Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Let there be snark.

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

We still have time to mess this up!

No one could have predicted…

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

This really is a full service blog.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

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Reader Interactions

103Comments

  2. 2.

    Patricia Kayden

    You don’t even need a BB gun for that. Seems like cops can shoot you for any reason and get off.

  4. 4.

    HinTN

    I look forward to an organized effort like the Panthers in California to start exercising the “right” to open carry causing massive bedwetting in the keyboard kommandos, their racist enablers, and the police themselves. That’s what it will take to effect change.

  5. 5.

    Ajabu

    @HinTN:
    Well, I understand what you’re saying (and I remember the Panthers in Sacramento) but — at this point I’m too fucking old to do it and I’m not offering up my own children & grandchildren to effect change. What we really need is an army of Marilyn Mosbys to actually put some teeth into the existing laws.
    These fuckers shouldn’t be able to kill with impunity and skate without so much as an indictment.

  6. 6.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @HinTN:
    At this point, I think that will only enable the gunhumpers and racists. A black armed individual will be a criminal, free to be shot by civilians or police. A group will be rioters, to be put down with force. Both kinds will scare the racists into wanting more guns, and the police into being even more sure they need to shoot first and ask questions later.

  7. 7.

    Miss Bianca

    I keep wondering when the penny is going to drop for white America. When we’re going to have a come to Jesus moment regarding the connection between Second Amendment Uber Alles!! and Gotta Keep Those Scary Black People Down. I thought Michael Moore did a pretty credible job (with easy-to-follow graphics) making the connection in “Bowling For Columbine”. I keep thinking, “it’s gotta come soon, it’s gotta come soon”, and then I think, “this has been going on for 400 years. Hell, girl – the Rapture is going to come sooner.”

    Then I get so depressed I just want to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me.

  8. 8.

    dedc79

    @HinTN: Ohio has open carry already. For all the cops knew, Tamir Rice was exercising his “right” to open carry (after all, they keep telling us he looked like an adult). I don’t want anyone else dying even if it’s to prove the point that open carry is dumb and dangerous.

  9. 9.

    jl

    Judging from the most recent inexplicable shooting from Chicago, being a 55 year old woman trying to help a neighbor with an emotionally upset son is enough to get you killed, with no explanation, by the local police.

    Police report I saw said confronting a ‘combative subject’ ‘resulting in the discharging of the officer’s weapon, fatally wounding two individuals,” Will the investigation end in some contrite statement that goes like “Hey, a little sad harm there, but no foul?”

  10. 10.

    rikyrah

    uh huh

    uh huh

    ………………………………..

    Rich, White and Refusing Vaccinations

    By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

    DECEMBER 24, 2015 4:32 PM

    The people most likely to refuse to have their children vaccinated tend to be white, well-educated and affluent, researchers report.

    A study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health used California state government data on “personal belief exemptions,” or opting out of vaccinations for nonmedical reasons. From 2007 to 2013, the rate of vaccine refusal for personal belief doubled, to 3.06 percent.

    The researchers reviewed data among all kindergarten children in the state during that time. More than 17,000 children, attending 6,911 schools, were exempted.

    Exemption percentages were generally higher in regions with higher income, higher levels of education, and predominantly white populations. In private schools, 5.43 percent of children were exempt, compared with 2.88 percent in public schools.

    In some suburban areas, rates of exemption were near 50 percent, and more than a quarter of California’s schools have measles immunization rates below the 92 to 94 percent required for herd immunity, the level of vaccination necessary to protect people who are not immune.

    The lead author, Y. Tony Yang, an associate professor at George Mason University, said that broader vaccination coverage is critical for public health. The findings “emphasize the importance of a targeted approach, focusing on selected communities,” he said. “And we have to think about communicating with these people effectively without attacking them or making them feel defensive.”

    http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/rich-white-and-refusing-vaccinations/

  11. 11.

    jl

    @Miss Bianca:

    ” I keep wondering when the penny is going to drop for white America. ”

    If you are very poor, homeless or mentally disturbed, it already has dropped for white America, as far as lethal police violence. There are videos of public executions by local police of those people too. I guess we will have to wait until it starts happening on a regular basis for middle class white Americans. And I think it will. Lawless authority and control, private or public, won’t be able to keep itself hemmed in by petty boundaries like race or ethnicity. Sooner or later the sickness will spread.

    I guess the rich will be off limits, as they are in other areas.

  13. 13.

    rikyrah

    A lot of these deaths hurt, but I know why Jordan, Trayvon and Tamir hurt me so much…..

    YOU CAN LITERALLY SEE THAT THEY WERE STILL BABIES!!

    They had not grown out of their Baby Faces.

    You take a picture of them when they were 1 or 2, side by side with a picture of when they were MURDERED…and it’s only older…

    They hadn’t grown out of it.

    Which is why the evilness of them trying to perpetrate that that MURDERER thought he was ‘OLDER’ than what he was..

    PHUCK THAT WAS A LIE.

    A DAMN LIE!!

    Their Baby Faces are right there.

  14. 14.

    east is east

    They almost always walk. If I’m ever in trouble I’ll call a friend. At least they won’t kill me.

  16. 16.

    MomSense

    @rikyrah:

    Yes!!!! I want to scream! They still had their baby cheeks. They are doing a nasty, nasty character assassination on a boy with a baby face. Black children are not allowed to be children in this fucked up country of ours. They look just like my twelve year old who is taller than his grandmas but still has a baby face.

  17. 17.

    schrodinger's cat

    Is it some rule that every post and comment on Balloon Juice lately be awash in negativity and despondence? Is there nothing good happening anywhere under the sun?

    ETA: I am tired of this constant refrain that we are the worstest country ever, it is as tiresome as the we are bestest country ever.
    /end rant.

  19. 19.

    WaterGirl

    @jl: I passed a TV set in the lounge at union station in Chicago on sunday. The stationary banner on the screen for the story was:

    Police “accidentally” shoot boy and 55-year old grandmother.

    I thought maybe that was progress since the “accidentally” was in quotes.

    It’s horrifying to think what we have become as a society. It’s slightly more horrifying that whenever a related subject comes up and I say something about “open season on black people (or young black men) by the police” that the supposedly liberal people I am talking to look at me like i’m from outer space. It’s sad enough / bad enough that it took Trayvon Martin to open my eyes, but where have these people been since then that they still can’t see this?

  22. 22.

    jl

    @WaterGirl:

    ” I thought maybe that was progress since the “accidentally” was in quote. ”

    It’s not progress if the police and local government say that these sad regrettable accidents are just a byproduct of how we do things, and things do not change. And I fear that is what is happening. As I typed in comments yesterday, the defense of the first trial for the cops in Baltimore seemed to be “Well, sure, none of the police followed procedures and this guy in particular did not do what he was supposed to, but we and he never do that stuff.” And he got a hung jury on that. Well, at least it was not an acquittal, That might be progress too, but it well might not be progress too.

  23. 23.

    WaterGirl

    @jl: I agree with you.

    But at least it was a TV station saying “accidentally” and not just someone here at BJ. I took it as a slightly hopeful sign that even the corporate-owned media aren’t buying all these “accidents”.

    It’s shameful that we let this go on, but I don’t know what to do about it, either.

  24. 24.

    nutella

    @rikyrah:

    associate professor at George Mason University:

    we have to think about communicating with these people effectively

    But how? Apparently more education made them considerably stupider than their neighbors with less education, so how do we communicate/educate them out of the stupid?

    edited for clarity

  25. 25.

    dogwood

    @jl:
    We live in a culture that continually reinforces the idea that poverty, familial dysfunction, etc, are entirely the result of bad character and poor choices. See David Brooks. Thus each time a cop kills or injures an unarmed suspect or a stand your ground guy goes on a tear, we are treated to the he/she wasn’t an angel routine. That gives everyone permission to not give a damn, or even worse cheerlead for the killers. And you’re right that this happens to white Americans as well. It’s not all about race; we’re more than willing to support victims of color if they are educated middle class black folks at Bible study, or if you are model child with great parents like Hadiya Pendelton. Nobody could find any excuses to blame the victim in those circumstances, though I’m sure some tried. You can’t have any kind of justice system if the citizens decide that wide swathes of the populace aren’t worthy of protection and respect.

  28. 28.

    JordanRules

    @schrodinger’s cat: That’s not really true at all. We still have generally jovial recipe, sports and garden threads.

    I think the issue this thread is about actually needs to be talked about more but YMMV.

  29. 29.

    Adam L Silverman

    @jl: Given that the neighbor was shot through the door while she was trying to open it for the cops, I’m not sure the actual evidence is going to back up that police report. I’m also not sure its going to matter.

  30. 30.

    Adam L Silverman

    @jl: The negative interactions involving white Americans tend to involve the use of tasers. Digby has been documenting this for a long time at Hullabaloo.

  31. 31.

    dogwood

    @schrodinger’s cat:
    Your point is well taken, and necessary. I was struck a while back when I listened to a podcast of President Obama’s conversation with Marilynne Robinson. She made a very thoughtful statement to the effect that we are living in a time when it is assumed that the worst thing we say about a person, policy, group or institution is somehow viewed as the truest thing we can say.

  32. 32.

    Adam L Silverman

    @dogwood: It goes beyond this. Even when there is a civil judgement against a law enforcement officer for misconduct, regardless of whether there was/wasn’t a criminal trial or its outcome, the judgement is paid for by insurance taken to cover these types of events. And in fifteen states there is a Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, based on Supreme Court rulings, that provide them additional due process protections for actions that occur during the course of their duties beyond what non law enforcement Americans get under the Constitution. When you combine these two things, additional Constitutional protections and civil judgements being paid by a third party, there are no incentives to change law enforcement culture, training, operations, and leadership. Its a perfect storm of institutions and structures reinforcing each other to ensure the status quo.

  33. 33.

    eemom

    @HinTN:

    Exactly. What I want is a Million Man Open Carry march on Washington. I don’t think any police would dare mess with that or anyone in it, and it would indeed have the fucking NRA and its enablers shitting their pants.

  34. 34.

    eemom

    @MomSense: @rikyrah:

    Thirded. As the mother of a teenage son those pictures break my heart.

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    A post on the topic of a twelve year old kid shot dead in cold blood by the police strikes me as an awfully ill chosen place to complain about gloom and doom.

  35. 35.

    srv

    If it’s the drone’s fault when innocents get courtesy bombed, why do people blame the cops instead of their guns?

    Putting the U.S. military in charge of drone strikes in Iraq and Syria has effectively reduced congressional scrutiny of those sensitive operations, leaving some activists, lawmakers and U.S. intelligence officials fearful of increased civilian casualties.
    …
    The shift reflects both legal and philosophical considerations. When he announced a framework for targeted killing two years ago, President Barack Obama argued that the military, not a secret intelligence agency, should be the primary instrument of lethal force against terrorists.

    But one byproduct of the change, American officials say, is that congressional staffers no longer examine the details of each individual drone strike.
    …
    Despite promises that the military would be more transparent about targeted strikes, the details of the operations remain secret. There is no way for the public to know whether the drones’ Hellfire missiles are hitting the right people and avoiding civilian casualties.

    The best solution is to not count anymore.

  36. 36.

    PurpleGirl

    @schrodinger’s cat: I know what you mean. I do jigsaw puzzles on line. I recently saw one from the AuntyAcid FB page. Quote:

    I don’t want to “adult” today…
    I don’t want to human today…
    I want to be a cat today,
    with a picture of Aunty Acid laying down on a couch under a blanket.

  42. 42.

    WaterGirl

    @Germy: Un-fucking-believable. That’s disgusting.

    Oh, wait, that’s what I’m saying. What is she saying? That she’s sick and so is the idiot she represents?

  44. 44.

    Germy

    @WaterGirl:

    What is she saying? That she’s sick and so is the idiot she represents?

    Listen to her speak for more than a few moments and it becomes obvious she is a sociopath.

    The perfect spokeswoman for tRump.

  47. 47.

    Germy

    Honest Tea Is Removing an ‘Inspirational’ Donald Trump Quote From Bottle Caps

    Fair-trade, organic beverage-maker Honest Tea is pulling a Donald Trump quote from its bottle — because of course. The phrase is pretty vanilla, as far as most Trumpisms go these days, and it reads, “If you’re going to think anyway, you might as well think big.”

    The company maintains that the timing is purely coincidental and that the phrase’s removal has nothing to do with Trump or politics or the barrage of tweets Honest has received over the past 48 hours. But this claim hasn’t done much to appease Trump supporters, many of whom are, right on cue, now threatening to get their bottled tea elsewhere.

  49. 49.

    Hal

    I know I posted this before, but the grand jury decision once again brought to mind one of my favorite pieces of dialogue from the hbo version of Angels in America:

    Belize: I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on Earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

  51. 51.

    oz29

    @Adam L Silverman: Don’t forget that, in many states, even if a cop gets caught engaging in misconduct, he can simply move on to a new department (or a new state) and his disciplinary records are as good as vanished. Officers with histories of violence, perjury, steroid use . . . just have to be willing to relocate and take a pay cut for a fresh start.

  55. 55.

    scav

    @Germy: Well then, all the mechanisms of production are already in place and only a slight change in labelling will be required. Even better.

  56. 56.

    WaterGirl

    @Germy: I didn’t watch the video, and now it looks like the link may be gone. But from the photos, it looks to me like she’s on drugs. Baud is right, she’s about as classy as the Rump himself.

  57. 57.

    Prescott Cactus

    @jl:

    I guess we will have to wait until it starts happening on a regular basis for middle class white Americans.

    All 8 of them ?

  58. 58.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Cacti: What this is leading to is vigilantism. Because the American Criminal “Justice” system has nothing at all to do, it is painfully obvious, with Justice.

  59. 59.

    WaterGirl

    I had missed “A Christmas Story” in the bb-gun cartoon.

    John Edwards was right about one thing, there really are two Americas. And I don’t mean North America and South America.

  63. 63.

    amk

    @srv:

    The best solution is to not count anymore carpet bomb ’em all. Of better yet, kill all their relatives.

    you are a lying pos hypocrite, aren’t ya?

  64. 64.

    Baud

    @Prescott Cactus:

    I guess we will have to wait until it starts happening on a regular basis for middle class white Americans.
    All 8 of them ?

    There used to be a big libertarian push for criminal justice reform, but then videos about cops killing black people started to emerge.

    I blame Obama.

  76. 76.

    Germy

    @WaterGirl:

    Maybe it would help if we dropped them on their heads now?

    It would help me.

    It wouldn’t make much difference to them I suspect.
    Trump University graduates.

  78. 78.

    Prescott Cactus

    @Germy:

    She says it’s “real ammo, made in Texas, support local business.”

    You don’t put holes into the casing of real ammo so that you can string it on a necklace. Bad things would happen.

  82. 82.

    Steve from Antioch

    @scav: here it is:

    If someone is walking around in an urban or even suburban areas brandishing a weapon (or even a potato that looks exactly like a weapon) I am in favor of the police rolling up and shooting the asshole, regardless of the asshole’s race

    There you go.

    Seriously, what would the downside of this policy be? Fewer assholes brandishing weapons in public? What else?

  84. 84.

    mclaren

    At this point, someone needs to set up a massive kickstarter to provide kevlar vests for all African Americans in the U.S. That’s the only solution I see.

  86. 86.

    dogwood

    Funny, but I don’t remember any of the gun guys like Steve, being concerned about brandishing guns at the Bundy ranch. Or remember those people brandishing their assault rifles outside venues where President Obama was speaking? Patriots all.

  88. 88.

    Poptartacus

    Hey they are just trying to keep people safe, most cops are good guys BLAH,BLAH,BLAH anyone with any sense stays as far away from the police as possible. Nothing good EVER comes from interaction with them, in any way, shape or form

  91. 91.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Villago Delenda Est:
    There, do you feel better now?

    Nothing like a making a nasty comment on the inter webs to puff up oneself is there?

    You are making a difference with your carefully cultivated outrage. Do carry on.

  92. 92.

    Steve from Antioch

    @dogwood:
    I tell you what, sport, go find any comment I made about Bundy and report back.

    Then we can see whether your “recall” is worth giving a shit about.

    ———-

    Meanwhile, I thought that Obama and the BLM (here meaning the Bureau of Land Management, not the folks who shout down Bernie Sanders) were far too lenient with Bundy and his crew.

  93. 93.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Steve from Antioch: Given your lack of concern about “brandishing” weapons as outlined by others, and your known ammosexual tendencies, I stand by my assessment of your dick as being tiny.

  94. 94.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Okay, where are all of your posts demonstrating your deep and heartfelt concern about “brandishing” weapons?

    While you’re looking for those, please find that show my lack of concern, too.

    You really are an illogical shithead, aren’t you? Just latching onto any scrap of argument as long as it supports whatever preconceived ideas you are vomiting out.

  99. 99.

    Paul in KY

    @Hal: Good quote, but Star Spangled Banner set to music from an English drinking song that was purposely hard to sing.

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