Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

T R E 4 5 O N

In my day, never was longer.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

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

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

No one could have predicted…

The willow is too close to the house.

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

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

You are here: Home / Humorous / OK. I Laughed

OK. I Laughed

by | 75 Comments

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The Reddit MeIRL crowd produces some of my son’s favorite internet snark — and provides a bridge between 16 y.o. consummate savvy and [mumble mumble mumble] technological cluelessness.

Here’s what he shared with me today:

snek

May your day be one in which all your sneks are garters.

(And no, not that way. This is a family blog.)

Open. The Thread. It Is.

Reader Interactions

75Comments

  5. 5.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    May your day be one in which all your sneks are garters.

    (And no, not that way. This is a family blog.)

    Huh, when the fuck did this here blog become a family blog?

  12. 12.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: My favorite surprise from my second watching of Airplane was the sign Whacking Materials at the magazine stand.

  16. 16.

    OzarkHillbilly

    I want to do a Gadsden Flag with “Corporations” in the form of a boot print (hobnailed of course) on top of the snake.

  17. 17.

    Pharniel

    My buddy who was in Afghanistan showed up with that shirt Sunday. He Felt it adequately mocked the sentiment.

    Good to see he’s not alone.

  19. 19.

    Betty Cracker

    @Elizabelle: Same here, which is why I like the reboot pictured above; I see it as taking back the original sentiment that the teaturds defiled (even if that’s not the intent of the dudes pictured). A similar operation needs to happen to reclaim the word “liberty” from the Paultroons.

    @raven: Very clever. I like that they made the bowl the candy reservoir. We had many cute trick-or-treaters last night, but the activities ended earlier than normal. Usually, there’s a wave of little kids just after dark, then older kids and teens after that. The latter materialized in much smaller numbers.

  20. 20.

    Botsplainer

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    The snake needs to be completely smashed underfoot, with a semiautomatic, a cross, and American flag smashed and poking out as well.

    The phrase on the flag should be “Liberals Warned You”.

  24. 24.

    NotMax

    Very, very early alert.

    Tuesday, Nov. 8, 4:30 a.m., TCM: Four Days in November. For those not around in 1963, as close as you can get to being whisked there as events played out before, during and after the assassination of JFK. For those of us who were around, a documentary record of what we saw, heard and experienced.

  30. 30.

    Schlemazel

    @Pharniel:
    I was at a stop light the other day & saw some jackhole with an “ISIS hunting licence” sticker on his pick-em up truck.

    I rolled down the window but couldn’t get his attention. I wanted to tell him where the recruiting office was & let him know if he had any balls he was free to do it for real & not just pretend.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    @raven

    Sixth year in a row with not a single trick or treater coming by.

    Yet know deep down that should I fail to stock some candy, that’s when they’ll come by in droves.

    Do kids still collect for UNICEF on Halloween? Those little orange and black cartons used to be ubiquitous.

  33. 33.

    Jeffro

    Predictions I sent to my dad and bro today (we had all agreed to put in our guesstimates by Nov 1st, just for bragging rights afterwards):

    Dems win the Senate but it’ll be close, 51-49. Toomey (PA), Ayotte (NH), and Burr (NC) all go down for the Rs. (SCOTUS filibuster eliminated the day after Cruz or Lee try to filibuster Clinton’s first nominee, btw)

    Final vote percentages (nationally): Clinton, 50.5%; Trump, 44%; Johnson, 3.5%; Stein, 0.8%; other, 1.2%

    Final EV count: Clinton, 334; Trump, 198, McMullin, 6.

    Happy to re-copy the predictions into another thread if we’re going to have one of those…what do you say, front-pagers?

    Three more canvassing/GOTV shifts coming up…good for the body and soul to ‘walk it off’!

  34. 34.

    raven

    @NotMax: We’re wondering how long this will last. The real action is a couple of block away but there were hundreds and hundreds of kids an their parents.

  35. 35.

    oldster

    I’m just not getting it. Sorry–I’m not usually humor impaired, but I just can’t tell whom this is ridiculing, on which grounds, with what background presuppositions, etc.

    It’s a variation on the Gadsden flag, i.e. “don’t tread on me” as voiced by a snake.

    In this case, the variation that makes it funny is:
    1) it’s not the snake talking, it’s someone else talking about the snake?
    2) it *is* the snake talking, but pretending to be someone else, but it doesn’t know how to spell “snake”?
    3) people who don’t know how to spell are funny?

    Help me out–what’s snarky about this?

  37. 37.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @oldster: It is done as a 2nd grader would do it…. Which perfectly matches the maturity level of those who parade about town with a Gadsden flag.

  40. 40.

    The Moar You Know

    The military guys I work with don’t like the Gadsden sons of bitches any more than I do. Glad it’s universal.

  44. 44.

    hovercraft

    For those of you who were asking about the 13 point swing in the ABC tracking poll, Steve Kornacki explained that it’s not that a whole bunch of people have changed their minds, it’s that a lot of republicans have moved into “likely voter” from just supporter. They were with Trump a week ago, but they were not sure if they were going to go out and vote for him, so it’s almost entirely a change in enthusiasm. As the whole I like to sexually assault women thing faded from the headlines, they slunk back to their candidate. So at this point his hordes are more enthusiastic than our side, so as BR would say GOTV. Seeing the polls close usually lights a fire under our side, so lets hope everyone gets out and votes.

  48. 48.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @hovercraft: Kevin Drum-

    here we are, and everyone is talking about tightening. So why am I not talking about it? Well, take a look:
    He shows a Pollster Aggregates graph
    Do you see much tightening there? I don’t. Now, as it happens, there actually is a bit of tightening here, maybe half a point or so over the past week. But it’s so small it’s almost invisible even in a big chart.
    ….
    I’m not seeing much tightening there, and I’m not seeing much more anywhere else—including from Sam Wang, my longtime preferred poll averager when it comes to predictive accuracy. There’s maybe a point of tightening over the past month, maybe half a point, but that’s all. This race has been astonishingly stable for an entire year, and so far it’s staying that way.

    The graph is very reassuring.

  49. 49.

    OGLiberal

    @hovercraft: ” As the whole I like to sexually assault women thing faded from the headlines, they slunk back to their candidate.” Out of site, out of mind – ie, if you’re not telling me about it I’ll forget it ever happened? These people are as sociopathic as the candidate they support. But you can count on the media to harp on about emails that nobody has even read yet so, yay!

    Our country is freaking nuts. The white folks, that is. I give up. Clinton will win but it will be tight and in a sane world she’d be winning 40 states. To paraphrase the crazy guy running for president – SAD!

    Yeah, yeah, GOTV. That’s not going to change the fact that a large majority of white people in this country are simply arseholes. I don’t know what does – white arseholes raised white arseholes who are now raising their kids to be white arseholes. Vicious cycle.

  50. 50.

    comrade scott's agenda of rage

    @Elizabelle:

    The Tea Party has kinda ruined that snake for me.

    Exactly. I have a tshirt from a gaming convention that was American Revolutionary themed that year and it’s yellow with the Gadsen Flag symbol. In 2011 I drove cross country wearing it and wondered why people kept starting. Then it dawned on me…

    Tshirt’s been in my drawer ever since. Fucking Teanderthals.

  51. 51.

    comrade scott's agenda of rage

    @WaterGirl:

    My favorite surprise from my second watching of Airplane was the sign Whacking Materials at the magazine stand.

    Back in the day, early early days of HBO, they’d play movies on seemingly an endless loop. When Airplane! was in rotation, it was a godsend. Why? You can watch that movie at least a dozen times (raises hand) and *always* find something you missed the previous gazillion times you’ve watched the movie. It’s incredible.

  52. 52.

    raven

    The Gadsen Flag was also used heavily in the “People’s Bicentennial.

    On the National Mall near the Capitol in Washington, thousands of citizens gathered to exercise their all-American right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Many of the rally-goers sported the tri-cornered hats and colonial costumes of America’s Revolutionary era, and everywhere the yellow Gadsden flag with its image of a coiled rattlesnake and the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me” waved in the summer breeze.

    A “tea party” protest in the nation’s capital? No, this scene enlivened Washington on July 4, 1976, during the nation’s bicentennial. The citizens who rallied under the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on that day were the political polar opposites of the tea party crowd of 2010.

    Activists from the American left organized the 1976 Washington rally under the aegis of a national group called the People’s Bicentennial Commission. I was a supporter of the PBC, and I attended the rally to write an opinion column about the historic event for the Athens Observer weekly newspaper here in the Classic City. Though I have been to many larger rallies in Washington over the span of decades, the People’s Bicentennial rally 34 years ago still stands out in my memory for its hopeful patriotism and its message against the predations of plutocracy symbolized by the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from the stage and from the crowd more than a generation before the same flag was appropriated by the tea party crew.

    The Gadsden flag was named for Christopher Gadsden, a Revolutionary War hero from South Carolina. It was flown by American sailors and marines during the revolution, but the first political group to feature the rattlesnake flag at a Washington rally was the People’s Bicentennial Commission that flew the flag to warn against the growing power of multinational corporations. The tea party movement that waves the Gadsden flag today is quite cozy with multinational corporations and big-business billionaires such as the Koch brothers, with their combined fortunes of some $35 billion and their ownership of oil refineries, Georgia-Pacific lumber and even the company that makes Dixie cups.

    During the People’s Bicentennial rally in 1976, activist Mary Murphy explained the symbolism of the rattlesnake flag, saying, “The rattlesnake has no eyelids, so it is ever-vigilant. Also, it never attacks without warning.” To this day, I still treasure a souvenir button from the People’s Bicentennial in Washington. It depicts the familiar coiled rattlesnake and has the “Don’t Tread on Me” slogan along with the words “July 4, 1976” and “Washington DC.”

    Although a Senate hearing a few months before the rally blasted it as “The Attempt to Steal the Bicentennial,” the People’s Bicentennial actually was a needed addition to the nation’s 200th birthday celebration. Rather than stealing the show, the left’s bicentennial rally in Washington added much-needed revolutionary spirit to a day commemorating a revolution.

    The People’s Bicentennial rally is largely forgotten today, but it was there that patriotic Americans on the left first waved the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake flag in Washington in 1976, long before the tea party converged on the capital. With its focus on the power and predations of multinational corporations that owe no allegiance to this nation, the People’s Bicentennial Commission was a prescient voice for patriotism that still is relevant today.

    Those who flew the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag in the nation’s capital in 1976 underscored the revolutionary words of Thomas Jefferson, who said, “Do not be frightened into surrender … by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendancy of the people.”

  53. 53.

    D58826

    If the week wasn’t bad enough here is today’s Plum line nightmare scenario: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/11/01/heres-the-election-day-nightmare-scenario-that-should-terrify-you/?utm_term=.a593ba7a70b4

    Also a third GOP Senator has come out in favor of not confirming any of Hillary’s SCOTUS nominations (as well as suggesting she be murdered).

    Ben Franklin said in 1787 that the Convention had give the people a republic if they could keep it. Looks like that proposition is really going to get a test this year.

  55. 55.

    hovercraft

    @NotMax:
    He’s still good with the numbers when he just reports on them. The thing that bothers me is that just like the rest of the media he searches for that one number that says she is doing badly. The only reason he did the deep dive is that Stephanie Rhule asked him to explain the discrepancy between the NBC/SM, 6, the Reuters also 6, and the ABC tracker Trump up 1. I’m sure that he will harp on Trimp’s momentum on his 4 o’clock show.

    I see the typo, but I like it.
    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Steady as she goes.
    @OGLiberal:
    Groping women was so last month, now my Obamacare premium is going to rise 11ty billion percent, and Hillary’s aides husbands laptop shows she was sexting with a 15 year old girl. I always knew she was an evil lesbian.

  58. 58.

    Corner Stone

    @hovercraft: CHANGE ELECTION! The people want change!
    They’ve had 8 freakin’ years of a president who is too good to allegedly rape a 13 year old girl. For heaven’s sake, why can’t you get it that they’re ready for a little something different?!

  59. 59.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Heh. I love Juanita Jean’s beauty salon:

    The ballot board is made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. We certify signatures on the mail ballots. Since all my customers here have a vested interest in mail ballots, I work on the board every election.

    Yesterday on the ballot board, one of our mail ballots got tagged. I asked the head election worker to please check why this voter was tagged and therefore we couldn’t approve his ballot signature on the back of his emailing envelope even though it matched his application signature.

    She left and returned about 15 minutes later. The voter had died last week. The worker called his home and his wife explained that he had filled out his ballot just 4 days before he died. The worker checked further and discovered that his ballot had been received in the elections office 2 days before he died. She left it up to the board to decide whether or not to accept the ballot.

    “Oh hell yeah,” I shouted in the Republican ear next to me, ” I’m a Democrat. I’m used to voting dead people!”

    They did not laugh and wanted to disallow the ballot. Not on my watch. I argue that if he had voted in person, there would be no way to recall his vote. That settled it. His ballot by mail vote counted.

    Two things: (1) Democrats do , indeed, vote dead people. (2) Vote the first day of early voting or the day you get your ballot by mail because then, if you die, your vote still counts. Do not toy with fate or despicable Republicans.

  60. 60.

    laura

    There’s a totes adorbs picture on the front page of the paper sacbee.com featuring California’s first dog Sutter Brown awaiting trick or treaters with Jerry, Ann Gust and a friend.
    Sutter is home after surgery for invasive cancer and prospects are grim.

  61. 61.

    Elizabelle

    @D58826: I am sick of the disaster porn.

    People: stop reading this crap and go call some volunteers or voters and do something positive. We can do something this week. Next week is back to whining and complaining.

    Call voters to make sure that endangered GOP senator gets his/her defeat.

    I’m serious. If you have time to be posting this shit to scare and demoralize the rest of us, you have time to get off your ass and contact an actual voter.

  64. 64.

    amk

    Bill Carter ‏@wjcarter 28m28 minutes ago

    As race tightens 2 factors will be huge: get-out-vote vs voter suppression. One party specializes in one of those, other in the other.

    0 replies 76 retweets 95 likes

  65. 65.

    amk

    Mark Thompson ‏@Son_of_a_Thomp 1h1 hour ago

    Trump supporters fervently love their candidate because he doesn’t follow the rules and hate Clinton because she didn’t follow a rule.

    0 replies 86 retweets 180 likes

  66. 66.

    amk

    The Daily Edge ‏@TheDailyEdge 2h2 hours ago

    After a lifetime of lies, scams, lawsuits, tax fraud, bribery, sex abuse, and corruption, Trump requests that you just trust him on Russia.

    0 replies 109 retweets 97 likes

  67. 67.

    OGLiberal

    @Elizabelle: We’re Democrats, we like to be scared and worried and all that. Wing nuts just yell “skewed” and go on oblivious to their fate. Us? We like to worry until days after the election.

    Hillary will win but as I noted earlier, that this sociopath, groping, dangerous buffoon will get at least 47% of the vote is very, very unnerving. And every year we say, well, they’re dying, the kids are different. But every year, the Republican candidate has a floor of about 46-47%. The markets exploded under a Republican president, their candidate was an old guy who suspended his campaign and who chose a person not fit to be president of the student council in a small Alaska high school as his running mate and that dude still got 46% of the vote. That was 8 years ago and it was closer in 2012. Stuff ain’t changing – we just need to win on the margins. And above all we need to take the 2020 election seriously because we need to control redistricting – that we didn’t in 2010 is effing us until we can change it…until then it’s unlikely we win back the House and all a Dem presidency does is serve as block against conservative insanity. Even if we hold the Senate 51-50 we’re still probably looking at an 8 person Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. And that’s hoping at RBG can hold out/stay alive for as long as possible.

  68. 68.

    Elizabelle

    @OGLiberal:

    We’re Democrats, we like to be scared and worried and all that

    Do we? Because I sure don’t. I’m already avoiding cable news, like the plague it is, and not reading political news from most of the major dailies.

    At some point, people get cynical and tune out.

    I like BJ, because I like hearing what some of the brighter sorts here have to contribute, but the “hey, I got a cloud for that silver lining!” smarty types are starting to make me want to vomit. Or flee.

  70. 70.

    hovercraft

    @OGLiberal:

    And above all we need to take the 2020 election seriously because we need to control redistricting

    Yes this is very important, but there is a still the problem of democrats being concentrated in and around the cities. It’s true that gerrymandering has rigged the legislative election against us, but with the exurbs and the rural areas become redder each year we will still have problems winning out there. In order to dilute our vote we will need to draw districts that are as contorted as the ones they have drawing for themselves. Our ideological segregation is not healthy.

    ETA: Of course we wet our pants, we are democrats, that’s what we do.

  71. 71.

    OGLiberal

    @EBT: Except when some douchecanoe like Manchin decides he can’t, in good conscience, appoint that person and Susan Collins doesn’t have the cojones to go against her crazy party’s base.

  72. 72.

    The Moar You Know

    “The rattlesnake has no eyelids, so it is ever-vigilant. Also, it never attacks without warning.”

    @raven: Hilarious. Rattlesnakes absolutely have eyelids, and more often than not will strike without rattling.

    That’s actually quite a slice of history I didn’t know about. I was only ten at the time.

  73. 73.

    D58826

    @OGLiberal:

    illary will win but as I noted earlier, that this sociopath, groping, dangerous buffoon will get at least 47% of the vote is very, very unnerving.

    This is the danger. In 2000 there was a lot of grumping on the left about Bush v Gore but Al Gore made a gracious concession speech and the democratic leadership backed the outcome. Bush was president and that was that. What ever ‘birther’ equilivant did not have the backing of the party leaders.

    It may be disaster porn but the GOP will not accept the results of a Hillary win, Trump will continue to rant about the fixed system and the militias will be buying more guns and ammunition.

    A democratic senate may be able to get nominations approved if they go nuclear but there is something called a senatorial hold. In the United States Senate, a hold is a parliamentary procedure permitted by the Standing Rules of the United States Senate which allows one or more Senators to prevent a motion from reaching a vote on the Senate floor.
    If the Senator provides notice privately to his or her party leadership of their intent (and the party leadership agreed), then the hold is known as a secret or anonymous hold. If the Senator actually objects on the Senate floor or the hold is publicly revealed, then the hold is more generally known as a Senatorial hold. The hold can be defeated by a cloture vote, but unless the nuclear option applies then that is 60 votes.

    In the meantime the House will crank up it’s investigations and make life as miserable as possible for anyone confirmed by the Senate.

    Any Goper who would risk voting for a Mother’s day resolution if Hillary supported it would be primaried.

  75. 75.

    germy

    It’s getting ugly

    Trump supporters are showing up at Democratic headquarters to harass workers.

    I witnessed something similar in 2012, but nothing this dramatic. They just stood around outside and smirked at the nice Democratic ladies who were inside phone banking. I asked them what they thought they were doing and one of them told me they were “just having fun.”

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