✌A president who wakes up and the first thing on his mind is his country, not his Twitter feed. Done!
✌A competent cabinet, none of whom have degrees in grifting or ransacking. Done!
✌The White House Science Fair. TBA
✌ Democratic control of the Executive and Legislative branches…at the same time! Done! (For two years. And we’ll take the House back in ‘24.)
Took me two hours to get the lid off.
✌ A First Lady whose resting face isn’t a creepy sneer-scowl hybrid and who doesn’t wear clothing boasting of the fact that she doesn’t care. Done!
✌ Membership renewal in the Paris Climate Accord and respect for our NATO allies Done!
✌ A press secretary who tells the truth. Done!
✌ 15-flush toilets.Dashed (Disclaimer: only because they were never a thing to begin with.)
✌ Senate Committee chairwomen and men with a “D” after their name. Done!
✌ The nuclear launch codes in the possession of a stable person. Done!
✌ POTUS and FLOTUS attending the Kennedy Center Honors again. Done!
✌ An independent Justice Department. Done!
✌ Dogs—and a cat—running around the White House. Done!
✌ Justgetting shit done. Done!
The good news is, twelve “done”s minus one “incomplete” and one “dashed” means I owe you exactly one Coke. The bad news: I’m serving it to you in a two-year-old mayonnaise jar.
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Note:If you’re twisting up a blunt this morning, here’s a test to see if you’ve had too much: when you’re convinced that today’s date—011823—is a palindrome, you’ve had too much. Have a mellow day. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
6 days!!!
Days ’til the next federal holiday (POTUS Day): 33
Minimum number of Americans who went on strike in 2022, making it the work-stoppage’iest since 2005: 200,000
Number of consecutive midterm elections in which voters under 30 favored congressional Democrats: 5
Number of overdose deaths in the U.S. for the 12-month period ending last August, according to the CDC: 107,000
Number of times the debt ceiling was raised under Ronald Reagan: 18
Recent temperature reading in Yakutsk, Russia: -58F
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Mid-weekRapture Index: 187 (including 3 droughts and 2 gay lions sneaking onto the ark).Soul Protection Factor 16 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
CHEERS and JEERS to moolah matters. As the week rolls on towards its inevitable conclusion (tomorrow’s the Rapture, so get packing), let’s check in with some recent economic headlines we plucked off the money tree to find out if we should start moving our cash from the secret hole in our back yard to the secret hole in our basement. Caution: whiplash ahead:
» Bank earnings: ‘We’ll have more certainty’ in 2023, analyst says
» New study proves every company, business should go to 4-day workweek
» Morgan Stanley 4th quarter earnings top estimates
» Businesses more confident in ability to manage a crisis
How’s that Tubman 20 coming along, Secretary Yellen?
» CEOs are more pessimistic than they’ve been in a decade
» As China reopens, economists are starting to get less gloomy
» Americans starting to pull back on their spending
» Biden blasts “fiscally demented” Republicans
» Global air traffic may return to pre-pandemic levels in June
» $1.35 billion Mega Millions lottery ticket sold in Lebanon, Maine
» Applications for unemployment benefits lowest in 15 weeks
» China‘s population falls for the first time in 60 years, hampering its economic rise
And best of all, Elon Musk now owns the Guinness Book record for most money lost fastest by an individual: $180 billion in 14 months. In fairness, if you expand that to include all species, the humpback whale known as “Carl” lost over 210-billion krill in a day. (He ended up so broke he had to sell his Tesla.)
CHEERS to collaring the last of the cement shoe peddlers. Mama mia! The era of horse heads under the covers and café assassinations and “sleeping wi’ da fishes” has come to an end in Italy:
Italian authorities arrested Italy‘s most-wanted fugitive on Monday, taking mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro into custody after a 30-year manhunt. Messina Denaro’s arrest brings to a close the era of the “Cosa Nostra” Sicilian crime syndicate depicted in “The Godfather” movies. […]
Metteo Messina Denaro in his prime.
Messina Denaro was considered “Mafia nobility”—the last of three top mafia bosses, the others being the notorious Salvatore “Toto'” Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, both of whom also eluded capture for decades, continuing to live clandestine lives in Sicily. […]
Criminology expert Anna Sergi at the University of Essex in England said Messina Denaro was “the last one, the most resilient one, the ‘purest’ Sicilian mafioso remaining.”
And unless he “bribed all’uh de judges,” he’ll be sent to prison for the rest of his life, where he’ll spend his days making rigatoni and cannolis for the other incarcerated goombahs in the waste management business who made their bones hittin’ up the saps for juice. Except on Christmas—then they all get’uh de spicy meat’uh balls. Chance of parole? Fuggedaboutit.
CHEERSto riding to the rescue. 32 years ago this week, under the strategic supervision of Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell and General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf,Operation Desert Stormbegan. A coalition of the willing—like, arealone—pushed Saddam Hussein’s supposedly-mighty Iraqi army out of Kuwait within 100 hours. We know two things in retrospect: 1) the first President Bush saw to it that it was an efficient operation with a valid, defined goal that, once achieved, would prompt our immediate withdrawal, and 2) his eldest son wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERSto Synonym Fever! Happy 244th Birthday to Peter Roget, who published the first Thesaurus in 1852 (a decades-long endeavor undertaken in part to help him deal with bouts of depression). Curious if there was a synonym for thesaurus, I went to—where else?—Thesaurus.comto find out. Their list is BOGUS, and let me tell you for the umpteenth time why:
A thesaurus is aglossary, but a glossary isn’t necessarily a thesaurus.
Finally—as of today, an end to those insufferable Thesaurus Day carols.
A thesaurus is alanguage reference book, but a language reference book isn’t necessarily a thesaurus.
A thesaurus is astorehouse of wordsand atreasury of wordsand even aword list, but neither a storehouse of words nor a treasury of words nor a word list is necessarily a thesaurus.
A thesaurus is anonomasticon, but an onomasticon is not necessarily a thesaurus.
Now you know why the one thing my parents made sure never to run out of was earplugs.
JEERS to today’s edition of Hey, Try Not To Be As Stupid As James Comer. The MAGA-led House of Representatives just keeps on bumping into the furniture. Courtesy of NBC News:
The White House and U.S. Secret Service said Monday they do not maintain visitor logs for President Joe Biden’s personal home in Wilmington, Delaware, a day after a top House Republican called for their release.
“Like every President across decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,” White House counsel’s office spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement. […]
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., on Sunday sent a letter to White House chief of staff Ron Klain asking for the visitor logs as the Justice Department and House Republicans investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time in the Obama administration.
This has been today’s edition of Hey, Try Not To Be As Stupid As James Comer.
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Ten years ago in C&J: January 18, 2013
JEERS to flying the friendly skies in an unfriendly aircraft. Says here that a whole bunch of those new Boeing 787 aircraft have been grounded The problem: “an emergency landing of one of the jets exposed a battery fire risk in the technologically advanced aircraft.” Or as they’re now calling it: “not technologically advanced enough.”
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And just one more…
JEERSto moguls among the moguls. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Hey Billeh, I heard that the World Economic Forum in Davos is happening this week. Do you know anything about this consequential world event?”
If you ever travel to Switzerland, wear safety goggles around the Matterhorn. That thing could poke your eye out.
Oh…you mean the confab in swanky Switzerland where the perfectly manicured, pedicured, furriered, botoxed and mansculpted ultra-rich fly in on their private jets and, after finishing their champagne and zipping their flies, get whisked in limos to the Ritz, gorge on gourmet food, drink $500 bottles of wine out of ladies’ shoes, shuss the slopes in $10,000 designer skiwear, party the night away with the finest prostitutes money can buy, and make back-slapping backroom deals that bulldoze more money into their off-the-books Caribbean accounts, all while pretending to care about the climate crisis and the poor, as Tom Friedman spins folksy firsthand yarns about the unexpected geopolitical insights of Swiss taxi drivers in his belovedNew York Times?ThatWorld Economic Forum in Davos? Sorry. Never heard of it.
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
“The biggest problem with Cheers and Jeers throughout is that it isn’t wilder; it does not revel appropriately enough in its open dumbness.”
