Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Peak wingnut was a lie.

After roe, women are no longer free.

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

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

In my day, never was longer.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

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

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

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

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

No one could have predicted…

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

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Reader Interactions

44Comments

  6. 6.

    Ohio Mom

    Wow. I didn’t ever imagine that there was one specific Nigerian. I thought it was some sort of cabal. That one guy did that all by himself, that’s impressive.

  7. 7.

    Chyron HR

    “I barely knew Ummagumma! His trial had nothing to do with FAKE COLLUSION which is the WORST HOAX EVER! End the RIGGED WITCH HUNT now!”

  13. 13.

    Just Chuck

    BEC is a lot more than the run of the mill Nigerian scams. It’s typically a targeted scheme involving getting a business that does a lot of spot cash transactions to sign off on a bogus transfer under time pressure. It usually involves some prior compromise beforehand to find identities to steal. Not that taking down a single BEC scammer makes an iota of difference, but it is a step up from the usual Nigerian scheme.

  17. 17.

    Chip Daniels

    Dear Mr. Trump
    I am Nigerian businessman, incarcerated in New York, looking to launder billions of dollars out of country…

  18. 18.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Ohio Mom: I’ve read descriptions of Nigerian internet cafes (back in the day; I don’t know if internet cafes are still a thing anywhere) where every single person there was busily engaged in Nigerian-scamming.

    It’s not just one person, it’s an industry. One that is always evolving. In fact my first encounter with it was a snail-mail letter received in a business PO Box. I’m sure our inboxes will continue to be flooded.

    Sounds like this was a more specific, more targeted scam. See Just Chuck’s comment at #13.

  19. 19.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    I no longer have the bookmarks or remember their locations, but there used to be a couple of really good scam-the-scammer websites that suckered these guys into extended correspondences, offers of marriage, etc. Even occasionally getting money out of them.

  20. 20.

    Ohio Mom

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Thanks, that explanation makes more sense — and confirms my original understanding, that there was a good-sized group behind the emails.

    I actually got one of those emails, years ago. Looking back, I should have printed it out for a souvenir.

  23. 23.

    Schlemazel

    HELLO GOOD FRIEND!

    My name is Onyekacki Opara and I find myself in a situation that will be of good benefits to you.

    I have in an account in the Bank of Great England of the amount of $21,000,000 . Unfortunately I am unavailable to access these fund owning to my current situation in a foreign country.

    Meh, you get the idea

  24. 24.

    Chip Daniels

    @Schlemazel: And my beautiful assistant, a Russian national who loves guns, is looking for middle aged lonely man to have sexy sexytime with, if only she could get bail….

  27. 27.

    randy khan

    @Ruckus:

    I’ve gotten both emails and a letter.
    The emails were better written. Not by much mind you, but better.

    I’ve read that one of the tricks is to make the writing imperfect because it makes the marks believe they’re smarter than the cons.

  28. 28.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Adam L Silverman: there was a post at slate laying out all the state charges Manafort could face if he doesn’t cut a deal. IANAL, but I hope that L was right, and I really hope Barbara Underwood hates trump as much as most people

  29. 29.

    Luthe

    My favorite Nigerian scam email is the one I got from “Mr. Warren Edward Buffett Billionaire investor.”

  31. 31.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:
    Probably you’re thinking of https://www.419eater.com/
    ( https://www.419eater.com/html/ethics.htm )
    I never had the nerve or (mainly) vindictiveness. (A friend did an early 2000s 419 spoof involving Princess Leia (the person at the linked site did not write it) )

    DEAR friend.
    I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR OF THE ROYAL FAMILY OF
    ALDERAN. I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER, IN CONFIDENCE
    CONSIDERING MY PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION. …

  33. 33.

    jonas

    Wait, so what happened to the widow of the Nigerian general who has my money order for the fee to transfer the $250 million into a Swiss bank account for me?

  37. 37.

    Ruckus

    @randy khan:
    First, it didn’t work.
    Second, I find it difficult to think that an educated person, could even think badly enough to write that bad. Then it hits me that our current asshole in charge had a prep school/reasonable college education. Which of course he got absolutely nothing out of. Fred must have been pissed that he paid that much and got nothing for it.

  40. 40.

    Felanius Kootea

    Oh wow, an actual Nigerian name this time and not a Louisianan “Nigerian scammer” by the name of Michael Neu. Impressive.

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Internet cafes are still a thing in many developing countries. The scammers who lurk in the Nigerian ones are called “yahoo boys” but not everyone using the Internet cafe is a scammer.

    My first academic job in the US, one of my colleagues (originally from Norway) received a Nigerian scam email from someone pretending to be Umaru Dikko, a former Nigerian Minister accused of embezzling billions of dollars from Nigeria and fleeing to the UK, where he lived out his days in style. There’s a fascinating story about how a subsequent Nigerian government, with help from the Israelis tried to kidnap him from the UK in a diplomatic bag, but that’s one for another day.

    Since I was the only Nigerian my colleagues knew (and the only black person in my research lab), I was asked to explain the scam email (because of course, every Nigerian knows every scammer). I asked the colleague who’d received the email to forward it to me and I send a metric ton of curses to the scammer. He replied and said something along the lines of “Wait, you made it out to the US and live well and now you’re trying to prevent me from earning a living? How mean of you. By the way, if you send me some dollars I might stop targeting your colleagues.” I gave up at that point.

  41. 41.

    oldgold

    From WaPo:

    On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson pushed back a scheduled pretrial hearing in the case from Wednesday to Friday. Court filings did not indicate the reason for the delay.

    Interesting.

  42. 42.

    divF

    @NotMax: I used to open my Sunday morning radio show with Careful with that Axe, Eugene. I thought it was a great segue from the religious programming that preceeded me.

  44. 44.

    HeartlandLiberal

    The scams are relentless. Couple days ago an email slipped through the spam filters of my university account, which I got to keep in retirement, and has excellent spam filtering, offering me a job doing home work for Walmart. Yeah, right. I pulled up the received headers, and figured out the email originated from from some IP in Nigeria. It was faking an from: address at some university here in the U.S.A., totally false and easily forged, of course.

    As for the phone scams, they continue. Right not we get a couple of area code 202 calls every day, usually a 202-860-nnnn number. Never answer these. They are usually IRS scams, spoofing DC area code to try and make you think the call is legit.

    Also, we are still getting daily calls from long phone numbers starting with letter “V”, which appears from what I researched on Google to be new generation autodialers used by businesses and cons artists.

    It has gotten so bad the last few months we simply don’t answer the phone unless the caller ID shows who is calling and we know them, or the number without caller ID is one we recognize. They can leave a message if they are legit.

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