Just got done reading and checked the site and saw that y’all had been left alone for four whole hours, which kind of scared the hell out of me. “Oh, god. What kind of obscene comments will I get emails about? Who is going to email me whining about who should be banned? What kind of bizarre speculation took place? HOW CLOSE ARE THEY TO RIOTING?”
And that is how I felt after leaving you reprobates alone for only four hours.
And yes, I know the god damned mobile site is causing problems. Stop emailing me. Redesign should be done in a few days.
Alison
You know you love us.
Or at least like-like us.
Death Panel Truck
Y’know, in the world I inhabit, “god damned” is one word.
Jes’ sayin’.
Yutsano
Meh. I was good. My carpet not so much.
Suffern ACE
The war will be over in 24 if the Iranian’s help by overthrowing their government after an air raid. Or if we ignore things that could go wrong, everything would be swell. Who knew Netanyahu was such a happy go lucky optimist?
Geoduck
Has anyone mentioned the mobile site is causing problems?
freelancer
Any update on those of us who open up the site on a mobile device, which, when we do, we get the Mobile site, and we select the option to go back to the regular site and get a Server error?
Also, if you have any scratch left in your account, resident blogwhore jurassicpork posted below and apparently is still in dire need of some help. I’d pitch in even though I don’t like the guy’s style, but I’m broke as a Steinbeck character this week.
Personally, I think he’s a self-promoting dickhead of a commenter, but if he’s really going through what he says he is, then better safe than sorry and he could use the shout out.
PeakVT
@Suffern ACE: Netanyahu has been trying to get the US into a war with Iran for twenty years now.
piratedan
I just wish I wasn’t so incredibly angry at all of the idiocy that I see in our politics and in our culture these days. I ask these fundy asshats what the main tenets of their religion is, i.e. what did Jeebus preach while he walked land (and water) of our planet and instead of tolerance, love and forgiveness; I get some old testament diatribe and a bunch of ever willing bastards to not only cast the first stone, they’ve brought a wheelbarrow full and are looking to make a profit off of it.
I see asshats like Santorum and Romney and hear the rank idiocy of what they say and I sit back in wonder how any of these ratfuck bastards could be within 20 polling points of Bush, much less Obama. We start to see the tide of progress finally invest some basic rights for our brethren that don’t swing the way of the “majority” and while we applaud that movement these vile hypocrites seek to make women chattel and incubators again. All in the name of a God, who never wanted a church built in his name much less the use of his name in order to oppress the poor, the weak and the downtrodden.
Schlemizel
Yeah know, maybe if you got some drugs you could sleep at night (it might also help to turn off the damn twitter machine and just do a delete all on your email at random intervals). Then you wouldn’t be as bothered by the incessant whinging about the goddam site and your sister could learn that patience is a virtue.
Now if I could just get some goddam sleep I wouldn’t be here whining about the whining.
Schlemizel
@piratedan:
As it was in the beginning it is now and ever shall be, world without end
I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
The prophet Nostradumbass
What’s it gonna take, to make you Riot?
PeakVT
This piece by Goldberg from 2008 has to be self-parody, right?
The prophet Nostradumbass
@PeakVT: Magic 8-Ball says: Very doubtful.
Spaghetti Lee
C’mon, John, you know you can trust me to behave myself. Well, except for the horse porn.
amk
yeah right, we will believe it when we see it.
Schlemizel
@PeakVT: The fuckup known as Viet Nam taught these dipshits a lesson about the use of power that lasted almost a generation. That ended with the jingoistic orgasm of dessert storm. The neocrud couldn’t wait to unleash some real large scale death and destruction though. In response to the monumental fuckups of Afghanistan and Iraq they have decided that the real solution is to triple down and fuck up Iran also.
I’m sure if we just kill enough people they will all love us and want to live in peace and harmony.
piratedan
@amk: what’s all this talk about a Red Ensign anyways?
Martin
@Alison: He says that, but he only spoons the dog.
Martin
@Schlemizel: If they don’t love us, then we clearly didn’t kill enough of them.
James E. Powell
@Death Panel Truck:
I’ve written both ways. Writing it as two words gives a sort of caesura.
El Cid
__
However, it’s preposterous when the libs say that the stimulus didn’t fail, that unemployment would have been much worse without it. How can you put so much faith in a mere counterfactual, libs?
gene108
Going back to grad school, in my late 30’s has made me realize I would be a bad parent.
I’ve truly come to understand homework and studying suck. It’s O.K. to try to B.S. your way through exams.
If I had kids, who complained about not wanting to do homework, I’d be like “yeah kid, you don’t have to do homework. It sucks. Now join me in a bout of insomnia, as write comments on Balloon Juice at 3:48 am, when any good parent would make sure you were in bed.”
PeakVT
Fallows has his say about the Goldberg piece.
I don’t trust Goldberg one bit, so I’m inclined to view it as a propaganda piece, though I’m not sure what he’s trying to achieve.
Anne Laurie
Maybe everyone’s just waiting with bated breath for the Big Reveal?
My sense is that an open thread is needed when the top-most post reaches 200 comments or so, that being when people reading on their mobile devices start complaining the thread won’t load for them. Some just north of 500 comments is where my Fios-driven FireFox-using desktop system stops loading. Now that Balloon Juice is getting a redesign, and its own server IIRC?, no doubt the metrics will reset and we’ll all have to recalibrate with it.
John O
@gene108:
I’m up from a lately-recurring dream in which I am trying to balance both a job and school, and doing neither worth a shit, and doing it alone, and it’s all unpleasant enough to me to jar me from sleep. I’m recently unemployed, and thinking of going back to school at 53. I assume there is a connection.
So here I read.
Anne Laurie
@Anne Laurie: Speaking of which, Cole, it’d be nice if the “Schedule” function were to be repaired during the reboot. One reason for the awkward pace of postings recently, I believe, is that your minions can no longer put together a post and have it held for a decent interval after the latest news. And those of us who are not on a “prime time” East Coast schedule lose our chance to front-page stuff like pet rescue blegs when the greatest number of readers will see them.
Elizabelle
I’m glad DOJ is investigating the Trayvon Martin case.
That high school student died because he went out for Skittles and an iced tea.
Reminds me a little of the Louisiana man killing the Japanese teenaged exchange student years ago. Acquitted by a jury of his peers, but guilty in a civil trial. $650,000 for shooting a 130 pound teenager dressed as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Hattori
Heartbroken for Trayvon’s family and friends. What a waste.
wasabi gasp
Amazon wants to give you a $10 gift card for 5 bucks. Take advantage.
NotMax
It has been like a year-and-a-half since Nate Silver hooked up with The NYT. Might be time by now to update the 538 link on this site to his no longer new digs.
MikeJ
@NotMax: Frankly I’d scrap the entire blogroll and then let each of the frontpagers add one site. Two, maybe three rounds. With nine front pagers that’s a plenty long blogroll and you would know that everything added was a live blog and had the right address.
I’d leave the mocking category though.
Schlemizel
@Anne Laurie:
Baited breath . . . well that would explain the smell of rotting fish
Joseph Nobles
A modest request that “Enormous, mendacious, distended anus”, funny as it is, be stricken from the rotating header list. If anyone from work checked my surf history…
Schlemizel
@MikeJ:
I’d ask that great care be taken in trimming the blogroll. One of the things I appreciate most about BJ is that it has led me to a couple of other very worthy blogs. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a must read (unlike the other Atlantic bloggers who range from sometime worth the effort to OMG why does she even exist let alone have a blog!?).
The mock roll though I do have an issue with. The front pagers have beaten that useless sack of shit Sully to death again and again, there is the rare whack at Politiwhore and someone mentioned dredstate the other day but that might have been a commenter. It seems like we never hear a peep out of them about the really horrific blots on the digital landscape. How did treason in defense of slavery’s grill survive the winter? Has the anchor baby gotten new pom-poms yet? Is Huge Fuckwit even still posting? Diseased minds want to know!
HeartlandLiberal
Lately when reading the site with my laptop upstairs, which connects via my wireless router, the site will come up with what I assume is the mobile version. Usually a hard refresh will force it to reload the page with the non-mobile version.
Since the laptop is running Win 7, I cannot imagine what about it would be triggering this, unless there is something in the way the proprietary Netgear WNA3100 Wireless-N 300 USB adapter driver is presenting itself.
Anyway, just a data point, FWIW, for the work on the mobile site.
Winston Smith
[Complaint]
[Snarky retort]
Omnes Omnibus
@Winston Smith: [Threat of pie filter.]
kindness
@John O: You’re never too late. I went back 10 years ago. It was difficult getting into the mind set of memorization and writing papers and being intolerably poor but it worked.
OK, I say it’s never too late but from here on out I’ll only go back for classes for fun, not for another degree.
Winston Smith
Breitbart’s new editor snubs the birthers. Comedy gold ensues: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2861304/posts
flukebucket
@Winston Smith:
Good God. The comments at Free Republic and World Net Daily reach a level of suck so far unexplored.
There is even somebody on there that does not believe that Obama’s mother is really dead but is instead living somewhere off the grid.
Damn.
dance around in your bones
I’m not sure I can handle the mental image of crowds of Repub/Baggers gripped in the throes of an enthusasticasm.
The mind reels.
different-church-lady
Yeah. Sure.
different-church-lady
@Winston Smith: You’re saying there’s a bridge too far even for the bed-vetters? Hard to believe.
samara morgan
@Suffern ACE: the stupid it burns.
Iran is america redux. Khamenei and Nejad have the redstaters, rural, ostentatiously pious, undereducated, older………..iranian conservatives.
Mousavi has the urban, socially liberal, educated, younger….the democratic progressives of Islam.
This is a conflict between two different versions of Islam.
Like America is conflict between two different versions of quasi-secular democracy.
samara morgan
@Schlemizel: jaysus h keeyrist inna handcart at least get rid of the League of Incredibly Boring Glibertarians.
kerFuFFler
@flukebucket:
Bless their little hearts….”enthusasticasm”?
samara morgan
@El Cid:
what brand of retard said that?
Fordo, Our Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s target site of choice, is buried under a mountain topped with the second holiest city of Shi’ia Islam, Qom.
Given that Israelis refuse to pre-notify their nominal “ally” America of a strike, that is open season on every NGO, missionary, american soldier and/or Xe/CIA contractor in the region.
Besides which it will kick off WWIII.
THE
@samara morgan:
I think your scenario is exaggerated Samara. But for sure, USA is moving a lot of military power into the region.
samara morgan
@THE: i think that is just preventative. Bibi is actively campaigning against O’s re-election by trying to jigger gas prices. The price of gas could impact O’s re-election.
its better if Iran backs down from its threat to mine the straits of hormuz.
samara morgan
@THE: tolejaso.
Simulation forcasts WWIII
lol.
do you think China, Russia, and India are going to sit on the sidelines?
tick tick tick goes the doomsday clock.
THE
@samara morgan: That is not how I’m reading it. I think it’s mainly backing up the huge economic pressure that is currently being put on Iran as a result of the increasingly ferocious economic sancitions.
I believe it’s just trying to deter any Iranian tendency to lash out.
The biggest impact on oil prices right now is the sanctions are making it harder to get Iranian oil onto the market.
THE
Well that’s quite possible, but its a shitload short of WWIII. The last WW cost 60 million dead.
EDIT: That’s why I find your language exaggerated, hysterical, and way over the top.
THE
Yes absolutely I think they will.
samara morgan
@THE: /yawn how did any of the world wars start?
small.
the whole region is a tinderbox, and social media wont allow the US maintain the status quo.
look at syria.
if the US gets drawn in on Israels side the KSA royals are in big danger of getting their own arab spring.
right now the US cant aid the syrian rebels because the syrian alawhites and christians will be slaughtered with arms we gave to the syrian muslim brotherhood.
ouch!
THE
I do agree with that part. But that’s not the direction I see US policy moving.
samara morgan
@THE: again, the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Israel.
if regional fighting breaks out both state and non-state actors will seize that as an opportunity to attack Israel and broaden the conflict.
from mitch’s article, which im sure you read.
samara morgan
@THE: i agree with this.
but i disagree with this.
the saddle point where the US has no leverage is Israel.
the US was UNABLE to shape Turkish policy during the Palesetinian statehood crisis last fall, and American -Turkish relations have been damaged by Israeli actions during the blockade running incident.
i dont think Turkey is quite the US patsy the author wants it to be.
samara morgan
@samara morgan: alsotoo consider the combined oil reserves of Iraq and Iran.
dont they rival the Saud reserves?
;)
THE
You are raising way too many issues. I don’t have time to answer them all. I monitor the region closely because it impacts the oil market. I tried to answer some issues in the article already at your website. But of course Mitch has access to my research. So I don’t need to explain so much stuff to him.
There are so many things I disagree with in that article that its hard to know where to start.
samara morgan
@THE: what i see is the Shanghai Coop backed by Iran/Iraq oil reserves moving to achieve parity with the AmerIsrael-Euros, backed by KSA oil reserves….like teams choosing up sides for the apocalypse.
but KSA is pure islamist– the constitution IS the Quran.
one false step…….WWIII.
;)
samara morgan
@Schlemizel: you act like this hasnt been SOP for America for the last half century.
its regime change, nothing more, nothing less.
only it fails every time.
;)
THE
Just to take the segment you quote in #58.
The SCO is not a military alliance. Also none of the powers in question have anything like the naval power to challenge the United States in the Persian Gulf. I find it hard to believe they could do so, in less than 10 or 20 years, even assuming China continues to grow at its current pace.
e.g. China is only just starting up its first aircraft carrier.
samara morgan
@THE: meh.
economic might > military might…you taught me that, big guy.
you saw what military might bought the US in Iraq and A-stan– jackshit.
like i keep sayin’ ……TWO hostages to fortune. can’t irradiate either the oil fields or Our Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
;)
you’re welcome
THE
There are many problems with that article, for me, that short of Fisking it paragraph by paragraph…. I don’t know how to deal with it. Almost every paragraph I have problems with.
samara morgan
@THE: just acknowledge ONE SINGLE THING.
we are chained to the ME because of Israel.
well isnt that special.
waddisay, waddisay.
;)
samara morgan
@THE: i recommend Beinarts new book.
Because it will give Jeffery Goldberg and the Israeli Firsters bleeding suppurating hives.
THE
OK. Even as the oil fades away as a factor. USA will remain tied to the ME because of Israel.
But the steady growth of Israel as a power, economically & demographically. vs. the decline of so many other nations in the region, make it an important future asset as well as a liability. I would project Israel will be a far more significant power by mid century than it is today. And it’s not insignificant today.
samara morgan
@THE: not an asset. no.
again, when the neighbors have hard times, what traditionally happens to the jewish folk?
Israel is a pretty sorry ally to the US. A parasite that meddles toxically in our politics, starves children, spies on us and refuses to warn us of pre-emptive strikes.
samara morgan
@THE: not to mention sukks up foreign aid, pogroms palestinians and imposes a Warsaw-style ghetto on arab families in Gaza, and adamantly refuses to discontinue policies (settlement land grab) that damage US interests.
not an asset.
THE
I think it you read the opinions of early zionists in the 19th century, it was to end that culture of eternal victimhood that the concept of the return was dreamed up.
Jews started to believe that if you are going to be killed whatever you do, you might as well live in the one place that really matters to you, and where you can look after each other’s backs, and at least fight back.
Knowing the history of Judaism, my sense is that they are not really any worse off in Israel than they would be anywhere else — Seeing Israel purely as their survival strategy. If I was Jewish I think I would be in Israel too.
I think the “land grab” is a phase all colonialist powers have gone through, US and Australia, certainly, no less than anyone else. I am conscious that I am writing this, while sitting on “stolen land”.
I guess I see them as an asset because they have been such a prolific scientific culture. Per capita, no-one has beaten them. Yet. Maybe China will one day, who knows?