Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

So very ready.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Consistently wrong since 2002

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Archives for 2020

Pet Calendar: Great Names, Great Pics, Great Quotes

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Has everyone ordered their Pets of Balloon Juice 2020 Calendar?  (I don’t think so!)

I fell half in love with some of the guys in the calendar –  just from seeing their pictures while I proofed the calendar for Beth.  (Who did all the real work.)

Kira won the coveted WaterGirl Really Wants to Take Her Home Award.

Marty and Hissy Kitty look like their parents caught them fooling around and turned on the lights.  Uh oh.

And the names.  So fun!

· Betty White · Noodles · Oscar · Mozart · Blizzard · Vivian · Bean · Lightning · Monet · Bubba · Wallace ·
· Kira · Janeway · Soul Dog · Bruiser · Pablo · Espresso Bean, Queen of Concord · General Stuck’s Charlie ·

Have any of you received your calendars yet?

What do you think of the addition of the In Memoriam quotes this year?  What were your favorite quotes?  Did they bring back any blog memories?

Great Names, Great Pics, Great Quotes

 

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Balloon Juice Meetup – Santa Fe, February 4

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I have reserved a table at La Boca for Quinerly, O. Felix Culpa, and me for Tuesday, February 4, at 12:30 pm. If you’d like to join us, please comment here.

I have the sense that our separate page for meetups isn’t working well for announcements. Or perhaps it’s just that there aren’t that many of us in New Mexico.

Anyhow, here’s another chance. Come meet Quinerly while she’s here!

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Per WaterGirl’s Request

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Here’s a great story about AOC campaigning in Iowa.

Gary Lipshutz, 77, a liberal who’s been active in Democratic politics since the ’60s, said he’s impressed.

“I mean, you could hear a pin drop in that room, and this is a girl from the Bronx in Sioux City, Iowa!” he said. “I’ve seen 19 presidential candidates this year. I think she had the most magnetism of any of them. Bernie included.” (Lipshutz is caucusing for Warren and came to the rally solely to see Ocasio-Cortez.)

I know that some of you can’t handle the Bernie affiliation. But I agree with Gary: I’ll vote for Warren, but AOC is the real deal. Yeah the adulation of her fans gets a little old, who cares what Michael Moore thinks, and I really wish she would have chosen Warren.

But she also is a happy warrior who gets shit on every day and still fights with a smile. We need that kind of bravery in our party. We need someone who is full of hope, because the main weapon of Republicans is cynicism. Her connection of her personal story to policy goals is authentic and well done. She’s better than a lot of politicians who have been in the game for 30 years. She is not a flash in the pan, and I hope that I’m still standing when she runs for President so I can knock on some doors for her.

( I’m gently joking with WaterGirl, obviously, she didn’t really request this. )

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In Your Hearts, You Know It’s Wrong

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I was looking through the tweets in Anne Laurie’s post below and it just struck me how much energy goes into the fucked up anachronism that is the Iowa primary.

Not only does the caucus system effectively disenfranchise handicapped voters, it also makes it tough for voters who work evenings, and it’s generally confusing. One of the long-term goals of the Democratic party is to make it easier to for everyone to vote, yet our first big event is probably the least democratic form of participation possible. And, because it gets so much publicity, and idiot pundits fetishize all the dumb little details, it gives off the message that you have to know a lot about politics to participate in the primary process.

Iowa is also lily white and rural, while the battlegrounds we need to win are in the industrial midwest and the sun belt are urban and multi-racial.

Of course, I know how hard it is to get states that are used to the millions of dollars of revenue to change their primaries, but at some point in 2021 we need to have this fight.

Or maybe we just need to get a billionaire to tell the DNC he doesn’t like the process. That seems to work, too.

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Saturday Morning ‘My Happy Place’ Open Thread: “Great for America”

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… All campaigns are knocking on doors, all campaigns are raising money, and all campaigns are trying to get voters to commit to caucus. But none have been doing it as long or as hard as Warren’s has in Iowa. She has been campaigning in Iowa for nearly a year, with roughly 150 staffers on the ground and 26 field offices. And it’s not just about numbers. Observers say that Warren’s campaign has been notable for the depth of its engagement in local communities.

When a local animal shelter needed a boost, Gomez brought Warren volunteers to help. When a neighborhood in Des Moines needed help with their community garden, Hines organized Warren volunteers to pull weeds and till the soil. “I said, ‘Great, we’ll be there every Saturday,’” he recalls. “We fed folks in the community where there are no grocery stores around. We went door-to-door handing out vegetables to people.” Hines says the area near the garden now has several Warren signs that weren’t there before.

As field organizers in Polk County—the most populous in Iowa—Hines and Gomez spend their days training precinct captains, calling volunteers and directing canvassers. But they’re also performing the crucial emotional labor that keeps the campaign running: making sure Warren supporters stay excited about their candidate. That work has taken on added importance in the final days before the Feb. 3 caucuses. With the candidate stuck in Washington for President Trump’s impeachment trial, it’s up to staffers like Hines, a 30-year-old from Nevada, and Gomez, a 23-year-old from Pennsylvania, to keep the Senator viable in the state…

Hines and Gomez say they tell their volunteers never to bash Warren’s opponents when they encounter a supporter of a different candidate. “We say, ‘That’s fine, I like them too, what do you like about them?” says Hines. “We never speak negatively about another candidate.” That’s especially important in Iowa, where the caucus process allows supporters of less popular candidates to switch to another as the caucus goes on if their first choice flops.

“We know that we’re a lot of people’s second choice, and we know that if we start playing divisive politics that’s not going to help us,” Gomez says. “No matter who you’re caucusing for, we’re always going to be polite, respectful, kind. We know that’s going to win us delegates on caucus night for sure.” …

They’re hardly the only ones pounding the pavement for Warren. Hines and Gomez named their orange tabby foster cat Carl, after Carl Schumann, an octogenarian Warren volunteer who is one of the campaign’s most dogged local canvassers. Schumann started off knocking doors twice a week, Gomez says, then graduated to four times a week.

“I’m very impressed with his dedication,” says Gomez. “He thinks it’s the last campaign he’ll be able to knock doors for, and what better way to end his canvassing experiences than by trying to elect the first woman president.” As Gomez and Hines they were telling this reporter about Carl the cat, another organizer knocked on the door to tell them that Carl the human had arrived at the office for his canvassing shift…

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The 2019-nCoV Coronavirus Update – Friday / Saturday

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Sarah Zhang at the Atlantic explains the reasoning behind this well-intentioned “best practice”, but I’m not sure how many non-scientists are going to be persuaded. SARS and MERS were labelled fairly expeditiously; Ebola, on the other hand, is irretrievably connected to the river near the first diagnosis.

… In an epidemiological twist of fate, the coronavirus’s mildness may help it spread undetected until it hits the most vulnerable people. Experts are concerned that it could find a devastating “sweet spot”—mild enough that some patients will go about their normal routines and spread the virus far and wide, triggering an increase in deaths. And if some patients may spread the virus when they have mild or no symptoms at all, as Chinese officials have asserted, that would undercut efforts to halt transmission…

“Even if only 1% of people who are infected die, if it can spread globally, that will be a lot of people,” said Christian Althaus, a computational epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

So far, the vast majority of the 6,000 global cases of the new coronavirus, known for now as 2019-nCov, have been contained to China.

But the disease has spread inside the world’s most populous nation, a major hub of travel and trade for the region, with cases emerging in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere. There are early reports of spread in other countries, as well. Four people in Germany were infected by a coworker visiting from China who didn’t get sick until her plane ride back. In Vietnam, a Chinese man from Wuhan spread the disease to his son there during a visit to the country, during a trip where the infected family traveled around the country on planes, trains, and taxis.

Inside China, the actual case count may be far higher than has been reported. One estimate says the number of infections may have hit more than 26,000 by Jan. 28, according to research from Jinan University published in the biology preprint website, Biorxiv.

Within China, “what the numbers are telling us is this is a very serious situation and the virus is spreading in a very concerning way,” said Michael Olsterholm, director of the the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. So far, it appears “it is going to be much more difficult to control than SARS.”…

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Semi-Respite Open Thread: Sorry, Mr. Delaney, ‘Niche’ Is Not Enough

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Pointing & mocking is the only reasonable conclusion. Ed Kilgore, at NYMag, “Delaney Was First In, and Now Is Finally Out”:

Every presidential election cycle, there are vanity candidates: pols or wealthy business people who have the determination, the resources, the ego to persist in the difficult task of running for president despite abundant signs that it’s not working. Many observers accuse 2020 candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer of running that kind of campaign, wasting tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars better spent on promoting the Democratic Party or down-ballot candidates.

But before either of these men got into the fray, there was another wealthy candidate who launched a presidential campaign long before anyone else, made a brief but not necessarily positive mark on the contest, and then hung in through thick and mostly through thin before abruptly leaving the race just three days before the Iowa caucuses: former Maryland congressman John Delaney.

A three-term congressman from a gerrymandered district running from the D.C. suburbs into western Maryland, and before that a successful (and largely self-made) banker, Delaney emulated another Marylander, 2016 candidate Martin O’Malley, in following the “book” by getting into the race early and focusing obsessively on Iowa. Indeed, nobody was going to beat Delaney to the starting post: He announced his candidacy on July 28, 2017. Unlike O’Malley, Delaney was rich enough to self-fund (loaning over $20 million to his campaign), and by declining to run for reelection in 2018, he was able to run full-time. By the end of 2018, he had completed the so-called “full Grassley,” with appearances in all 99 Iowa counties, a feat many presidential candidates never accomplish. By the autumn of 2019, he had spent a total of 80 days in the state, holding 229 events. From the get-go, he identified himself as a member of the moderate, “pragmatic” wing of his party. But his early start didn’t do much for him in terms of early popularity…

From the Cosplay Socialists — d/b/a ‘dirtbag leftists’ — pushing their own vanity candidate:

At least Delaney wasn’t being propped up by the Russians and the Republicans. Assuming there’s a difference between those two groups any longer.

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