By the Numbers:
10 days!!!
Days 'til the start of Adopt A Ferret Month: 11
Days 'til the Eastern Alpaca Jamboree in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: 10
Hike in the retirement age unilaterally decided on by French president Macron, for which he is now in deep Le Doodoo: 62 to 64
Estimated number of active TikTok users in the U.S.: 150 million
Average age of the active TikTok user: 31
Sales at Freeport, Maine-based L.L. Bean in 2022, its second-best year ever: $1.8 billion
Rank of L.L. Bean's Wicked Good Slippers among its top-selling items last year: #1
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Puppy Pic of the Day: And the most popular dog breed in America in 2022 was…
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CHEERS to previews of coming attractions. Today former president Donald J. Trump will be arrested, cuffed, booked, cavity searched, hosed down, issued an orange jump suit, told by the warden that "what we have here is a failure to communicate," and indicted. Unless he isn’t, in which case the Dom Perignon goes back in the fridge and we try again tomorrow. (We will, however, still eat the caviar. You hate to see it go to waste.)
JEERS to self-immolation. The cold, hard truth is that the universe doesn’t care that we're here. It doesn’t even know we're here. Our pale blue dot is, relatively speaking, an atom on an elephant's butt, if that elephant was the size of Jupiter. One day—a blink of an eye in universe time—our home planet will get swallowed up by the sun or pulverized by an asteroid, and that'll be the end of it. But between now and then it would be nice if we tried to avoid snuffing ourselves (and our furry, finned, and slimy co-inhabitants) out due to greed, apathy, and neglect. Yup, it sure would be nice. But it's not looking good…
The chance to secure a livable future for everyone on Earth is slipping away. “Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”
—Kurt Vonnegut That was the dire message from a United Nations report released Monday, the culmination of more than six years of work by thousands of climate scientists contributing to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all,” the report’s authors wrote. […] The panel also found that a key aim of the landmark Paris climate agreement---to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—may be out of reach.
As these reports always do (to prevent mass despondency), this one says there's still hope! If we can find a needle in a haystack and then manage to stuff a camel through its eye, they say, we might prevent a full-on apocalypse. And in a demonstration of total global unity to make it happen, every country's representative at the U.N. just signed a binding proclamation turning that duty over to Greta Thunberg. By noon, please.
CHEERS to the Nailbiter Heard Round the World. Ah, yes…I remember it like it was just 3,718 days ago. On March 21, 2010, after a huge amount of debate, committee hearings, number-crunching and input from the entire health care and insurance industry—y'know, all the responsible rule following that the Republicans never bother doing—the Nancy Pelosi-led House passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Preside Obama and VP Biden applaud House passage of the ACA.
And what a collection of moments we saw. From blue dogs Bart Stupak and Dan Lipinski's grandstanding over abortion, to the late John Dingell showing off his historic Medicare gavel, to the House leadership locking arms and walking through a canopy of teabaggers like the protagonists of The Wizard of Oz skipping down the yellow brick road, to the hecklers that created "mass hysteria" (Barney Frank's words), and finally the moment that nobody wanted to arrive because they were all having so much darn fun: the 219-212 vote shortly before midnight. There was still work to do in the Senate, but this was nothing less than historic. Today Democrats will mark the occasion with quiet reflection on a job well done (like eliminating discrimination based on pre-existing conditions), a commitment to expand and improve it, and the satisfaction of knowing signups and savings are still robust. Republicans will mark the occasion by gnawing the bark off a tree.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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x One line drawing a portrait only using circles with variable line thickness
[📹 EASYUSE (Döuyin):
https://t.co/UyL5bJ8Q4A]pic.twitter.com/pUcspwRR4K — Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 19, 2023
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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JEERS to how far we've fallen. On March 21, 1790, Thomas Jefferson reported to President Washington as America's first Secretary of State, during which he grappled with weighty and complex issues related to the debt, foreign affairs and the location of the new U.S. Capitol. Exactly four years ago, Donald Trump's second Secretary of State in less than two years (the first one had trouble waking up from his naps) held a conference call with a bunch of right-wing religious outlets to plan for The Rapture, but not before he was called a "butt boy" for a"wannabe dictator" on national TV. And now he thinks he wants to be president. I had a punchline all set to go for this item, but it just walked out onto our roof and jumped.
CHEERS to a temporary thaw. Hey, I'm a lover not a fighter, so I'll jump on the Biden bandwagon and join him in wishing the Iranian people a Happy Nowruz. The president closed his message with the traditional, "Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak," which loosely translated means "Gangnam style, whoop whoop." (Admittedly, very loosely.)
It's a classy and important thing to do. I know it's a classy and important thing to do because the right-wingers are grinding their teeth down to the nub over it—always a good sign that our side's doing something right. And now, without further ado: [Fires glitter cannon.] "Nowruzetan Pirooz!" And many blessings on your goldfish.
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Ten years ago in C&J: March 21, 2013
CHEERS to the dean of Deans. This is cool—Chris Savage at Eclectablog got a chance to grill none other than Howard Dean recently. They cover a lot of ground, including Howard's advice as former DNC Chair for success in the 2014 midterms:
I’d be doing what we did in 2006. I’d be working really hard for a 50-state strategy and I’d be finding candidates that Washington insiders don’t know anything about. That’s how we won. We had a lot of surprises and the reason we had a lot of surprises because we made the party strong enough and worked with the state parties. People who were finding candidates were local people because they knew where the best candidates were. It’s pretty hard to pick a candidate from Washington! The best way to do it is let the local people pick their own candidate and then support them. So, I’d go back to the 50-state strategy.
I was going to suggest the 50-kicks-to-the-GOP-groin strategy. But the 50-state one is good, too. Not as much fun, but good.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to snatching victory from the full diaper of defeat. Down yonder at the University of North Carolina and Duke University at Chapel Hill, the sporting event of the year was held earlier this month, and only through an amazing network of couriers using perilous back roads and secret tunnels (and, I was just told, a pole-vault stick to get over a nasty briar hedge) did the news make it to our C&J home office. After independent verification, this morning we’re happy to report that the result of the Diapers To Dorms Dash was a thrilling come-from-talcum-powdered-behind finish:
As soon as the race started, a baby girl called Lyla went racing ahead of the other babies and stopped inches before the finish line. […] Remember when President Obama illegally coached the winner in 2015? A shameful blight on his presidency. Meanwhile, another baby named Emmit came crawling behind Lyla and also stopped near the finish line. A third baby named Brexley made slow progress across the court and even stopped in the middle for some time. However, against all odds, she managed to complete the race first by crawling across the finish line into her mother's arms.
So congratulations to 2023 champion Baby Brexley, along with runners-up Lyla, Emmit, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial "Let me be clear about what I'm calling for right now: I'm calling for an independent investigation of the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool and the whole algae-control system there. Bill in Portland Maine doesn’t just get to do it." —Senator Elizabeth Warren
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[END]
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