Pic taken last summer of the BLM stump on our street.
Yesterday, out of curiosity, I took a mental note of the various signs within a four-square-block area. There are a ton of Black Lives Matter ones—pre-printed, handmade, painted on a tree stump, and even as chalk art on the driveway a few houses up. They outnumber everything else by a mile. There are also maybe half a dozen sun-faded Bernie and Biden-Harris campaign signs still in scattered windows. It’s nice to see—a reminder that Portland is progressive from our L.L. Bean hats down to our…well, our L.L. Bean boots.
[Whispers: And then there’s this one house that’s got a Trump sign on the fence, another one in the first-floor window, a Trump flag hanging from the second-floor window, and a sign in the driveway that says stay out, keep out, and if you park here you’ll come back and find your vehicle has been reduced to a one-inch cube. We stay away from that one. It smells of sulfur.]
So we totally agree with Kos, and not in a suck-up kind of way, either. Take a walk. It’s good for ya!
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Note: Today is chocolate cake day. Chocolate has healthy properties. Be healthy—eat chocolate cake today. And every day. Even if it’s not Chocolate Cake Day. Which today it is. Yeahhhh!!!
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By the Numbers:
Full moon tomorrow. Don’t forget to go outside, look up, think of Neil Armstrong, and give it a wink.
Days ’til the next full “wolf moon”: 1
Percent of those arrested so far in the Jan. 6 Republican insurrection who are veterans: 20%
Amount for which Rudy Giuliani is getting sued for defamation by the Dominion voting machine company: $1.3 billion
Number of reputable polls in which a majority of Americans do not want the previous president tried and convicted in the Senate next month: 0
Amount that cleaning all the carpets before the Biden administration moved into the White House and EisenhowerExecutiveOfficeBuilding cost, according to NBC News: $44,038
Amount spent on cleaning the drapes: $29,523
Number of ads Budweiser will air during the Super Bowl as it instead shifts its ad spending to Covid-related public service messages: 0
CHEERS to history of the history-making kind. Hey, everybody, she’s in. Over at Treasury, a brilliant, competent, well-qualified woman is taking over the job previously held by—[checks notes]—the “foreclosure king”:
Former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen was confirmed as treasury secretary Monday, with the Senate voting 84-15to make her the first woman to lead the department.
Amazing she’s still smiling, knowing the mess her predecessor left her.
Yellen steps into the role with some advantages: She is well known and well respected among lawmakers of both parties, and she has experience with enormous economic challenges. … Yellen, the product of a middle-class upbringing in the New York borough of Brooklyn, has cited the critical—if often unseen—role that macroeconomic principles play in the day-to-day well-being of American families. At the Treasury Department, she is expected to target the roots of the nation’s growing inequality, along with the factors that aggravate it.
Among her first priorities: fixing the economy, fast-tracking the Harriet Tubman twenty-dollar bill, and peeling ”The Mnuchins” off the mailbox in front of Fort Knox.
CHEERS to the walk of shame. Monday night the House impeachment managers donned their springiest Nike sneakers and trotted the article of impeachment—”Incitement of Insurrection”—over to the Senate, which accepted it with the traditional response: “Thanks, man. Hey, you want a hit off Inhofe’s joint we’re passin’ around?”
The formal step comes just over a year after the House last transmitted an impeachment measure against Trump to the upper chamber. The latest rebuke alleges that the former president incited the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. […]
A gavel, some say.
The trial itself will begin on Feb. 9, giving the nine House impeachment managers and Trump’s defense team two weeks to file briefs and finalize their legal preparations.
True fact: as the article of impeachment was read aloud, Senator Ted Cruz let out a burp in violation of the strict code of silence and was sent to prison for the remainder of the trial, in accordance with rules in the U.S. Constitution. No one complained.
JEERS to Germany‘s great shame. Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, coinciding with the 76thanniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz and Birkenau Nazi death camps. With memories of World War II rapidly fading, and the Nazi movement once again eyeing world domination, survivors continue telling their stories with greater urgency. And the pandemic is giving them a new way to share their lessons:
The chairwoman of the Auschwitz Committee criticized coronavirus-deniers and those who refused to wear masks, during a digital memorial event in Hamburg on Sunday. Esther Bejarano, 96, was outspoken against those who see mask-wearing as a “deprivation of liberty,” saying: “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Liberated January 27, 1945.
Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, which originally reported Bejarano’s comments, said: “History has shown that ideologies of conspiracy can easily lead to ideologies of extermination.”
Bejarano was deported to Auschwitz in April 1943, having spent two years in a hard labour camp following an unsuccessful bid to emigrate to Palestine. Her father, head cantor of a Jewish municipality in Saarlouis, southwest Germany, had encouraged Bejarano’s interest in music, and she was a keen piano player. In the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, she played accordion in the girls’ orchestra, and is one of its last surviving members.
We’ll mark the occasion as we always do—by not joking about it.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to today’s edition of Thank God We Cleared THAT Up! After a week of sleepless nights, Yahoo News sets the record straight:
The new Biden administration has yet not disclosed the secrets of Area 51 or explained what the Air Force really knows about UFOs, but it did clarify, at least, the mystery of the vanished “Diet Coke button” former President Donald Trump would use to summon refreshments in the Oval Office. The usher button, as it is formally known, is not gone, even if it is no longer used to summon Diet Cokes, a White House official tells Politico.
This has been today’s edition of Thank God We Cleared THAT Up!
JEERS to today’s edition of Hey Wait A Minute I Thought We Cleared That Up! Dammit, Yahoo News, I thought we cleared that up:
The White House official “unfortunately wouldn’t say what Biden will use the button for.”
This has been today’s edition of Hey Wait A Minute I Thought We Cleared That Up!
CHEERS to the good times. On January 27, 1998, Democratic President Bill Clinton told the nation during his State of the Union address that the federal government would have a balanced budget in 1999…the first in 30 years. And then he callously left his Republican successor the back-breaking task of screwing it all up. And then his Democratic successor cleaned it all up. And then his Republican successor screwed it all up. And now his Democratic successor is cleaning it all up again. I’m sensing a pattern here.
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Ten years ago in C&J: January 27, 2011
CHEERS to naughty nature. Scientists say Yellowstone National Park is experiencing a swelling magma bulge, which has caused the ground to rise by ten inches. And if it lasts for more than four hours, see your volcanologist.
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And just one more…
JEERS to broken promises. Remember when President Obama starting holding those really cool science fairs at the White House that allowed the whole world to see the ingenuity and creativity of America’s physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers of tomorrow? Remember how excited everyone was four years ago when the previous administration said it was absolutely, positively going to continue the tradition? Yeah, well, here’s something else for you to remember: they reneged on their promise—there was no White House science fair in 2017. Or 2018. Or 2019. Or, obviously, 2020. So, since we have no best-of footage from the last four years, enjoy this classic moment from 2012, when the White House was a true laboratory of democracy instead of a dark fortress of doom littered with McDonald’s wrappers…
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When he gets through sciencing the shit out of the pandemic, President Biden will absolutely bring the kids back for the revival of the White House Science Fair. In the immortal words of some dude I forget who it is: “Gather ye marshmallows while ye may.”
Have a happy humpday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
Eagle-eyed fans have spotted a modern-day blunder in the opening moments of the runaway hit Netflix period drama Bridgerton. While the tale of sex and scandal is set in Regency era London, early 19th century, the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool was clear on the road used, for dramatic purposes, by horse-drawn carriages.
