Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

This really is a full service blog.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

He really is that stupid.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Accountability, motherfuckers.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Let’s finish the job.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

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70Comments

  1. 1.

    General Egali Tarian Stuck

    When crazy people address the Asylum.

    Back in 2007, students at Pat Robertson’s Regent University were outraged when Mitt Romney, a Mormon, was invited to deliver the commencement address.

    I wonder if we will see similar protests from students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University now that it has been announced that Glenn Beck, also a Mormon, will be speaking at their graduation ceremony next month:

    I did not know Beck was Mormon. The stuff you learn on the internets.

  2. 2.

    Uloborus

    Okay. While I finally have an open thread that’s fresh, can somebody get me a link to that ‘Obama had somebody killed’ story? Just, you know, something factsy and newsy instead of an opinion piece? I just want to be sure that I actually understand before I finalize my opinion, and I’m not really sure where to start looking.

  5. 5.

    james hare

    My girlfriend even laughed at that one, and she hates all politicians. Something about working with politicians every day.

  7. 7.

    Cacti

    Since it’s an open thread, I just wanted to give a sincere and humble thank you to the socialist Fire Department and socialist Ambulance service who saved my wife’s life a few days ago when the incision from her C-section came open at home.

  8. 8.

    demkat620

    So John, once you’ve killed all the dandelions, can you come over here and kill the fucking pollen too?

    Jeebus it is driving me crazy.

  10. 10.

    Cacti

    Since it’s an open thread, I just wanted to give a sincere and humble thank you soshulist Fire Department and soshulist Ambulance service who saved my wife’s life a few days ago when the incision from her C-section came open at home.

  14. 14.

    MikeJ

    @lamh31:

    Call me the trigger man
    Looki lookin’ for the governor

    Uhm, no. We’re not as bad as the teabaggers are. Or shouldn’t be.

  17. 17.

    General Egali Tarian Stuck

    @lamh31: I wouldn’t worry about Arizona, as we are building an artsy fartsy hippie army to invade them from their eastern border. We plan to draw and paint anything that moves. The crusty assholes won’t know what framed them.

  19. 19.

    Xenos

    @General Egali Tarian Stuck: Beck being a Mormon is a big key to understanding his version of right-wing crazy. Not to be gratuitously insulting to Mormons, but you need to be a really, really credulous, superstitious and thoroughly miseducated dumbfuck to fall for his schtick. He relies on historians of American and human history who systematically get every damn thing wrong and all twisted and unrecognizable. It is like B.O.B was his prophet or something.

  20. 20.

    Uloborus

    @Ailuridae:
    It’s a left wing smear, bizarrely. I found it once I remembered the guy was in Yemen. It basically fit the circumstances I had heard. It’s an order to kill *or* capture, but there’s zero ability to capture while he’s holed up in the middle of a large anti-American tribe that has promised to kill anyone who tries to take him in any way.

    Those are the details I needed to confirm.

    EDIT: And people keep showing up on this blog going insane about it, so I wanted to, like, make sure I actually understood enough to have an opinion.

  23. 23.

    Mark S.

    @General Egali Tarian Stuck:

    I don’t think it’ll be too long before Beck starts his own religion:

    We are entering a dark, dark period of man. Um, I was, um, I was in the Vatican, and I was surprised that the individual I was speaking to knew who I was. And they said: ‘Of course we know who you are. What you’re doing is wildly important. We’re entering a period of great darkness, and if good people don’t stand up, we could enter a period unlike we have seen in a very long time.’

    He’s been talking directly to God lately so I think it’s only a matter of time. O’Reilly will get so jealous he’ll try to start one too.

  24. 24.

    Ailuridae

    I am not sure how much of a main stream Mormon Beck is. He a huge fan of Cleon Skousen who seems to have had more than a few run-ins with the Elders etc.

    Today was the day the FDIC came for Chicago area banks. While I am sad for all of those who lost their jobs it is doubly tough on my neighborhood as we lost two major corner tenants at huge intersections. And this comes not too long after losing 5-6 WaMu locations at major intersections. I ran today and about 60% of the street level retail in my neighborhood is unoccupied.

  25. 25.

    lamh31

    I like how the AZ Hispanic Republicans are taking a shot at Obama. It’s funny to me that people are blaming Obama for the state of immigration reform in America. Now didn’t Bush and McCain try for some sort of reform way back when, and GOP shut it down. So the immigration “crisis” just kept chugging along, so how is that Obama’s fault. IT IS HIS RESPONSIBILITY NOW…, but to quote billy joel he “didn’t start the fire…”

    Their own party, makes them 2nd class citzens, and they try to blame Obama. yeah right…

    Statement from Arizona Hispanic Republicans

  26. 26.

    General Egali Tarian Stuck

    @Mark S.:

    I will repeat what I said here months ago, that one day we will wake up to news that Beck leaped to his death from a tall building somewhere. Leaving behind a note that said “Gawd told him he no longer needed Fox News and was big enough now, he could fly on his own”.

  27. 27.

    WereBear

    @Mark S.: Dayum. That’s some @#(*$&@( sh!t there, man.

    Well, you know. Beck. Grandiosity. It’s like he’s a really bad performance artist, but thanks to long tail marketing, the people who watch Fox love it. Coherence is for sissies.

    @Cacti: Best wishes to the family. That’s the last thing she needs. Great that people were there for you.

    Love the poster.

  28. 28.

    Yutsano

    @lamh31: Oh man I love that letter/ “The Republicans are acting like flaming racists but Obama is still the suxxors!” The cognitive dissonance in that letter is probably worth a PhD thesis in psychology for an ambitious enough student.

  29. 29.

    celticdragonchick

    Best laugh I have had all week. Whoever came up with that picture needs a free beer tonight.

  30. 30.

    beltane

    @lamh31: I think the numbers of Hispanic Arizona Republicans have dropped precipitously over the past few hours. Soon they will be like the black Republican caucus in the House of Representatives.

  31. 31.

    eemom

    @Uloborus:

    oh yes. The ‘Zilla was totally starbursting over that one. And the “worse than Bush crowd” thought they’d died and went to heaven.

  34. 34.

    Liberty60(Veteran, Great war of Yankee Aggression)

    OK< another item for the Epistemic closure file- Now the American Family Association hates teh Military:
    “In a blog post on the AFA’s website, Fischer, who is the group’s Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy, listed the reasons he agreed with Graham’s statement about Islam, saying the military had been ‘bullied,’ and calling its leaders ‘spineless,’ before concluding:

    Bottom line: you want to know who’s now running the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy and the Marines and calling the shots where it counts? Fundamentalist Muslims and homosexual activists.”
    And don’t even get them started on the Pentagon’s wholesale embrace of green energy saving measures.

    So um, who will be left to turn out the lights once all the moozlims, gheys, leftards, soldiers, and “intellectuals” like Manzi get purged from The Party?

  39. 39.

    JGabriel

    @Xenos:

    Beck being a Mormon is a big key to understanding his version of right-wing crazy.

    It should be noted that Beck converted to Mormonism. He was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic schools.

    How anyone taught by Jesuits could convert to Mormon is beyond my ken.

    .

  41. 41.

    Wile E. Quixote

    I’m working at a contract job with a company that uses Ubuntu and I have to say that I’m really digging it. Not so much for apt, I’ve always been kind of “meh” about its supposed advantages over RPM but because of the vmbuilder script and their KVM implementation, which beats the snot out of KVM in CentOS 5.4.

  45. 45.

    MikeJ

    @JGabriel:

    How anyone taught by Jesuits could convert to Mormon is beyond my ken.

    You would think it would turn you off all religion.

  46. 46.

    And Another Thing...

    @Ailuridae: Most of my Mormon relatives are fans and are really proud of him. I believe he was a convert sometime in the last 10 years or so. He’s an avid fan of Cleon Skousen, who used to be considered fringe but is now mainstream. Beck seems to be getting loonier.

  49. 49.

    Anne Laurie

    @General Egali Tarian Stuck:

    I will repeat what I said here months ago, that one day we will wake up to news that Beck leaped to his death from a tall building somewhere. Leaving behind a note that said “Gawd told him he no longer needed Fox News and was big enough now, he could fly on his own”.

    If we are very lucky, he will land on Roger Ailes.

    Naaahh… Beck (like Ailes) is a specimen of Homo Cockaroachus. He’ll live for another fifty years, leaping from crazy-fringe to crazy-fringe of a series of increasingly authoritarian religions. The question is, will the rest of us survive long enough to see Beck publically regarded as what he really is — a bipolar ex-substance-abuser who won’t take his meds — rather than a Significant Media Village Idiot?

  51. 51.

    Mike Kay

    @eemom: can you imagine how the “worse than bush” firebaggers would be squawking if Edwards didn’t get his dick caught in a wringer. It would have been endless “if we only nominated edwards we’d have free soft serve ice cream coming out of the modem”.

  52. 52.

    Uloborus

    @eemom:
    Eesh. Look, law enforcement does this in the US. ‘A threat to other people’ and ‘Can’t be arrested’ means, yes, you kill them. It’s just REALLY HARD to make yourself unarrestable in the United States. In the back country of Yemen, it’s somewhat easier.

  54. 54.

    Wile E. Quixote

    So I went to the movies last night to see Kick Ass (which kicks ass) and saw the trailers for The A-Team, The Losers and The Expendables which are all movies about small teams of soldiers/mercenaries who end up being stuck in bad situations and face overwhelming odds but who presumably triumph in the end. There’s also something called Furry Vengeance coming out soon, which, despite the title, is apparently a movie aimed at children. All of these movies prove that Hollywood is incredibly liberal because Stephen Baldwin isn’t in any of them.

  55. 55.

    Mike Kay

    @Uloborus: the philosophical and ideological really put earplugs on and won’t have dialogue with pragmatists.

    I can’t tell how many times someone would respond by saying how is this different than shooting down a hijacked airliner heading for a hi-rise building or how is this different than shooting the mass murder at Virginia Tech, and the ideologues refused to see any similarity. of course the similarity is some people won’t be taken alive.

  56. 56.

    Montysano

    @demkat620:

    So John, once you’ve killed all the dandelions, can you come over here and kill the fucking pollen too?

    Our strategy this year is to Embrace The Pollen. I’ve built all new screens for the windows, the house is wide open, we’ve yet to turn on the A/C this spring.

    It’s raining here, quite lovely. Stevie’s “Secret Life of Plants” on the turntable.

  58. 58.

    Brachiator

    @Cacti:

    Since it’s an open thread, I just wanted to give a sincere and humble thank you to the socialist Fire Department and socialist Ambulance service who saved my wife’s life a few days ago when the incision from her C-section came open at home.

    That must have cost you a lot of chickens.

    Much more seriously, I hope that your wife is doing well. I know what this is like.

    Geez, they’re making a movie about the A-Team? Why?

    There’s a law that anything that’s ever been on TV must be made into a movie. I understand that “Glenn Beck: The Motion Picture” is in development.

    And did Liam Neeson really need the money that bad?

    I think that Neeson is working his butt off in part to help deal with the impact of the loss of his wife, Natasha Richardson.

  60. 60.

    Liberty60(Veteran, Great war of Yankee Aggression)

    @Mark S.:
    Liam Neeson should fire his agent- why he was talked into “Clash Of The Titans” is beyond me.

  64. 64.

    Uloborus

    @JK:
    I… disagree with him absolutely. His problem is that it’s morally objectionable to show a violent and deranged 11 year old? Noor?

    I disliked the movie strongly – because I found every character, especially the hero, utterly unlikeable. Except Mindy. She’s an almost psychopathic mess, but at least she’s *interesting*.

    I never got the impression for a moment the movie is trying to sell any kind of moral message of any kind. If it did, it would have failed utterly because the hero is kind of contemptible, and Mindy wouldn’t even get to be an issue.

    Of course, I also don’t see it as a comedy. For the ‘it’s not funny’ part, okay. I go with that. It’s not funny.

  65. 65.

    Anne Laurie

    @JK:

    “Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original [Kick Ass] comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.”

    I heart Roger Ebert so much for this. I was a comix geek, I still love anime & manga, and I even enjoy a certain degree of “shit blowing up” video. But the live-action blood-pr0n stuff? Don’t need to see the movie, your trailer has demonstrated that it is a world I am so very not interested in!

  66. 66.

    Josh

    Gwang, The trailer for The Losers suggests to me that they’ve really sexed it up and dumbed it down. But you’re right, given that the villain was created as “a cross between Rumsfeld and Blofeld,” and the heroes have left CIA and the military after having been morally repulsed by what they were told to do, it’s not gonna be a fun story for conservatives.

  67. 67.

    Uloborus

    @Anne Laurie:
    See, as an individual, I’m totally cool with you thinking that way. I found the movie gorier than I like in some parts, myself. If you don’t like that kind of thing, I’m with you.

    But you’re not a movie critic. This whole review is a moral lecture. ‘Grr, movies with graphic violence are bad! Shame on you for showing a mentally unhealthy little girl!’ I thought Ebert prided himself on viewing movies as art and on having a good grasp on the artistic standards of cinematography. There are reasons he could have hated the movie in those terms – but he didn’t mention any of them. He just disapproved of it because it wouldn’t get off his damn lawn.

  69. 69.

    YellowJournalism

    @Anne Laurie: What’s funny is that a lot of the fans of the comic are coming out and saying they hate the movie version because it drops some key plot points and story twists that ground the movie in the “reality” of ordinary people becoming superhereos. The original backstory for Hit Girl, in particular, would better portray why she’s a killing machine with no show of remorse.

    But I love Crazy Cage movies, so I might see this when it comes out on VOD or I’ll just wait for the movie channels to show it.

    ‘Grr, movies with graphic violence are bad! Shame on you for showing a mentally unhealthy little girl!’ I thought Ebert prided himself on viewing movies as art and on having a good grasp on the artistic standards of cinematography. There are reasons he could have hated the movie in those terms – but he didn’t mention any of them. He just disapproved of it because it wouldn’t get off his damn lawn.

    That’s not his point. His point is that they did a crappy job with the characterization of the girl and just went for the sensational approach, kind of like Kill Bill’s Bride without the backstory. And he has stated many times that he enjoys movies on what we may consider a “pure popcorn” level of entertainment. Sometimes, as the title of his books say, when he hates a movie, he just “really, really hated this movie”. Not that much different than your average viewer, which is something I’ve liked about him in addition to his film history knowledge. While your lawn line is funny, I disagree with the notion that Ebert is just a cranky old guy who doesn’t “get” the movie.

  70. 70.

    YellowJournalism

    @Uloborus: I want to note that I think, as you say, if it had been actually funny, Ebert would have liked it more. He’s always struck me as the type who believes in anything offensive in comedy is okay as long as its actually funny.

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