Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
NEW – Corey Lewandowski, Trump adviser who's been working on efforts to bring lawsuits alleging illegal election activity in specific states, tested positive for COVID yesterday per a person briefed. Lewandowski had been in Philly for days and believes he contracted it there.
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 12, 2020
Late Night Open Thread: Preznit Superspreader Strikes Again!Post + Comments (88)
I dunno what the hell happened to everyone, but this front page seems empty as hell, so here is an open thread.
For whatever reason, I am just exhausted tonight and might be in bed before midnight. Hospitals just suck the life out of me.
On the Road: Week of November 16 (5 am)
Albatrossity – Fall in Flyover Country #2
Captain C goes to Japan: Kyoto & Osaka
?BillinGlendaleCA – East Asian Gardens at the Huntington
Steve from Mendocino – Pacific Ocean Park
Pharniel – Kyoto In FallIn After Dark this week, we return to Fall Colors.
On the Road Election Respite and Fall Colors: Week of November 16 (10pm)
Mike in Oly – Fall Foliage – Tieton River, WA
JanieM – Fall Color, Central Maine Sampler
Mike in Oly – Fall Foliage – Olympia, WA
JanieM – Fall Color, Part II
Mike in Oly – Fall Foliage – My BackyardNext week, it looks like we might have a mix of Fall Colors and Parks After Dark in the 10 pm slot, depending on the submissions that come in this week.
? And now, back to ema
The weather in the city has been pretty mild, with just a few days in the 40s, so my “garden” hasn’t yet reached peak color. However, if you look closely, you can notice some nice color spots emerging.
On The Road – ema – Fall ColorsPost + Comments (10)
Overall, it’s mostly green. Mostly.
New: The disparate tribes of MAGA Nation — Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Infowars fanatics, Groypers, Proud Boys, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and die-hard Trump fans — are promoting an impromptu, chaotic MAGApalooza rally in DC on Saturday.https://t.co/CMzrlNykVU
— Tina Nguyen (@tina_nguyen) November 11, 2020
From the Washington Post‘s ‘Local’ section:
GOP Death Cult Open Thread: DC-Area (Social Media) Traffic AlertPost + Comments (102)
This is so absurd that we are still tip-toeing around the fact that Biden won:
Joe Biden will win Georgia, CNN projected Friday, striking at the heart of what has been a Republican presidential stronghold for nearly three decades. The former vice president is the first Democratic nominee to triumph in Georgia since Bill Clinton did it in 1992.
Biden’s victory adds 16 electoral votes to his tally, bringing him to 306 — matching President Donald Trump’s 2016 total. With CNN’s projection that Trump will win North Carolina, the final tally is 306-232, a landslide for the President-elect, who flipped five states and a congressional district in Nebraska from red to blue in 2020.
The symmetry provides the President with yet another bitter pill to swallow. Trump has spent years tweeting and talking up his margin of victory against Hillary Clinton — one that has now been turned on its head in a final, national rebuke of his presidency.
And he won by 5 million plus more votes- more even than Reagan vs. Carter, which used to be short hand for asskickings.
Another thing that has been pissing me off is the way people are framing the House election- “We lost seats.” Christ on a crutch, Democrats suck at framing things. We didn’t lose anything. Every two years every single house seat is up for grabs, and this year, like two years ago, we grabbed the majority. We didn’t lose anything. We just didn’t win as many seats as we did in 2018.
So in 2020, we won the House, we clobbered the Republicans in the Presidency, and we can still win the Senate. That’s pretty fucking good.
Oh, BTW, Biden Won the Presidency Again TodayPost + Comments (79)
Just got my billing for hosting, and we are good to December, but our rate went up slightly (a couple hundred a month), but that is good news because the rate is determined by traffic. So that means there are more of us reading and out there, and hopefully that will translate into more members of this special little shitshow community we have here.
At any rate, it’s time to rattle the cups to get us through winter and spring, so if you are able to, please hit the paypal, and if you want to mail a check, email me and I will send you the snail mail address. BTW, several of you have set up recurring paypal monthly donations for a buck or two- if you do that, PLEASE do not set it up for services because PAYPAL hates that. Just set it up for sending money to a friend or something.
You can also give through Venmo: @john-cole-94 (as long as you see a photo of Lily, you’re in the right place, and you can click the “I don’t have the phone number” button and send anyway.)
You can also give through Zelle: jgriffincole at the google mail place.
Soon you will be able to give through Patreon, but it’s not set up yet.
You can also give through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/balloonjuice
This is my absolute least favorite thing to do for the website, so I will just pin this post until we have met our needs and then take it down and that way I will not have to do multiple posts.
I’m off to take a nap. Just got back from four hours at the hospital for mom’s colonoscopy. Everything was fine, before you ask.
Betty wrote about her normie husband the other day, and that got me thinking because I’m married to a political normie, too. She’s a liberal/progressive Democrat who doesn’t follow politics much, though she hates Trump with the passion of a thousand flaming suns. Anyway, she grew up in the Dakotas, like me. Unlike me, she’s on Facebook, and she has a lot of relatives and friends back where we grew up. Most of them are, naturally, conservative, and some of them are rabid.
Our conversations have two themes: decoding and lamenting. By “decoding”, I mean trying to figure out the genesis of whatever horseshit story is being pushed on Facebook that day. That mostly happened earlier this year when some of her connections were pushing right wing bullshit that you can only understand if you spend hours watching Fox at night. We moved to the lamentations after the election, when her connects began spouting theories about non-existent election fraud.
She made a good point the other day — she’s not the only liberal or centrist Democrat (or even centrist Republican) among her connections. Yet, she noted, nobody (including her) says anything as the most feral morons on her feed push out their hot garbage. The reason is probably obvious to any of you, but engaging with these folks just encourages them, and it’s an exhausting, pointless exercise. Still, I’m sure at one point these idiots got some pushback, and Facebook’s algorithm dutifully recorded that as “engagement” and trained itself to prefer the kind of language present in their posts. Since that algorithm earns Mark Zuckerberg a lot of money, it’s natural that this is position on Steve Bannon:
Mark Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting that Steve Bannon has not violated enough policies to be suspended from Facebook. Bannon suggested in a now-removed video that FBI Director Christopher Wray and Dr. Anthony Fauci should be beheaded. https://t.co/8dIPbyDNKG
— Sabrina Siddiqui (@SabrinaSiddiqui) November 12, 2020
The results of the election show that shithead Trump worshipers is a growing group, and Facebook is a huge part of the reason. I know this is obvious to us, but my normie believes it, so maybe some kind of regulation of Facebook would be accepted by normies in addition to those of us who are more engaged.