Cheers and Jeers: Rum and Wear A Mask FRIDAY!

Late Night Snark: Just Another Week of Normalcy Edition

“You can tell we’re officially living in Joe Biden’s America, because just one month ago, we were fighting for the soul of our nation. Now, we’re fighting for the soul of GameStop.”
—Samantha Bee

“This morning President Biden attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. At the event he quoted the famous philosopher Kierkegaard, [saying] ‘Faith sees best in the dark.’ Isn’t it nice to have a president who quotes 19th-century Danish philosophers instead of Twitter accounts with cartoon frog profile pics?”  
—James Corden

Continued…

“A lot has happened since our last show. The inauguration…that was nice. Christmas. And, hey, now the terrorist watch list includes white people. So yay for diversity.”
—Colin Jost, SNL

“Press Secretary Jen Psaki said yesterday that the Biden administration will resume the practice of releasing White House visitor logs to the public. Previously, the only way to know who was going in and out of the White House was by which pillow they were holding.”
—Seth Meyers

BREAKING: A group of 10 Republican Senators has released its counterproposal to Biden’s COVID relief plan pic.twitter.com/zRKee6Zozj

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 1, 2021

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“Donald Trump’s new, new lawyers released their response to the impeachment charges they will defend him against in the Senate next week, and this is great: on the very first page of their very first legal filing, they wrote, ‘To the honorable members of the Unites States Senate.’ They misspelled United States. Aaaaaaand we’re off!”
—Jimmy Kimmel

“Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour. Which would finally give minimum-wage workers the ability to pay rent in the year 1995.”
—Michael Che, SNL

“Punxsutawney Phil is giving clearer stay-at-home orders than most governors.”
—Conan O’Brien

And now, our feature presentation…

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Cheers and Jeers for Friday, February 5, 2021

Note: Just a heads-up that there will be no C&J Monday because sometimes I feel the need to keep you people in line by using the withholding of my love as a weapon. It was either that or this ticking bomb. Back Tuesday with HUGS!!!

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By the Numbers:

Days ’til the start of the impeachment trial of the deposed 45th president: 4

Percent chance that the Economic Policy Institute has crunched the numbers and believes the economic rebound will happen faster than expected: 100%

Percent of Americans polled by Quinnipiac who do and do not, respectively, support President Biden’s move to stop border wall construction: 54%, 42%

Percent who support and oppose, respectively, allowing undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to remain here and eventually apply for citizenship: 83%, 12%

Percent of registered Utah Republicans who have quit the party since the Jan. 6 Republican attack on the Capitol: 7,600

Percent chance that marshmallow Peeps will be on shelves in time for Easter after a hiatus due to the pandemic: 100%

Time it took to complete a single Peep in 1953 (when the brand was launched) and last year, respectively: 27 hours / 6 minutes

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Puppy Pic of the Day: Coming Sunday to a Puppy Bowl on a TV near you…

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CHEERS to neutering a nattering nabob of nuttiness. Once again, Democrats have to clean up the Republicans’ mess. This time it was the forcible removal from the House budget and education committees of a Georgia performance artist with pork rinds for brains who convinced enough people in her district to elect her to Congress, whereupon she set upon infecting the dendrites of democracy with her special brand of sub-reddit conspiracy slop endorsed by her deposed supreme leader, whose impeachment trial starts Tuesday:

The House voted 230-199, with 11 Republicans joining every Democrat who voted.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had rebuked Republican leaders for refusing to take away Greene’s assignments. “I remain profoundly concerned about House Republicans’ leadership acceptance of extreme conspiracy theorists. … Particularly disturbing is their eagerness to reward a QAnon adherent, a 9/11 truther, a harasser of child survivors of school shootings.”

Greene [expressed] support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, embracing calls for violence against top Democrats and suggesting the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings were staged.

She becomes just another disgraced Republican idiot from a gerrymandered district with a lapel pin and a big, frequently-unmasked mouth. Or as she’s now known: Louie Gohmert minus the charm.

CHEERS to a really special delivery. If there’s one thing we discovered during election season, it’s that Americans hold their mail carriers in higher esteem than just about anyone. And we were in no mood to stand by as Postmaster and Satan’s spawn Louis DeJoy tried to kill the Postal Service to grind vote-by-mail ballots to a crawl on orders from President Biden’s vanquished foe. (Hell, even Republicans were pissed over the delays of their prescription meds and CHRISTmas fruitcakes.) Thankfully he failed. But the USPS still needs a lot of TLC, and so this is good news:

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced legislation that would provide the Postal Service much-needed financial relief by doing away with a mandate that required it to prepay retirement benefits decades in advance.

The issue stems from a 2006 law that required the Postal Service to create a $72 billion fund that would pay for its employees’ retirement health benefits for more than 50 years into the future. This is not required by any other federal agency.

The “USPS Fairness Act,” introduced by Democrats and Republicans in both chambers, would do away with the requirement and comes as some lawmakers and the biggest Postal Service union have called for President Joe Biden to quickly install new leadership in the federal agency.

There’s also momentum for firing the Postal Service’s board of governors, hiring a new batch with brains, and then loading DeJoy into a catapult aimed at the sun. Personally, I think that’s a little harsh. Launching him to Mercury would be plenty enough to send a message.

CHEERS to historic moments in getting busted for doing something naughty with your hand. Eleven hilarious years ago this week, while bamboozling a rapt Tea Party audience in Nashville at the height of the movement’s Black President Panic of 2010, former everything Sarah Palin got caught for the most juvenile of transgressions: writing cheat notes on her hand:

Energy. Budget Tax cuts. Lift American spirits.  So complex were those concepts that she had to write them down.  On her hand.  Seven words.  And even then she made a mistake and had to cross one out.  Y’know, we don’t say this to our right-wing friends nearly enough: even though you’re lunatics with incurious, reality-averse mush for brains who represent the worst of human instincts, thank you anyway…for your healing gift of laughter.

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BRIEF SANITY BREAK

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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK

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CHEERS to the Illinois governor who took on the Kansas general. Happy 121st birthday to Adlai Stevenson II.  He lost to Dwight Eisenhower in both 1952 and 1956.  (Then again, I think God herself would have, too.)  But as U.N. Ambassador he pleasantly surprised the Kennedy administration by giving the Russians hell during the Cuban missile crisis.  And he sure understood Republicans:

“A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation. “

“I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends… that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”

And I love this:

“We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.

We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.”

In other words: nice knowin’ ya.

CHEERS to blowing this popsicle stand. Speaking of being passengers on a little space ship: every time you go outside on a clear night you’re doing yourself a grave disservice if you don’t look up and nearly choke on your bong hit as you realize that the universe up there is pretty damn spectacular. The elves at NASA are also aware of this, so they always let us in on the big celestial events for the month. Here’s a look at February’s sky-watching tips, including the Perseverance landing on Mars, a sassy asterism, and the moon gettin’ it on with the Gemini twins:  

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By the way, I hate to burst his bubble, but I know how Orion the hunter manages to look so svelte up there year after year: Spanx.

CHEERS to home vegetation. If it’s Friday, the boob tube must be singing its siren song. The viewing starts off the usual way, with Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow digesting the Friday news dumps. At 10 on HBO’s Real Time, Bill Maher talks with Jimmy Kimmel, Matt Welch, and Charlotte Alter.  Guests on The Graham Norton Show (11, BBC America) include Tom Jones, who turned 80 last year, and the great and underrated Sam Neill.

The most popular home videos, including the features and TV movies nominated this week for Golden Globes and SAG Awards, are all reviewed here at Rotten Tomatoes. The NHL schedule is here and the NBA schedule is here. Also: the final rounds of the Phoenix Open (NBC) are happening in…um, I forget which city. Dan Levy (Schitt’s Creek) hosts SNL, which is totally must-watch.  Joe Biden will appear for the traditional pre-Super Bowl presidential interview, and 22-year-old inaugural poet Amanda Gorman will be part of the pre-game show, but I’m not sure exactly when because CBS’s coverage begins at freaking 12 noon—that’s worse than the Oscars. How dare they stomp on Puppy Bowl XVII (2pm, Discovery & Animal Planet, and Champ and Major Biden will pop in). The kickoff is finally at 6:30, followed by (I looked it up) 11-15 minutes of actual football action. And if you’re still up at 11:30 Sunday night, Stephen Colbert hosts a post-Super Bowl edition of The Late Show.

Now here’s your Sunday morning lineup:

Meet the Press: The order is given: Release the Fauci!

This Week: Pete Buttigieg makes his Sunday morning debut as Transportation secretary; Sen. Roger Wicker (Q-MS).

Face the Nation: WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead Marie Van Kerhove; Sen. Lindsey Graham (Q-SC); sportscaster James Brown; Plus: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen talks fiscal policy while demonstrating proper hand-chalking for climbers of Yosemite’s El Capitan. 

CNN’s State of the Union: Bernie!!! Sen. Pat Toomey (Q-PA); Plus: Janet Yellen talks fiscal policy while demonstrating her deadly Ninja judo chop hai!!! 

Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: Sens. Rand Paul (Q-KY) and Chris Murphy (D-CT); Rep. Liz Cheney.

 Happy viewing!

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Ten years ago in C&J: February 5, 2011

CHEERS to Fox News.  Seriously.  They nailed Barack Obama for quoting a passage from the New International Version of the Bible at yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast.  Fox contends that he should’ve used the King James version instead.  A couple years back, Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson told me during a visit to Portland that King James was “as gay as a goose.”  So good call, Fox News, for tut-tutting the President of the United States for not quoting scripture from the homosexual-approved version of the Bible.  Next: Sean Hannity dons a silk cravat?

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And just one more…

CHEERS to the Energizer Maestro.  Woo-hoo!  It’s time for our annual “Happy Birthday” (Monday) salute to 25-time Grammy winner, 5-time Oscar winner, 3-time Emmy winner, Kennedy Center honoree, and rock-ribbed dirty fucking hippie union-loving Democrat John Williams.  He is hands-down my favorite composer, and he’s widely considered America’s greatest living composer period. Over a span of over 60 years he’s given us:  

» One iconic theme for NBC Nightly News and another for Meet the Press

» One score for an Oscar-winning animated short based on the late NBA star Kobe Bryant’s poem Dear Basketball

» Two Jaws scores

» Two Jurassic Park scores.

» Two themes and one episode score for Land of the Giants

» Three Oliver Stone films (Born on the 4th of July, JFK, Nixon)

»  Three iconic disaster flicks (Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, Towering Inferno)

» Three Harry Potter scores

» Four Indiana Jones scores

» Five themes for the Olympic Games

» Nine Star Wars scores—a 42-year magnum opus d’cinema that will never be equaled

» 20 scores for episodes of Gilligan’s Island

» 28 scores for Steven Spielberg movies

» And, yes, a disco version of his theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind that he regrets recording but it was a Top 40 hit, won a Grammy, and it’s actually pretty catchy.  

He’s also composed music involving a gaggle of American presidents: John F. Kennedy (JFK), John Quincy Adams/Martin Van Buren (Amistad), Tricky Dick (Nixon, The Post), Lincoln (Lincoln), and Obama (a piece for the first inauguration, in which he expressed “in a very simple and not ostentatious way the solemnity and beauty of the moment and the promise of the moment”). Also: Queen Elizabeth II (in The BFG). Oh! Almost forgot Dick Cheney’s theme:

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After capturing Vienna’s heart last year by conducting two sold-out concerts there—from which he produced an album that became the #1 classical seller of 2020—he’s currently pondering his next post-pandemic project, with no intention of retiring. Happy 89th birthday, John. Only 11 more years and we might let you retire.

Have a great weekend. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?

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