Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

The willow is too close to the house.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

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

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Infrastructure week. at last.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

This blog will pay for itself.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

No one could have predicted…

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread

Reader Interactions

20Comments

  1. 1.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    The high here is supposed to be in the 70s today, thank god. Back to the high 80s or 90s starting tomorrow. Yeah, I’m a heat wimp, but the humidity this summer has been appalling, and I always ache everywhere when it’s like that, no matter the temperature.

    Some day, I’m going to need to move someplace with a dry climate. How’s Calgary for weather?

  2. 2.

    Cat Lady

    Today is the pick of the week here in Boston – dry air! There was a hint of cool early which by this time during these summer muggies I start anticipating those early fall days, when you can feel that the fronts have come over the Arctic. We New Englanders will sure miss the Arctic when it’s gone.

  3. 3.

    Violet

    It’s like a sauna where I live. Walked outside to take out the trash and started sweating the minute I opened the door. It’s about 85 degrees, yes at this time of the morning, and probably about 90% humidity right now. Every blade of grass, ever leaf, the entire fence, everything is covered with thick dew. If the car weren’t parked under something I’d have to use the wipers just to see out.

    Summer is my least favorite season.

  4. 4.

    PurpleGirl

    NYC will be hot today but not humid. Tomorrow both the temperature and humidity will be going up. I see a lot of AC in my future. Right now I have the living room windows open and the terrace door open, although in a few hours, the AC will have to go on because the room’s orientation is south-southwest and it becomes an oven later in the day. For now the breeze is nice.

  5. 5.

    R-Jud

    It’s Septemberish over here in the UK: about 65 with a breeze and passing showers. I needed a sweater in town this morning. As I like my summer summery, it’s a bit annoying.

    And I’ve had two power outages so far today. I imagine they are thanks to the geniuses doing construction a couple of blocks away– this has happened before. We will probably get letters of apology through the letterbox tomorrow, but apologies don’t refreeze my popsicles, dammit.

  6. 6.

    Montysano

    Most every night at about 8-9:00 PM, we shut down the AC, open the windows, and crank up the whole house fan. We don’t go back to AC until the temp inside gets to about 85 the next morning.

    Not last night…. At 10:00 PM, it still “felt like” 90 degrees outside. Ah, summer in the Deep South.

  7. 7.

    Violet

    @PurpleGirl:

    in a few hours, the AC will have to go on because the room’s orientation is south-southwest and it becomes an oven later in the day. For now the breeze is nice.

    A little trick I learned after living for weeks without a/c after a hurricane knocked out the electricity is to cover the windows getting sun. Cover the east windows in the morning and west windows in the afternoon and south ones all day long. I used cardboard boxes. Don’t let the house get hot in the first place and you don’t have to wait for it to cool down. Cardboard boxes in the windows may not look all that great, but they work.

  8. 8.

    Tom

    Uh, has anyone seen Captain Ed’s latest post on the Journolist “scandal”?

    Jonathan Strong saves the real story for last, however:

    Time’s Joe Klein then linked to his own piece, parts of which he acknowledged came from strategy sessions on Journolist. “Here’s my attempt to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of this august list-serve community,” he wrote. And indeed Klein’s article contained arguments developed by his fellow Journolisters. Klein praised Palin personally, calling her “fresh” and “delightful,” but questioned her “militant” ideology. He noted Palin had endorsed parts of Obama’s energy proposal.

    This piece makes the argument that JournoListers attempted to shape coverage through their debates. Klein wrote this article in the first person, attributing these ideas to himself. He could just as easily have written, “Political activists are wondering about the following” in his list of issues in this first reaction to the Palin announcement. Instead, Klein wrote, “I wonder about the following,” which misleads readers into believing that these points sprang from his own forehead as Athena from Zeus. While Klein is very clearly an opinion journalist at Time, he represented those opinions as his own — and one has to wonder how many other talking points from JournoList Klein passed off as his own over the years at Time. The magazine needs to address that issue immediately.

    This might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read on the Internet.

  10. 10.

    QuaintIrene

    Today is the pick of the week here in Boston – dry air! There was a hint of cool early

    Same here in Jersey. Slept last night without waking up every two hours to splash my face with water. (Got central air , but I have to have the windows open at night.)

    John, what is a ‘cooker?’ Oh wait, John’s gone.
    Some kind of bar-B-Q?

  13. 13.

    That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal

    I hate ad servers. I can’t get anything to load quickly anymore, and Firefox always locks up with the message, “Waiting for anotherfuckedupadserver.com.”

    This isn’t a complaint about BJ, since this is far from the only place it happens. It does seem to be worse here than a lot of other sites, but it’s not that different. It’s a complaint about the web as a whole.

  14. 14.

    Bill H

    We had a one-week warm spell, almost hot actually, but now we’re back to morning drizzle from the marine layer, which is solid clouds that move in from the ocean. It lingers until midafternoon or all day and we have high temps that struggle to make it up to even seventy. Forecast is more of the same.

  15. 15.

    Moses2317

    I am a big fan of Balloon Juice. And, I agree that the Sherrod thing is an outrage in terms of what the right wing did to her, how our conservative media went along with it like a bunch of lemmings, and that Vilsack and the Obama Administration need to learn to stop giving a crap what the crazies say.

    However, I am disappointed that we are letting this incident distract us from talking up some significant successes that progressives achieved yesterday. The President signed a significant financial reform bill that, while not perfect, will go along ways toward ensuring that taxpayers will not have to bail out the banksters again, creates a consumer financial protection agency, and regulates the risky derivative scams and other financial instruments that helped drive our economy into the ditch. In addition, Senate Democrats finally overcame the Republicans’ ridiculous filibuster of extending unemployment benefits.

    These two achievements both show fundamental differences between the parties that have real impacts on the every day lives of millions of Americans. They also help demonstrate why we need to do everything in our power to make sure that the November elections lead to a larger progressive majority in the House and Senate, not a smaller one. Finally, they are further examples that refute the false canard that the Obama Administration has not achieved anything or has sold out progressives.

    I am not blindly in favor of everything the Administration does, and have expressed disappointment and exasperation with the Democrats frequently over the past 18 months. And I agree we need to push back on the crap that the right wing is doing to destroy well-intention folks like Ms. Sherrod. However, we need to be loudly and proudly trumpeting the successes that progressives have had over the past 18 months to help rally our side and make clear to the American people why they should not return power to the folks that destroyed our economy. Let’s use this blog to do that, rather than getting distracted by the latest right wing charade that comes down the pike.

  16. 16.

    PurpleGirl

    @Violet: I will try that as my living room windows are more of window wall — nearly floor to ceiling and from one wall to the opposite side wall. And since I’m on the 17th floor how it looks doesn’t matter. Keeping the room, and especially the work corner (where the computer is) cool/comfortable is.

  18. 18.

    sstarr

    For whatever reason people in the Pacific Northwest seem to have a strong belief that you should never install an effective central heating or cooling system in any building. Results may vary.

    Today the temperature is 55, with the potential to soar into the low 70s. Grey and cloudy in the morning – what local forecasters like to call a “push of marine air.”

  20. 20.

    Violet

    @PurpleGirl:
    I found white cardboard worked the best, since it reflects the most light.

    @Corner Stone:
    Brutal. Had to fix something in the car last night and was outside at dusk. Thought it would take five seconds, took 20 minutes. Big mistake not to go with the bug spray. All the rain has woken up the little suckers.

Comments are closed.