Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

An almost top 10,000 blog!

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

This really is a full service blog.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

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

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

Optimism opens the door to great things.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Thursday Evening Open Thread: Breaking…

Thursday Evening Open Thread: Breaking…

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Still a few bugs in the system!

Also breaking: Apartheid Princeling’s tiny heart.

Yes, I’m sad for the science guys, but not a big enough person to resist the easy target.

NO RESPECT!

Reader Interactions

71Comments

  1. 1.

    different-church-lady

    I do believe Pillow Guy might have just won the award for most expensive mouth-shoot-off ever:

    The MyPillow founder claimed he had data showing Chinese interference and said he’d pay $5 million to anyone who could prove the material was not from the 2020 election. A computer scientist is entitled to the prize, arbitrators ruled.

  2. 2.

    different-church-lady

    Somebody really needs to ask Musk to his face, “Dude, why do you have to be such an asshole?”

  4. 4.

    Ruckus

    @different-church-lady:

    Well at least we know for sure, money can buy stupid. In Mike’s  case I’m thinking he bought an entire train’s worth of stupid. Most settle for a lunch bag amount of stupid, but Mike is special.

  6. 6.

    piratedan

    as seen elsewhere on the Web….

     

    “Thank God the missle exploded when it did, else the autodrive could have kicked in and directed the rocket to the closest orphanage…..”

  7. 7.

    different-church-lady

    I think we’re seeing signs that the “Get away with anything as long as you’re a Republican” era is starting to wind down:

    GOP leader, who voted to expel Tennessee Three, found guilty of sexually harassing interns.

  8. 8.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: If India’s justice system worked as well as ours does RSS would be paying until eternity for their non-stop lying

    Also to0 bhakts has a sad because 40% of American adults have no idea who Modi is.

  10. 10.

    different-church-lady

    @Ruckus: I still think it’s a chicken/egg problem: does money turn normal people into assholes, or do assholes have a magnetic effect on money?

  12. 12.

    Baud

    @different-church-lady:

    I think assholes have an advantage because it is easier for them take the actions necessary to succeed, whereas others may hesitate out of guilt or insecurity.

    I also think that people who achieve high status end up getting obsessed about the threats to their status, and that turns them into assholes.

  13. 13.

    BruceJ

    My favoritr part of the SpaceX rocket blowing up, is that they’re calling it a ‘sudden unscheduled disassembly event’

  17. 17.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @different-church-lady: they get away with it, until they don’t

    As lawmakers filed into the House chamber after a lunch break on Thursday, the desk of former Rep. Scotty Campbell sat empty, the characteristic lawmaker name plate missing from its front.
    Campbell, R-Mountain City, resigned from the General Assembly in a sudden move Thursday, less than two hours after he told The Tennessean he had no plans to step down from a Republican caucus leadership position over a harassment policy violation.

    what are the odds somebody reminded him evidence of something worse in that two hours

    I’m guessing there are whole lot of state legislatures and legislators who would not be comfortable the kind of national spotlight TN GOP drew upon itself

  19. 19.

    different-church-lady

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    I’m guessing there are whole lot of state legislatures and legislators who would not be comfortable the kind of national spotlight TN GOP drew upon itself

    Oh I dunno, there seem to be more every day.

  21. 21.

    hueyplong

    The chef’s kiss part of the MyPillow award is that Lindell’s dare/offer included a binding arbitration clause and, unlike corporate defendants against individuals in 99% of cases, he actually lost the arbitration.

    Mikey is about to find out how often appeals of binding arbitration work out.

    Schadenfreudelicious.

  22. 22.

    different-church-lady

    @Eunicecycle: Oh I love it! The guy must have been like, “5 million dollars or support Trump?… 5 million dollars or support Trump?… fuck it, 5 million dollars!!!“

  23. 23.

    Roger Moore

    @different-church-lady: ​
     
    I think the biggest thing is that rich people can show off their inner asshole in a way the rest of us can’t. Most really bad assholishness is directed at people’s social inferiors. For most people, the pool of clear social inferiors isn’t that big, which limits the scope of how big an asshole they can be. For rich people, the pool of clear social inferiors is much larger, so they have many more opportunities.

  27. 27.

    narya

    @different-church-lady: @Baud: And I think a lot of people just don’t care that much about money. The ones who do are also the ones who are insecure about whatever status they do achieve and/or think they are owed deference [waving to Clarence Thomas]. There’s probably a third category, too–the folks born into substantial wealth who have no interest in, or ability to understand, “regular” people; that’ll get you partway to “asshole” all on its own.

  28. 28.

    Shalimar

    Here’s a shock for everyone.  Musk scheduled the Twitter revocation of blue checkmarks for 4/20, and it has been total chaos so far.  No one can sense any pattern to the implementation.

  29. 29.

    prostratedragon

    @different-church-lady:  And police can manage to get even an armed person without a hail of bullets. (Fortunately, the fool did let his minor child walk out of the house and away from him.)

  31. 31.

    Tony Jay

    @Roger Moore:

    It sounds like he was just someone with enough intellectual honesty to accept what the data showed him.

    How much would it cost to pay, say, ten percent of Republican voters $5 million each to do the same thing?

    Cheaper than the usual campaign spend? Might be worth it.

  32. 32.

    Roger Moore

    @Tony Jay:

    How much would it cost to pay, say, ten percent of Republican voters $5 million each to do the same thing?

    Let’s see.  Trump received about 74 million votes in 2020, so 10% of that is 7.4 million.  7.4 million voters times $5 million/voter = $37 trillion.  That doesn’t seem like a good use of money.

  33. 33.

    RaflW

    @Ruckus: People do recover, but I wonder if he permanently fried a bunch of circuits.

    “Lindell abused heavy drugs much of his life, starting with cocaine in 1982. He switched to crack cocaine in the late 1990s.

    By spring 2008, his drug use had gotten so bad that his three crack dealers got together and did something that defies logic: they attempted an intervention.”

  34. 34.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Roger Moore: What Lindell *said* about the data was that it represented packet captures (called pcaps if you deal with them.) If you’ve spent time analyzing them for a living, it takes a few seconds to determine if something is a pcap or not. It wasn’t. Doesn’t matter what else he said about voter data or Chinese interference or anything else – he said it was a particular type of data, and it wasn’t.

  35. 35.

    OzarkHillbilly

    I understand the desire to stick pins in the apartheid princlings very thin skin, I want to at every opportunity, but still feel the need to point out that space is hard.

    That is all.

  36. 36.

    trollhattan

    Ain’t that America.

    Police in North Carolina are searching for a man accused of shooting a six-year-old girl and her father after their basketball rolled into the suspect’s yard.

    Two other victims, a woman and a man, were also injured.

    Police said the suspect, 24-year-old Robert Louis Singletary, remains at large. Mr Singletary faces four counts of first-degree attempted murder. Police have also charged the suspect with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and one count of possession of a firearm by a felon.

    The suspect was previously known to police for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend with a sledgehammer in December.

    Police in Gaston County first received a 911 call at 19:44 local time on Tuesday (00:44 BST on Wednesday) about the shooting. Investigators later reported that a six-year-old child and her father were both seriously injured. An adult female was grazed by a bullet and a second adult male was shot, they said.

  40. 40.

    RaflW

    @prostratedragon: In the upsetting cops-hail-of-bullets category, the autopsy of the guy in the protest camp near Atlanta who was probably (IMO) flat out murdered by cops has been released. Manuel Teran received at least 57 gunshot wounds.

    That case has stunk since day one. I don’t expect real justice, but at least some facts are dribbling out.

  43. 43.

    Anne Laurie

    @Baud: 40% of American adults have no idea who Modi is.

    I’m surprised it’s that high.  We aren’t great when it comes to foreign affairs knowledge.

    It’s a short name, easy to remember.  Also, Trump talks about him — they did at least one massive mutual grip’n’grin back in the Before Days — so MAGAts who’d normally claim all those brown ferriners look alike have reason to remember him.

    And then, of course, there’s lots of Indian-Americans and people who associate with Indian-Americans!

  47. 47.

    Dangerman

    I was around the for the earliest days of the Internet (before Netscape); put me down for the category of the “money turns people into assholes” and “the bigger the money, the bigger the asshole”. Exhibit A, Elon Musk.

    I should note, for the record, I ended up dirt poor. Each of my startups went “poof”.

  48. 48.

    different-church-lady

    @Dangerman: Musk is a white South African, so I gotta think he was well on the way to asshole long before he had any money of his own.

  49. 49.

    TheOtherHank

    @OzarkHillbilly:

     the need to point out that space is hard.

    I did some googling of the 37 test launches of the Redstone rocket (the one that boosted Alan Shepard into almost-space), 27 were successful. Or to put it another more than 25% failed.

    For Mercury rockets, 11 successes, 4 failures

    So lets all point and laugh at Elon, but rockets blowing up during testing is not that rare.

  53. 53.

    prostratedragon

    [email protected]: Not only that, but there can be legal consequences. Michael K. Williams’s dealer was recently charged in his death, for instance. If Williams hadn’t died, the dealer might have stayed under the radar.

  54. 54.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    It is a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one’s safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

    Alan Shepard. Who, IIRC, while awaiting liftoff for the USA’s first manned (suborbital) flight, sat in his Mercury capsule on top of that Redstone for so long he had to take a leak in his spacesuit. (Aaah, piss on it! he was reported by no one to have muttered…)

  60. 60.

    Citizen Alan

    @Baud: Honestly, I imagine a large percentage of the 60% who “know who Modi is” think he’s a techno-pop star from the early 1990s.

  61. 61.

    Roger Moore

    @prostratedragon:

    Why was he out?

    People are supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and keeping them locked up while waiting for trial should be an exceptional measure.  It sucks that sometimes people  commit another crime while they’re waiting for trial, but they have a constitutional right to bail.

  62. 62.

    Salty Sam

    @Baud:    I also think that people who achieve high status end up getting obsessed about the threats to their status, and that turns them into assholes.

    Nailed it!

  65. 65.

    RaflW

    @Jackie: Scotty ran unopposed in the last election, and in ’20. The R before him ran unopposed as well. Have to go back to 2016 for a Republican to face an opponent, who was an independent and lost 86%-14%.

    Maybe it was Run for Something that I saw saying that TN, in addition to outrageous gerrymanders, has an unusually high rate of unopposed elections.

    Running a D for those seats likely sucks, is a slog, and I dunno how effective it is. But. Dems give literal 10s of millions for challenges against ppl like Susan “awful waffle” Collins.

    We’ve gotta reallocate investments.

  66. 66.

    El Muneco

    @trollhattan: Singletary got multiple first-degree murder charges immediately. None of the three shootings earlier this week got higher than second-degree, and that was like pulling teeth.

    Anyone want to guess Singletary’s race compared to the three aging “stand your ground” cases?

  67. 67.

    Jackie

    @RaflW: I’m *hoping* Democrats are fired up after the mass shooting in Nashville, removing 2 of the 3 TN3 from office for peacefully protesting against gun violence, learning their State Speaker is corrupt, and this latest Republican scandal -and start challenging those unopposed seats and actually win some of them.

  69. 69.

    brantl

    @TheOtherHank: Yeah, but an awful lot of the hard struff has already been done. That he can’t follow in the footsteps of a successful space program just shows that he can’t learn from other people’s knowledge.

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