Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

He really is that stupid.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

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59Comments

  1. 1.

    ArchTeryx

    Reposted from a dead thread downstairs, since this seems far more suitable for a writer’s thread.

    The current situation reminds me heavily of David Brin’s Uplift series of books. It’s set in the Five Galaxies, an intergalactic federation which is defined by ‘uplift’ – existing races finding pre-sentient ones and raising them to sentience, for which the newly created sentient race owes somewhere around 100K years of indentured servitude. After that – if they survive at all – they become patrons and can raise their own ‘children’. Entire family trees stretching out millions of years exist.

    Then humans get discovered, and they have no patron – yet they’ve already uplifted two species on their own, dolphins and chimpanzees. That touches off an enormous religious and political debate in the galactic community, which breaks down to three factions that readers of BJ will find very, VERY familiar.

    The Powerless Liberals – mostly the fox-like race the Tymbrini and their tiny family tree. They’re open advocates for humanity because it’s the Right Thing to Do. Their greatest weapons are mockery, snark and practical jokes, since militarily they are a nonentity. They think the old system is hopelessly corrupt, but lack the power to change it directly, even to assist humanity.
    The Mushy Centrists – The vast majority of the races, which simply want to be left to their own devices and their families, and don’t care about the ‘wolfing’ humans one way or another. They are the biggest power, collectively, but they don’t care to use it unless directly threatened. They are the status quo ante.
    The Religous Reactionaries – the Tandu, the Soro, the Gubru, the Jophur and other assorted baddies, that want to forcibly adopt us. They abuse their client races without mercy and believe God is on their side in all things. Tradition is everything and power is all they care about, to nihiliistic extremes. They possess a minority of military and political power, but they aren’t afraid to use it, and when they do, they use it without mercy (though they are very careful to avoid pissing off the centrists, lest they get involved). When they don’t have anything better to do, they constantly war with each other to see who’s God is greater.

    There are even right of center races such as the Thennanin, who philosophically agree with the reactionaries but aren’t themselves jihadists, and find open religious warfare distasteful. They play a crucial part in the book Uplift War.

    Probably the most politically nuanced sci-fi I’ve ever read, and by a died-in-the-wool liberal activist at that.

  2. 2.

    Mnemosyne

    I see horses on my commute quite often because I drive past the LA Equestrian Center on my way to work. It still strikes me as very surreal to see horses crossing the street in urban Los Angeles.

    My favorite was the vaquero who was drinking a Starbucks while riding one horse and leading another. I’m still not sure if he picked the coffee up on his way to work that day or stopped to get it while he was out with the horses.

  3. 3.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @Mnemosyne: I used to live near the equestrian center in Burbank/North Hollywood,. Always odd seeing them walk down the street.

    One day I was caught in a traffic jam on my way to Boulder. Why? Because a hot air balloon had come down on the side of the highway. LOL

  4. 4.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Mnemosyne: When I was in school in London in the mid-’80s, I lived near Hyde Park. There was a riding stable in one of the mews around the corner. It was incongruous.

  6. 6.

    Ben Vernia

    I’m not a blogger nor much of a Balloon Juice regular, but is there some way to suggest a topic for one of the regulars to address? Here’s mine: Democratic IT infrastructure. I worked in both Virginia and Michigan this year, and in both locations, we used the same paper VoteBuilder printouts for phone banking and canvassing. This obviously gives us something like 50% return on volunteer time, because the work done making contacts must then be typed into the actual database. I’ve read articles about the GOP (or Koch Bros., or someone equally evil) having access to phone/tablet apps. Why are we still using tech dating from the 2008 race?

  7. 7.

    Mnemosyne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Griffith Park, which is where people ride their horses, is bounded on two sides by two major freeways. There are tunnels that go under the freeway to allow riders to go from their stables to the park to go riding.

    Los Angeles is a very strange city — it’s very, very urban in some areas and genuinely rural in others. And near us, they managed to combine the two.

  8. 8.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    Matthew Yglesias‏ @mattyglesias 10h10 hours ago

    Trump’s team forced Nikki Haley to fire career staff who were coaching her in how to talk tough to the Russians.

    122 replies 3,362 retweets 2,482 likes

    so many coincidences

  9. 9.

    Sab

    Where do you live? I commuted to work in a blizzard today. It was very dull but terrifying.
    My grandfather grew up on a dairy farm in PA. Real cows that hardly ever rode upside down in the back of a pickup truck
    Cool picture though.

  16. 16.

    efgoldman

    Many years ago, driving on Rt 128 outside Boston, we started gaining on a pickup truck with what looked like a very large dog in the bed.
    Turned out to be a live black bear, chained by a collar, Damndest thing.

  18. 18.

    Mnemosyne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Most of the intersections along that stretch of Riverside Drive have “walk” signal buttons at the height of someone on horseback so riders don’t have to get down to press the button. It’s a stretch of about 3 miles or so, east to west.

    ETA: There have been a couple of mornings when I had to explain to my boss that I was a few minutes late because someone’s horse decided to stop in the middle of the street.

  20. 20.

    efgoldman

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I once saw a horse trailer (in an Ohio blizzard) with at least four tigers in in it.

    Al Kaline, Alan Trammel, Denny McLain and Micky Lolich?

  21. 21.

    Mnemosyne

    We’re going to see Fun Home at the Ahmanson tomorrow for the matinee. I kept hearing it was good, and we got offered a deal for $49 seats.

  23. 23.

    Ohio Mom

    @Ben Vernia: I can’t answer that question but I went to my local Democratic club meeting a couple of weeks ago to hear the head of the Ohio Democratic Party give a postmortem on what went wrong in the Buckeye state last fall. I was pretty horrified at some of the strategic errors the Hillary campaign made.

    But also came away with a newly deepened appreciation of exactly how huge and unwieldy it is to do a national campaign. It’s amazing anybody ever wins…

  25. 25.

    Mike J

    @Omnes Omnibus: Caught a few minutes. I’m watching J class boats on youtube. 1930s America’s Cup class.

    Biggest boat I’ve ever raced on is 44′, these are 130′ and just look like a sailboat. The archetype. Getting the blood up for spring racing.

  26. 26.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Major Major Major Major: Nor do I. But it was a bit surreal to see to tigers’ heads appear out of the gaps in the tailgate and other paws appearing out from further along the trailer. Who knows how many were actually in it? Well, I assume that the people who loaded it did, but I didn’t mean to be literal.

  27. 27.

    BruceFromOhio

    What are you up to tonight?

    Drinking heavily. Avoiding cows in traffic. Wondering what floor the down-escalator of America The Beautiful finally stops on, and what department is there. Professing admiration for my general practitioner in the survey I received today from Hospital, Inc.

    Being grateful I am still alive, awake, and aware, come what may.

  29. 29.

    Aleta

    It may take a sub to read this essay in Harper’s by Rebecca Solnit. Some paragraphs from it (the essay is much longer):

    Think of our democracy as a house we built in 1776, big enough only for Christian, property-owning white men. Over the next two centuries, various groups struggled to make it bigger, with space for people of other faiths or no faith, people of color, poor people, and women. Imagine then that someone stole a shingle, or a nail — first one, then another. After many such small thefts, the structure weakens. The roof begins to fall in; whole rooms are torn down, the wreckage is carted away; eventually, all that remains is a skeleton.
    …
    Democracy thrives best in a society whose water is drinkable, whose schools impart a decent education, whose denizens have adequate incomes and hope for the future. People have less time, less energy, and fewer resources to participate in civic life when they lack reliable access to food and shelter, when they are overworked and scrambling to stay afloat, when they have been burdened with immense debt by the cost of an education or housing or health care, when they have been criminalized, marginalized, terrorized.
    …
    … Today’s Republicans are democracy’s enemy, and it is theirs.

    In 2000, when the recount in Florida was under way and the outcome of the election remained uncertain, well-dressed men and women showed up to disrupt the process. These were not spontaneous protesters but Republican operatives and paid participants; their wardrobe gave the event its name, the Brooks Brothers Riot. The party feared that if the recount went forward, Al Gore might win the state, and thereby the presidency.

    When the 2016 election was challenged by the Green Party’s Jill Stein, the party intervened again. Nick Shapiro, a Bay Area software executive, returned to his native Detroit to assist with the recount in December. He told me that the Republicans were out in force. At the vast Cobo Center, where Shapiro was assigned to work, each table had at least one Republican observer standing by, equipped with a script that they used to contest every single precinct. There were only a few observers present from the Green Party. Shapiro told me that the election officials at the table he was monitoring were prevented from counting a single vote during his first four-hour shift.

    The problems the Michigan recount was intended to address weren’t negligible. Optical-scanner machines had recorded 75,000 “blank” votes for president, a higher number than in previous elections; these ballots were never manually inspected to decipher the voters’ intentions. People sometimes purposefully leave portions of their ballot blank, but machines also sometimes fail to count ballots that have been marked. In addition, Detroit officials claimed that eighty-seven of the city’s optical scanners had broken down during voting, and there was a discrepancy in many Detroit-area precincts between the number of paper ballots on hand and the number of people who were recorded to have voted. All this, in a state where Trump’s victory came down to 11,000 votes. Yet a Michigan law prevented recounts in precincts with such discrepancies, which meant that a record number of precincts in this Democratic stronghold were excluded from the process. In the end, though, neither the Republicans’ ground-level sabotage nor the bizarre regulation mattered; an obliging judge called off the recount after three days.
    …
    Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, is infamous for his efforts in the 1980s to persecute black voting-rights activists and intimidate hundreds of black voters. In the next decade, either the Party of Lincoln will force us to backtrack for decades, perhaps a century, or we will overcome its obstructionism and walk forward. If anything redeems this nation, it’s the idealism that has for centuries moved abolitionists, suffragists, Freedom Riders, and their like to stand up for the country’s principles — to risk, sometimes, their lives. Hundreds of activist groups have formed in the wake of the election, beginning projects to register voters, renew voting-rights campaigns, and organize local power to influence national policy. The NAACP’s Barber calls this era the Third Reconstruction.

    On January 6, the final drama of the Electoral College unfolded…. That cold winter day in Washington, seven legislators, five of them people of color, spoke out against the proceedings. James McGovern, from Massachusetts, mentioned “widespread violations of the Voting Rights Act.” “People are horrified,” said Barbara Lee, a congresswoman from Oakland. Yet as police arrested onlookers shouting objections from the gallery, Vice President Biden gaveled her and the others down.

    It’s worth remembering that democracy has always flourished not in the citadel of government but in the campaigns to open it up, to make it more than it has been. The dream arises on the outside, but it is about being allowed in. May we pry open the doors, unlatch the windows, let the breeze blow through.

    -Rebecca Solnit

  30. 30.

    BruceFromOhio

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Trump’s team forced Nikki Haley to fire career staff who were coaching her in how to talk tough to the Russians.

    If accurate, she’s not going to like that. Also a trend – when the bottom finally falls out of the Republican Agenda, there will be plenty of minions throwing stones, anvils, malatovs. Churn and burn has logical limits if only the top tier collects the bonuses.

  32. 32.

    Mnemosyne

    I made two more character dining reservations at Disneyworld and now feel satisfied that we will reach Peak Princess. We are now going to have lunch with Cinderella, ice cream with Tiana and Naveen, and dinner in Norway with three additional princesses to be named later, since they rotate them through.

    We are also having breakfast with Lilo & Stitch and Mary Poppins (on separate days at separate locations), so it’s not 100 percent princesses. I actually really want a photo with Baymax, because I love Baymax.

  34. 34.

    BruceFromOhio

    We are also having breakfast with Lilo & Stitch and Mary Poppins …

    I am available for adoption, and can also provide basic automotive maintenance and groundskeeping labor.

  35. 35.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    The Young Girls of Rochefort just started on TCM. Somehow a nice follow-up to Young Frankenstein.

  36. 36.

    Mnemosyne

    @Aleta:
    @BruceFromOhio:

    The 16 year old and I may be more excited to meet the princesses than the 11 year old is. G is no longer regretting that he isn’t coming on this trip since it’s all about living out my secret princess fantasies.

    And the B-Jers who’ve met me can tell you that in person I’m pretty much the antithesis of a Disney Princess, which is probably where this obsession is coming from.

  39. 39.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Steeplejack (tablet): If you want to play clueless, don’t be surprised if someone takes you up on it.

    ETA: I’ve missed easy things before. Most people do on occasion. If you were being sarky, it’s on me. If not, calm down.

  48. 48.

    Calouste

    I drove today past someone who was parked on top of a fire hydrant. No, not in front, on top. Htf that happened I don’t know.

  49. 49.

    efgoldman

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Must have been Redshirt picking up one of her bears.

    Long enough ago that she wouldn’t have retired to Maine yet. Bears in Boston are so thin on the ground as to be invisible.

  51. 51.

    mouse tolliver

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:

    so many coincidences

    Speaking of coincidences…

    Isn’t funny how that Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev — who gave Citizen Trump $100 million for a house that was only worth $40 million — somehow managed to visit a half dozen American cities at the exact same time Candidate Trump visited those cities during his campaign even though the Russian oligarch doesn’t even live in the United States?

    http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/russian-s-travel-examined-for-ties-to-trump-889988675966

  52. 52.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Yarrow: Yes, but it’s taking some getting used to. I just drove over to get a Tommy burger over in Eagle Rock. I really wanted one yesterday but the wife had other ideas, and I also wanted to see how the car did on the hill there. I was pretty happy how it handled the hill.

  53. 53.

    Anne Laurie

    @Calouste:

    I drove today past someone who was parked on top of a fire hydrant. No, not in front, on top. Htf that happened I don’t know.

    If your area is anything like that of the Boston local-news media, I’d guess an elderly driver hitting the wrong pedal / gear chain reaction. Last night’s story was an 83-year-old taking out the front entrance of a chain grocery; the night before had two — one oldie accidentally driving into a stripmall donut store, and a whole different tragedy in another town where the aging van driver ‘didn’t see’ the woman crossing the parking lot in front of him in the evening darkness.

    And then there’s the “impairment” problem; earlier this week a car went through two guardrails before ending up at the bottom of an ocean cliff, but the authorities hadn’t decided whether it was the booze or his age that led the driver into that predicament…

  57. 57.

    MD Poole

    I’m new here; like the threads. Looking for suggestions for advertising my new book about dogs. And want to chat with balloon-juice person. Suggestions?
    Love the cow; was in NYC during the cow exhibition; cows all over town for months.

  59. 59.

    btom89

    @Ohio Mom: I always wondered if that was where the 50 state campaign came in—they delegated to local authorities who knew the locals better and was able to adapt the tactics on a local level to boost turnout and enthusiasm for local candidates, state candidates and the presidential candidate. It just seemed like they should come up with an overarching approach—federal support who knew how to handle the national media, with overseers and local experts who knew the local communities and their problems, and they talk to each other and adapt on a daily basis. Remind everyone everywhere why government matters and why the Republicans do not watch out for it and the citizens’ needs first.

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