Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The revolution will be supervised.

đŸŽ¶ Those boots were made for mockin’ đŸŽ”

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

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

After roe, women are no longer free.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

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

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

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

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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Reader Interactions

100Comments

  6. 6.

    morzer

    Apologize to Jon Kyl now, Mr Cole. He’s set a fine example of taking a break from his duties, and here you are letting him down!

  8. 8.

    Tim

    You are pathetic, Cole.

    But don’t worry about it: There are far worse addictions than intertron posting.

    Try NOT announcing that you’re taking a break from it. You seem to post MORE after such declarations.

  12. 12.

    General Stuck

    I really suck at this not blogging thing. I swear I’m not doing it on purpose- I really meant to turn to take a break:

    I got the same problem. So I have devised a brilliant plan for taking breaks from blogging and the internet from time to time. Going to hike up to one of the mountains nearby, as far as my unyoung bones will take me. With the power cord to my modem, wrap that sucker in ziplock paper bags, and put it in a mason jar, and bury it. And when the need to surf the net gets more powerful than the natural aversion to mountain climbing, I’ll retrieve it and get back on the grid. You have to have dropped a lot of acid in a previous life, to think of shit like this.

  15. 15.

    fourlegsgood

    John, in case you missed my comment below – forget the Calphalon – get stainless. I have Cuisinart (for 30 years, LOVE IT) and others recommend All-Clad. Also wonderful.

  16. 16.

    David Hunt

    This time I mean it.

    We know you mean it. We also know you meant it the last time you said you were taking a break. Eventually that monkey on your back tells you to share your thoughts with us…

  17. 17.

    Jay in Oregon

    @Tim:

    Try NOT announcing that you’re taking a break from it. You seem to post MORE after such declarations.

    I wonder if it’s not a case of confirmation bias; people are expecting him to post after announcing he’s taking a break, so it’s more obvious. One could look at the frequency of his posts before and after such an announcement to be sure.

  18. 18.

    jwb

    You’re just going about it backwards. You’ve got to tell us that you are planning to spend all week doing nothing but blogging, then, if you are like me, your procrastination gene will kick in and ensure that the last thing you do is blog.

    ETA: That, or escape somewhere with no internet access.

  20. 20.

    General Stuck

    @Maude:

    Do you have a very powerful flashlight for when the urge hits in the middle of the night?

    Gawd, I hope so :)

  21. 21.

    AxelFoley

    This thread is useless without pics/video of Christie Brinkley from the 80s.

    And is that that cat from Fleetwood Mac? Been like 25 years since I’ve seen this video and I never knew that dude from Fleetwood Mac sung this (I wasn’t too familiar with Fleetwood back then).

  24. 24.

    General Stuck

    Historically , Tuesday nights are the big blogging and traffic nights on BJ, so the karma is strong for more posts.

  25. 25.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    If you were to be gone for too long, John, we’d have to send the paramedics to your house. Though we would have to warn them to cover their eyes.

  27. 27.

    Southern Beale

    I never knew this was a Lyndsey Buckingham song. Wow. I feel out of it.

    I took the month of November off. Here’s how I did it. I changed my home page from my blog to something else. I stopped watching most news and listening to news on the radio.

    And I came over here a lot.

    :-)

  29. 29.

    Poopyman

    I’m about to head out, but as I go, I want to point you to The Kindness of Strangers, and in particular, this line:

    ….There were even some who admitted later that they were considering suicide until this gave them hope. Some of those people considering suicide? Were the donors.

    I dunno why that stuck with me.

    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
    Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

    Ciao for a while. Bet Cole posts again before I can log back in!

  30. 30.

    Southern Beale

    John, have you asked your doctor if hiatus is right for you?

    :-)

    I actually think my blood pressure dropped significantly in my month off of blogging. Really it’s about unplugging from the discourse. I swear this country would be a gazillion better times off we all just turned off FOX, MSNBC, etc. Just pay attention to the general headlines and ignore the rest of it.

    99.9% of it is bullshit anyway.

  32. 32.

    Ana Gama

    This is kinda humorous:

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “When it’s all going to be said and done,” he said on Fox News Radio today, “Harry Reid has eaten our lunch. This has been a capitulation in two weeks of dramatic proportions of policies that wouldn’t have passed in the new Congress.”

  35. 35.

    change

    You know why you were able to ram through everything you wanted during the insane duck except for the Obamabus Spending Bill and the DREAM Act?

    Because the GOP is playing the long game. We’re going to FORCE the debt issue when the debt limit comes due–either cut non-defense federal spending back to 2007 levels, or we shut the whole thing down!

  36. 36.

    General Stuck

    @Southern Beale:

    Plus, I think we are entering a period where objective political thought will be out of fashion, and demagoguing full time ideological viewpoints will fill most of the content of political speech. It is already that way to a significant degree.

    I already know what the wingnuts think, and they know what I think, then there are those others whom I will not name. I just want to know what happens, and not argue over the color of the drapes with folks on my own side of things. I don’t want to hear somebody elses precanned spin.

    We are choosing up sides in this country, left and right, and it is a force of nature that cannot be stopped by reasoned high brow political dialogue, imo. It will have to be slogged out along political skirmish lines, mostly in the congress and acts of governance generally, as well as elections, and hopefully not devolve into live fire skirmish lines.

  38. 38.

    Comrade Mary

    @change:

    For “ram through”, read “the GOP spread their cheeks and begged for it”.

    (Oh, I feel dirty now. But good. Dirty and good.)

  44. 44.

    AxelFoley

    @change:

    You know why you were able to ram through everything you wanted during the insane duck except for the Obamabus Spending Bill and the DREAM Act?
    Because the GOP is playing the long game. We’re going to FORCE the debt issue when the debt limit comes due—either cut non-defense federal spending back to 2007 levels, or we shut the whole thing down!

    Someone plug this fool’s mouth. My zipper’s stuck.

  49. 49.

    Southern Beale

    @General Stuck:

    You know, I just want to know WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED IN THE WORLD TODAY. You know, mudslides, pirate attacks in Somalia, treaties signed in Europe and Asia, some shit happening in China, whatever. You know, NEWS.

    We don’t get news anymore. We get what people think of the news. I don’t care what most people think of the news. I care what certain people think of the news and those people have blogs.

    :-)

    Call me part of the problem.

  50. 50.

    tworivers

    Does anybody know anything about Michael Hudson? Is he a crank/crackpot? The argument he makes in this interview (suggesting that the financial industry in the US is essentially acting like a parasite does in nature) makes sense to me. I’m not sure if I buy every last bit of it, but he’s got an interesting viewpoint on the subject definitely.

  53. 53.

    someguy

    @General Stuck:

    won’t devolve into actual skirmish lines

    Don’t look now but I just heard a news report that some right wing fuckstick shot up a Charlotte TV station. Because of teh gheys I’d assume. Or maybe teh negroes.

  54. 54.

    Martin

    @Cris: California added 3 Montana’s worth of people and didn’t gain a seat. If you guys don’t start cranking out some kids up there, we’re going to glue to to Wyoming, take one seat away and make you share the other.

  55. 55.

    Bubblegum Tate

    Has the wingnut freakout about net neutrality started? Because this is a good one.

    We must roll this back – and, in fact, this would be an excellent first step in curbing government and starting to re-establish Constitutional government. The liberals on the FCC will rue the day they made this step too far.

    I like to read the “rue the day” line a la Sideshow Bob:

    Bob: But I’m innocent! I saved the children!
    Cecil: Tell them they’ll live to regret this.
    Bob: YOU’LL LIVE TO REGRET THIS! … Oh thanks a lot, now I look crazy.

  57. 57.

    lamh32

    This video has probably already been seen by some, but it’s pretty cool anyway. I think I may actually like it even more than the video that the President made himself.

    White House Staff: It Gets Better

    I like that it’s staff members. Seriously though, is Obama’s WH the most diversely staffed or what?

  58. 58.

    Complimentary Airsickness bag

    Even though this video is almost 30 years old, at 1:22, it looks like Osama bin Laden is adding a brick to a wall.

  59. 59.

    IrishGirl

    @tworivers: I don’t know anything about the writer, but his premise is correct. Unlike a symbiotic relationship, a parasite can and often does kill the host. I think many in polysci and econ would claim that the unregulated financial services industry has behaved in exactly this manner and almost took us out in the past two years. And they still have the potential to do it again, in spite of recent reforms.

  60. 60.

    Sko Hayes

    @change:

    You know why you were able to ram through everything you wanted during the insane duck except for the Obamabus Spending Bill and the DREAM Act?

    Because Republicans got off their asses and stopped being obstructionist?
    Go ahead, shut the government down again, make sure that soldiers don’t get paid, or that seniors don’t get their Social Security checks. That worked so well for you last time.

  61. 61.

    Southern Beale

    @Bubblegum Tate:

    the FCC will rue the day they made this step too far.

    They play that card all the time. I remember one time they said liberals had poked a sleeping bear in reference to Rush Limbaugh … we’d said something mean, done something mean. I don’t remember what. It amounted to nothing, as usual.

    They’re such cute little beasts.

  62. 62.

    The Dangerman

    @jinxtigr:

    Just as long as you’re not doing as much coke as Buckingham apparently was…

    I read someplace that Fleetwood Mac’s recording of Rumours was one monster coke binge, sleeping at a minimum and snorting at a maximum. Some drug dealer probably retired after the sessions.

    Edit: I stand corrected on the Dealer:

    “While recording their 1977 masterpiece Rumours, Mick Fleetwood and his Fleetwood Mac bandmates snorted so much cocaine that they demanded that their dealer be given credit on the album. Producers understandably demurred. Sadly, the man was killed before the album was released, quickly solving the dilemma … Stevie Nicks? She snorted so much coke that she was rumored to have hired a special “assistant” to administer the drug rectally.”

    Well, damn,learn something new everyday. Have never hard that method of taking coke.

  63. 63.

    Mike Kay (Team America)

    Arlen Specter gave a barn burning speech torching the GOP and accusing John Roberts of perjury.

    Maybe Dems should have kept him instead of primarying him. He has voted the straight Democratic line, even after he lost his primary.

  65. 65.

    joe from Lowell

    @change:

    We’re going to FORCE the debt issue when the debt limit comes due—either cut non-defense federal spending back to 2007 levels, or we shut the whole thing down!

    The last time the Republicans tried that, they were much more popular, and they were led by one of the best political tacticians in recent history (Newt Gingrich). They still got their ass kicked.

    Today, the Republicans are enormously unpopular, much less popular than the president they want to take on, and they’re led by John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Eric Cantor.

    Bring. It. On.

  67. 67.

    jl

    If Cole sneaks out on vacation again, Rosie has promised to get tough on his ass. That’s what it is.

  69. 69.

    Tsulagi

    Christ, New Year’s is coming up, Cole. Stop playing with your blog and go out the door. There’s gotta be some women in WV you’re not related to. Wouldn’t it be nice for a change to wake up to a warm body that isn’t furry? Or at least not completely furry? Baby steps.

  70. 70.

    AxelFoley

    @The Dangerman:

    I read someplace that Fleetwood Mac’s recording of Rumours was one monster coke binge, sleeping at a minimum and snorting at a maximum. Some drug dealer probably retired after the sessions.

    ROFL

    Edit: I stand corrected on the Dealer:
    “While recording their 1977 masterpiece Rumours, Mick Fleetwood and his Fleetwood Mac bandmates snorted so much cocaine that they demanded that their dealer be given credit on the album. Producers understandably demurred. Sadly, the man was killed before the album was released, quickly solving the dilemma 
 Stevie Nicks? She snorted so much coke that she was rumored to have hired a special “assistant” to administer the drug rectally.”

    Cot damn! Up her arse?

    Well, damn,learn something new everyday. Have never hard that method of taking coke.

    LOL, no shit, huh?

  74. 74.

    JCJ

    So, driving home this evening I heard on the radio (I know, NPR) that the president of Cote d’Ivoire and his family are not allowed to travel to the U.S. according to a new State Department ban. Is this the guy Lanny Davis is representing as covered in a post yesterday?

  76. 76.

    Chyron HR

    @change:

    You know why you were able to ram through everything you wanted during the insane duck

    Because the GOP voted with the Democrats. What makes you think they won’t continue to do so?

    Now isn’t it about time for another one of your “We must appease the Islamists by banning homosexuality” posts?

  77. 77.

    Chyron HR

    @change:

    DADT will remain the police of the US military into the distant future. No repeal is going to happen, liberals, we’re going to run out the clock on the insane duck session.

    Only a stupid child would disagree with your prognostications.

  79. 79.

    eemom

    tee hee. Face it John Cole, you just can’t quit us — we iz yer own personal zoo of Obots, firebaggers, dullards, and shithouse lawyers.

  80. 80.

    Montysano

    After going through 3-4 copies, I recently found a pristine copy of Buckingham Nicks on vinyl (it’s never been released in any digital format). What a gorgeous album. Buckingham’s guitar style is so distinctive.

  81. 81.

    Anya

    @lamh32: I watched that video with some of the youth I work with, and one of them — a 15 yrs. old runaway kid from upstate NY, whispered to me that he was gay and he did not tell his parents (who are very religious). He said that he was going to show his parents the video. I am not sure if it will help with his parents, but I am sure it helped that one particular kid. It helps to know that he too can one day over come the prejudice and the fear. I thought it was a great video. Dan Savage deserves a lot of kudos for this great project. I think the video of the White House staff is specially wonderful.

  86. 86.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @change:

    You. are. a. pathetic. attention. seeker.

    If your truck is in your garage, start it up and burn a bunch of gas to piss liberals off. It’s best if you keep the garage door closed and let the fumes build up so you can release them all at once for maximum effect.

    It might start to run rough after a few minutes so I would recommend staying in the garage to keep your foot on the gas.

  90. 90.

    Nellcote

    @lamh32:

    I like that it’s staff members. Seriously though, is Obama’s WH the most diversely staffed or what?

    Thanks for the link! I’m curious about the back story there.
    It’s a real rainbow coalition but I suspect there were as many gay staffers before it’s just that they can be out now.

    This whole project is profoundly moving. I wish with all my heart there had been something like it before my younger brother passed on.

  92. 92.

    Laura W.

    @Cat Lady: KEEPER!!!

    @Montysano: That was very sweet. And if you watch the entire 7:14 of Frozen Love that I linked for Steep, which I did, you will note the poster for AL. I thought of you when it flashed on the screen, actually. (Unless I hallucinated it, which is equally probable.)

    You have to check out the photos on this one:
    They were BABIES together.

  93. 93.

    Dee Loralei

    @Anya: Baby girl, due on the Solstice! Suzanne was supposed to be induced earlier today and we’ve heard nothing!

  94. 94.

    Svensker

    @Bnut:

    Mick Fleetwood is one of the manliest names I have ever heard. Only slightly less than Staff Sergeant Max Fightmaster.

    That is awesome.

  95. 95.

    Svensker

    @Sixers:

    Steelers mistakenly given first down

    They absolutely were. But it kinda got evened out with the lack of a pass interference call at the end. Win some, lose some.

    Yay, Jetties!

  99. 99.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Nellcote: I’m so sorry to hear about your brother. My deepest sympathies.

    Cole, any update on suzanne yet? Pacing the virtual floor again.

    @Paddy: I love Grace Jones, but there is something vaguely creepy about that vid (could be because I don’t like Pee-wee, but I don’t think that’s it in this case).

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