Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

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

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Consistently wrong since 2002

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Let’s finish the job.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Come on, man.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

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

White supremacy is terrorism.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

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Reader Interactions

132Comments

  3. 3.

    Mark B.

    Really, I thought after my experience a few days ago, it was more likely that ‘testing’ would have been the banned word.

  8. 8.

    Pavonis

    The SCOTUS will be taking a private vote this week (is it today or tomorrow?) on their PPACA decision before writing their opinions. For such a high-profile and emotional case, you’d think there’d be a leak or at least a clear hint as to what the decision was (does Sotomayor come out smiling or frowning? How about Scalia?). Is it really possible for them to keep the decision under wraps until the end of June? Somehow, I think people who see the justices in the coming days can ascertain how the decision went based on the emotions of the most liberal/conservative justices. Or is it part of SCOTUS omerta to keep poker faces on at all times?

  9. 9.

    dmsilev

    So, has John calmed down, or is he just looking for an excuse to wield his strap-on and go chasing after the commentariat?

    Place your bets.

  12. 12.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    So, the drug name passes through the filter, so? What are a few spam penis ebiggener posts among friends?

  14. 14.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    Ah, I see the filter does still work against the p3n1s word.

  20. 20.

    KG

    @lamh35: my thoughts exactly.

    I really am curious who Romney is going to pick as veep. I don’t know who the GOP has that could potentially swing a state. And I keep watching game change and wondering if he’d be so cynical to thrust another relative unknown onto the national stage… or if he’s so cynical that he’ll go the complete opposite way and make a Cheney-style pick.

  22. 22.

    Martin

    @John Cole: It okay! The blog doesn’t die if someone mentions ciaIis. You want to block the spammers, but spammers aren’t about their use of a single word – it’s about how they submit the form, the full content of what they post, and so on.

    amk wasn’t spamming the thread, so don’t worry about that. If we get honest to god spamming – and we’ll all know it – then put the word back in. But I think Akismet will take care of all of that.

  25. 25.

    Martin

    @Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn: I think he only took that one word out. That’s fine. Baby steps. If Cole can be okay and see that taking one word out won’t do harm, then he’ll feel empowered to add and remove others from the list.

    I do look forward to September when he puts Tebow and Manning on the list. I may have to bribe him to add Yankees.

  28. 28.

    Tonal Crow

    Not all of the s-words work, ‘cuz my post with -ism, -ist, and -istic got moderated.

  30. 30.

    Jay C

    @Jay C:

    And can someone please explain to me why what sounds like a fairly prosaic Welsh political site’s handle ended up on the Index Of Forbidden Bloggery? Some of the words/phrases/products I can understand, but [email protected]@[email protected]@tive$? SRSLY?

    ETA: and why my idiot workaround ended up as a hotlink?

  31. 31.

    MikeJ

    @KG: He needs two contradictory things. He needs a veep that can swing a state, and one that will pacify the loons.

  32. 32.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    @KG:

    Of the moderately-known names out there, my money would be on Rubio. Precisely because Republicans are just d1ckish – and tone-deaf – enough to think that throwing a Cuban-American on the ticket will right themselves in the eyes of Latino voters, in that way they seemed sure sure Palin would bring home the Hillary supporters. Plus, Rubio’s a winger, and Mittens MUST have someone onboard that the teabillies can rally around.

  33. 33.

    amk

    @David Koch: Are you trying to give cole a hard-on (strike) hard time ?

    ETA – Yay, the old edit window is baaaack. The strike html is still on strike.

  37. 37.

    Maude

    @Martin:
    Akismet is the FSM of this blog.

    @dmsilev:
    It might be he’ll ask questions in a post and then let us have it. It doesn’t help that no one gets offended. Plus we tend to make jokes about the rant.

    It’s too wide.

  42. 42.

    Martin

    @Jay C: It was an online poker site hostname. Why did they pick that? Who knows.

    And you got hot linked because the auto linker saw the @ and decided it was an email address even though it doesn’t pass several of the rules for an email address. FYWP!

  45. 45.

    Amir Khalid

    My comment #36, mentioning a game beginning with P, is in moderation. So that word’s still taboo.

  46. 46.

    Martin

    Ha! I got moderated for mentioning pokér. Sorry, John. Should have caught that one.

    Jay C: It was an online pokér site hostname. Why did they pick that? Who knows.
    And you got hot linked because the auto linker saw the @ and decided it was an email address even though it doesn’t pass several of the rules for an email address. FYWP!

  48. 48.

    Catsy

    It’s basically lazy filter design. Whoever designed it made it a greedy match, so that it traps substrings as readily as exact text matches.

    I’m not sure how the match expression is constructed or implemented, but if it’s a regular expression it should be as easy as changing it from something like “cialis” (by itself) to something like “FYWPbackslashscialisFYWPbackslashs”, which would require that there be whitespace on either side. Or, if you wanted to make sure you catch instances on the beginning of a line and when immediately followed by punctuation, something like “(^|FYWPbackslashs)cialis(FYWPbackslashs|[?!:;,FYWPbackslash.])”.

    I guess removing the word entirely works too. :>

    FYWP edit: apparently it is completely fucking impossible to put a backslash in your comment even if you escape it out with another backslash. Awesome.

  53. 53.

    Mark B.

    @Jay C: It parsed the string as an email address, apparently because of one or more ‘@’ characters.

    Already addressed by @freelancer. My apologies for redundancy.

  54. 54.

    Martin

    @Catsy: It doesn’t do regex. Basically it was a very, very primitive, better than nothing solution that WP doesn’t recommend anyone use. It’s still on by default, and John (reasonably so) isn’t clear on the distinction between the shitty moderation list and the power of something like akismet, which really does work quite well.

  55. 55.

    Tonal Crow

    A vivid two-word term for what Republicans are doing to America trips the spam filter. Both words begin with “r”, the first one is usually capitalized, and both have two syllables. I’m certain it’s the second word that trips the filter.

  56. 56.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    @amk:

    Heh, this is a family blog ….

    Sure, if you’re talking about the Manson family…

  58. 58.

    BGinCHI

    Faster pussycat! Kill! Kill!

    ETA: Can’t say “pvssy” even in the word “pvssycat”

  60. 60.

    ant

    website workin pretty good on this end.

    i hope you get somthin otta this, cause everything pretty much the same over here. jus look different

  61. 61.

    KG

    @Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn: yeah, but Romney strikes me as a smart in the sense that he learns from other people’s mistakes. so he’d have to understand that Rubio is basically Palin 2.0, a superficial pick that looks good on paper but only because people don’t know enough about him.

    Which is why I think he’d go the other way, someone with a “long distinguished career” in politics that will still get the base on board and show that he’s serious about being president.

    Both are cynical, really. After watching Game Change a couple of times, I think the way you pick a veep is by asking a simple question “if I’m not president, who do I want to be president?” But maybe I’m still naive on some shit.

  62. 62.

    Pavonis

    @52

    Damn. So that’s why my comment ended up stuck in moderation:

    “The SCOTUS will be taking a private vote this week (is it today or tomorrow?) on their PPACA decision before writing their opinions. For such a high-profile and emotional case, you’d think there’d be a leak or at least a clear hint as to what the decision was (does Sotomayor come out smiling or frowning? How about Scalia?). Is it really possible for them to keep the decision under wraps until the end of June? Somehow, I think people who see the justices in the coming days can ascertain how the decision went based on the emotions of the most liberal/conservative justices. Or is it part of SCOTUS omerta to keep p * k e r faces on at all times?”

    bad luck, I guess

  66. 66.

    Hal

    So if the Sct voids Healthcare reform, am I naive in thinking that could very well work to Obama’s advantage for the fall? Obama’s argument is going to be that he’s working on the side of the under insured and the uninsured. If he can delivery fire to that argument daily, I could very well see him making it a winning issue.

    Plus, his likely competitor is going to be the Romney-bot. I just can’t wait for all the town hall meetings where his response to people who will lose their insurance, whose children will be kicked off their plan, who will find themselves once again in a black hole, will basically be “too bad” or “oh well.”

    Then he’ll talk about cheesy grits and how he really likes doing his laundry and eating pancakes.

  67. 67.

    Tonal Crow

    Romney’s Russian ranting,
    Has got the nutters panting,
    If it’s war, they don’t fuss,
    About no guvmint stimulus!

  69. 69.

    pragmatism

    the frothy mixture does not like pink balls when he is bowling or otherwise. brown ones are preferable.

  70. 70.

    KG

    @Pavonis: from what I’ve heard, mostly from my law professors who clerked for various justices, it works like this: they take a vote in a closed room where nobody but the justices are present. No clerks, no secretaries, no body. Chief Justice goes first, then around the table in order of seniority. If the CJ is in the majority, he picks who writes the decision; otherwise the Justice with the most seniority picks who writes it. They then return to their offices, whoever is picked to write it sets about writing it; circulates a draft that the others comment on (this is usually when concurring opinions become important) and finally have a draft a couple months later.

    ETA: and by “writing” I mean, they give it to one (or more) of their clerks to draft with some guidance.

  72. 72.

    Tonal Crow

    @KG:

    @Tonal Crow: that might be because you put it in multiple times in one post.

    I thought that might be right, comrade, but a single use of the -istic word trips it.

  76. 76.

    Corner Stone

    Cole. I couldn’t care less about the fucking filter. Put back the “Recent Comments” column. Tell the blogmistress I will ply her with expensive alcohol, pack her kids’ school lunches for a month, etc.

  80. 80.

    stibbert

    must say i kinda like the enviro ’round here – Cole loses his shit for a moment last night, then follows up w/ Allman Bros’ ‘Melissa’.

  81. 81.

    Corner Stone

    @KG: I hate to disabuse you of this notion but the clerks know everything. Every vote, every sneeze, every counter argument.
    I worked with a former SCOTUS clerk. They’re discrete but they’re more like butlers in the sense that they know more about the back of the house than the judges do.

  82. 82.

    Tonal Crow

    This is just one paragraph,

    And this is but another,

    In a single blockquote put them,

    And the mess it makes, oh brother!

    ETA: Yep, still borken.

  84. 84.

    Corner Stone

    @kdaug: Good God man. It’s a kid’s school lunch.
    Don’t try and tell me you’re more deranged than I am.

  85. 85.

    KG

    @Corner Stone: Of course, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I was talking more about the formal vote, the little idiosyncrasies of the Court (like the justice with the least seniority having to get up to open the door and whatnot). I would suspect that the clerks know how their justice is going to vote and that they talk amongst themselves. I would also suspect that they know the result of the votes as well.

  89. 89.

    Pavonis

    @85 KG

    I’m just wondering how likely it is that We The People get to learn about how the vote went before the end of June, either by leak or by Holmesian deduction. I mean, it was our duly elected democratic representatives who enacted the law in the first place. And many people’s futures depend on the outcome of the SCOTUS decision.

  90. 90.

    geg6

    Any chance of a larger font and numbered comments on the mobile site since, apparently, BJ will no longer load on IE, which is the only browser John has on our home laptop? I literally cannot see what I am typing here. At least I’ll know how it feels when I’m REALLY old and can’t see at all any more.

  91. 91.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @KG:

    Chief Justice goes first, then around the table in order of seniority. If the CJ is in the majority, he picks who writes the decision; otherwise the Justice with the most seniority picks who writes it. They then return to their offices, whoever is picked to write it sets about writing it; circulates a draft that the others comment on (this is usually when concurring opinions become important) and finally have a draft a couple months later.

    Rehnquist’s book on the history of the court is actually quite readable, and he does go into some detail about that very process.

  94. 94.

    jibeaux

    Not linking to it because you actually have to have a login to see it, but apparently it’s never too soon for the War On Easter. I was looking at these cute knitting and crochet patterns for lambs and bunnies on the Lion Brand yarn website, and the first fecking comment is about eight paragraphs about the True Meaning of Easter and why are there no patterns for, I dunno, scarves with a crucifix on them or whatever. On a yarn website, which I might add is a secular website. Some people are just completely…joyless.

  95. 95.

    Tonal Crow

    @Pavonis:

    ’m just wondering how likely it is that We The People get to learn about how the vote went before the end of June, either by leak or by Holmesian deduction. I mean, it was our duly elected democratic representatives who enacted the law in the first place. And many people’s futures depend on the outcome of the SCOTUS decision.

    I think it’s unlikely, as Bush v. Gore didn’t leak, and it was far more important (unless, that is, the Court goes full metal teatard and resurrects Lochner).

  98. 98.

    Concerned Citizen

    Anyone have a link to conservatives giving out private citizens addresses for retribution purposes? Trying to counteract some Spike Lee talk (I don’t condone what he did, but folks are saying wingnuts have never done such a thing)

  99. 99.

    Roger Moore

    @jibeaux:

    Not linking to it because you actually have to have a login to see it, but apparently it’s never too soon for the War On Easter.

    Wait, wait, there’s a war on Easter? Damn it, why haven’t I heard about it before? I didn’t see a single thing about any War on Easter on the Godless Heathen Atheist Secular Humanist mailing list. Why am I always the last to know?

  100. 100.

    WaterGirl

    @jibeaux:

    …and the first fecking comment is about eight paragraphs about the True Meaning of Easter and why are there no patterns for, I dunno, scarves with a crucifix on them or whatever.

    Well, you made me laugh, for maybe the first time all day! So your comment was a big success, as far as I’m concerned.

  101. 101.

    MonkeyBoy

    Strike-through AKA del does work.

    It is just that the current FYWP does not have a CSS rule to display it properly. Here is a rule for the Stylish addon that adds the correct CSS. Install this rule and you will see strike throughs in this message.

    @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
    @-moz-document domain("www.balloon-juice.com") {
    del {text-decoration: line-through !important;}
    }

  104. 104.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!

    Edit: Worked!

  105. 105.

    Corner Stone

    @Pavonis:

    Or is it part of SCOTUS omerta to keep p0keher faces on at all times?

    Am I the only one who saw that fucking punk Alito at the SoTU address?

  106. 106.

    Pavonis

    @95 Tonal Crow

    I think that for Bush vs. Gore, a defeatist attitude had already taken hold in the Gore camp (especially with Lieberman). And Gore, unlike Obama, was not charismatic and did not have a large numbers of devoted supporters. And many people, inside the Beltway and out, weren’t taking the election very seriously. No, if a leak happens, it is more likely with the PPACA.

    But dammit! I really want to know now! It’s a childish impatience perhaps but my fiancée has had really bad experiences with health care/insurance so I am really looking forward to reform.

  109. 109.

    Tonal Crow

    @Pavonis: It’s true that my view of importance of Bush v. Gore’s outcome is rather colored by subsequent events, but it was still an unprecedented decision and the country was positively buzzing to know the outcome.

  110. 110.

    Roger Moore

    @Pavonis:

    I think that for Bush vs. Gore, a defeatist attitude had already taken hold in the Gore camp (especially with Lieberman). And Gore, unlike Obama, was not charismatic and did not have a large numbers of devoted supporters. And many people, inside the Beltway and out, weren’t taking the election very seriously. No, if a leak happens, it is more likely with the PPACA.

    Also, too, it was less than 24 hours between hearing arguments and announcing the decision in Bush v. Gore, which presumably made keeping a lid on things easier. The decision on PPACA is due in something like 3 months, which is a lot longer to keep a secret.

  112. 112.

    Triassic Sands

    I’ve been listening to the SCOTUS oral arguments concerning the PPACA and it is really depressing.

    Scalia fancies himself an intellectual giant, yet he comes across as an utterly clueless political hack who doesn’t even understand how insurance works.

    The only conservative justice deserving of respect is Thomas. Yes, he may be the worst supreme court justice in history, but at least he’s not a hypocrite. He’s already made up his mind, he doesn’t pretend to care about stare decisis, and he has no need for oral arguments or asking questions. Scalia, especially, is engaged in a grand display of arrogance and hypocrisy.

    The fact that he actually brought up the “broccoli defense” is a sure indication that he is nothing more than a thoroughly corrupted political hack.

  115. 115.

    Steeplejack

    Testing:

    Does strike-through work? Because I don’t have Stylish active and I saw the strike-through in @MonkeyBoy’s comment.

    Also testing paragraph spacing.

    ETA: Cool! Both work now, and the edit-mo-tron now brings you back to the thread. Life gets better.

  116. 116.

    Anne Laurie

    @Martin:

    It was an online poker site hostname. Why did they pick that? Who knows.

    I’m guessing some fine ambitious conservative bought the ‘vale of glamorgan’ name, and ended up using the site for professional gaming activities.

    Remember, this site has a less-than-sercon-for-a-political-blog name because it was started by a guy who just wanted to keep in touch with his family & a few scattered friends. And then he started talking about politics…

  117. 117.

    amk

    check strikethrough.

    Yay. Thanks MonkeyBoy.

    Is it possible to add a preview button to the code ?

    What is the website for lurning such coding ?

  120. 120.

    MonkeyBoy

    In looking at what FYWP sends out I noticed that it parses out strings of capital letters and wraps them in a [span class=”caps”]. Here is a Stylish addon rule that colors such strings red, makes the font larger, and squishes the characters together.
    @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
    @-moz-document domain("www.balloon-juice.com") {
    span.caps {color: red; letter-spacing: -.08em; font-size: 130%;}
    }
    I think it is good for angry rant highlighting, as in Cole’s rant of the other day.

    Install this rule and have a look at this excerpt:

    “SOCIALISM SOCIALISM CIALIS SOCIALISM FUCK YOU JOHN COLE.”
    __
    Listen to me now, hear me later, understand me tomorrow. Unless you are a coder willing to come up with a spam plugin that can recognize the difference between cialis and socialism, GO ANALLY FUCK YOURSELF WITH A RUSTY PITCHFORK.

    Does’t that make it seem even angrier?

    For some reason it seems the FYWP parser doesn’t mark all-cap strings at the beginning of a sentence.

  123. 123.

    MonkeyBoy

    @amk:

    @MonkeyBoy: I would like to change the background color of the comment box to black. Could you help out ?

    I find the comment box kinda hard to see so here is a Stylish rule I like that makes it light blue and tries to fix the border though something is wrong with the border fix now:

    @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
    @-moz-document domain("www.balloon-juice.com") {
    textarea#comment {
    background-color: rgb(90%,90%, 100%);
    border-width: medium;
    border-color: black;
    border-style: solid;
    }
    }

    If you really want a black comment box the following rule will give you one (with white letters):

    @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
    @-moz-document domain("www.balloon-juice.com") {
    textarea#comment {
    background-color: black;
    color: white;
    }
    }

    ETA: I have no idea now why FYWP is screwing up the above code formatting.

  126. 126.

    MonkeyBoy

    @amk:

    I put that code for this site … It’s not working. The preview didn’t show any errors. What am I doing wrong ?

    I suspect you really don’t know how CSS works.

    To change just the Balloon Juice comment box to black I had to “inspect” the emitted HTML and discover that the box was given as [textarea class = “comment”] and thus I could write a rule that restyled just textarea#comment. On a different site you need to find out if the comment textarea has some other class such as “shoutYourMouth”.

    On the other hand, if you just want to restyle every textarea to be white on black you don’t need to restrict the style to any class. The following should work.

    textarea {background-color: black; color: white;}

    Though you might need to change it to

    textarea {background-color: black !important; color: white !important;}

    to make sure that the rule overrides other rules that style the textarea.

  127. 127.

    amk

    @MonkeyBoy:

    I love ya. The !importantfix worked. Thanks a million for educating a luddite. I have been struggling with white over grey background there for over an year.

    Cole, you should hire MonkeyBoy to fix up your site.

  128. 128.

    MonkeyBoy

    @amk:

    I have been struggling with white over grey background there for over an year.

    If you think others there also would appreciate your fix then go to userstyles.org, create an account, and publish your fix. That makes it easier for others to use your fix by just installing Stylish and going to the fix page – they don’t have to understand anything about creating rules in Stylish. (in fact I think just sending them to the fix page will prompt them to install Stylish if it isn’t already installed)

    That is what I did last year when I published Balloon Juice – fix reply button to fix a problem in the updated BJ CSS that kept the “reply” button from working correctly. 120 other Juicers installed that patch before the BJ CSS was finally fixed.

  130. 130.

    MonkeyBoy

    @amk:

    Did I do it right ?

    Nope. All you created was a blog comment not a user style.

    After you login on userstyles.org you want to click on Create new style”. You will be sent to a page where you give your style a Name and give its CSS.

    You should give it a name like “theobamadiary – make comment box pure black”.

    You really don’t need to give any explanation on how to install it or Stylish. Did you try going to my “reply button fix” page and clicking “install” to see how published userstyles work for the users?

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