Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Nothing worth doing is easy.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

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

It’s the corruption, stupid.

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

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

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

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

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

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

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

We still have time to mess this up!

No one could have predicted…

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Reader Interactions

106Comments

  3. 3.

    JGabriel

    So when do the paternity results come in?

    This what happens when you drink and park. Accidents cause people.

    .

  7. 7.

    joeyess

    Anyone here object to my band naming ourselves after something in the Balloon Juice Lexicon?

    We’re going for a polarized crowd.

    Someone recently said to me “you don’t want to mix politics and religion with music and entertainment. You’ll lose half your crowd.”

    I responded that half the crowd was precisely what I’m trying to avoid.

  11. 11.

    joeyess

    We’re an overtly political/atheist band looking to fuse those topics with great music and deliberately polarize in the belief that the crowd we retain will be devoted followers. The rest of them? Feh.

  13. 13.

    joeyess

    @amk: Something less pretentious. We were calling ourselves Poe’s Descent.

    Also, too, we need to find something that won’t come up on a google search as already a band name.

  14. 14.

    Little Boots

    we’re not done with sully are we?

    cause now I’m obsessed.

    and where is that crazy black woman, by the way?

  20. 20.

    Gex

    I was going to ask if it was Clarence Thomas’ wife, but then I remembered she’s white. She can definitely pull off the rest of the description: crazy lady calling people.

  21. 21.

    Little Boots

    Big round of applause for Iowa. making everyone see the silliness of the Repubs. bless you neighbor!

  22. 22.

    joeyess

    I plan on feeding this blog all kinds of original music, video, and live footage. I hope you’ll all receive it in the spirit intended.

    We’re all old pros. This is the last band I’ll ever be in. I’m going to make this one count.

    Frontpagers be warned. I’m going to fill your email with stuff in hopes you post it.

    Since I consider this my go-to blog, I would like to share the music with you all.

  26. 26.

    Dee Loralei

    I look forward to hearing it Joey. But I don’t remember Poe’s Decent being a Balloonjuiceism. Too lazy to look it up tonight, LOL. Sorry. Football wore me out.

  33. 33.

    YellowJournalism

    Quick scan of the lexicon bring me Poutrage, Puke Funnel, and Iatropic Excitement as good band names, although I’m quite partial to Doughy Pantload.

  37. 37.

    Dee Loralei

    @joeyess: I just saw that movie a few weeks ago! Oh, and I looked in the lexicon and didn’t find Poe’s Decent, then went back and re-read what you wrote, you were called that and now you’re looking at the lexicon for better ideas. (I told ya I was just wore out, LOL.)

  38. 38.

    YellowJournalism

    Katy: What about Naugahyde Windpipe?
    Cecilia: Too metal.
    Raji: Oedipus and the Mama’s Boys.
    Cecilia: Too college radio.
    Deeje: My Johnson Is 12 Inches Long.
    Cecilia: Interesting, but it doesn’t really sound like a band name.

    Sorry, I love the concept of band names, and that’s one of my fav scenes in that movie. I also adore the name they decide on: Everybody Gets Laid.

  39. 39.

    Little Boots

    somehow, a terrible song called Activist Judges that everyone must still listen to seems right. I will try to find it.

  40. 40.

    Dee Loralei

    @taylormattd: That was a wild game, taylor, sorry your team lost. And yea, normally 56 fucking points would be a blow-out! So that sucks for all Huskie fans.

  47. 47.

    Calouste

    “Caribou Barbie and the Banana Republicans”

    or if you have a male lead singer:

    “Commander Codpiece and the Banana Republicans”

  48. 48.

    JGabriel

    @Narcissus:

    Keynes was right. It blows me away that this is controversial.

    We’re talking about people who still think natural selection is the devil’s handiwork.

    .

  53. 53.

    Jason

    “If she phoned you, how did you know she was black? There you go, making assumptions about people just coz of how they sound. And why is her race relevant at all? Why mention it? You got something against crazy black people? You think craziness and black goes hand in hand?”

  57. 57.

    Calouste

    @joeyess:

    That was my first thought, but liked Wingnut Event Horizon better. Still, problem with that is that it sounds ok, but needs a lot of explanation. I assume you’d prefer a name that has the wingnuts protesting the moment you book a venue, free publicity is good publicity.

    ETA: What about “The Bush Crime Syndicate”?

  60. 60.

    Little Boots

    @sfinny:

    damn, I should know. I know they’re Romanian. but beyond that, I should totally know, since I’m a little obsessed with that song. but I will find out.

  69. 69.

    BonnyAnne

    @Yutsano: Oddly, I have to *work* at UW Med tomorrow. Be well, whatever the cause for your visit, and fear not: we are very fond of Cougs! We hire a lot of them away from Pullman. They seem to like it here. :D

  74. 74.

    JGabriel

    @sfinny:

    It’s a better name than Epistemic Closure.

    Well, yeah. Epistemic Closure sounds like a surgical measure to prevent Santorum.

    .

  87. 87.

    MikeJ

    @Yutsano: Not medical but I saw a coug on youtube who builds model farm machinery out of lego. Said he lived on a farm growing 600 acres of peppermint. You know that somebody somewhere grows it, but I never thought there were vast fields of peppermint so nearby.

  88. 88.

    Mnemosyne

    @joeyess:

    I’m partial to A Snarling Mass of Vitriolic Vicious Jackals myself. But that may be too heavy metal. Maybe just The Vitriolic Jackals?

  90. 90.

    BonnyAnne

    @Yutsano: I have always marveled at the connection. But yes, your nursing school is excellent (better than ours IMHO, because it’s not so full of itself).

    Perhaps smiling politely at angry men who call you “hun” and complain about parasite government workers while you clean up their poo is, if nothing else, a similar skill set to dealing with sick, miserable … never mind. I cherish all of my patients. Yes.

    (I once had to hold a man’s head while he vomited all over himself, and in the background on TV Sean Hannity talked about how Obama was secretly friends with the head of NAMBLA. That was a challenging shift.)

  93. 93.

    Redshift

    I think a lot of the lexicon entries, like Wingnut Event Horizon and Epistemic Closure, make better album names than band names.

    Discussions like this always remind me of a bit in Alan Moore’s DR & Quinch where they note that many bands have a limited amount of creativity (present company excepted, of course) and use it all up thinking of a name, so they present a long list of band names as a public service. Sadly, it’s not online, as far as I can tell.

  95. 95.

    BonnyAnne

    @Crusty Dem: haha I’ve never even been up there. Apparently there are other parts of the hospital? Cascade FTW!

    Someone braver than me should propose a Seattle Balloon Juice meet-up. Might help if we had a front pager to lend us some rainy, shitty-football-filled support.

  96. 96.

    Gex

    @JGabriel: And if you concede that they go back to arguing against plate tectonics. And if you concede that they start telling you how heliocentrism is a Jewish conspiracy.

    No way they are going to understand Keynes.

  98. 98.

    Yutsano

    @BonnyAnne:

    Someone braver than me should propose a Seattle Balloon Juice meet-up.

    This has been done. But it was too much of a blast to not have a repeat performance sometime soon. :) Plus we need to celebrate CaseyL’s new gig anyway.

  101. 101.

    BonnyAnne

    @Yutsano: OH MY GOD AND IT WAS EVEN AT THE ZIG ZAG. That is my favoritest bar of all favorite bars. I hate myself so much right now.

    Whatever CaseyL’s new gig is, I say yes and yes to a repeat. hopefully I will hear about this one.

  102. 102.

    BonnyAnne

    @Ian: I have seen some pretty bad shit, too but it turns out that not much tops choosing between someone vomiting up bile and Hannity saying “NAMBLA” over and over and over. I think I chose the bile.

  103. 103.

    Bago

    Wait, wait, wait, I missed an event at the zig zag? They had the BEST pizza before the remodel! I have been through New York, Vancouver, D.C. , San Francisco, Dallas, Amsterdam, Istanbul and several more cities too tedious to type out, but hot damn if they didn’t have the best pizza.

  106. 106.

    NobodySpecial

    If it’s not too late, let me suggest Green Balloons would also be an excellent band name. Or if you want to get really red-staters unwelcome, The Seventythird Percentile.

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