Life Lessons and Other Bits from May Birthday Kids
“Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan ‘Down With Socialism’ on the banner of his 'great crusade,' that is really not what he means at all. What he really means is, 'Down with Progress—down with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and down with Harry Truman's Fair Deal.' That is what he means."
—President Harry Truman
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.
—George Carlin
"I know those challenges that come up from time to time in life are our little learning tools, our little stepping stones. If we didn't have those things in our life, how would we learn anything? We would just be walking around like nothing. We need those obstacles in our life because I know one thing—I'm a much better person for them."
—Gladys Knight
"There's an old saying: don't get mad, vote. Well, I say get mad and vote. … Health care decisions should be between a woman and her doctor, not Ted Cruz."
—Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
“I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so I'm on my way home.”
—Bob Dylan
“The reason I made women's issues central to American foreign policy was not because I was a feminist, but because we know that societies are more stable if women are politically and economically empowered.”
—Madeleine Albright
“I was born of heterosexual parents. I was taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society. Television ads and newspaper ads—fiercely heterosexual. A society that puts down homosexuality. And why am I a homosexual if I’m affected by role models? I should have been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there’d be a lot of nuns running around the streets today.”
—Harvey Milk
If you retain nothing else, always remember the Most Important Rule of Beauty. “Who cares?”
—Tina Fey
To the above and those in our Daily Kos community who make another trip around the sun this month: happy birthday and many blessings on your camels.
And now, our feature presentation…
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, May 9, 2024
Note: Lint screens will fly at half staff today for National Lost Sock Memorial Day. They left us too early, darn them.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til election day: 180
Days 'til the Rhubarb Festival in Intercourse, Pennsylvania: 8
Drop in the U.S. murder rate over the last year: -19%
Drop in the murder rate in, respectively, Boston and Philadelphia: -80%, -40%
Year-over-year drop in U.S. rent prices: -0.8%
Population of Malmo, Sweden, where the Eurovision Song Contest final is Saturday: 344,166
Number of the songs in this year’s competition that are in a major key: 2
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
The other day at the Southern Legislators Conference, as I was attempting to point out that Canada has a sane, effective and cheap system of national health insurance, I was told: “Canada practices low-tech medicine. Why, in Thunder Bay, women have to have babies with no anesthetic.”
Right there in Norfolk, Virginia, I thought I heard the sound of several million Canadians politely choking. (Canadians are almost always polite.)
It takes a lot to startle a Canadian. Understatement is their national art form, calmness is their national mode, and their national motto is “Now, let’s not get excited.” Canada, Land of Low Blood Pressure. I think they even have a law against rolling their eyes. Even so, I wish you could have heard the reactions over the phone from successive layers of bureaucrats at McKellar Hospital in Thunder Bay, Ontario, when I called to ask if the assertion were true. They variously and politely gasped, strangled, wheezed and giggled.
—August 1994
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Oh fer…….
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CHEERS to cleaning up another fine mess Republicans got us into. Remember that gigantic tech center that pathological liars Trump and then-Governor Scott Walker pinky-swore would bring a gazillion jobs and gazillions more in revenue to Wisconsin, but instead all it did was ending up costing taxpayers a billion dollars and change? Yeah, about that: President Biden went to the site yesterday and showed how economic revival is done right, announcing a $3.3 billion Microsoft data center that will actually get done, and…
…will employ 2,300 union construction workers and create 2,000 permanent jobs over time, the White House said, adding that nearly 4,000 jobs have been added in Racine, with one third of those in manufacturing, and 177,000 in Wisconsin since Biden took office.
They’ll be cleaning ketchup off the Mara-a-Lago walls all day.
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The data center will be built on same property of a planned $10 billion Foxconn facility that former President Donald Trump…once called “the eighth wonder of the world,” [but whose job creation total dropped] from 13,000 to the roughly 1,000 spots that are filled now, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
The NBC News article says "the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment." Not surprised. It's hard to find the words when you've just been given a Herculean wedgie from your ass crack to your sternum by an 81-year-old man.
JEERS to Planet EZ-Bake. Here's a quick and overdue update on climate change on the third planet from the sun: everything bad is happening at a faster rate than even the most pessimistic scientists are able to predict. On the bright side, the electric bills for air conditioning on Mercury are much, much higher than here.
CHEERS to fuzzy math. Well, at least fuzzy mathematicians. Einstein's theory of relativity ("The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity" to be precise) was presented 106 years ago this week in front of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His later words:
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
Or sit with Marjorie Taylor-Greene for a second and it seems like forever. That’s eternity.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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JEERS to that nagging itch of futility. 23 years ago this week, John Paul II became the first pope to enter a mosque. He called for greater harmony between Christians and Muslims. Gee, that's going swell, don’t you think?
JEERS to today's edition of Well, That Explains A Lot! Courtesy this morning of Raw Story:
Third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a startling medical secret, according to The New York Times: Parts of his brain were apparently eaten by a parasitic worm.
[A] doctor at New York-Presbyterian Hospital contacted him…to tell him his illness in fact “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
This has been today's edition of Well, That Explains A Lot!
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Ten years ago in C&J: May 9, 2014
CHEERS to sealing our legacy in the amber of the printed page. Senator and card-carrying Kossack Elizabeth Warren is out with a new book! A Fighting Chance has been burning up the charts (currently #5 in combined hardcover and e-book sales on the NYT bestseller list), and I just snagged my own copy. Naturally, the first thing I did was what everyone does: fumble madly to crack it open and look for my name in the index. Aaaaand…rats. It goes straight from "Big tobacco" to "Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act." So then I looked up Daily Kos and… Yes! We made it! Page 250. A very nice shoutout:
Moveon.org also put their shoulder to the wheel. And Daily Kos, Democracy for America, and Progressives United rallied their huge e-mail lists time and again behind our campaign. To say I felt humbled by these extraordinary efforts doesn't begin to cut it. So many people made real sacrifices, and I was grateful for all their help.
[Tips cowboy hat] Tweren't nothin', ma'am.
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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 this week, good ol' Stinkypants (aka “Horace”) will be opening a can of odorama at Minnesota’s Como Park Conservatory. There's a method to its madness, according to How Stuff Works:
The substantial height of the Titan Arum broadcasts its stench to beetles and bees over a half-mile radius. These insects find the plant to be a primo location to lay their eggs, which in turn helps the process of pollination for the Titan Arum.
The plant heats itself to 98.6 degrees F, another way it deceives insects into thinking the plant is a newly ripening hunk of meat. Some scientists theorize that the fleshy colors of the leaves (or spathe) add to the illusion.
Plants that reek of dead animal carcasses fall under the category of carrion flowers.
I was going to compare its ungodly smell to the air around the conservative Supreme Court justices when they’re underground taking orders from their star chamber overlords with odd Nazi fetishes. But that wouldn’t be fair. To the corpse flower.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Question: What do you call a blog post that consists of nothing but a succession of groaners? Answer: “Cheers and Jeers.”
—Frank Swietek
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