Cheers and Jeers: Monday

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

The Guns of Billo Are Silent

One year ago this week, Bill O'Reilly unleashed a load of diaper pudding against DailyKos, our upcoming convention in Chicago, and a convention sponsor.

Ever the pillar of journalistic integrity, O'Reilly cherry-picked a few Kossack comments that hadn’t quite been troll-rated out of existence yet, and then took a six-month-old diary completely out of context to brand Daily Kos "a vicious far-left Web site," "one of the worst examples of hatred America has to offer," and all of us as "hate mongers." (Never mind that billoreilly.com contained hateful smear comments like this and this and this and this that were allowed to fester on his un-moderated site.  Some comments were so threatening that a writer at Huffington Post called in the Secret Service to investigate.

O'Reilly ended his July 16 Talking Points Memo with, "This isn't an ideological issue. If the company was sponsoring a David Duke convention, we'd do the same story. Hate is hate, no matter where it comes from."

Moments later he issued the coup de grace, telling guest Diane Brady of Business Week:

"This is hate of the worst order. It's like the Ku Klux Klan. It's like the Nazi party. There's no difference here!"

Bill O'Reilly had, out of the blue, declared war on us. It was like Christmas, Easter, Hannukah, Halloween, July 4th and our collective birthdays all rolled into one and smothered in gravy.

His tirades continued for two weeks to our great amusement (and thanks for the bump in traffic, Bill).  Then on Friday, July 27---six days before the convention, O'Reilly promised to drive "the final nail" into our coffin, "...but it is disturbing so be forewarned." The following Monday he revealed a "shocking" photo that caused even his hard-core viewers to bust a gut. This was his attempt to get the presidential candidates to drop out of attending Yearly Kos '07 and destroy the Great Orange Satan once and for all:

"I'm now going to show you a picture that was posted on the Kos website for almost a year. The picture is very offensive and you might want to change the channel right now. I'm only going to show this picture once, but it is necessary to demonstrate what kind of haters these Kos people are and why no politician should ever legitimize them." ...

[Click here if you dare]

"Finally, a word to the Democrats, who will speak at the Kos convention. That is a huge mistake. ... Associating with haters is not going to bring you credibility, and voters will not forget. And that's the 'Memo.'"

Immediately following what appeared to be his first brush with Photoshop, O'Reilly tried to pin down convention-goer Senator Chris Dodd...and got the tar kicked out of him.

Later, after our convention had proven to be a huge success, Stephen Colbert stepped into the fray to put it all in perspective:

Bill O'Reilly clip: [Daily Kos is] like the Ku Klux Klan. It's like the Nazi party.
Stephen Colbert: Exactly! The Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were both notorious for allowing people to express unpopular views in an open and free forum.

Markos appeared on the show as Colbert demonstrated how comments work in bloggerland:

Colbert: Nation, I recently went undercover as a Daily Kos blogger, registering under the discreet name of "notstephencolbert". Now I’m going to log onto my account right now and expose just how hateful this website truly is. [Colbert types into his laptop] Hungarians are dirty ghoulies who wash in peanut oil. Heil health care!

And...post!

Now let’s see what’s on Daily Kos today ... Oh my God! Hungarians are dirty ghoulies! I can't read this on the air! This is unforgivable! Let’s get this straight to this---what do you have against the Hungarian people?

Markos: It’s called an open forum, it’s called democracy, and sometimes some idiots get on there and write things on Hungarians.

Alas, things are different this year. As we prepare for the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, Bill O'Reilly's mighty guns are silent. Apparently fighting a gaggle of bloggers who possess the combined evil of the Nazis and the KKK and the Hungarian ghoulies and even Al Capone and Benito Mussolini was too much for the most-watched host on cable news, his millions of followers, and the bottomless resources of his giant national TV network.

But I have to admit: Billo's tush looks kinda sexy when he's running away.

Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Cheers and Jeers for Monday July 14, 2008

Note: Here's the schedule for the week: Front-page C&Js today and tomorrow.  Then we're off to Netroots Nation (for which Kossack vicki has created an easy-to-read online spreadsheet of the activities here), during which the surrogates will make mischief in the diaries until our return on Tuesday, July 22.  If Bill O'Reilly stops by, give him my best.

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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Barack Obama's 47th birthday: 21
Days `til John McCain's 72nd birthday: 48
Percent of American men who wear a tie to work every day: 6%
Age of the Men's Dress Furnishings Association when it recently disbanded: 60
(Source: Wall Street Journal and The Week)
Average cost of transplanting stem- and precursor-cells from an animal's fat into its ailing joints: $2,000
Percent of animals who show improvement from the treatment: 80%
(Source: TIME)
Number of video and audio message Osama bin Laden has released since September 11, 2001: 29
(Source: TIME)

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Your FINAL Monday Texan As A Second Language Lesson

Brought to you by the 2008 Netroots Nation Convention in Austin July 17-20:

A "dirt curtsy" is that little dip you do when your legs go all rubbery after your fifth or sixth (or, if you're an actual Texan, seventh) margarita but you don't actually fall down.

Some folks are so contrary that "if they drowned they'd float upstream".

If someone tells you "that was a long road to a little house" that means you used a whole lotta words to say a whole lotta nuttin'.
---Courtesy of Kossack Arielle

Say each phrase three times out loud before you go to bed and you'll be fluent in Texan in no time!

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Puppy Pic of the Day: Floating Swiffer

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CHEERS to making mischief.  You've probably heard the buzz about a group of Clintonistas that plan to raise a bit of a ruckus at our convention in Denver.  But that may be small potatoes compared to the rancor that may await the Republicans, said Pat Buchanan yesterday on The McLaughlin Group:

"The Republican convention is going to have an exciting side convention.  I think Ron Paul's crowd is coming out---they could have six to ten thousand there for the Campaign for Liberty...a big rally the Tuesday of the Republican convention.  I don’t think Ron Paul is going to endorse the Republican candidate."

I'll pay a thousand bucks to the first Paul supporter who manages to spike McCain's prompters.  All sixteen of them.  Plus the twenty backups.

JEERS to French-kissing the gutter.  The last line of the my letter to the editor of The New Yorker in response to their latest cover reads: "I will never touch your magazine again, as long as I live."  Too subtle?

CHEERS to professionals who made a difference.  A very important person died over the weekend.  We send our condolences to the family of famed heart surgeon Michael DeBakey:

Dr. DeBakey's pioneering surgical procedures in bypassing blocked arteries in the neck, legs and heart have been performed on millions of patients around the world.  By the time he stopped a regular surgical schedule, when he was in his 80s, he had performed more than 60,000 operations.

He was also instrumental in making Houston a major center for heart surgery and research and transforming Baylor into one of the nation's great medical-education and research institutions.

And he was a leader in developing mechanical devices to assist failing hearts.  An early invention, the roller pump, devised while he was in medical school in the 1930s, became the central component of the heart-lung machine, which takes over the functions of the heart and lungs during surgery by supplying oxygenated blood to the brain.  It helped inaugurate the era of open-heart surgery.

Other than that, he pretty much sat around the house in his underwear eating Cheetohs and watching The Price is Right.  He was 99 and the cause of death was listed as, "Everything but his ticker."

JEERS to a bad case of the stupids.  Kossack-turned-madman Larry Johnson's blog, No Quarter, is 100% devoted to tearing down Barack Obama because...well, because he's not Hillary Clinton and is therefore evil.  I can accept that he and his minions need to pump up their rhetoric by lying, exaggerating, and citing bogus sources---otherwise they'd have folded up their tent long ago for lack of content.  But having the worst sarcasm detectors on the planet is just embarrassing.  If I ever get to that stage, please...pull the plug.

CHEERS to our  hard-working, effective, patriotic leaders who we LOVE, oh YES WE DO!  The Bush administration will be all smiles today as they commemorate the July 14, 1798 passage of the Sedition Act, which made it illegal to say bad stuff about the government and stands as the blackest stain on the John Adams presidency.  The penalty was: "...a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years."  Or as Michael Mukasey would call it: A slap on the wrist.

"WAAAK!" to a clean bill of evil.  Dick Cheney went to the Tower of Sauron for a checkup Saturday.  Doctors found no signs that his heart was returning, so they gave him the green light to continue practicing his competitive scheming, seething and frothing.  (I hear he's a shoe-in to win the gold next month in Beijing.)

CHEERS to the Tooter-in-Chief.  Nixon pardon or no Nixon pardon, every year that goes by makes Gerald Ford look like a bleeding-heart liberal compared to the GOP goons in power now.  Today is the late cover-boy model and U.S. president's 95th birthday.  If for nothing else, we salute him for this (from Cormac O'Brien's book, Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents):  

Lyndon Johnson once claimed that Gerald Ford was too dumb `to walk and fart at the same time.'  Perhaps.   But Ford could definitely fart while standing still, which he apparently did with alarming frequency and abandon.  According to his Secret Service detail, the president would loudly let one loose and then always attempt to put the blame on one of them with indignant remarks like, "Jesus, did you do that?  Show a little class."

Pay your respects here.  Or at least wave from a distance.

JEERS to wasted airtime.  If you need more proof that the on-air pundits are really pre-programmed robots, consider that virtually every single one will, when given the opportunity, ask an interview subject---whether it's a sitting senator or a 100 year-old ex-dogcatcher---if he or she is interested in being Candidate X's vice presidential nominee.  And every time, the subject will say, "Oh golly, I don’t deal in hypotheticals.  I'm perfectly happy with the job I have now."  Just once I’d like to see someone jump up and yell:

"Yes!  Yes Yes Yes Yes!!!!  I want it, I want it, I want it!  It's mine, all mine, you hear me???  Please pick me, pleeeeease!!!  I've already measured the goddam drapes!  Give...Me...Vee...Pee!  Og!  Og!!!" [smashes dinosaur bone on floor]

On second thought, I think Mitt Romney may have done something like that on Face the Nation recently, but they cut to a commercial after he flung his poo into the camera lens.

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One Year Ago in C&J: July 14, 2007...

CHEERS to supporting the troops.  Democrats in the House yesterday passed a bill that would start bringing our troops home within 120 days.  Pelosi:

"Passage of Chairman Skelton’s bipartisan bill will reflect the will of the American people and reaffirm the judgment of the House that the redeployment of our troops is a central element and an effective way forward in Iraq. We will repeat that judgment legislatively as often as necessary, hopefully with an increasing level of support from our Republican colleagues, until pressure from the American people causes the President to change his mind and change his policy."

Thank you---that's more like it.  But, uh, we're not quite ready to remove your electric neck collars just yet.

JEERS to no-shows.  And now a recap of former Supreme Court nominee and graduate (summa cum Estee Lauder) of the ACME School of Cosmetology Harriet Miers' testimony yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee:

"       "

Republicans are shrill.

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And just one more...

JEERS to Deputy Droopydrawers.  Flint, Michigan police chief David Dicks (yep, that's his name)---apparently having nothing better to do in one of the most violent cities in America---has his super troopers using this handy chart to check citizens out for excessive asscrack exposure.  The maximum penalty is a year in jail.  Which I guess explains the recent disappearance of all the city's plumbers.

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Oh, and it's Bastille Day.  Here's your instruction manual.  Knock yerself out.  Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?

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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:

"Women with unusually short or long menstrual cycles get closer-to-average cycles after regularly inhaling Bill in Portland Maine's essence.  You just walk into Cheers and Jeers.  That's the odor."

---Winnifred Cutler, research biologist
MSNBC

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