Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Second rate reporter says what?

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

Come on, man.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

You cannot shame the shameless.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

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

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

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Reader Interactions

82Comments

  6. 6.

    Scratch

    Last evening I thought to stop in and leave a comment about the half-marathon I ran yesterday in Philadelphia.

    Security was tighter. It saddens me some to think of how nice and open it used to be to line up at the starting area in Philadelphia.

    Thanks to all those who contributed to the JDRF. Knowing that made me run with a little bit extra yesterday. I wrote about that in a blog post: That Little Bit of Extra

  10. 10.

    donnah

    I woke up still depressed that my Bengals lost last night, again. Coffee hasn’t helped. I may have to resort to more coffee AND a cinnamon roll.

    On a positive note, my middle son came home for Thanksgiving week last night and we get to enjoy his company until Sunday. My week will consist of shopping, housework and then cooking on Wednesday and Thursday, as we’re having fifteen people over for dinner.

    Our big chain grocery store was completely out of King Arthur flour and Philadelphia cream cheese, two key components in my baking plans. Hopefully they restock by tomorrow. It was a madhouse there yesterday, as if a hurricane was bearing down on us.

    Off to do more housework.

  12. 12.

    PurpleGirl

    I don’t believe it’s Monday morning… It can’t be Monday morning… Thursday is Thanksgiving???

    In other news: Kitten Bowl III is February 7th. Hallmark Channel is also planning Kitten Summer Games for August 2016.

  13. 13.

    Elizabelle

    Good morning all. Turkey Day week commences.

    Did it seem to you like not much mention of JFK yesterday? I was offline mostly, but still startle when I see that it’s November 22nd. That, December 7th and September 11th. And I guess we’ll remember October 13th for a while (easy to remember, Friday the 13th in Paris).

  15. 15.

    Germy

    The Great BJ Blackout Of 2015.

    I imagine nine months from now there’ll be an uptick in births. Balloon-Juice Blackout Babies.

  16. 16.

    Baud

    With Balloon Juice down, I was able to find a cure for cancer and reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics. So that’s good. I was about to publish my findings, but the website is up again, so maybe later.

  17. 17.

    FlyingToaster

    Wow, it’s back.

    I’m on day 3 of the cold (caught it running the school bookfair last week). I’m close to finishing my second box of kleenex.

    Oh, and Betty, the Pats will win tonight, despite your reverse psychology (or reverse whatever it is).

  18. 18.

    JPL

    It appears that Trump has moved on from the immigrants to the blacks are going to kill us all. Will the news media finally stop covering him? Nah… Ratings matter to them.

  21. 21.

    Patricia Kayden

    Can any of you brave folk tell me how Morning Joe and Shut up Mika are handling Trump’s racist tweet and support for beating down protesters at his rallies? I’m just curious seeing how Trump has been getting away with horrible behavior and I’m shocked at how low he has gone without any pushback from the media.

    If Secretary Clinton spoke about minorities the way Trump has or encouraged her supporters to physically attack protesters, the media would crucify her.

  24. 24.

    gene108

    @JPL:

    It appears that Trump has moved on from the immigrants to the blacks are going to kill us all. Will the news media finally stop covering him? Nah… Ratings matter to them.

    He has the support of the people. He’s leading in almost every Republican poll. That’s the scary part. The media is just covering the front runner of a major party. That’s not surprising.

  27. 27.

    Gimlet

    Making America great again

    From “The Hill”

    Donald Trump says if he’s elected president, he’ll bring back enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding for enemy combatants.

    “I would bring it back, yes. I would bring it back,” Trump said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

    Trump said waterboarding is tame compared to what Americans face when they’re captured by Islamic extremists.

    “You know, they don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads,” he said. “They use drowning people. I don’t know if you’ve seen with the cages where they put people in cages and they drown them in the ocean and they lift out the cage.”

    “I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us, what they’re doing to us, what they did to James Foley when they chopped off his head,” Trump added, referring to the slain U.S. journalist.

    He said he would “absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation.”

  28. 28.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Patricia Kayden: I only made it though 10 minutes of Joe pissing himself. He says the President isn’t taking ISIS seriously. Now that I’ve had my BJ fix, I can go to sleep.

  29. 29.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    @FlyingToaster: My wife is a psychotherapist, and has said once or twice, “Honey, you’re waaay too smart to fall for reverse psychology.”

    That’s reassuring to hear, otherwise I’d worry that she’s toying with me.

  30. 30.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @debbie: To be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to that date in decades. JFK was a half term President who’s greatest accomplishment was not starting an atomic war (no small accomplishment in and of itself considering the circumstances) and having LBJ for his VP. That and getting killed while still relatively popular.

    Then again, I don’t pay much attention to 9/11 either. Or anybodies birthdays, x-mas, deaths, etc. Probably just me.

  31. 31.

    FlyingToaster

    @Germy: Yeah, but the outage was upstream of any normal code; I was also having problems getting a connection to hostingmatters, which is why I think the mess happened upstream.

  32. 32.

    Patricia Kayden

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Have a good nap. Don’t blame you for not torturing yourself with Joe. I know that several BJ commenters brave it out each weekday morning so was just checking.

  33. 33.

    Amir Khalid

    Whuh … what happened? Where’d everybody go?

    While waiting for Balloon Juice to return, I — having no one to make a baby with, alas — went to other websites for news. The BBC front page had a headline saying I will not play with Amir. And I was like, Crap, what did I do?

  34. 34.

    RSA

    @OzarkHillbilly: Also, aside from being overshadowed by more recent historical events, it happened long enough ago that only about one in five Americans can remember having lived through it.

  35. 35.

    Amir Khalid

    @RSA:
    A person of the current president’s age (e.g. me) would have been all of two years old when JFK was shot.

  41. 41.

    MattF

    @OzarkHillbilly: In my family, there was a tradition of being born on bad days. My dad’s birthday was Nov. 22, my sister’s birthday is Dec. 7, my birthday is Aug. 9 (bombing Nagasaki). My mom’s birthday was benign… but maybe a disaster yet to come.

    ETA: I might add that Aug. 9 is also the anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, so there’s an upside.

  42. 42.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @RSA: I guess I am among the 1 in 5, at least in that I remember watching the funeral cortege on my family’s small black and white TV.

  45. 45.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Elizabelle:
    @debbie:

    A friend posted a “where were you when you heard?” post on Facebook yesterday. The truth is, there are fewer and fewer of us who are old enough to have true memories of the JFK assassination. In another generation the day will hardly rate a shrug of acknowledgement except maybe for the “big” (75th, 100th) anniversaries.

  50. 50.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @satby: That just means you don’t know me very well. I like to say “I don’t have any friends, just lesser enemies.”

    All in jest of course.

  52. 52.

    debbie

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I was in sixth grade. I remember when it was announced over the school PA system and school closed early. I remember watching television all weekend long. My parents had supported Nixon, and I’d had to watch the inauguration by myself in the basement, but they were just as shocked as everyone else in the country.

  55. 55.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Germy:

    Whew! Just quickly skimmed through that article, but it looks fascinating and wrenching. Will read it with more care a little later today, and probably also at some point the book from which it’s excerpted.

  56. 56.

    Wordpress Developers

    Folks,
    The site is back up, and it wasn’t us – the host upgraded the server back-end last night and didn’t test to see if the site came back up. I didn’t realize until this morning, and before I could diagnose, Mistermix had already submitted a trouble ticket. I am now going to put on the flame-retardant gear and review John’s post from late last week asking about issues.

    Some things to report – for Frontpagers, as well as Commentors and Readers:
    1) We have done nothing to futz with RSS over the past week or so, and for some or all RSS users, the site has been inconsistently updated with fresh content. I expect that this server upgrade will iron out those issues. If not, please report them via email to me.

    2) FYWP – eaten posts or comments. This shouldn’t happen, although sometimes it might when there’s a lot of server load. The upgrade should have enhanced multi-threading support, so we should see much less of this. So, for those that have had issues previously with either comments or posts that disappear into the aethyr, please let me know if things still disappear. Or if they seem better, positive reports are also welcome!

    3) Site not refreshing for the text version on mobile or tablet devices. This should also be fixed now; when you go to the site, you should always see today’s most recent post. Over the past few weeks, some readers were seeing day-old content as the most recent stuff. This seems to have mostly affected iOS devices. Before reporting a problem, please try this step to clear out the cache on your iPhone or iPad: Close all tabs in Safari that have Balloon Juice open, then go to your Home screen, and double-click the Home button and swipe to close Safari completely. Now, restart Safari and go to the site. From that point on, you should always see the most recent content (you can check by turning off the Mobile theme via a link at the bottom of the page)

    4) Accessibility for those using AT tech: through the kind efforts of a reader, I have a few things that I need to do to the site to make things better for your devices. I will be working on that as well.

    5) General site usability – the site should be a bit peppier, and we’ll try to nail down any issues slowing down page loading. In my testing and development, I do not use any ad blocking or other type of filtering technology, so I should see a “worst case scenario” view of the page load. Such things as the Twitter feed and Google Analytics do slow down the page load a bit. We are working on fine tuning the caching and CDN setup to make things as zippy as possible.

    6) Comments – Late last week, I briefly turned on a potential comment engine and folks hated it, especially Amir. Sorry for the confusion, but please let this serve as a warning – it may go back on temporarily in a few days for some limited testing. I’ll try to do it mid-day so hopefully less upsetting for many of the night/early morning crew. This is just to test it; the formatting is good enough for testing, even if it doesn’t have comment numbers, etc. There is no point wasting time on the formatting if I’m trying to see if the bloody thing works as it’s supposed to, and to see what kind of increase or decrease in server load it makes. It will be up for an hour or two, max, then I will disable it and return to this comment system. If it works well, we might just go with it instead of waiting for mid December when the alternate commenting plugin will have the functionality this site needs.

    I’m going to post this comment in each new thread to day to maximize the number of readers it reaches.

    Best,

    Alain
    [email protected]

  57. 57.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @satby: That’s not a particularly high bar you know. 99.99999999999999999999999% of the people in the world aren’t Donald Trump.

  60. 60.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @debbie: Yeah, it’s interesting to read comment after comment from boomer after boomer — the indelible memory mashup has to do with being in school, an announcement from the principal over the PA system, nuns in tears, teachers letting class out early, etc. Nearly every comment to my friend’s FB query yesterday seemed to be a variation on that theme.

    I had just recently become engaged. My new fiancé and I were at a jewellers in downtown Atlanta ordering our wedding rings when someone came running in from the street with the news.

  63. 63.

    RSA

    @Amir Khalid, @OzarkHillbilly: Me, I wasn’t yet a year old. I might remember RFK, five years later, but that’s iffy. I definitely remember the moon landing, as definite as anyone can really be about childhood memories.

    Also, I’m waiting for the day the President is younger than me. Looks like it won’t happen this cycle.

  64. 64.

    cmorenc

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    @debbie: To be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to that date in decades. JFK was a half term President who’s greatest accomplishment was not starting an atomic war (no small accomplishment in and of itself considering the circumstances

    Those of us who are old enough to remember living through the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis (I was 11 or 12) understand what an enormous accomplishment of steely nerve and shrewd judgment that was – the entire country was fearfully and correctly convinced the odds were better than even that nuclear war was imminent within the week. Everyone was discussing how close they were to likely nuclear targets and what the direct blast zones of obliteration and unsurvivable fallout would be from various yield nuclear weapons these might be hit with. The Soviets frankly underestimated Kennedy, thinking him an inexperienced young man who wouldn’t have the shrewd savvy or nerve to stand up to them, that he would fold with so many chips in the pot. Instead, he was the one who won the bluff.

    That moment, of itself made Kennedy’s presidency enormously worthwhile, irrespective of anything else. Imagine had we instead had the likes of President Trump – the world would be ashes right now.

  65. 65.

    Ruckus

    @SiubhanDuinne:
    Well I was in high school at least. And while I don’t know anyone who got married until senior yr I do know of a couple of girls who got pregnant.

  66. 66.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @cmorenc: I was 4 yrs old when it happened, so no memory of it at all. I have read the histories tho and it was indeed no mean feat.

  67. 67.

    satby

    @cmorenc: Yes, the threat was very real. And even then, the drills for an atom bomb attacks seemed so pointless to us when we were ducking and covering under our desks. Because we knew we’d be incinerated if there was an attack on Chicago. At age 9 that’s not really knowledge kids should have.

  69. 69.

    PaulW

    I had been unable to get onto Balloon Juice all day Sunday. Was it affecting everyone else or just me at my home (am currently posting from workplace)

  70. 70.

    Germy

    The House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 concluded that JFK’s assassination was likely the result of a conspiracy and that the Warren Commission’s report was “inadequate.”

  74. 74.

    yellowdog

    @cmorenc: I am about your age. During the crisis, I remember walking into my social studies class in Jr. High and finding that the globe had deflated. It was quite unnerving.

  75. 75.

    shell

    @Patricia Kayden: No, but I laughed at how Joe on Morning Squint was whining about Obama gallivanting off to foreign lands during this horrible, horrible crisis. Yes, a European capital was attacked by international terrorists, so how dare he meet with international leaders to plan and show solidarity against this threat. No, he should be back in DC, whimpering and wailing about Syrian orphans.

  77. 77.

    rikyrah

    How the Obama Administration Got 50% of Homeless Veterans Off the Streets in 4 Years
    updated November 21, 2015

    In 2010, the Obama administration unveiled Opening Doors, the federal government’s first strategic plan to put an end to homelessness nationwide. That vision is slowly reducing the homeless population of the country, which stands at over 500,000 people on any given night.

    At first glance, the immense progress that has been made isn’t immediately apparent. The Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual homeless assessment report on Thursday, showing a tiny decrease in homelessness between 2014 and 2015. Overall homelessness fell just 2%, and chronic homelessness decreased by a mere 1%.

    But if you take a step back, a more promising picture emerges. Between 2007 and January of 2015, overall homelessness fell by 11%, and chronic homelessness declined by 31%.

    http://mic.com/articles/128837/in-4-years-obama-cut-the-number-of-homeless-veterans-on-the-streets-by-50-here-s-how#.vjs1AVihc

  78. 78.

    SFAW

    @cmorenc:

    That moment, of itself made Kennedy’s presidency enormously worthwhile, irrespective of anything else. Imagine had we instead had the likes of President Trump – the world would be ashes right now.

    Ah, but if it had been President W – battle-hardened military hero that he was – he would have looked into the eyes (and soul) of Putin Khrushchev, said “Bring it on!” and the Russkies would have backed down

  81. 81.

    Matt McIrvin

    When I first heard Ronald Reagan had been shot, the person who told me assumed he was dead. So I guess I do remember hearing about a president getting killed, it just wasn’t true.

    I do remember hearing about John Lennon getting murdered when I was in junior high school; I barely knew who he was, though of course I had heard of the Beatles and knew some of their songs. I think the event sparked a lot of retroactive interest in the Beatles among people my age.

    But for big nerds of my generation, the approximate counterpart of the JFK assassination was hearing about the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. I actually saw that on live TV–I was home from school for some reason I can no longer remember, possibly just icy weather or possibly associated with preparations for Reagan’s planned visit to my school, which was a science/technology magnet school (the visit was going to be tied in with the Teacher in Space project). I was recording the shuttle launch off, I think, a local PBS station’s mirror of NASA Select TV, experimenting with our brand-new VCR.

    Back in school the next day, everyone was still just stunned and morose. At other schools it probably would have been just an occasion for sick humor, but we treated it with incredible solemnity. Reagan postponed his visit and we instead watched a satellite feed of the memorial service he attended. I remember trading speculations about what had caused the accident.

    When Columbia crashed in 2003, it didn’t have anything like the same kind of cultural impact, probably because by that point the Shuttle program was on its last legs anyway and nobody really thought it was going to make space travel cheap and lead to massive human expansion into space.

  82. 82.

    Matt McIrvin

    @rikyrah: That’s a good thing to pass on in response to all the “Obama cares about refugees but not homeless veterans” posts on Facebook.

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