Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

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

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

In after Baud. Damn.

Second rate reporter says what?

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Come on, man.

Not all heroes wear capes.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Bark louder, little dog.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

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

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The words do not have to be perfect.

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

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickle?”

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: The Resistance Continues

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Goddess bless the Belarussians, and I wish the Dropkick Murphys would do a cover of this as a fundraiser…

On this side of the water:

Meanwhile, the Squatter-in-Chief tried to spoil the mood by throwing a rally in Oshkosh. He was, as per usual, disgusting. And intent on provoking religious terrorism, because he figures that’s a positive for his side. He also (once again) attacked immigrants; lied about comparative coronavirus statistics; and made what the pundits will assure us is a ‘joke’ about running again in 2024 after his successful 2020 term “…because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

Every day, another disgrace, another international embarrassment, but…

Reader Interactions

80Comments

  2. 2.

    JPL

    Miles Taylor, the former DHS chief of staff, warned us yesterday that trump was dangerous, and it was just a blurb on the news. The amount of chaos in this country is nuts.
    On a brighter note, how is Melania going to compete with Michelle’s speech without plagiarizing parts of her speech.. hmm

  3. 3.

    Kay

    Best part of Michelle’s speech, IMO. “If you think it can’t get worse, it can”
    They’ve gotten worse every day in office. They will absolutely, 100%, get worse. Hard to imagine I know but..they’ve now ruined the post office. Cut your losses.

  4. 4.

    MJS

    Dana Perino said Michelle Obama “stuck the landing” with her speech. Chris Wallace said it was outstanding. Maybe they meant it, and maybe it was payback for Trump saying Fox is terrible now. Either way, it’s going to piss Trump off royally.

  6. 6.

    Kay

    @JPL:

    That was brave and he makes all the other people who didn’t speak out look like cowards. He has a career! He has Republican friends and is a Republican! Still, he spoke up.

    I worry about him, too. They’re going to go after him. I honestly don’t know if I would do it. So many, many people didn’t.

  7. 7.

    John S.

    If we lost the all important a$$hole boater demographic, we are doomed. DOOMED I tell you!

  8. 8.

    Gin & Tonic

    The key thing about the protests in Belarus isn’t hipsters with bagpipes, it’s the metro workers or the Ivan Six-pack types at the Minsk Tractor Works walking off the job; it’s the crowd of factory workers jeering Lukashenka and chanting “resign” or “leave” when he inexplicably chose to address them.

  9. 9.

    debbie

    @MJS:

    For some ungodly reason, NBC (or maybe ABC) had Rich Lowry as an analyst. He was far less partisan than I expected, admitting the convention was well-run and very effective. He just couldn’t resist knocking the speeches for being more anti-Trump rather than pro-Biden. Welcome to a political convention, jackass.

  11. 11.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Oh, I’m glad. On the “getting worse” theme, even I didn’t anticipate they’d not only refuse to help schools, but attack them. Public schools are, by far, the largest public system in this country. They just abandoned them.

  13. 13.

    debbie

    @Gin & Tonic:

    They all seem very brave to me, what with the threat of Putin’s interfering. Do you think they will succeed in getting Lukashenka out of office?

  14. 14.

    Jeffro

    My how far we’ve come from a “brokered convention”, eh Repubs?

    I still LOL that they idiots in the trumpov campaign thought they’d get to run against anyone but Joe Biden and ended up having to run against…Joe Biden. And they have put zero effort into making any sort of adjustments whatsover – “We’re just going to make shit up about Joe and the Dems and it’ll stick fer shure!” Morons.

  15. 15.

    JPL

    @MJS: trump is tweeting about Michelle.   trump was elected because of her husband.   It’s always Obama’s fault.

  16. 16.

    PenAndKey

    @debbie: He just couldn’t resist knocking the speeches for being more anti-Trump rather than pro-Biden. Welcome to a political convention, jackass.

    What did he think a non-incumbent political convention in the middle of a pandemic and depression level financial collapse was going to be about?

  18. 18.

    Ken

    @debbie: Did Lowry consider that the convention may have been organized that way? Start out with all the ways the incumbent has failed*.  Then, pivot to what your party and candidate will do to fix the problems.  Surely he’s seen this done before, although last night’s speeches were more, um, sane than Clint Eastwood shouting at an empty chair.

    * Well, not all of them, the convention’s only four days long.

  20. 20.

    WereBear

    @debbie: Part of the problem IS the corporate media, which puts the seal of approval on every single Republican administration… even this one.

    The only thing that stops them is the bad optics of mass death. At least we’ve found their stopping point, but it can’t go on this way.

  21. 21.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Ezra does the necessary but distasteful work of talking to RepublicansWhy Republicans are failing to govern

    Today, unemployment stands at 10.2 percent — higher than during the peak of the previous financial crisis, and that’s almost certainly an underestimate of the true employment calamity. The death toll from Covid-19 has likely passed 200,000. Vast swaths of the US remain at varying levels of lockdown. But McConnell — and, to be fair, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — is acting as if the most important thing to achieve is for President Trump to be a one-term president.

    This is the strange truth of 2020: The dynamic in Congress is virtually identical to what we saw in 2010. Democrats want more economic support; they passed a $3.5 trillion bill in the House in May. Republicans don’t, and they’ve refused to act on the House bill, or offer an alternative that reflects the size of the crisis — the main feature of the $1 trillion HEALS Act is that it cuts the expanded unemployment benefits in an attempt to push people back to work, even though the virus is anything but controlled.
    ………………..
    What’s baffling is that Republicans are running this strategy while they are in the majority. Donald Trump is president of the United States, and Mitch McConnell is Senate majority leader. They carry the burden of governance, and they will bear the blame for failure….

    Politically, the Republican Party’s current approach is so self-sabotaging that I figured I must be missing something. Someone must have a plan, a theory, an alternative. Chaos is Trump’s brand, but surely McConnell won’t walk passively back into the minority. And so I began asking Republican Hill staffers and policy experts for correction. What wasn’t I seeing? What was the GOP’s policy theory right now? What do Republicans actually want?

    I posed these questions to Tea Party conservatives, populist reformers, and old-line Reaganites. The answer, in every case, was the same.

    Long story short, there are four theories for the GOP’s governance crisis but they all boil down to, they don’t believe in governing, and they will do everything they can to stop any one else from governing.

    Yeah I know, obvious, but they have already given up on 2020 and are looking to reprise McConnell’s 2010 strategy of “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama (insert Biden) to be a one-term president,”

  22. 22.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    There was a bad tornado season in Oklahoma during Obama. A whole school system was destroyed – one. Like, one elementary, one middle, one high school. Schools are 95% state and local. Yet, Arne Duncan went there. Traveled there.

    Betsy DeVos has spent the summer at her lake estate, as she does every year at this time. She’s the US Department of Education and every school in the country was closed.

  24. 24.

    Gin & Tonic

    @debbie: It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

    Before last weekend’s election I was pretty sure Lukashenka had enough control to stay. The week after the elections showed me it’s more fragile than I thought. At this point I think it can go either way. Thing is, Belarusians had engaged in kind of a bargain for the last couple of decades – their standard of living is high for post-Soviet states, the infrastructure is good, consumer goods are good, the deal was Daddy will take care of you, just don’t be crying about “freedom” all the time. Now it seems the kids are ungrateful, and Daddy’s pissed.

  26. 26.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: That was my favorite part of the speech too, and I thought of your reminder that bad hires don’t get better — they always get worse! :)

    Trump has tweeted a rebuttal, but it wasn’t really him. Too restrained:

    Somebody please explain to @MichelleObama that Donald J. Trump would not be here, in the beautiful White House, if it weren’t for the job done by your husband, Barack Obama. Biden was merely an afterthought, a good reason for that very late & unenthusiastic endorsement…..

    ….My Administration and I built the greatest economy in history, of any country, turned it off, saved millions of lives, and now am building an even greater economy than it was before. Jobs are flowing, NASDAQ is already at a record high, the rest to follow. Sit back & watch!

    I think the social media caddy wrote it.

  27. 27.

    John S.

    @WereBear: I wouldn’t say it’s so much a seal of approval, but their incessant desire to engage in bothsiderism. That normalizes what Republicans do, and distorts what Democrats do — all in the name of “balance”.

  28. 28.

    Baud

    Today show doing a segment on black voter turnout in Wisconsin but not mentioning voter suppression.

  33. 33.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Looks like Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is organizing an alternative center of power to negotiate with Lukashenka if he stays in power or to move into power if he doesn’t. Short thread from a Belarusian reporter:

  34. 34.

    MagdaInBlack

    @debbie:

    I was thinking the fact that it credits the administration as well as himself, it probably wasn’t him.

    I dunno.

  35. 35.

    Ken

    I’m not that surprised that the technical side went well last night. Lots of people and programs have been doing these virtual meetings and broadcasts for six months now, so the issues have been ironed out and there’s a lot of knowledge out there.  All the Democrats had to do was identify some people with the right experience and take their advice.

    Which means the Republican version will be a sh*tshow.

  36. 36.

    Betty Cracker

    @debbie: The new GOP framing is that Trump insisted on the shut downs, “turning off” his magnificent economy that he alone built from scratch, to save millions of lives. Only he can turn it back on because he’s such a wiz at business. All lies, but that’s the latest spin.

  37. 37.

    SFAW

    @Baud:

    Today show doing a segment on black voter turnout in Wisconsin but not mentioning voter suppression.

    One of the NPR outlets interviewed Gretchen Whitmer. After noting that the Murderer-in-Chief “won” Michigan by less than 1 percent, the jeenyus interviewer asked Whitmer “What do the Democrats need to do to be more competitive in Michigan?”

    Morons abound

  40. 40.

    SFAW

    @Betty Cracker:

    All lies, but that’s the latest spin.

    Not that it would ever happen, but some enterprising media should push the idea that “Donald Trump lies constantly, about everything, and now the entire Republican Party seems to have become infected with the same disease.”

    [Yes, I realize they’ve been lying since forever. I phrased it that way in order for it to be highlighted by the MSM, and hopefully catch the attention of any sane fence-sitters (which may be an oxymoron).]

  46. 46.

    germy

    @SFAW:  One of the NPR outlets interviewed Gretchen Whitmer. After noting that the Murderer-in-Chief “won” Michigan by less than 1 percent, the jeenyus interviewer asked Whitmer “What do the Democrats need to do to be more competitive in Michigan?”

    Not Perceiving Reality

  47. 47.

    zhena gogolia

    @Baud:

    You’ll like this tweet.

    4 years of hearing "Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate" as the country burned but now that Bernie gave the speech he should have given 4 years ago… it is time to look forward only.?Hillary's speech Wednesday should just be the opening scene from Lean on Me.— J-L Cauvin (@JLCauvin) August 18, 2020

  48. 48.

    Baud

    @zhena gogolia:

    Thank you. My sentiments exactly.  I’m happy with Bernie’s speech last night just as I’m happy with the Lincoln Project’s ads, but it doesn’t change their histories.

    ETA: I was very pleased that Michelle Obama alluded to 2016.  Harris did the same in her speech as the Veep nominee.  I hate that we have to ignore that injustice because of the need to beat Trump, but it is what it is.

  49. 49.

    JPL

    @germy: Just wait until trump tweets that Biden was a homewrecker.   Maybe he’ll wait until the debate stage.      Apparently Jill’s ex is gonna write a book.

  51. 51.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    It will get worse. They will absolutely plunder if they’re retained in power. Even if there’s good outside the WH they’ll fuck it up. They can no more manage the logistics of a national vaccination program than they can rebuild an engine. They are a group of people who don’t know how to do anything. They don’t even have the background understanding sufficient to recognize the problem, let alone solve it.

    They destroyed mail delivery because they don’t know how it works. They have no practical skills of any kind. There was this federal government machine operating in the background their whole lives and they took it for granted because they are privileged and coddled people who never have to think about anything real. It’s falling apart and they don’t know where it went because they never understood how it worked to begin with.

  53. 53.

    Baud

    LGM

    The checks don’t check and the balances don’t balance any more. What’s left is triage. The United States as a liberal democracy might survive, or the Republican party might, but both can’t, not in anything like their present forms. One or the other must be destroyed utterly, and will be, one way or another.

  55. 55.

    Kay

    Ohio is mandating random testing of nursing homes and assisted living. The state notices the facility that they’ve been chosen at random and then goes in and tests. I think that’s smart oversight. They’ll game it if they aren’t watched.

  56. 56.

    PsiFighter37

    @JPL: Strange how people like this guy and Tara Reade only decide to come after Biden now…as opposed to when he was on the VP ticket in 2008 or 2012. All of it stinks to high heaven, if not amateur attempts at ratfucking by Russians or BernieBros.

  59. 59.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: I think a lot of the media culturally identifies with the GOP and sees us as the Other.

    When you realize that for a significant part of the country, as well as the press, “white Christian” is the “normal, regular” voter, and everyone else is “other”, the reason for this attitude becomes clear. The Democratic Party isn’t “white Christian” enough to be “normal” in their eyes. It’s why they are absolutely obsessed with those blue collar voters in the diners in small towns – they think those people should all be Democrats, and don’t understand why Democrats aren’t doing everything they can to win them back, including throwing all those “other” voters under the bus. When I started thinking about their attitude in that way, it made a lot of things clearer.

  60. 60.

    Baud

    @Soprano2: I think that’s right.  Even if media people don’t like Trump right now because of all the deaths, he’s still “family,” while we are strangers to them, at best guests in their country, at worst, unwanted interlopers.

  61. 61.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: It explains almost everything about the press’ attitude toward Democrats and Republicans, including part of why they seem to cut Trump so much slack. Can you imagine how they would treat a comparably outrageous Democrat, especially one who wasn’t white and/or male?  Not with the kid gloves they’ve used for Trump, that’s for sure. A comparable Democrat wouldn’t have lasted a year in office before all the talking heads and press organs would have been screaming for his/her resignation. They still see Trump as part of the “normal” America they’re used to looking at. They saw Obama as part of that “other” America. I’m not even sure that it is conscious for most of them.

  62. 62.

    germy

    “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if this election is rigged.”  – Donald Trump

    With quotes like this, I doubt his fans will accept defeat quietly.

  63. 63.

    Jeffro

    @Baud: I haven’t heard that particular bit of nonsense in a while, no.  What I’ve been getting is a steady and sad dribble of ‘both sides’, like “I’d hate to be a fact-checker for either campaign” (seriously!)

    My guess is, after I zing him about Sanders being a team player and Kasich ALSO being a team player (just not for the Rs!), he’ll just pivot to 2024.  Let’s go see…

  65. 65.

    Spanky

    @germy:

    Let him come home and be free.

    I welcome the day when I can meet Edward Snowden on the street. I know that I’m not alone in this.

  66. 66.

    Jeffro

    @OzarkHillbilly: great article – thanks for the link and excerpt.

    I think all of Klein’s reasons are correct (and it seems to me like he could combine the four reasons into two):

    – it’s trumpov’s fault + looking ahead to 2024 are two pieces to the same issue.  McConnell & Co would desperately like to be rid of trumpov at this point, and this is a way to take him down without (they think) taking down the party.  “That trumpov, he sure did a great job of speaking for our base but whew, he SUCKED at governing!  Here, America, how about we give you some competent racists who don’t golf and don’t tweet much?”

    – they’re worried about Tea Party 2.0 + conservative thinking has no room for dealing with Covid-19 are also similar: since they can’t be bothered to ‘do’ policy, ever, they need to be reactionary bomb-throwers, and it’s hard to do that when you’re in the majority/hold the WH.  But they don’t want to be overrun by the QAnon nuts, or they’ll lose both houses and the WH, so they’d like to settle back into their usual ‘Dems spend too much’ routine, and to do that they need to work on hamstringing the incoming administration.  Set them far back as possible.

  67. 67.

    Nicole

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:   Unless you had your heart set on following live comments on social media during the convention, I think it’ll be just as good on the rerun.

    I thought it was pretty solid, all in all, and I really liked how quickly everything moves when you’re not waiting on the clapping to died down after applause lines every third sentence.  That was one really interesting thing, from the writer’s standpoint- seeing how speeches were crafted with an eye toward no live audience. Totally different pacing and flow.

    And I loved Stills’ and Porter’s  go of, “For What It’s Worth.”

  68. 68.

    satby

    @germy: they went to the MI legislature with their weapons of mass murder to intimidate the lawmakers out of stricter pandemic measures. I doubt anyone thinks the losers will go quietly.

  69. 69.

    WereBear

    @germy:

    With quotes like this, I doubt his fans will accept defeat quietly.

     
    Trump “fans” are a CULT.

    Republicans are a CULT.

    The corporate media is controlled by a CULT.

    This is a death cult and they will take us down with them. We have to see it that way, because they do.

  70. 70.

    Skepticat

    Took a break while packing up to leave the suffocatingly hot Bahamas for the terrifying petri dish, and I saw an article that not only are they removing mail-sorting machines, but they’re also destroying them. Beyond senseless. It made me cry, and that’s not easy to do.

  74. 74.

    gene108

    @Baud:

    I think a lot of the media culturally identifies with the GOP and sees us as the Other.

    2/3’a of white men vote Republican. White men are the default setting as what a Very Serious Person is. Therefore, Republicans get taken seriously because they represent most of the Very Serious People in the country.

  76. 76.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @WereBear: But there is the problem, it’s a cult based on perpetually escalating fear, mass suicide is inevitable and considering what we’ve seen this year with the reaction to the Pandemic it’s started.

  77. 77.

    Ruckus

    @Kay:

    It’s never what it is, it’s what it looks like.

    Their money means they can buy what makes them look successful, and if they can either start with a bundle or steal a bundle they can look successful for a long time. And that’s all they need, want, give a damn about. Doing anything, anyway positive for humanity? Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

  78. 78.

    Citizen Alan

    @Baud: I often feel that Betsy DeVos is God’s way of punishing me for suggesting halfway through the Obama Administration that Arne Duncan was easily the worst thing to ever happen to the DoE since it was founded.

  80. 80.

    Soprano2

    @gene108: 2/3’s of white men vote Republican. White men are the default setting as what a Very Serious Person is. Therefore, Republicans get taken seriously because they represent most of the Very Serious People in the country.

    Yep, this is exactly it. They think the issues white men care about the most are the most important issues out there. You notice you never hear anyone say “‘X’ candidate would have lost if white men hadn’t voted for them”. You hear this about pretty much any other group, but never white men. What they want and what they think is considered, by the press and most of the culture right now,  the norm for pretty much everything. This is one of the things Republicans are desperately fighting against, the idea that what they want might not be the “norm” anymore.

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