From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Monday Channel Surfing
"Hi, I'm Pastor Chuck McAlister. Come on down and join the Lone Oak Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky for a chance to win a handgun, a long gun or a shotgun in Jesus' name!"
[
Click]
"Hi, I'm Pastor John Koletas. Come on up and join the Grace Baptist Church in Troy, New York and you could walk away with a genuine God-blessed AR15 assault rifle!"
[
Click]
Hi. I'm Bill in Portland Maine. If you've been looking to join a conservative evangelical church lately, you've probably been peppered with all kinds of offers for free guns. But you know what? Guns are a dime a dozen these days, aren't they? Truth be told, they really don’t impress God anymore. Heck, if a church tries to give you a wimpy old pistol, they might as well be inviting Satan to waltz right through the American heartland to fry your soul on the altar of tyranny.
But now there's a better way. Come join me in pastoral unity here at the Church of Billeh. At the C of B, we believe that devotion is best expressed not by the caliber of the bullet, but by the size of the explosion. That's why, when you join my church, you get a gift that's worthy of your love for Jesus: dynamite.
That's right. Join the Church of Billeh today and I'll drive you out to my personal armory on Leviticus Lane so you can pick up your own box of 100 percent pure dynamite. That's twenty sticks you can use to make a joyful noise in His name and leave some craters for Christ. You can even use it to teach important Biblical proverbs like this one: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. But toss a stick of dynamite from the Church of Billeh in Moosehead Lake and you'll be passin' the tartar sauce around the dinner table for, well, at least a good three months anyway."
So if you're tired of the same old churches doing the same old boring gun giveaways to get your butt in their pews, come have a blast with your own free dynamite from the Church of Billeh, where our motto is nailed up over the door: "Praise the Lord and Stand the Hell Back."
Now back to our regularly-scheduled blogging.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Monday, March 10, 2014
Note: Today in the C&J cafeteria: nothing. Because we will not become enablers of your parents' withholding love from you. It's disgraceful. ---C&J Brown-bag Commission
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4 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til spring:
10
Days 'til the
Fitzgerald Wild Chicken Festival in Georgia:
4
Average tax refund given out so far in 2014, up 3 percent from a year ago:
$3,034
Number of refunds given out as of February 28, up 5.6% from this time a year ago:
48 million
(Source: The IRS of course, you silly goose)
Telephone lines on a terrorist “alert list” that were monitored daily by the NSA from '06 to '09:
17,835
Percentage of those lines that met the agency’s legal standard for “reasonable articulable suspicion” of terrorism:
11
(Source: Harper's Index)
Rank of Washington, Montana, Vermont and Maine among states that report UFO sightings most frequently:
#1, #2, #3, #4
(Source: National UFO Reporting Center)
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NEW! Your Monday Michigan Moment
Brought to you by the 2014 Netroots Nation Convention in Detroit, July 17-20. Quick! Snarf up these Fast Facts before they disappear:
The last Wolverine.
• Alpena is the home of the world's largest cement plant.
• Although Michigan is often called the "Wolverine State" there are no longer any wolverines in Michigan.
• Michigan ranks first in state boat registrations.
• Standing anywhere in the state a person is within 85 miles of one of the Great Lakes.
• Grand Rapids is home to the 24-foot Leonardo da Vinci horse, called Il Gavallo, it is the largest equestrian bronze sculpture in the Western Hemisphere.
Trust me…you don’t want to be standing in back of it when it drops a bronze turd.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: A tisket a tasket, a red and yellow basket…
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CHEERS to staying up late. Tonight at 10 O'clock, most Senate Democrats (plus independent Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine) will use a solar-powered Senate floor commandeering machine to commandeer the Senate floor in an environmentally-responsible way so they can spend several hours warning their colleagues on the Hill about the dangers of climate change. Says the Washington Post:
But a pajama party
with a message...
It's a strategy that's been in the works for several months, organized by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who've been seeking to raise awareness about their [climate change] concerns on and off the Senate floor. Adopting a strategy used in the past year by some Senate Republicans, the Democrats will begin speaking Monday night after a series of votes and continue until about 9 a.m. Tuesday, according to Senate aides. The event will mark the third late-night Senate session of the past year, but the first prompted by Democrats.
It's all part of the Senate's new "Crap and Trade" program, where every two late-night sessions of Republican crap spewing must be offset with one Democratic session of crap debunking. Warning: Dick Durbin of Illinois may take to the floor in his jammies. Viewer discretion is advised.
Sad bulletin board at CPAC.
JEERS to foolish fools and the foolish fools they fool. It was quite the knee-slappin' hootenanny at the 2014 CPAC (Conservatives Pissing At Clouds) convention, which wrapped up Saturday in the "Real American Values Heartland" known as Washington D.C. What we saw (besides an endless cascade of gay and straight sex-hookup requests on Craig's List): anger, rage, tried-and-failed ideas, madness, pretzel-twisted logic, xenophobia, homophobia, immigrant-o-phobia, Islamophobia, isolationism, birtherism, secession and denial, denial, denial. Plus exciting discussions about the groundbreaking new Republican agenda of tax cuts, annexation of our female citizens' Mommy parts and...um...did we mention tax cuts? Attendees left fired up with one overarching theme echoing in their ears: "This is the greatest country in the world, blessed by God, and a black man in mom jeans is going to kill us all."
CHEERS to reaching out and touching someone. 5 Exeter Place. Boston, Massachusetts. March 10, 1876. Thomas Watson receives the first telephone call. On the other end: Alexander Graham Bell. On Watson's next credit card statement: five magazine subscriptions, a life insurance policy and a set of Miracle Blades.
If it's Sunday morning, it's,
war criminal-coddling time.
JEERS to what's wrong with Sunday morning. When I'd heard that
Face the Nation snuck Dick Cheney into their lineup yesterday, I knew I had to cement the weekend's morning show lineup in amber for the future. The following Republicans/conservatives shared air time yesterday at 9am on ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS:
Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Rand Paul, Ralph Reed, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Dick Cheney, Rep. Paul Ryan, Rich Lowry, Rick Santorum, Robert Gates, Peggy Noonan, Rep. Mike Rogers, James Baker, Ana Navarro, and George Will.
There was one Democratic solo guest, and he was some no-name White House deputy who must've drawn the short straw. Oh, and on the same weekend as International Women's Day, male guests outnumbered female guests 22-9. So, yeah,
that's what's wrong with Sunday morning.
JEERS to Scott Walkers of yore. On March 10, 1629---it seems like only yesterday, dun'it?---England’s King Charles I dissolved Parliament. Innocent mistake, really. He thought he was opening the fridge for some chilled kippers and it turned out to be the Ark of the Covenant. Silly Brits.
This'll teach Putin to
mess with The Decider!
CHEERS to great moments in memory-hole retrieval. So the current right-wing outrage involves President Obama traveling to Florida for a little R&R as the situation in Ukraine continues unspooling. The Breitbart.com headline, which you can Google if you feel like it, actually says
"While Crimea Burns, Obama Golfs." As usual, they fail to do even a smidge of homework that might save them the embarrassment of being hit over the head with the fact that, when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, George W. Bush was being invited to slap a member of the U.S. women's beach volleyball team on the hiney. The
UK Telegraph's headline then:
"While Georgia burned George W Bush played volleyball." Conclusion: the right-wingers don’t know how to check their history, but they seem to be quite adept at stealing headlines. As the saying goes: par for the course.
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Five years ago in C&J: March 10, 2009
JEERS to sneaky bad people. After waging the Great War on Terror for seven and a half years, you'd think the number of suspected evildoers might---oh, what's the word?---decline. And you would be wrong. So please give a warm suspicious American welcome to the 1 millionth person added to the federal terrorist watch list:
[Cue thunderclap]
People put on the watch list by intelligence and law enforcement agencies can be blocked from flying, stopped at borders or subjected to other scrutiny. About 95% of the people on the list are foreigners, the FBI says, but it's a source of frequent complaints from U.S. travelers. ... Without specific rules for who goes on the list, it's too bloated to be effective, says Tim Sparapani, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
As for suspect #1,000,000, Slomama Ginbladen of Piedmont, North Dakota: you might want to carve out a few extra years for "travel time" as you're planning your next trip to Boca.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to C&J's senior editor. And by senior editor I of course mean C&J's yellow lab mix Haley, who joined our family one year ago. Haley is a rescue dog---a southern belle from down yonder in Macon Georgia, where she was dropped off at a shelter in a cage with 13 other puppies. She was 13 weeks old when we got her, and after overcoming the shock of forgetting how much round-the-clock attention a puppy wants needs demands, we settled into a familiar pattern of familiarizing her with the patterns of the C&J household. Far be it from me to suggest that she's grown up to be the best dog in the world (she has), but suffice it to say she and her Dobbie ears (or, if you prefer Michael's description, Sister Bertrille from The Flying Nun ears) have charmed the kibble out of us. Here she is the day we got her, complete with a bile stain on her side that some other pooch must've ralphed up on her during her trip north:
Here she is about a month ago with her Joker smile on, topping out at 50 pounds:
Oh, and she's a parvo survivor, so she's one tough beeyotch. But first and foremost, she's a cutie wootie woooo. To use the technical term.
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:
My skin crawls every time I hear the President open his weekly address with, "Hi Bill in Portland Maine!" A far cry from "My fellow Americans."
---Gregory T. Angelo
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