Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

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

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

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

A norm that restrains only one side really isn’t a norm – it’s a trap.

It could be worse. Vance could have said “post-menopausal sows.” Waiting for that audiotape to surface.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

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Archives for November 2018

Artists In Our Midst

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It’s been a super long time since we have had one of these, and I was looking for a niche item or two, and thought I would see if any of you do these things or have any recommendations.

At any rate, I am looking for a new 8″ chef knife since I broke the tip of my Viking and they do not make the model any more. Do any of you make custom knives? I only want one.

Second, I would like a nice stained glass piece to hang in the window in my office to reflect the light and bring in some color. Do any of you do this?

Finally, like all Artists in Our Midst, feel free to ply your wares, share your etsy store, or just highlight you singing, music, art, writing, or whatever you do that makes you you.

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Floriduh! Man: Head Out on the Highway Edition

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We’ve got actual documentary footage from Steve in the ATL’s recent trip to Florida!!!

Awooooooo!!!!!

The temperature drops into the mid 50s for a couple of days and everyone breaks out the furs.

Actually Steve in the ATL emailed me this link to Buzzfeed‘s annual 40 Most Insane Things to Happen in Florida in 2018 article. If you click through you might notice that I covered at least 15 of those here as Floriduh! Man or Woman posts.

Remember motorcycles are everywhere…

Open thread!

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Great Bill, Great Policy, Great Politics

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This is an exciting bill:

House Democrats unveiled details of their first bill in the new Congress on Friday — a sweeping anti-corruption bill aimed at stamping out the influence of money in politics and expanding voting rights.

This is House Resolution 1 — the first thing House Democrats will tackle after the speaker’s vote in early January. To be clear, this legislation has little-to-no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate or being signed by President Donald Trump.

***

There are three main planks the bill covers: campaign finance reform, strengthening the government’s ethics laws, and expanding voting rights.

Campaign finance

  • Public financing of campaigns, powered by small donations. Under Sarbanes’s vision, the federal government would provide a voluntary 6-1 match for candidates for president and Congress, which means for every dollar a candidate raises from small donations, the federal government would match it six times over. “If you give $100 to a candidate that’s meeting those requirements, then that candidate would get another $600 coming in behind them,” Sarbanes told Vox this summer. “The evidence and the modeling is that most candidates can do as well or better in terms of the dollars they raise if they step into this new system.”
  • Passing the DISCLOSE Act, pushed by Rep. David Cicilline (RI) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), both Democrats from Rhode Island. This would require Super PACs and “dark money” political organizations to make their donors public.
  • Passing the Honest Ads Act, championed by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Mark Warner (VA), which would require Facebook and Twitter to disclose the source of money of political ads on their platforms, and share how much money was spent.

    • Ethics

  • Requiring the president to disclose his or her tax returns.
  • Stopping members of Congress from using taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment cases or buy first-class plane tickets.
  • Giving the Office of Government Ethics the power to do more oversight and enforcement and put in stricter lobbying registration requirements.
  • Create a new ethical code for the US Supreme Court, ensuring all branches of government are impacted by the new law.

    • Voting rights

  • Creating new national automatic voter registration that asks voters to opt out, rather than opt in, ensuring more people will be signed up to vote. Early voting and online voter registration would also be promoted.
  • Restoring the Voting Rights Act, part of which was dismantled by a US Supreme Court decision in 2013. Ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections and prohibiting voter roll purging.
  • Beefing up elections security, including requiring the Director of National Intelligence to do regular checks on foreign threats.

    • Obviously, the devil is in the details, but on their own, each one of these seems reasonable and a genuinely good thing. The other thing I like about this is that it is a direct response to what the public is demanding, and the House will be passing it while the Republicans are already on the defensive regarding corruption, with two members of their caucus currently under indictment and all of them staggered by the overt corruption and cronyism of the malignant narcissist in chief and his lackeys in the administration.

    Pass it, and dare them to vote against it. It may be DOA in the Senate because Mitch McConnell is shameless, but they can just do what the GOP does best, and beat the Republicans around the head and neck with it all the way into 2020.

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    Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: “I AM NOT A CROOK”

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    I figured it was intended to be more like The Apartment, only for murders instead of extramarital assignations. Which is a whole different can of worms, but hey — foreigners! Watcha gonna do?

    … BuzzFeed News first reported in May on the secret dealings of Cohen and his business associate Felix Sater with political and business figures in Moscow.

    The two men worked furiously behind the scenes into the summer of 2016 to get the Moscow deal finished — despite public claims that the development was canned in January, before Trump won the Republican nomination. Sater told BuzzFeed News today that he and Cohen thought giving the Trump Tower’s most luxurious apartment, a $50 million penthouse, to Putin would entice other wealthy buyers to purchase their own. “In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin,” Sater told BuzzFeed News. “My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units. All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin.” A second source confirmed the plan.

    Sater, a brash real estate promoter who pleaded guilty to racketeering in 1998 and became a longtime asset to US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, had worked with the Trump Organization on deals in the past and said he came up with the idea. Cohen, Sater recalled, said, “Great idea.”…

    Another sidebar: Trump and his minions knew Sater had ratted out prior partners to the FBI, but they trusted him into their deals anyway. Did Donny Dollhands actually believe he was smart enough not to get caught the same way, or was he just that desperate for anyone who might help him make some ready cash?

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    Early Weekend Open Thread

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    I found pictorial representation of how I feel several times a day, having started a new job, and moved to a new city, that feel far above my station.

    I shouldn’t say too much about work, but everything you’ve seen on Silicon Valley is true. Folks seem to have collectively decided work was over around four. Now my remaining coworkers are drinking old-fashioneds, playing shuffleboard, doing puzzles… we apparently have a guitar in the office, as somebody is practicing it.

    We are, literally, trying to finish off the week’s avocado delivery.

    And so I’m accessing Balloon-Juice for I think the first time on the office network. Hi! I’m going upstate to see Samwise this weekend. There will be pictures.

    Do any of y’all have anything fun planned?

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    That October Surprise From The New York Times

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    Given the new developments in what we know about Donald Trump’s interactions with Russia, some of us have been kicking around that “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” story that the New York Times served up on October 31, 2016.

    Our own Tom Levenson has a theory:

    James Fallows agreed.

    https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1068502035169861632

    Hillary Clinton tried to get the story out.

    Here’s a more recent story on that connection to Alfa Bank.  Still ambiguous.

    After the election, Times public editor Liz Spayd blasted the Times for that story. Editor Dean Baquet has given only short, weak responses like this one.

    Here’s Southpaw:

     

     

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    The Curse of Cassandra

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    Hillary Clinton gave this speech just a few days after the Comey letter dropped, an event that prompted The New York Times to publish an edition with this all-caps headline: “NEW EMAILS JOLT CLINTON CAMPAIGN IN RACE’S LAST DAYS” [PDF].

    I hope Clinton gets some satisfaction from the knowledge that she was right about everything. I doubt it’s much comfort since Clinton doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who sees herself as the center of the universe.

    Of course, Trump thinks the sun rises and sets in his pants, and we can see how disastrous it is to put someone like that in charge of a large, rich, diverse, heavily armed country. But less malevolent manifestations of the same pathology greased the skids toward our present catastrophe.

    Comey is one example. Following boring old FBI protocol wasn’t good enough for a world-bestriding colossus such as Comey, so he inserted himself into the race, and disaster followed.

    The front page of that infamous Times edition showcased another example of the “I am the cosmos” syndrome that was instrumental in bringing a once-great nation low: Clinton beat reporter Amy Chozick, whose byline appeared on an article entitled “With 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation ‘Changes Everything.'”

    As y’all may know, Chozick wrote a memoir of her time covering the Clinton campaigns in 2008 and 2016. Her book has been optioned for a TV series, which I sincerely hope is the biggest flop in history. That’s not just me being catty (though I am) — it’s a desire NOT to see someone rewarded for doing a shitty job because we’ll get even more of that behavior.

    Anyhoo, in a Guardian interview/book review published in April but newly relevant in light of the revelations about Trump’s Russia ties, Chozick attempts introspection, but it leads right back to her own goddamned navel, as always:

    “It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history,” Chozick writes, highlighting the difficulty of reporting on hacked emails belonging to Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. There is almost a tacit admission that perhaps there was some fairness to the Clinton campaign’s repeated suggestion that reporters did not take seriously the alarms they sounded over the Russians and their role in the hacks of Podesta and the Democratic National Committee.

    Chozick said Chelsea Clinton’s reaction to her book was part of why she often “felt defeated”. “To be immediately greeted with antagonism when you’re writing something that was pretty sympathetic and self-reflective reminded me of the constant state of play in the campaign where you just can’t win,” she said.

    “You write a positive story, there’s something they hate about it.”

    Yeah, that’s the important thing here — [sob] “Chelsea haaaaaaates me!”

    This post was originally intended to be about Clinton’s prescience, and it is. But it seemed incomplete without showcasing the astounding incompetence and hubris that obscured her prescience. It wasn’t just Comey, and her delusions of grandeur aside, Chozick was merely a bit player, but she’s emblematic of a much larger problem.

    It pisses a certain type of person off when a woman is right — not just sexist men, but sometimes grown-ass women who still haven’t gotten over their mommy issues or those who see an advantage for themselves in siding with men to oppose a powerful woman. Call it the Curse of Cassandra.

    It’s depressing, but here we are, and I don’t know how we solve this problem.

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