Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

This really is a full service blog.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

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Archives for December 2018

Open Thread: The Chinese Leaders Are Laughing *At* You, Donald

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Yesterday:


 
Today…

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My Highly Nuanced and Sophisticated Legal Analysis of Mueller’s Flynn Sentencing Memo

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Strap in for my hot takes:

1.) Flynn is crazy and a total fucking asshole, but he’s not as dumb as many others in Trump world, knows when he is caught, and is smart enough to listen to his lawyers when they tell him to cooperate because he does not want to die in jail.

2.) This is like Fitzmas, but this time there is a present, only when we open it all there is a promise for several more presents in a couple more weeks.

There you go. This is why this is a near top 1000 blog.

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LTG Flynn Met With the Special Counsel’s Investigators 19 Times!!!!

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Special Counsel Mueller has submitted his sentencing memo to the court regarding LTG Flynn. The two top take aways are that LTG Flynn met with the Special Counsel’s investigators 19 times and that, as a result of his full cooperation with the Special Counsel’s investigation, Special Counsel Mueller is recommending no prison time for the crime that LTG Flynn plead to. Basically Flynn sang like a bird and told the Special Counsel everything!!!!!!

Flynn was facing up to five years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.

Here’s the link to the memo.

Buzzfeed has the details!

WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Mueller is okay with a sentence that doesn’t include any jail time for Michael Flynn — the former Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents in the Russia probe — according to a new court filing Tuesday night.

Flynn is scheduled for sentencing on Dec. 18, more than a year after he first appeared before a federal judge in Washington, DC, to enter his guilty plea. His deal with the government required him to cooperate with Mueller’s office, and in Tuesday’s filing, prosecutors said Flynn’s offense was “serious,” but that he deserved credit for accepting responsibility and “substantially assisting the government.”

“Given the defendant’s substantial assistance and other considerations set
forth below, a sentence at the low end of the guideline range — including a sentence that does not impose a term of incarceration — is appropriate and warranted,” prosecutors wrote.

Much more at the link.

The supplementary filing had a lot of redactions:

Expect the presidential frenzy, as well as the frenzy of those around him, to increase exponentially.

It is important to remember that anyone who tells you definitively what the Special Counsel and his investigators are doing does not know what the Special Counsel and his investigators are doing. The only people who know what the Special Counsel and his investigators are doing are the Special Counsel and his investigators and they do not comment publicly. They only speak through indictments, other court filings, and in court.

Don’t lie to the FBI! It’s rude and upsets the special agents’ feelings!

Open thread.

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Balloon Juice Site Redesign Fundraiser

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As you know, we are working on a new website, and a crew of longtime members of the blogetariat have been helping me see things through the eyes of the reader and coordinating the redesign. They have put together a comprehensive list of what we want from the “new” site, and are currently in the process of reaching out to web developers for bids. Thus, I have been informed that now is the time for the site fundraiser.

We will let this run for two weeks (and then again in January), with another updated post every day or so. As always, the paypal thing is always to the right, and should you do your Christmas shopping on Amazon, click through the link to the right and the website cuts a minute commission. Should you choose to not want to use paypal, email me and I will send you a snail mail address.

In what I consider the best news of the year, CafePress is once again doing calendars, so the BJ calendar will be available for purchase that way instead of having to go through the sheer hell we went through last year.

In other good news, the Balloon Man is coming back.

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Did I miss the Flynn sentencing memo?

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Been waiting for my phone to DING with glad tidings of Muellermas, but so far, nothing. Maybe because Trump tanked the economy by lying about reaching a deal with China? Hmmph!

Here’s something amusing to divert us while we wait: Angela Merkel using one of my very favorite English words — SHITSTORM — in remarks that are otherwise in German:

Good to see evidence that the linguistic borrowing isn’t Einweg.

Anecdote: I was driving myself and two friends around Salzburg many years ago, and passing motorists kept waving at me and saying “Einbahn!” in a pleasant tone. I asked my friends, “WTF is Einbahn?” But they didn’t know either. I eventually figured out I was going the wrong way on a one-way street (when a policeman pulled me over and politely informed me, in English).

I couldn’t believe how nice they were about it! Pull that shit in America, and 10 people will flip you off and call you a stupid fucking bitch before you get a block down the road.

Open thread!

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Reading and Headline Writing are Fundamental: Epstein Lawsuit Edition

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Earlier today The Associated Press reported that a settlement had been reached in ONE OF THE lawsuits in south Florida involving Jeffrey Epstein. The headline and the wording of the tweets breaking the news were bad:

Here’s what’s in the actual AP reporting (emphasis mine):

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A last-minute settlement was reached Tuesday in a long-running Florida lawsuit involving a politically connected financier accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, clearing the way for the victims’ lawyers to try to unravel a once-secret agreement that prevented federal criminal prosecution of the financier.

The non-prosecution agreement protecting Jeffrey Epstein was negotiated a decade ago by prosecutors in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office, which was then run by current Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. It is the subject of a separate federal lawsuit in Florida filed by victims who say the deal trampled their rights to be heard.

“That injustice needs to be addressed and will be addressed,” said attorney Jack Scarola, who represents fellow lawyer Bradley Edwards in the lawsuit settled Tuesday. “There is no justification for the broad scope of immunity that was granted.”

Epstein, 65, pleaded guilty in 2008 to two state charges after reaching the non-prosecution deal with Acosta’s office while under investigation for sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls. He served 13 months in jail, was required to reach financial settlements with many of the victims and registered as a convicted sex offender.

But Epstein could have faced a possible life sentence if federal prosecutors had pursued a draft 57-page indictment that was never filed. Now, Scarola and Edwards say that possibility still exists, and the victims — some of whom were only 13 or 14 when they were molested — may yet get their day in federal court amid a national #metoo movement that seeks to hold sexual harassers and abusers to account.

“They’re willing to talk. They want to share their stories,” Edwards said.

None of the victims was in court Tuesday and it wasn’t clear if any would be available immediately for interviews.

The settlement reached Tuesday involved a lawsuit Epstein filed against Edwards almost a decade ago. Edwards filed a counterclaim, contending that Epstein sued him maliciously, trying to harm Edwards’ reputation and derail his work with Epstein’s own abuse victims.

The final paragraph is where they buried the lede, as the saying goes. The lawsuit settled this morning IS NOT the Federal lawsuit seeking to set aside the Federal non-prosecution agreement that current Labor Secretary Alex Acosta negotiated and agreed to when he was a US Attorney in south Florida in 2008. The lawsuit settled this morning was between Epstein and one of the attorneys representing Epstein’s victims. It is important to highlight all this, because, as usual, everyone read the tweets and the headline and started jumping to the wrong conclusions on social media. Including people that are normally very good at not doing these things. For instance, the normally reliable Dr. Kendzior:

I’m not trying to knock Dr. Kendzior here, she’s just the most well known of the people I’ve seen so far who bit on the AP’s inaccurate headline and tweets. Everyone is busy, everyone is overwhelmed right now with the holidays, with getting by day be day, with the fact that it’s winter, with trying not to let the insanity emanating from DC and many state capitols, as well as from abroad, overtake their daily lives. So not having time to read the article is understandable. What isn’t, and what is also not forgivable, is that our news sources, including some of the best ones, seem to have gotten into a pattern of writing inaccurate and deceptive headlines and then tweeting them out to announce their reporting in a way that further compounds the inaccuracy. It is bad enough that there are hostile foreign state and, and in some cases both foreign and domestic, non-state actors conducting ongoing information and psychological warfare, having legitimate, credible sources of news doing the same thing because they can’t get their acts together makes the hostile state and non-state actors jobs easier.

Despite, or, perhaps, because of this morning’s settlement, Epstein’s crimes and the despicable story about how he was allowed to escape proper accountability for his crimes is not going away. The Miami Herald isn’t going to let this story go. And a lot of people’s foul, stinky laundry is going to get aired out in public. And the disingenuous stories they’ve been telling to cover their own misdeeds aren’t going to hold up when this happens.

Open thread!

 

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Arsonist lied about firefighting activities

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Arsonists don’t make the best firefighters — hoocoodanode, amirite?

Valued commenter A Ghost to Most alerted us to this Raw Story piece, which has more details, in the morning thread:

A new note from investment bank JPMorgan advises traders to not buy into the hype that President Donald Trump has ended his own trade war with China.

As reported by CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, JPMorgan is telling investors that Trump’s declaration this week that China will immediately drop all tariffs on American cars has no basis in reality.

In particular, the note said that investors should have “valid reason for caution” when it comes to investing on the hopes that Trump is on the verge of a major breakthrough with China.

“It doesn’t seem like anything was actually agreed to at the dinner and White House officials are contorting themselves into pretzels to reconcile Trump’s tweets (which seem if not completely fabricated then grossly exaggerated) with reality,” the note states.

This is new, right — a pathological liar in the White House causing several-hundred-point swings in the stock market by casually tweeting big, fat whoppers, necessitating investment banks to issue cautionary statements because the president is a fucking liar who can’t be trusted to tell the truth about anything?

Someone must’ve clued Trump in, because he tweeted out this garbled dog’s breakfast of moronitude:

The negotiations with China have already started. Unless extended, they will end 90 days from the date of our wonderful and very warm dinner with President Xi in Argentina. Bob Lighthizer will be working closely with Steve Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow, Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro…..

……on seeing whether or not a REAL deal with China is actually possible. If it is, we will get it done. China is supposed to start buying Agricultural product and more immediately. President Xi and I want this deal to happen, and it probably will. But if not remember,……

….I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN

I was an English major at a Southern football school, and even I know consumers eat the costs of tariffs, but it doesn’t sound like the Wharton grad with superior genes gets that.

OMFG, Mr. Mueller — please do something before this moron wrecks not only what was once the world’s most stable democracy but brings the entire global financial system to ruin because he needs a “win.”

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