Tip: We recommend you handle each purchase with tongs and have them tested for Novichok. You can’t be too careful these days.
Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, April 14, 2022
Note: The C&J elevator is currently out of service. Please use the wicker basket attached to a string after leaving everything to me in your will. Thx. —Mgt.
Expected deficit reduction this year: $1.3 trillion
Percent of Americans who aren’t liberal economists and care about deficit reduction: 0%
Percent chance that the Maine Senate just approved the nomination of Rick Lawrence, who now becomes the first Black justice on Maine’s state Supreme Court: 100%
Age of Gilbert Gottfried when he died Tuesday: 67
Number of times you could circle the globe with the 16 billion jelly beans that’ll be eaten at Easter time: 3
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
As more and more rich people cheat on their taxes, the IRS is increasingly unable to go after them because it is so poorly funded.
For all this, we can thank the Republican Party.
Every year at this time, conservatives moan and groan and tell us how terribly, terribly overburdened we are by taxes. We wouldn’t be overburdened if the tax code hadn’t been rewritten by Republicans, and if Republicans hadn’t weakened the IRS so much it can barely function. Damn right, this is a partisan effort. And damn right, I’m bitter about it. We don’t need to raise taxes in this country, we need to collect them. We need tax cuts that don’t favor the obscenely rich. You are getting screwed.
CHEERS to previews of coming attractions. As if to make up for all the GOP obstruction of his former boss’s judicial nominees, President Biden has wisely made the appointment of federal judges a top priority during his presidency. Next week he plans to keep the conveyor belt rollin’ by announcing five new gavel thumpers…
Biden is nominating John Z. Lee, a district court judge in Illinois, to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Salvador Mendoza Jr., a district court judge in Washington, to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Nancy Maldonado
He plans to nominate Stephen Henley Locher to the Southern District of Iowa; Nancy L. Maldonado to the Northern District of Illinois; and Gregory B. Williams to be district court judge in Delaware. The five additions bring Biden’s total to 90 judicial nominations. […]
The new nominees reflect Biden’s goals of adding racial, ethnic and professional diversity on the courts. If confirmed, Lee would be the first Asian American to serve on the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees numerous Midwestern states. Maldonado would be the first Hispanic woman to be a federal judge in Illinois, the official said.
Lee will subsequently become the first Asian-American associate justice on the Supreme Court when Clarence Thomas f… Oops! Almost spilled the beans.
CHEERS to the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Got him! Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, they finally got the goods on that corrupt bastard in a real estate-related fraud scheme. He’s been arrested and booked, and now he’s headed to trial and quite possibly…the pokey! Best of all, his political career is over:
New York Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin resigned Tuesday in the wake of his arrest in a federal corruption investigation. […]
He was accused in an indictment of participating in a scheme to obtain campaign contributions from a real estate developer in exchange for Benjamin’s agreement to use his influence as a state senator to get a $50,000 grant of state funds for a nonprofit organization the developer controlled.
Facing charges including bribery, fraud, conspiracy and falsification of records, Benjamin pleaded not guilty Tuesday. He was released and bail was set at $250,000.
Having gotten that case out of the way, dare we hope that the Manhattan D.A. will now get around to arresting and indicting Donald Trump for his real estate-related fraud—a case that one of the former prosecutors said is rife with “numerous felony violations”? No. No, we dare not. Sadly, these days premature optimism has a tendency to inflame my lumbago.
JEERS to wacko thespians. A hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, John Wilkes Booth shot a derringer ball into Abe Lincoln’s head, snuffing out the life of a great (the greatest?) president who was then a year younger than I am now: 56. Here’s a pic of the 44th president gazing at the 16th president who made his ascension to the White House possible…
Tuck in your shirt and pay your respects here. They say that as an actor John Wilkes Booth was considered “the George Clooney of his day” when he killed Lincoln. As a “human being”? Not so much.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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rest in peace to Gilbert Gottfried who has probably the best sequence in game show history on Hollywood Squares. if you’re not an old hag like me who remembers the rules, both contestants needed his square to secure the 5-square win, but he decided to troll both of them pic.twitter.com/Egzyzygudd
CHEERS to wurds. 204 yeers agow tooday, Noah Webster puhbilshed the fuhrst (frist??) Amarrican dikshunery. It hellpd peeple spull bettor. (Sorry about that…this is the one day of the year that we let our spellchecker have the keys to the liquor cabinet.)
CHEERS to telling Iowa where they can stick their corn dogs and New Hampshire where they can stick their…uhhhhh…granite dogs? Finally, a credible, boots-on-the-ground effort by a state to muscle its way to the front of the pack in a presidential primary season. Yes, ladies and germs, the great state of Nevada is…
…making a coordinated push like never before to remove the primacy of New Hampshire and Iowa. […]
Letting Nevada go first would be a nice tribute to Harry.
In an interview last week, [Democratic Sen. Jacky] Rosen stressed that Democrats in her state were working on the bid in unison. “This has been a team effort to push Nevada to be first in the nation,” Rosen said.
The late Sen. Harry Reid, who built a powerful political machine in the state, had fervently advocated for the party to oust Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary from their longtime leadoff perches in the Democratic presidential primary season.
I’m totally on board for NV going first before IA and NH. And you know who should go second? ME! ME! ME!
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Ten years ago in C&J: April 14, 2012
JEERS to academic flexibility. That’s a nice way of saying: Hey Tennessee public school kids, guess what? Thanks to the actions of your state’s governing bodies, you now have a license to rely on a collection of outlandish and ancient parables as actual science. That’s right—women are men’s ribs, Jesus rode a dinosaur to Wal-Mart, climate change is a hoax, and the universe is only 6,000 years old. Of course, the source of this “alternative” science is limited to The Bible, so the rest of you religious types can go straight to you-know-where with your silly “theories.” This is America, dammit—we have standards.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to horse power. You know what officially turns 57 this week? The original pony car, the “car that dreams are made of”—the Ford Mustang:
Making its debut at the New York World’s Fair, the first Ford Mustang proved to be one of the industry’s biggest hits ever, quickly requiring the automaker to fire up three assembly plants—two more than planned—to meet soaring demand. Interest was so intense, then-Ford President Lee Iacocca and Mustang landed on the covers of both Time and Newsweek, a unique coup.
Yet, the Mustang almost didn’t happen. The car was rushed to market only after another major Ford product program collapsed. … Ford’s designers and engineers worked feverishly to pull the project together in barely two years, about half the time it normally took to develop a new car from the ground up. But the first production models were already in dealer showrooms in time for the World’s Fair debut April 17, 1964.
Happy anniversary, Mustang fans. But don’t get cocky and challenge my Metro bus to a game of chicken. The driver mounts the losers’ hubcaps on the wall as trophies.
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
It is time to nominate Cheers and Jeers for the Pulitzer Prize
