Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Come on, man.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

We will not go back.

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

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Books are my comfort food!

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81Comments

  2. 2.

    JPL

    Since it’s an open thread, I’ll share a story. Yesterday while waiting in a line at the post office, the man behind me mentioned that he just came from the bank and they had three “mexican” tellers and now at the post office, the teller was the same. My empathy kicked in and I asked “is that a problem for you”? (I intentionally did not ask do you..)…
    After a few ehs, he mentioned they were so slow. At that point the man in front of me said your kidding right? The next lady in line also made a statement in support of people who work hard. Long story short, I met a few really nice people and an asshole. BTW…I live in a conservative district north of Atlanta.

    The man in front of me thanked me for saying something, also, too.

  3. 3.

    Mako

    We had a lawn. Well, actually, a concrete stoop painted green. But it was a great stoop. We used to sit there for hours playing mumblety-peg and stain-the-rabbit…

  4. 4.

    jl

    So, cranky again, eh? Cole should tell us what awful thing Rosie/Tunch/Lily did now.

    OK, what Rosie or Tunch did.

    Edit: since Cole is dipping his toe into long form blogging, and masterfully so, I request a post on how he used to walk barefoot in the snow to school, uphill both ways. Like a real Yorkshire lad.

    Four Yorkshiremen
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

  5. 5.

    robertdsc-PowerBook

    The Kenyan Islamocommufascist usurper gave me my tax refund today. Much rejoicing went on, though I know that some of it was from the deal he worked out with the terrorists GOP fucknuts back in the lame duck. Bleh.

  6. 6.

    Southern Beale

    @JPL:

    Wow, you were a lot nicer than I would have been. I would have been like, “Mexican? You sure? Did you ask? Cuz you know Mexico is a country, not an ethnicity. They might be Guatemalan. Honduran. Colombian.”

    I’m kinda obnoxious that way. It’s a problem.

  7. 7.

    piratedan

    sites like this one:

    http://arizona.typepad.com/blog/

    and the FP folks here, do tend to keep me on my blood pressure medication. There are times when I wanna go get a baseball bat and start kneecapping folks, then I take a deep breath, read another source of idiotic Republican overreach, sprinkled with Democratic inadequacy and wonder how we can have any hope to fix things. Then I look in the mirror, check the bank account and the calender and donate some more time and money to the works and people I believe in and then pet my cat Jake and tell him that I hope we can survive ourselves.

  8. 8.

    gogol's wife

    John’s righteous post immediately before this one has put me in a better mood. How can this get out to the wider world? Everyone should send a link to it to all their friends. I’m going to.

  9. 9.

    Villago Delenda Est

    We had to get up off the couch, walk across the room, and turn a dial to change the TV channel.

    And there were only THREE channels!

  13. 13.

    General Stuck

    We are currently in the midst of about the worst/dust windstorm since I’ve lived in SW NM. Sustained winds of at least 50 mph, and my guess of gusts near hurricane strength from just taking the pooch for his walk. A fairly short one.

    And I’ve never seen the dust here so thick you couldn’t see the mountains. When I lived in Alamogordo for a while ten years ago, the dust storms were worse, along the lines of my vision of hell, especially with White Sands monument next door.

    But I would still take this rather than the cold dismal all day rains from back east.

    I JUST KNOW OBAMA IS BEHIND IT – SOLD US OUT TO THE WEATHER, AGAIN

    THE BIG BLOW HARD

  15. 15.

    Linda Featheringill

    Uphill both ways:

    Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was actually married. Once in a while my hubbie, bless his little heart, would complain about having to work for spending money as a kid. Since I came from the level of rural folks where EVERYBODY in the family has to engage in manual labor to provide for the needs of the whole family, I would think that he was just nuts. And I usually told him so.

    [Of course, we trudged uphill to toil in the fields and uphill again to drag our poor and pathetic selves home. :-)]

  16. 16.

    Donut

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    It really was horrible, weren’t it, to have to get up and change channels and volume? The Horror.

    But I will say, we had six channels where I grew up. The three networks, plus PBS, and a couple of independent super stations that we were close enough to pick up – KPLR in St. Louis and WGN in Chicago.

    That takes me back to memories of watching pre-WWF pro wrestling on channel 11/KPLR on Sundays, after mass and before St. Louis Cardinals football games…Anyone else from the Midwest remember Baron von Rashke and the Brainclaw? Anyone?

  17. 17.

    Linda Featheringill

    @General Stuck:

    Big dust storm:

    Hot and dry in your area? One of the real problems with dust storms is that it is the topsoil that is picked up and blown around. And by the time it is deposited [somewhere else], all the microbial life has been killed and it is just dirt, not fit to nourish anything.

  18. 18.

    Delia

    Complain while you can. The days are coming when we’ll be telling the grandkids about how nice it was in the good old days when we had lawns and everything didn’t belong to the Koch Brothers.

  19. 19.

    Elizabelle

    John, I am glad that you wrote out the post immediately before this one rather than evading your disquiet with a pot of tea and a good book, as I’d suggested.

    Much better use of your time, and some points that your BJ commentariat can use in letters to the editor.

  20. 20.

    Chris

    Although I’m a regular Balloon Juice reader, I don’t yet know the mores (not yet aware of all Internet Traditions) here regarding open threads.

    Someone please tell me, would it be uncouth to share a link to a recent humor piece I wrote?

  21. 21.

    eemom

    also too, there was only ONE phone for the whole family…..and it was stuck to the wall…..and when it rang you answered without having ANY IDEA who was calling.

  22. 22.

    Anne Laurie

    I’m late catching up on my NIXONLAND assignment for tomorrow’s discussion (7pm EDT — join us!). Just getting to the part in 1970 where union workers started wildcat-striking because they were losing so much ground economically. So the Very Serious People announced that unions would have to be broken, immediately, because if ‘everyone’ didn’t share the financial pain, then “prices would rise beyond reason“…

    The sorry truth is that Nixon, effing Tricky Dick, was smart enough not to listen to those Very Serious People. If only Timothy Geithner could be forced to read Nixonland!, she said piously.

  23. 23.

    RossInDetroit

    @Donut:

    That takes me back to memories of watching pre-WWF pro wrestling on channel 11/KPLR on Sundays, after mass and before St. Louis Cardinals football games…Anyone else from the Midwest remember Baron von Rashke and the Brainclaw? Anyone?

    I’m 52 and vividly remember Big Time Wrestling on the Detroit stations. The Sheik (the original one) lived in the biggest house in our small town. he never dropped out of character, which was really weird at the grocery store.

  25. 25.

    General Stuck

    @Chris:

    Open threads means it’s acceptable to tell the blog host exactly what you think of him, without any blowback. Think of them as daily internet tradition John Cole Festivus. Let’s see what you got. The mores, the better.

  26. 26.

    Amir_Khalid

    @General Stuck: Be glad you weren’t here in south east Asia during the Great Haze of 1997. Raging forest fires in Borneo (the Indonesian part) caused a great pall of smoke that for many months turned the sky over Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines into a brownish-gray soup in which the sun was not visible. Often anything more than 200 meters away wasn’t visible either.

    The air smelled like your neighbor burning garden refuse whenever you stepped outdoors — wearing a mask to filter out the smoke particles. On really bad days the schools cancelled outdoor physical education class.

    This went on for about half a year before they finally got the forest fires under control. Now that was bad.

  27. 27.

    Dennis SGMM

    @eemom:
    I’m so old that I remember being on a party line when we lived in rural Washington state. You counted the closely-spaced rings to determine if the call was for you. We were three.

  28. 28.

    BombIranForChrist

    Here in Seattle, it is almost sunny, which means that Summer is currently happening right now and will be done in a few hours. I’m going to run out, celebrate July 4th et al. and then come back in for Winter starting at 5:15.

    So, for lunch .. burgers.

    For dinner …. borscht.

  29. 29.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Anne Laurie: What are the chapters for this week, AL? I’ve been slammed all week so I’m planning on a quiet day catching up tomorrow. The new time slot works great for me, so thanks for that.

  31. 31.

    M-Pop

    Okay, I don’t want to start a shitstorm but since it’s an open thread I wanted to share a criticism about posting pull-outs from other blogs; I think it’s fine to do this within limits, but using long passages from the blog doesn’t inspire people to go to the blog itself, which takes views away from the blog you are promoting in a post. That’s all I wanted to say.

  32. 32.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Donut:

    In my case, in the tiny burg of Eugene, OR, in the 60’s and 70’s, we had NBC, ABC, and PBS.

    That was it. If you wanted more, you had to get cable, at the mindbending cost of $5 a month. Which my father had to remind me, when I suggested getting cable, that the cost was $60 a YEAR. Which was ridiculously high.

    But with cable, you’d get the Portland stations, which brought you CBS and an independent station which ran reruns of Gilligan’s Island! Continuously! On a loop, practically!

  34. 34.

    Josie

    @Donut: No, but I remember Gorgeous George and the Garibaldi Brothers from my childhood. Wow, that was such a long time ago and I hadn’t thought of them in forever. Before George would get really mean, his bobby pins would fall out and his long blonde curls would unfurl. Then you knew he was serious.

    Edit: That was before abc, cbs, or nbc. We got a station on Channel 7 out of Matamoros, Mexico. I lived in South Texas back then, too.

  35. 35.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Chris:

    Links are good.

    Cutting and pasting huge tracts of stuff that could be linked to is bad.

  36. 36.

    Dennis SGMM

    @Villago Delenda Est:
    We lived in Medford in 60-61. There was one channel if you didn’t have cable. It was on the air at 11 AM and went off the air at 11 PM. The rest of the time we just had to read and do things.
    ETA: the commercials for Groceteria, the town’s only supermarket were kind of cool.

  38. 38.

    WereBear

    @Villago Delenda Est: an independent station which ran reruns of Gilligan’s Island! Continuously! On a loop, practically!

    Central Florida had such a UHF channel; I remember the Underdog cartoon would be continually interrupted by the regular summer monsoon rains; and that one was my favorite.

    It was also the station that made the used car salesman famous; the one who jumped up and down on the vehicles and yelled “I want to sell you a car!” We all watched in case the roof caved in, and it occasionally did.

    And when we went on long car trips, we were simply bored to the point of gnawing on our own limbs and those of our siblings.

    That, to me, is one of the biggest changes. Younger people have no real concept of boredom.

  39. 39.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    Spring in DC is full of tourists. They invaded my Metro stop yesterday. My Metro stop has one staircase and two escalators. One escalator was not working. A tourist complained about the bad planning of having one staircase because it took a while to get down from the platform. I replied — not bad planning, but insufficient funding. I got applause from the commuting regulars.

  40. 40.

    lamh34

    I have to get ready for a friend’s birthday party, but I don’t wanna got. I’d rather stay home and watch the new episode of ICarly! Sam is in love, and it’s someone we least expect!!! I hope it’s with Freddie (DON’T JUDGE ME…LOL!)

    I really need to win the lottery, so I can just do nothing all day. Behold my theme song: The Lazy Song

  41. 41.

    licensed to kill time

    @Chris: Please do! I always enjoy your comments and would very much like to read something else you have written.

  42. 42.

    Chris

    @Cheryl from Maryland: About three weeks ago, I began to think there had been an executive order deploying every suburban high school in the country to DC.

    As I stood at my shuttle stop one afternoon, I must have counted at least six mega-buses, parking their bloated, idling asses illegally in the pick-up lane, as one bright-T-shirt-wearing larvae after another spilled out onto the sidewalk, blinking at the dirty, urban wonder of the Metro entrance.

  43. 43.

    eemom

    @Cheryl from Maryland:

    yeah, ain’t it fun?

    I drive in from VA myself so I get to fight with big stupid tour buses all the way down Constitution Avenue.

    They ARE particularly priceless on metro though. Once years ago I got on at my stop, Vienna, and witnessed a couple bitterly arguing about whether they’d gotten on a train going in the wrong direction.

    Also too, I would swear that some bored bureaucrat designed the farecard machines for the express purpose of fucking with their little tourist brains.

  44. 44.

    Chris Martinez

    @licensed to kill time: Thanks, but you might have me mistaken for another Chris? I only recently started posting here under my first name (some time ago, I posted very occasionally as DCLaw1, I think).

    I’ll post under my full name, since I dropped the pseudonym a long time ago at Greenwald’s blog, and to avoid confusion with any other Chris.

  45. 45.

    eemom

    @Chris:

    you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to turn into a garage while an army of them marches by on the sidewalk.

  46. 46.

    Anya

    Since this is an open thread, and one of my newest minor causes is to expose the vulgarian reality teevee star birther, please check out You’ve Been Trumped.

    You’ve been Trumped is a documentary about the residents fighting Donald Trump’s £750 million golf development in Aberdeenshire, Scotland and the expected environmental impact of this monstrosity.

    To help out with getting word out, click on the link and send this link to your friends or post it somewhere, whenever Trump spouts his usual nonsense about birthism.

  49. 49.

    RossInDetroit

    @Anya:

    Since this is an open thread, and one of my newest minor causes is to expose the vulgarian reality teevee star birther, please check out You’ve Been Trumped.

    This should be easy to do well. He’s just about as exposed as he can manage to be, craving attention like the addict the pipe. And unlike certain brown nosing elite pundits, doesn’t seem to care if people think he’s a dee-bag.

  51. 51.

    RossInDetroit

    @Donut:

    You have a few years on me but I do remember the Shiek pretty well.

    Eddie Farhat, playing a violent misogynist Muslim from Syria. I doubt that would get far even in the WWF these days.

  52. 52.

    Donut

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    We got cable in the very late 70s. I was born in ’71. I remember at first, getting cable only basically meant you got HBO and clear reception. Not much else was available in southern Illinois.

  54. 54.

    M. Bouffant

    @eemom: when it rang you answered without having ANY IDEA who was calling.

    No sheet. Now I can’t imagine just answering the damn thing w/o knowing who it is.

  55. 55.

    Donut

    @Josie:

    I remember my dad telling me about Gorgeous George’s hair gag. Funny how the wrestling gig hasn’t really changed all that much. I haven’t paid it any attention in decades, but I’ve got a five year old girl and two year old boy writhing around and jumping around the living room right now who will likely draw me back into it.

  56. 56.

    Yutsano

    @M. Bouffant: We used to not have an answering machine. So Mom used to tell us to make sure and answer the phone when she wasn’t home. Then she’d yell at us if we couldn’t remember the message. Good times.

  57. 57.

    Josie

    @Donut: I am a strong believer in meeting your children where they live. I have three grown sons, and when they were in junior high, one of the fun things we did was to watch the wrestling shows together and shout at the TV. Wrestling was not quite as outrageous then as it is now. One of our favorites was Rick Flair, “The Nature Boy,” who probably got his shtick from Gorgeous George.

  58. 58.

    eemom

    @Yutsano:

    and those little pink message slip thingies that were used in offices before e-mail and v-mail. WHILE YOU WERE OUT. Ah, the ancient relics of bygone times….

  59. 59.

    Yutsano

    @eemom: When I was a kid, out of nowhere, I tasted one of those slips once. It was kinda weird. But I was a little off when I was younger too…

  60. 60.

    TruthOfAngels

    You have weather? We dream of fucking weather, ‘twould be a palace to us, you screaming lightweight. I’ve lived in a vacuum since 1896 and you don’t see me complaining, you great big girl’s blouse.

    Weather, indeed.

  62. 62.

    quaint irene

    Jeez, John. What kind of weather are you having?
    In a past post you said you haven’t had a drink in a couple weeks. Maybe it’s time for a snort or two.

  63. 63.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    Someone needs to explain to the Minnesota-Duluth Bulldogs that “blond” does not mean the same color as a lemon.

  64. 64.

    PurpleGirl

    @Donut: Manhattan got cable below 96th Street sometime in late 1970s. The other boroughs didn’t get cable for another 20-odd years (time taken up with political games). By the time my neighborhood in Queens got cable (Time Warner) they were starting to use fiber optic cable and I got close to 100 channels — more than Manhattan had and more than friends in Westchester County).

  66. 66.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    Ben Winnett hasn’t been the kind of scorer expected when he arrived at Michigan, but he had the only non-empty net goal on Thursday against North Dakota, and just put the Wolverines up 1-0 on Duluth.

  68. 68.

    piratedan

    sad news… Sidney Lumet died today @ 86. Director of Network and personal favorite 12 Angry Men. 12 Angry Men was one of those movies that shaped me as a person and served as a blueprint for how to live your life.

  69. 69.

    Redshirt

    @M. Bouffant: Sure, you didn’t know who was calling. But, also, you knew it was for someone in the house, and why not talk? Oh, for the days of carefree telephone answering. Now it’s “(PAUSE)[ROBOTIC VOICE] Hello, this is Capital One/Visa/Mastercard/Toyota/Sketchy Insurance company/Etc. Now, it’s only by caller ID and since I’ve given up caring about most things, usually first to voicemail. So cold.

    I’ve given up answering the phone at work too since the ratio to sales call to actual call is 15 to 1.

    Curse you business!

    Also as well: I knew the family that started the first Fox station in Maine in like 87 or so. I thought it was cool as hell, since I saw it as a blow to the Big 3 I’d long lived with. Shake it up! Little did I know what would come.

  70. 70.

    Phil

    It looks like poor John Cole is now getting into some rather testy fights with his old boyfriend Andrew Sullivan. Do I sense a breakup in the works? Alas, and here I was thinking it was meant to be.

    That’s ok, there’s still plenty of bitter, angry, “progressives” to go around, right John Cole?

    Wait, what’s that that? I’ve just been told “progressives” lost an election in which their side was completely fired up and the other side wasn’t even paying attention until the last minute? And this was in a BLUE STATE???

    Wow, perhaps there aren’t that many bitter, angry “progressives” after all John Cole. Just you and your fellow travelers. Not even Andrew Sullivan is interested anymore. Ouch.

  72. 72.

    PurpleGirl

    @eemom: Was it from the same company as Westchester County? Cause, Queens and Brooklyn didn’t get cable until the 90s.

  73. 73.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    @eemom: My version of your stories occurred every year at Union Station on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when us regular MARC commuters had to run the gauntlet of an army of once-a-year Amtrak passengers gumming up the Metro platform, escalators, every walkway and concourse in the station, and horror of horrors, the liquor store where we bought a beer for the train ride home.

  75. 75.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    @eemom: WHILE YOU WERE OUT. When I would call a girl up in college and the reception desk said she wasn’t in, I’d just hang up. Until I found out they would give her a phone message that just said “YMCNM” Young Man Called – No Message. I started leaving my name after that.

  77. 77.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    1-1 early in the second. This is a good game, after two good semis. Kind of the opposite of last year’s Frozen Four.

  78. 78.

    Steeplejack

    Way late to this thread, but this is bringing back memories. I first got cable in the mid- or late &#14670s in Mobile, AL. The only real benefits were HBO, TBS (although it had different call letters then) and rock-solid reception. But it led me to become a lifelong Braves fan, because TBS showed every freakin’ one of their games. And that was back when the Braves were teh suxxor. But it seemed like the Braves game was always the best thing on (or the least worst thing) at those odd hours of the night. I was still getting used to the awesome luxury of there being TV on at all after midnight.

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