Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

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

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Books are my comfort food!

No one could have predicted…

Petty moves from a petty man.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

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

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Late Night Open Thread: New Frontiers in Ghostwriting

Late Night Open Thread: New Frontiers in Ghostwriting

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(Except, of course, none of these Big Swinging Dorks would ever admit they had ghostwriters. Was it Dennis Rodman who threatened to sue his ghostwriter for inaccuracies in his autobiography after the book was published and sportswriters started mocking him?… )

Reader Interactions

53Comments

  2. 2.

    Amir Khalid

    We need a new word for people who ghostwrite tweets professionally. How about ghost-tweeter?

  8. 8.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Baseball teams do this.  They hire noted players to schmooze with advertisers to make them feel good about the money they spent.  When a team needs to raise capital for big dollar improvements they hire greats like Willie Mays or the Phillie Phanatic to play golf with the money people.

    But baseball isn’t that popular with younger people so in the near future they’ll have to go back to the tried and true way of hookers and blow to grease the skids.

  9. 9.

    eclare

    I assume most of the rich and famous, including celebrities, athletes, pols, etc. have social media teams.  The WH just got a new Twitter person, and she is doing a really good job.

    I only tend to notice when they do not.

  12. 12.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    There are some Masters of the Universe who I suspect do their own tweeting rather than have somebody on staff to handle their social media interactions. The likelihood of that is directly proportional to the likelihood that the MOTU in question puts up bone-headed stupid or enraging things on their social media. (See, for example, Elon Musk and TFG.)

    Conversely, I’m fairly certain that Hillary Clinton has a social media wrangler on her staff.

  13. 13.

    JoyceH

    I follow Lake Superior on Twitter. Wonder who ghosts for a lake? (“Without me, they’d be the Good Lakes”)

  14. 14.

    SpaceUnit

    I have no idea what this post is about, but I suspect it’s related to the reason I’m not on any form of social media.

  21. 21.

    opiejeanne

    @Chetan Murthy: Thanks.

    In the 90s we lived in the east bay, just south of Oakland, and it was a heady time for people looking for Venture Capitalists. They were thick on the ground and threw money at almost every new idea. I went to a huge party for a group of them at the Design Center in San Francisco once. Just astonishing to witness.

    I worked for a company that was digitizing archives for big corporations and sometimes had to pick up documents from companies that had the most gorgeous young women imaginable at their front desks, and sometimes no hint of what their product or business was about. One place had huge photos on the walls of the sky, sometimes with a large antenna in a lower corner. I handled their documents, scanned them, photographed them, etc. and still had no clue what they did, but it wasn’t antennae.

    The SF Chronicle documented Yahoo’s launch, and PeopleSoft’s very bad behavior. Crappy, tiny, little houses in San Jose were selling for a million dollars which drove up the price of housing throughout the bay area. When we were looking for a house near Hayward, we thought we’d be living in a garage, if we could find one we could afford. Hayward’s school district had just gone bankrupt and our girls were in 6th and 8th grade so we didn’t dare buy a house there.  Ended up in Castro Valley, where Rachel Maddow grew up.

  22. 22.

    eclare

    @opiejeanne:   I bet those gorgeous women at the front desks couldn’t explain what their employers did either.

    I remember in the late 90’s, maybe early 2000’s, several friends had jobs where they could not describe what their employer did in plain English.  At least once a friend showed up to work to find the place closed.

    Crazy times.  And I assume it hasn’t slowed down.

    Are you getting any smoke from the fires?

  23. 23.

    opiejeanne

    @eclare: Re: the fires? Oh God yes! It’s so smoky that we can’t have the windows open. The Air Quality Index is 258 right now, where my house is. That’s an improvement that means nothing, down from 288 earlier. We’re in the purple part of the chart,  green is anything below 40 (I think). It’s really ugly  when I went out when it was “only” 141. It’s so bad that King County has opened air quality shelters for the homeless, so they don’t die.

  24. 24.

    ColoradoGuy

    At least the Gilded Age left behind great architecture, public museums, universities, and foundations. All we’re getting is Bitcoin and tweets. Time to bring back that 91% top tax rate.

  25. 25.

    opiejeanne

    @eclare: I still know people who can’t explain what their company does, at least not in terms that I can understand. I wonder what happened to all those eye candy girls at the front desks when their looks started to fade a little.

  29. 29.

    NotMax

    Heh. Only now noticed the brand name on the package of grapes* on which I’m snacking as dessert is Air Chief.

    So old I only know that as a brand of vacuum cleaner. Pretty nice vacuums too, in their day.

    *Product Of U.S.A. stamped on the bag, one side of which is printed in English, the other in French (Raisins Noirs De Table Biologique Sans Pé Pepins, Produit Des É.-U.A.).

  32. 32.

    eclare

    @opiejeanne:   I worked for a company here that had squat, three story, glass boxes.  Everything inside the office was brown:  carpet, walls, file cabinets, desks, chairs, cubicle walls, etc.  It was a vicious assault on anything nice.

  37. 37.

    lowtechcyclist

    @ColoradoGuy: ​
     

    Time to bring back that 91% top tax rate.

    And crack down on some of the more frequently used dodges that rich people use to keep a great deal of their income from being taxed at all.

  38. 38.

    Shalimar

    It was Charles Barkley who wanted his own autobiography pulled from the shelves because his ghostwriter got stories wrong.

  39. 39.

    raven

    @Shalimar: When my dear friend and boss was dying of cancer she made a trip to her beloved Auburn to see Barkley at a AU Hall of Fame event. Fucker was a no-show and it crushed her.

  41. 41.

    Tony G

    @Amir Khalid: I’m paid $500 per comment for commenting on Balloon Juice!  I used the money to buy one of those Oculus gadgets, so that I’ll never have to deal with the real world again.

  42. 42.

    Tony G

    @ColoradoGuy: That’s right.  In the original Gilded Age useful things (public and private) were at least built.  What does the United States build now?  Third rate movies and vaporware.

  45. 45.

    Tony G

    @opiejeanne: I traveled in less trendy circles during my I.T. “career”, but the “gorgeous young women” ploy seems to be an old trick.  I would occasionally be sent to “technical conferences” (which were largely useless) featuring kiosks with gorgeous young women handing out software product brochures.  I could have gotten the same information by just contacting the companies by email or reading the websites.  Even thirty years ago about 30% of the technical workers were women, so you’d think that the conference organizers would supplement the lovely women with strapping you men, but old ways die hard.  I guess it was a gig for a young woman pursuing a modeling career.

  47. 47.

    SFAW

    @SpaceUnit: ​
     

    I have no idea what this post is about

    “Mr./Ms SpaceUnit, I have a Mr. Cole on Line 2, he said he wants to talk to you about being a ‘Front Pager.’ At least, that’s what it sounded like.”

  48. 48.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony G: The United States actually still has a lot of manufacturing; the sector just doesn’t employ very many people because it’s highly automated. We have a lot of medicine factories that are these sort of robotized biochemical assembly pipelines.

  49. 49.

    different-church-lady

    God all fucking mighty I made such a mistake not choosing sociopath for a career path…

  50. 50.

    Tony G

    @Matt McIrvin: Interesting.  I’m behind the times, as usual, so I’ve been envisioning extensive robotic manufacturing as something “in the future”.  The future is now (at least in that field) I guess.  That raises one of the standard questions that used to be raised in science fiction decades ago: What should a society do when millions of workers have been rendered obsolete by technology?  In the U.S. the answer is: “let them sink into poverty and opioid addiction”.  The steep decline in labor unions over the past forty years is a factor.  An anecdote: More than fifty years ago my father’s job (maintaining telephone switching equipment for New York Bell) was rendered obsolete when the equipment was upgraded from analog to digital.  However, because he was a member of a strong union (Communication Workers of America) he was retrained (at company expense) to do a different job rather than being thrown out the door.  As a result, my family didn’t sink into poverty.  The decline of unions means the workers have little protection when the robots take over.

  52. 52.

    StringOnAStick

    @Tony G: One of the hot degrees to get now is mechanical engineering so you can work with and on those manufacturing robots and automated systems.

  53. 53.

    dnfree

    @NotMax: presumably these grapes are sold in the US and Canada. There are rules on which languages must be on packaging to be sold in a country,

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