Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

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

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

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

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

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

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Archives for September 2018

And everywhere I look there’s a dead end waiting

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I don’t suppose any of you are surprised that brave Jeff Flake’s FBI gambit will end in a sham investigation designed to clear Saint Brett:

Perhaps more important, the White House Counsel’s Office – i.e., close Kavanaugh associate Don McGahn – has given the FBI a list of permitted interviews. This list appears to prevent any follow up on a number of leads raised in Thursday’s hearing, such as conflicting accounts of Kavanaugh’s college drinking and the reference to Mark Judge’s high school employment which was referenced as a possible corroboration of Blasey Ford’s testimony.

If we’re being honest, this is really a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.

We’re nearing our goal in the Balloon Juice Forty House Seats To Freedom Fund. The money is split 40 ways by default, but you can give to just a few candidates to minimize mailing lists. If we don’t take at least one chamber this November, I do fear for our democracy, such as it is.

Goal Thermometer

hen I hit the goal, I’ll take recommendations for more races and do those. By the way, last Friday ActBlue took in 11 million dollars, the most ever in a single day.

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The Anti-Trump (Open Thread)

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Housekeeping comment: This is a post about the 2020 presidential election. Yes, I know there is a midterm election happening in 37 days. Our focus should be, has been and will be primarily on that and other present-day issues. But this is an almost top-10K politics and pets blog, and if we can take time to talk about gardening, gaming, TV, movies, cat-shaving, home improvement, etc., without shattering the republic due to a lapse in concentration on the midterms, by golly I think we can occasionally cast our speculation forward without all coming to naught.

Senator Elizabeth Warren made an unsurprising announcement at a town hall yesterday (NYT):

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts declared on Saturday that she would “take a hard look” at running for the White House in 2020 once the midterm elections are over, and called on the country to elect a female president to fix the “broken government” in Washington.

Ms. Warren made the announcement during a town-hall meeting in Holyoke, Mass., where she was decrying President Trump and Senate Republicans for digging in behind Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, the embattled Supreme Court nominee who has been accused of sexual assault. She described the hearings as a spectacle of “powerful men helping a powerful man make it to an even more powerful position.”

“I watched that and I thought: time’s up,” Ms. Warren said, according to a transcript and video of her remarks provided by an aide. “It’s time for women to go to Washington and fix our broken government, and that includes a woman at the top.”

She continued, “So here’s what I promise: After Nov. 6, I will take a hard look at running for president.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar hasn’t mentioned throwing her chapeau into the ring, but an article by Aaron Blake and Dave Weigel in The Post speculated about her possible future as a 2020 nominee. It recounted the moment when Kavanaugh angrily demanded to know if Klobuchar is a black-out drunk in response to a politely posed and relevant question.

During the hearing, Kavanaugh publicly apologized to Klobuchar after the break, perhaps perceiving that his taunting question came across as rude and aggressive, especially since Klobuchar had just shared that her 90-something father is a recovering alcoholic.

The scene at the hearing — in which Kavanaugh was defending himself against allegations of sexual assault — has at once thrust Klobuchar into the national spotlight and reinforced what could be her central shortcoming as a 2020 contender for the presidency. In a party that by most accounts is searching for liberals and powerful personalities to counteract President Trump, Klobuchar has crafted a brand almost diametrically opposed to that. In many ways, Klobuchar’s running and winning in 2020 would defy conventional wisdom, just as Trump did in 2016…

“While she’s a down-the-line Democratic vote, she doesn’t have an image here as the partisan bomb-thrower,” said Minnesota Republican consultant Mark Drake. “I think Democrats are looking for someone who is the partisan bomb-thrower. She’s the senator next door, not the bomb-thrower next door.”

If both women run, we’ll be treated to all sorts of dumb stereotypes. I don’t look forward to that, but I’d love to see either Warren, Klobuchar or both in the race and/or continuing to play prominent roles within the party. Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand too.

It’s tempting to think that Hillary Clinton’s loss proved we’re just not ready for a woman president in America. I wondered that myself early on, but I don’t anymore — there’s a difficult and unfair double-standard the first woman president will have to overcome, just as President Obama had to clear extra hurdles to become the first black president. But I do believe it’s possible.

Clinton’s loss, rather than arguing against women’s viability as presidential candidates, is an argument in favor of it. She was sandbagged by a decades-long media defamation campaign, bogus “dynasty” charges, Russian active measures, third-party sneering and voter suppression, and she still won the popular vote by millions.

On the contrary, I think the Democrats NEED a woman on the ticket in 2020. Whoever she is, she will not only be an effective foil to Trump, she’ll be a walking reminder that we can’t afford another misogynist on the Supreme Court. May the best woman win.

The Anti-Trump (Open Thread)Post + Comments (198)

Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Winter Prep

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Update from indefatigable gardener / commentor Opiejeanne:

This is the garden shed project so far.

[Here’s the original post, from back in May.]

You can see we haven’t quite figured out how to put the ceiling up. Some of the items like the paint tubes and brushes will have to be brought in for the winter because freezing is not recommended.

The purple chair was a garage sale find; $5.

The blue dresser/desk/secretary was $35 at an architectural salvage place in Seattle. They don’t usually have much furniture. I painted it after finding out that it used to have a nice mahogany veneer that must have gotten wet and the “repair” job was not good. They filled the areas with spackle and didn’t bother to sand it down before painting it black with a drab green interior.


The floor needs to be swept and the rug shaken out; the little rug was damaged by our cats so the shed got it.

***********

What’s going on in your garden(s), this week?

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Darkest Night Open Thread

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Tonight on Balloon-Juice After Dark: Strong women!

The Many Faces of Women Who Identify as Witches

The witch is often understood as a mishmash of sometimes contradictory clichés: sexually forthright but psychologically mysterious; threatening and haggish but irresistibly seductive; a kooky believer in cultish mumbo-jumbo and a canny she-devil; a sophisticated holder of arcane spiritual knowledge and a corporeal being who is no thought and all instinct. Even more recently, the witch has entered the Zeitgeist as a figure akin to the so-called nasty woman, who—in the face of a Presidential Administration that is quick to cast any criticism as a “witch hunt”—has reclaimed the term for the feminist resistance[…] The muddled stereotypes that surround witches nowadays are, in the end, not so very different from those used to define that perennial problem: woman.

In her portrait series “Major Arcana: Witches in America,” which will be shown at the ClampArt gallery, in Chelsea, beginning October 4th, the photographer Frances F. Denny seeks to explore the figure of the contemporary witch beyond the cultural chestnuts that have shrouded and obscured it. In the course of the past two years, Denny, who holds an M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (where I taught her for a semester a number of years ago), has travelled in California, Louisiana, and along the East Coast, taking the portraits of dozens of women who identify as witches.

It’s a photo feature, so click through and take a look. I’d include a sample here but I’m too tired to remember how copyright works.

Open thread!

Updated because I remembered this:

Darkest Night Open ThreadPost + Comments (90)

Excellent Read: “Kavanaugh & the Blackout Theory”

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First, some comforting news — everyone can read Paul Bronks’ twitter feed again!


 
I guess Saturday night is either the worst or the best time to post these links. The Washington Post has an article (from an ex-Yale prof!) warning “Many teens drink. Rich ones like Kavanaugh are more likely to abuse alcohol. Affluence is a risk factor for dangerous behavior”.

In the NYTimes, Sarah Hepola:

… One of the trickiest things about blackouts is that you don’t necessarily know you’re having one. I wrote a memoir, so centered around the slips of memory caused by heavy drinking that it is actually called “Blackout,” and in the years since its 2015 release, I’ve heard from thousands of people who experienced them. No small number of those notes contain some version of this: “For years, I was having blackouts without knowing what they were.” Blackouts are like a philosophical riddle inside a legal conundrum: If you can’t remember a thing, how do you know it happened?…

There are two kinds of blackouts. The more common is fragmentary, where slivers of the night are missing. The more extreme version is “en bloc,” where several hours can be wiped from the memory drive. Fragmentary blackouts start at a blood alcohol concentration of about 0.2, though they’ve been found at lower levels; everyone’s brain is different. En bloc blackouts happen closer to 0.3, and it’s worth noting that at 0.35, it is estimated that about half of drinkers will die, so blackout drinkers are getting up there.

A common bonding experience in drinking circles is “piecing the night together”— friends sitting around the next day, laughing as they scroll through text messages and camera rolls, trying to fill in the gaps in one another’s memories. Some of the missing dots are easy to connect: Oh, that’s right, we went to the bar! Others might be confounding: Wait, we went to a BAR?

“Piecing things together” is a phrase that jumped out at me when I read Judge Kavanaugh’s 2014 speech to the Yale Law School Federalist Society, in which he describes drunken heroics as a routine part of campus life; Senator Richard Blumenthal also leapt on this at the hearing, although Judge Kavanaugh deflected the inquiry, as he did every question about any possible dark side to his consumption…

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Open Thread: First Class Citizenship And Not A Bad Job Application

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And some kittehs from JeffreyW:


Open thread

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Something’s wrong ’cause my mind is fading

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If you’d asked me before Thursday, I would have said that part of me hoped that Kavanaugh’s nomination went through because his likely replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, is a right-wing lunatic who is a member of a weird Catholic cult. But If found his performance sickening. He got up and raged like a drunk or a dry drunk and told no end of bald-faced lies, about “Renate alums”, the Devil’s Triangle, and a host of other things.

What disturbs me most these days about establishment commentary is that our pundits think that to be “objective”, whatever the hell that means, you have to put away your common sense. Common sense tells you that false accusations in this setting are rare, that Ford came across as credible, and that Kavanaugh did not, both because of his childish rage and the fact that he lied constantly about other things. Thus common sense tells you that it’s extremely likely that Kavanaugh committed sexual assault. That’s not a right-wing position or a left-wing position. It’s an my-head-is-not-up-my-ass position

Fuck all these assholes. Give to the Balloon Juice Forty House Seats To Freedom fund. Frankly, some of the polls haven’t been that great the past few days, specifically the live NYT ones, and we’re going to have to go all out to take back the House.

Goal Thermometer

Something’s wrong ’cause my mind is fadingPost + Comments (179)