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Cheers and Jeers: Monday [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-21
Monday Twain Blogging
Mark Twain, a man whose bullshit detector went to 11, died 115 years ago today, on April 21, 1910. A year earlier he wrote:
I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'
More Twain:
"Always respect your superiors; if you have any." “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.” “Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.” "Travel is fatal to prejudice." "It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races." “Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” “Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.” “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.” “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
He was anti-slavery, pro-women's rights, clear-eyed about religion, and a big supporter of labor unions. Occasionally humorous, too. Pay your respects here.
And now, our feature presentation...
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, April 21, 2025
Note: In honor of kiddie pool splasher Maudlin's run today in the Boston Marathon, all pickle juice in the C&J cafeteria is buy-one-get-one-free. Add 50 cents and we'll spoon-feed it to ya from a bread bowl. —Chef Billeh
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By the Numbers:
5 days!!!
Days 'til May Day: 10
Days 'til Hawaii's Waikiki Spam Jam: 5
Current expected rate of economic growth for the first quarter under the glorious Trump regime that promised 5-6 percent growth: 0.4 percent
First-time unemployment claims announced last week, down 9k from the previous week: 215,000
Number of additional states (MO, VA, and LA) now reporting measles cases, raising the number to 27 states under the glorious regime of HHS director RFK Jr.: 3
Speed at which NASA's spacecraft Lucy passed by an asteroid over the weekend: 30,000 mph
Maine's tourism-related haul last year, an amount that will likely decline this year thanks entirely to Donald Trump the genius businessman: $9.2 billion
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Goooooooooooal…!!!!!
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CHEERS to order in the courts. As we wakey wakey, stretchy stretchy, and wipe the sleepy sleepies out of our eyes, let us take a moment on this blessedly quiet and peaceful new dawn to WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM!!! the gavel of justice with updates on a quartet of fine rulings from late last week:
Deportations 1 A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from deporting noncitizens to countries other than their place of origin without due process. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued an injunction that bars the Trump administration from deporting any noncitizen to a country not explicitly mentioned in their order or removal without first allowing them to raise concerns about their safety. The official Gavel of Justice is actually 1,000 times bigger. Deportations 2 The U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday temporarily blocked the deportations of any Venezuelans held in northern Texas under an18th-century wartime law. In a brief order, the court directed the Trump administration not to remove Venezuelans held in the Bluebonnet Detention Center "until further order from this court." CFPB firings A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered an immediate halt to the planned firings of nearly 1,500 employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and is ordering the Trump administration to hand over communications and make top officials available for testimony to determine whether they deliberately violated one of her court orders. The Google Goliath Google illegally dominates two markets for online advertising technology, a judge ruled on Thursday, dealing another blow to the tech giant and paving the way for U.S. antitrust prosecutors to seek a breakup of its ad products. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, found Google liable for “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power” in markets for publisher ad servers and the market for ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers.
For their good works, the judges and their staffs will receive absolutely nothing but the compensation package they already get. Plus the usual thanks of a grateful nation.
JEERS to a vicious cycle in a tri-corn hat. So, if you're just waking up from a 250 year slumber, let's get you up to speed: over the weekend in 1775, protesters of the king won a skirmish at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, sparking a revolt and eventual independence from said king. Then we went through a bunch of territorial expansion, massacred of native tribes, saw a slow and war-filled end to slavery, created a bunch of civilization-enhancing inventions, fought a couple world wars, then another war, then another war, then two more wars. Then our Supreme Court gave our president the powers of a king, which we did not take kindly to. And as of last Saturday, here we are again back where we started:
The [nationwide "Hands Off!" protests] ranged from rallies in midtown Manhattan and in front of the White House to a demonstration at a Massachusetts commemoration marking the start of the American Revolutionary War 250 years ago. Concord bridge, where we fought the tyranny of the king in 1775. And 2025. Thomas Bassford drove from his home, some three hours away in Maine, to witness the reenactment of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and "the shot heard 'round the world" on April 19, 1775, that heralded the start of the nation's war for independence from Britain. The 80-year-old retired mason said he believed Americans today are under attack from their own government and need to stand up against it. […] Boston resident George Bryant was among those who turned out in Concord. He said he was concerned Trump was creating a police state in America as he held up a sign saying, TRUMP FASCIST REGIME MUST GO NOW! "He's defying the courts. He's kidnapping students. He's eviscerating the checks and balances," Bryant said. "This is fascism."
As for the reenactment itself, we're happy to report that the British got their asses kicked again. (Will they never learn?)
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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JEERS to the man-made creature that created a black lagoon. Today marks the 15th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, which killed 11 rig workers and a whole bunch of sea life, and spewed 134-million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. On the first anniversary in 2011 I wrote in C&J: "like the perpetrators of the '08 financial collapse, many among the oilpocalypse’s guilty parties will, mark my words, go unpunished." And so they mostly did, and we apparently learned nothing from it:
[G]overnment data reviewed by the Associated Press shows the number of safety inspection visits has declined in recent years, although officials say checks of electronic records, safety systems and individual oil rig components have increased. […] The busted blowout preventer made for some of the most horrifying live television in April of 2010. And it could absolutely happen again. “I’m concerned that in the industry the lessons aren’t fully learned—that we’re tending to backslide,” said Donald Boesch, a university of Maryland professor who was on a federal commission that found the BP blowout was preventable. […] Warnings and citations to companies for safety or environmental violations peaked in 2012 and have since fallen faster than inspection visits. The decline accelerated under the current administration. … Fewer inspections and citations suggests safety improvements after the spill are unraveling, said Matt Lee-Ashley, formerly of the Interior Department.
Needless to say, inspections will likely evaporate entirely under the watch of the teenage offshore oil rigging experts at DOGE. But the big question that's been keeping me up since that fateful night in 2010 is: "Hey, Tony Hayward! Did you get your life back yet??!" Or, to be more accurate, it's the question the guy I hired still asks over and over under his bedroom window with a bullhorn every night.
CHEERS to going back in time half a century (your time travel coordinates may vary). Happy Kindergarten Day. It's the day when we fondly look back and remember those golden moments sitting around in a big building eating paste, running around with shoes untied, making crude misspelled signs on construction paper with giant markers, not making it to the bathroom in time, throwing tantrums, enjoying extended nappy time, and babbling constant nonsense with no particular point. Or As the House Freedom Caucus would call it if they weren’t on vacation this week: Monday.
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Ten years ago in C&J: April 21, 2015
CHEERS to knocking off with the nun shaming. Three years ago this week, Pope Benedict—now a former pope who just turned 88—began a bewildering crackdown on American nuns. Ratzinger's bizarre charge: the womenfolk have a habit (heh) of acting like "radical feminists." Well, last week his successor, Pope Francis, called off the hounds:
Francis has shown in his two-year papacy that he is less interested in having the church police doctrinal boundaries than in demonstrating mercy and love for the poor and vulnerable—the very work that most of the women’s religious orders under investigation have long been engaged in.
Here's Sister Simone Campbell's take on it (Hint: she's happy as h-e-double-toothpicks.) I guess Francis remembered the reality of the situation: priests control the wine and the incense, but nuns control the rulers.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to being patriotier than thou. Today is Patriot's Day (yes, that's where the apostrophe goes up here), a commemoration of, as mentioned above, the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord that sparked our War of Independence 250 years ago. Only three states are flagpinny enough to make it an official holiday—Maine, Wisconsin and Massachusetts.
Lexington, April 1775: Colonial patriots fight the British over runaway egg prices.
The big event today is the 129th Boston Marathon. As usual, I'll go out on a limb and predict that the winners will be the secretly-Obama-trained Kenyans unless the nerd from MIT perfects his rocket shoes in time...and someone can achieve the impossible by waking him up before noon.
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 "It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass cannonball in the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool." —David Brooks
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[END]
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