Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

You cannot shame the shameless.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

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

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Republicans in disarray!

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Countries / China / Saturday Night Snark Open Thread: Spy Balloon All GONE!…

Saturday Night Snark Open Thread: Spy Balloon All GONE!…

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Saturday Night Snark Open Thread: <em>Spy Balloon All GONE!...</em> 1

(John Deering via GoComics.com)

So much comedic potential just… wasted!


Saturday Night Snark Open Thread: <em>Spy Balloon All GONE!...</em>

(h/t Baud)

Reader Interactions

95Comments

  3. 3.

    dm

    From Gary Legum’s keyboard to God’s browser…..

    Straightforward from here: 1) Several GOP House members stroke out over the balloon. 2) Democrats win the special elections to replace them. 3) Democratic House majority! It’s foolproof.

  4. 4.

    Alison Rose

    In case you were wondering if Joe Wilson is still a fucking idiot, indeed he is, my friends.

    The catastrophic Chinese Spy Balloon spectacle clearly threatened American families from Alaska to my home community in South Carolina and confirms President Biden and Vice President Harris should resign. (1/5)
    — Joe Wilson (@RepJoeWilson) February 4, 2023

    I’m sure Joe and Kamala had a good laugh together over this one. Josh Marshall said it best:

    Lol, grow up, hoss
    — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 5, 2023

  5. 5.

    Alison Rose

    Is there a single GOPer who isn’t losing their shit over this? These people who call Democrats babies and snowflakes are afraid of drag queens, M&Ms, gay penguins, and now…balloons. Good Lord, someone give them all binkies and a stuffed dog and put them to bed, please.

  6. 6.

    HumboldtBlue

    Jerry and Marge go large. An extraordinary story of a retired Michigan couple and how they made millions playing the state lottery. They even made a movie out of the story.

    Math nerds win.

  7. 7.

    CaseyL

    If 45% of the country didn’t nod like dashboard doggies at every syllable these overgrown infant nitwits utter, the inanity would be hilarious.  It’s like a competition for who can come up with something even dumber than what the previous brainless wonder said.

    I do wonder how GOPers manage to breathe without professional assistance.

  8. 8.

    Splitting Image

    I may have to re-read The Preacher soon. One issue of the comic depicts Sheriff Root shooting wildly at the Martians that he is convinced are overhead somewhere. Like many other bits of satire, everything in that book that I thought was over-the-top has been superceded by more recent events.

    (Except maybe Jesus’ last heir being squashed by the two-ton pope falling on his head. That still hasn’t happened yet. I think.)

  9. 9.

    khead

    80’s movie and college football dude who would like to note the irony of a senator from Ohio looking like a guy who should be yelling “WOLVERINES!!!”

  10. 10.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Alison Rose: It’s mostly performative (there are some who are truly retarded and/or insane) to their intended audience. The scary part is that the performance is actually effective w/ such a high percentage of their intended audience.

  11. 11.

    Steeplejack

    Kudos to Martin for putting it all in perspective earlier today:

    In all seriousness, I am glad that we’ve restored America’s military honor by shooting down a near stationary object the size of a barn by a $250M aircraft. For 3 days it was like the national dick had fallen off.

  16. 16.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Dangerman: Most of the “3 buses” worthy of length was taken up by the solar panels. The sensor suit would be a small fraction of that. The panels could generate a few kWs of power, though.

  18. 18.

    Another Scott

    @Dangerman: I think the “3 buses long” refers to the diameter of the balloon itself, and roughly the same size length of solar panels.  The actual sensors, etc, have to be much smaller (balloons don’t have a lot of lifting capacity per volume – that’s why they’re so huge).

    I can see the conspiracy theories forming now:

    “They said it was carrying 3 bus-sized crates!  But the pictures only show a few cameras and antennas and batteries!  Where’s the rest!  What are they hiding from us!!11ONE”

    :-/

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  19. 19.

    Mike in NC

    This whole absurd story reminded me of how during WW2 the Japanese at one time launched balloons containing bats over the Pacific Northwest. The idea was that the bats would thaw out and potentially start major forest fires. Yeah, that didn’t work out either. Someone actually wrote a book about it that I read many years ago.

  20. 20.

    dm

    @CaseyL: I do wonder how GOPers manage to breathe without professional assistance.

    No problem, they get plenty of practice hyperventilating.

  21. 21.

    Kelly

    @Mike in NC: You’ve merged two WWII stories. The Japanese sent fire bomb balloons to the US. We had a scheme to send fire bomb bats to them which we didn’t implement.

  22. 22.

    NotMax

    “Once it goes up who cares where it comes down? That’s not my department,” said Werner von Xi.
    //

  25. 25.

    Ascap_scab

    Biden did the right thing in letting it get to the ocean before shooting it down.

    All these morons have forgotten the entire ‘Covid is a Chinese bio-weapon that escaped the Wuhan Lab’ they have been spewing the last three years.

    Suppose the balloon was filled with Helium AND Anthrax (or some other Chinese made bio-weapon), and China expected the stupid war-mongering Americans to shoot it down over US soil killing people, crops, and/or livestock.

    We would only have ourselves to blame, especially when Tucker and the tRumpublicans refuse any vaccinations or treatment.

    At least over the Atlantic, there is a chance the salinity / PH might neutralize it.

  26. 26.

    YY_Sima Qian

    So the China MFA is now officially upset that the USAF shot down the balloon, promising to “defend the interests of Chinese entities” & possible further “retaliation”. Have to keep up the charade that it was civilian property, I guess. Maybe it was a semi-private company who constructed the surveillance balloon on a Chinese government contract.

    OTOH, the chief of the China National Meteorological Bureau was removed on 2/3, the same day the balloon made news. Coincidence?

    This timeline is just getting dumber & dumber, weirder & weirder.

  27. 27.

    West of the Rockies

    So bat bombs–actual bats–was s thing.  I had never heard of this. Why not turkey bombs?

    As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could  fly.

  28. 28.

    MisterForkbeard

    OT, but I’m abroad right now on a business trip. And watching the international coverage of this has been kind of funny – the filipino news (and international new orgs) are all covering like this “It’s not really a big deal but the US media seems to care a lot about it, so here we go” :)

  29. 29.

    smike

    @West of the Rockies:

    Wild turkeys can actually fly (for about 100 yds), and also fast, according to the intertubes. Mostly you don’t see them, though. You might hear them, but they hear you better and are quite adept at staying away from our kind.

  30. 30.

    NotMax

    Only thing I really want to know is from where it was launched.

    Crossing the entirety of the Pacific Ocean strains credulity.

  31. 31.

    Chris T.

    @smike:

    Wild turkeys can actually fly (for about 100 yds), according to the intertubes …

    I don’t know about distance, but yes, they can fly. The Oakland/Berkeley Hills area has turkeys and they fly up into, and down out of, the trees at times.

  33. 33.

    smike

    @Chris T.:

    Yeah, that’s easy to believe. I’ve even seen a roadrunner get up in and out of a tree. The dismount was not exactly graceful, but the reward was a nice sized lizard (the lizard was slapped against the ground repeatedly before consumption.)

  34. 34.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Chris T.: We live in the north bay and there are literally small flocks of wild turkeys that roam the suburbs. It was actually in the house disclosures when we bought it.

    And yep, in some Springs the local flocks will come to our backyard so they can jump off the arbor and teach the turkey chicks how fly/glide. Very cute – they climb up this thing and glide down for hours. It looks like they’re having a blast.

  35. 35.

    CaseyL

    IIRC, the “bat bombs” were an espionage false flag:  never intended to actually be done, but the “secret plan” to do so was allowed to be leaked to the Japanese, along with quite a few others, so that they wouldn’t know which tactics were really being planned.  (And possibly also to give the impression that American war strategists had gone insane.)

  36. 36.

    Ladyraxterinok

    1940s grade school song—-

    Five fat turkeys are we.

    We slept all night in a tree.

    When the cook came round,

    We couldn’t be found.

    And that’s why we’re here, you

    see!!

  37. 37.

    TriassicSands

    “We still don’t know what information was collected and where it was sent. Is that bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan?” World class genius Rep. James “Albert Einstein” Comer

    Duh! Obviously the balloon was headed for Mar-a-lago (when it was blown off course) to pick up Top Secret documents.

    (Question for polymath Comer: “Is our children learning?”)

    Every time a Republican opens his or her mouth I think the same thing — “How do people get this stupid?”

    Clearly, Biden should have nuked the balloon on the take-off pad in Wuhan. Except, why would he do that since he obviously ordered the launching of the balloon.

    Senator Tim “Isaac Newton” Scott: “The balloon should have been shot down before it crossed the continental United States, not after. We still don’t know what information was collected and where it was sent. This was a dereliction of Biden’s duty…”

    You know what this means…impeachment.

    It’s so shocking to think that the Chinese might try to spy on the US. I mean, we would never try to spy on them.

    The balloon does raise some interesting questions. Is a large balloon really the best way to sneak into a country to gather intel? What information is the Chinese balloon that is located over Central America looking for? Classified salsa recipes? Top Secret burrito dishes? On the other hand, maybe the balloons really are weather balloons, or alternatively, maybe sneaking in with a large, easily seen balloon is sneaky-clever. It does seem rather foolish of the Chinese to do this at a time when Blinken was on his way to China for talks to, what, reduce tensions between the two countries? It kind of looks like the Chinese are potentially as bumbling as the US often is.

    The big question now is when will VP Harris take the oath of office and how many years will Biden have to serve for treason. The other big question — what role does Hunter Biden’s laptop play in all this? I assume it is the key to unlock the mystery.

  38. 38.

    TriassicSands

    @CaseyL: ​
      “I do wonder how GOPers manage to breathe without professional assistance.”

    I’ve often said that if breathing required conscious thought, most Republicans would suffocate.

  39. 39.

    Carlo Graziani

    @NotMax: Adam’s earlier Ukraine update had a section on The Balloon, only slightly less for-laughs than this one. A US DOD spokesman mentioned that it entered US air defense coverage over the Aleutians.

    If you examine this visualization of stratospheric winds (this is for about 18400 meters, roughly the altitude of the balloon) you can see that the winds at the Aleutians do in fact trace back to the Chinese mainland.  They start out at about 150 km/hr over China, dropping to about 45 km/hr over the Pacific, somewhere past Hokkaido in Northern Japan. The distance from Hokkaido to the Easternmost Aleutians is about 3600 km. So that leg of the trip would take about 80 hours, which is less than 4 days. Say 4-5 days total from launch.

  43. 43.

    JCJ

    I have seen enough episodes of Pokémon to state that this was without a doubt once again an attempt by Team Rocket to steal Pikachu from Ash.

  44. 44.

    Ken B

    @West of the Rockies: Never heard of turkey bombs, but the US start did start developing a pigeon-guided bomb during WWII.

    It got put on hold, then restarted after the war, and eventually dropped when electronics became available that could guide the bomb and didn’t require food or statues to shit on.

  47. 47.

    Robert Sneddon

    @West of the Rockies: ​
      Britain at one time had plans for nuclear land-mines in West Germany meant to deter or at least slow down any Warsaw Pact invasion. There was a problem, how to keep the buried nuke warm? One proposed solution was to house chickens with the bombs.

  50. 50.

    Matt McIrvin

    <doofenshmirtz>BALLOOOOONIIEEEE!!!</doofenshmirtz>

     

    They won’t protect themselves against the virus that’s already here and they’re freaking out about imaginary viruses?

  51. 51.

    Baud

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    the chief of the China National Meteorological Bureau was removed on 2/3, the same day the balloon made news. Coincidence?

     

    Being 气球运营总监 is not for the faint of heart.

  55. 55.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Baud: In all seriousness, in Jan. the guy was appointed (“elected”) as the Chairman of the Provincial People’s Political Consultative Congress in Gansu Province. (PPCC is of the 2 rubber stamp legislatures in China, exist from municipal/prefectural to national levels). Therefore, he was schedule to step down as head of the China National Meteorological Bureau soon, anyway. I am not sure whether that is considered a lateral move or a promotion.

  57. 57.

    Geminid

    Thank goodness that balloon shootdown punctured the tension over primaries in yesterday’s morning thread. I was afraid I’d have to post another interview with freshman Representative Gluesenkamp Perez in order to calm people down!

    The interview is by Oregon Public Broadcasting, who evidently do a lot of coverage of southern Washington. The title is, “From Skamania County to Capitol Hill, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez reflects on legislative priorities, bipartisanship, and her surprising victory.” It contains none of the criticisms of her party that people here found offensive as presented in the Politico interview with its clickbait title and subtitle.

    Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez talks about other things, like a legislative initiative regarding “Right to Repair” and how she looks forward to working on the Agriculture and Small Business Committees. From the introduction:

       On the campaign trail, she pledged to fight for reproductive rights, lowering the price of prescription drugs, and shoring up blue collar and manufacturing jobs.

  58. 58.

    Baud

    @Geminid:

    It contains none of the criticisms of her party that people here found offensive as presented in the Politico interview with its clickbait title and subtitle

    👍

     

    ETA

    Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez talks about other things, like a legislative initiative regarding “Right to Repair” and how she looks forward to working on the Agriculture and Small Business Committees. From the introduction:

       On the campaign trail, she pledged to fight for reproductive rights, lowering the price of prescription drugs, and shoring up blue collar and manufacturing jobs.

     
    👍

  60. 60.

    Geminid

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I remember reading a book about the the British special bombing command know famously as the “Dambusters.” Having busted their German dams, the support group of scientists turned their attention to destroying the battleship “Tirpitz,” then undergoing repair in a Norwegian fjord. The “boffins” experimented unsuccessfully with a cat-guided bomb.

  61. 61.

    Kay

    Greg Sargent
    @ThePlumLineGS
    ·Feb 3
    Dem governors can step up and declare their classrooms free of creepy censorship efforts like those inflicted by DeSantis.
    In coming months, JB Pritzker will be doing more of this, a source tells me. Something like this is also happening in Michigan.

    Whitmer explicity compares Michigan’s progress on protecting rights to the lurch backward in Ohio and Indiana. She wants the refugees from those states :)

    Competition! Also- “creepy censorship” is just perfect.

  62. 62.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    Especially because DeSantis looks kind of creepy.

    ETA

    Whitmer explicity compares Michigan’s progress on protecting rights to the lurch backward in Ohio and Indiana

     

    This is the first I’m hearing of this. We do a bad job promoting our side.

  63. 63.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    She to me is kind of a classic “happy warrior”. She took this approach with health care/agency for women in her re-elect and it paid off.

    Governors are perfectly placed to fight this battle. It’s all state law. I’m glad the midwestern governors are engaging on it- they think it can work in our favor and I do too. Walz in Minnesota is taking the same approach.

  64. 64.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    Yet DeSantis gets all the headlines, including here.

    I agree that Dem governors should lead.  We always want the president to do everything, but dealing with DeSantis is really beneath Biden.

  65. 65.

    Kay

    The insufferable “cancel culture” moaners and CRT panic instigators can take the 27% and we can take the 37 + 34 :)

    Perhaps the simplest way of understanding the clashes over schools is the question posed in a recent Associated Press poll: “Do you think your local public school system is focusing too much or too little on racism in the U.S., or is the focus about right?”
    Divisions were clear: 37% of Americans said about right, 34% said there was too little focus, and 27% said there was too much. In other words, a majority of adults believe schools need to change the amount of focus — but they diverge on what direction they should go. This split is echoed in other polling too, including surveys of parents.

    34%. Too little focus. When do they get their 500 NYTimes editorials? Never, of course, but they’re out there and we can welcome them.

  67. 67.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    When you said we don’t promote our own side I realize Greg Sargent does and that’s where I get all this stuff.

    But you’re right. We need more happy warriors especially because the far Right is so bitter and rigid :)

    Put Alito’s scowling face on everything. Creepy!

  68. 68.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    It just makes sense for governors to do it because it’s mostly state law and it’s thus easier for them to deliver on the promises, too.

    My big fear in 2022 was not Congress. I was afraid the “Red Wave” political media sold us would knock out our governors and state reps. It didn’t.

  70. 70.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: It was a legit fear. Some of the worst damage in 2010 was at the state level, and Republicans were openly planning to leverage their state-level gains in 2022 to game the 2024 election and essentially re-do the 1/6/21 coup by means they could argue were completely legal. They may still try but their disappointing results in 2022 took a lot of the air out of the effort.

  75. 75.

    oldster

    I’ve changed my mind about the whole shoot-down.

    I thought that they might have used an inert warhead to simply puncture the balloon. And I thought they should have.

    But the best footage now shows a clear explosion. And I now think they were right to do it that way.

    For one thing, I have learned that balloons can survive holes a lot longer than I had thought.  So, sending an inert missile through it would have caused it to fall, eventually, but it might have drifted hundreds of miles first. E.g., over international water. Using the explosive warhead guaranteed it would fall not far from where it was shot.

    The more important thing, though, is that the explosion caused the right visual effect: the whole world has now seen the US fighter fire a missile, and the balloon pop violently and dramatically. If instead an inert missile had put a few holes in it, there would have been no instant visual.

    And that, sad to say, is probably the most important result of the shoot-down.  Yes, it might have been nice to retrieve the equipment with less shrapnel in it. But the equipment was expendable, and China will not have sent its most secret stuff.
    What Biden really needed to do was to send a message to Xi’s friends in Beijing, and to Putin’s friends in the Republican Party. And the message was: one shot, one kill.

    To send that message in the most visible way, and to make sure it would happen, an exploding warhead had to be used.

  76. 76.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: My research into the Washington 3rd CD that Ms. Gluesnamp Perez now represents shows that it has been a “swing” district ever since the Second World War, in both Presidential and Congressional elections.

    Trump carried it by 3.7% in 2020. It was redrawn last year and Trump would have carried the new district by 4.2%. So it is one of only a handful of districts that voted for Trump but have Democratic Representatives. The Maine 2d CD is another.

    Research psychologist Brian Baird was the most recent Democrat to represent the 3rd. He retired in 2011, and is the maternal uncle of singer Billie Ellish.

  77. 77.

    evodevo

    @smike: ​
      Yes…we have had a lot of them on our KY farm …they prefer to quietly run away (you will never know they were there) and only take flight when all else fails. they run like roadrunners and are quite fast…

  78. 78.

    sdhays

    @oldster: I think the whole thing has been tedious. Blowing it up tells Xi nothing special (it’s a balloon, not a Chinese U2 plane), and it’s unfortunate that Blinken now won’t be able to tell Xi anything to his face, at least for a while.

    But there’s certainly value in blowing it up to get it out of the headlines and making the GQP do what it does best – sounding silly and insane.

  79. 79.

    oldster

    @sdhays:

    I think we’re in agreement here.

    I liked the tweet that said this was part of Biden’s war on inflation.

    I hope the ending of the saga will let us get back to real issues.

  80. 80.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Some of the worst damage in 2010 was at the state level,

    Yup. I think Democrats finally got that state government matters a lot. It’s not either/or politically either. A strong state ticket can bring the national one along, just like the reverse. They don’t have to choose.

  81. 81.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I want to get away from the idea of “scarcity” in D campaigns and politicking. Democrats raise A LOT of small donor cash. They can expand to include state races. No one has to choose. It doesn’t have to be so siloed. They have enough money. Money is not what they lack, which is a very nice problem to have.

  82. 82.

    dm

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: House (and temple, shrine, palace) construction in earthquake-prone Japan prior to WWII was primarily wood.  The bats would have tiny incendiary devices strapped to them.  They would be released over an urban area (e.g., Tokyo) in the belief that they would take shelter in the eaves of houses.

    It wouldn’t take much of an incendiary device.  The result, it was hypothesized, would be scattered fires at random times throughout the city.

  83. 83.

    different-church-lady

    It was a mistake to not shoot down that Chinese spy balloon when it was over a sparsely populated area

    It’s just one ballon, Michael. What could it cost, a hundred lives?

  85. 85.

    Anyway

    Yes, yes — I’m all in favor of Dem governors getting more of the spotlight. Lamestream media puff up Rethug governors as “the bench” and usually ignore D govs unless they’re in trouble. I am still super psyched about the state results in PA, MI,  MN, IL…  I like how Newsom and the others are solidly behind Biden and don’t undermine him.

  86. 86.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Kay: Also too: now break it down by race.  I’m gonna hazard a guess that most of the people who think there’s “too much” focus on race, are not black

    Whoops, never mind.  I see they cover this and my presumption was correct.

  87. 87.

    Another Scott

    @different-church-lady: Waiting until it was over water makes sense for other reasons too – it means that the US Navy will be collecting the parts, not some local yahoo treasure hunter that might get – or claim to get there – there first.

    “Yeah, Jack got to that Jina balloon first and found a vial of Fauci plague!  He showed it to me!!11”

    (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  88. 88.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Looks like Elon Musk’s Twitter is trying to make it harder for people to read this article about The Nation’s long history of Russia/Putin cheerleading.  Give it a click/read and help make Fascists cry:

    “On July 13, 2018, the answers that vanden Heuvel wanted were published by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in an indictment of twelve Russian officers. The document, which was made public, provided names and explained in technical detail how Russian agents had penetrated thirty-three DNC computers to steal data and pass it to Wikileaks and others. Later, in Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections, he revealed even more astonishing information about how the hacking was carried out.

    The Nation ignored all that; to this day, evidence of hacking has never been mentioned in its pages. (Vanden Heuvel says that the magazine has covered the indictment and Mueller’s conclusions about the hack, but an exhaustive search of The Nation’s website finds only pieces asserting “no evidence” that Russia was at fault.) “Many people were astonished,” Dreyfuss tells me, by vanden Heuvel’s non-response to the Lawrence debacle, and “beside themselves with her stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality.” Other Nation staffers, past and present, are dismayed that the article remains available, circulating misinformation.”

  89. 89.

    Bill Arnold

    @smike:

    Wild turkeys can actually fly (for about 100 yds), and also fast, according to the intertubes.

    A lot further than that. I watched a flock take off about a kilometer away. Reaction was “those aren’t geese”. Then they approached, it became clear that they were wild turkeys within 100 meters after takeoff, they flew over my house, and the flock of 50+ landed nearby. Loud flyers; their wing noise was loud.
    Regularly have smaller flocks landing, and coming from at least several hundred meters away.

  91. 91.

    J R in WV

    @smike: we had a big tom fly over the back deck, while building the steel deck railing, crowd of workers, grinders, hammering to chip away slag from the stick welding.  Right overhead about 20 feet up, was like a fighter twisting between trees. We were all amazed. Beautiful bird in flight..

  92. 92.

    cain

    @Baud: ​
     
    That 30% sales tax will drive the demand for right to repair. It will also drive demand for products that lasts.

  93. 93.

    J R in WV

    In hilly areas turkeys often roost in trees up on the ridges, in which case they can fly downhill for considerable distances, like miles. If they want to, to get to a preferred area where oaks have shed tons of acorns, for example.

    They also just wander around in spring with flocks of babies, we see 2 or 3 moms with 20+ chicks wandering across pastures, have to stop in the road to let the flock pass by. Amazing wild birds, very flashy in flight. Ben Franklin thought they should be the national bird, as eagles do a lot of carrion. As in so many things, Mr Franklin was wise about these big birds.

    On the other hand, the eagle had the right reflex with regard to SFB, TFG. That boy jumped back faster than I thought he could ever move. Self preservation!

  94. 94.

    JaneE

    @Ascap_scab: Actually, having the balloon full of deadly bioweapons and the desire to shoot it down over land where there would be people to be infected are quite normal for Republicans.  The more casualties the better.  It is perfectly consistent with their actions for the last half century.

  95. 95.

    sab

    @YY_Sima Qian: That really sucks. Guy appointed to a reasonable job does what they expect (not awful) and when western media irrelevent squrrel sighting outs him he gets fired?!

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