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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I really should read my own blog.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

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

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

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

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

“Alexa, change the president.”

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

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Not all heroes wear capes.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

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

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

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You are here: Home / Archives for 2024

Archives for 2024

Medium Cool – Dame Maggie Smith, One of a Kind

by WaterGirl|  September 29, 20247:00 pm| 51 Comments

This post is in: Medium Cool, Open Threads, TV & Movies, Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In

Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in.  We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.

Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered.  We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWBP6g2j23U

Let’s talk about Maggie Smith.  A force of nature.  One of a kind.

“Maggie doesn’t just steal a scene; she commits grand larceny.”

Medium Cool – Dame Maggie Smith, One of a KindPost + Comments (51)

Sunday Evening Open Thread: What Happened to Elon Musk

by Anne Laurie|  September 29, 20246:05 pm| 173 Comments

This post is in: Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Tech News & Issues

it's not a novel observation, but musk's lived for a long time at a level of wealth that i have to imagine resembles having some kind of delusional disorder. every single person who interacts with him in nearly every encounter has a vested interest in lying to him about whatever he wants.

[image or embed]

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) September 28, 2024 at 3:08 PM

My personal opinion, Musk has always been a Sales Guy, and Sales Guys need to lie to themselves before they can successfully lie to their potential customers. But there’s no denying he’s gotten worse at distinguishing lies from fact over the last decade or so… At the Atlantic, Lora Kelley interviews Charlie Warzel:

Lora Kelley: Elon Musk has been crossing into the worlds of conspiracism and disinformation for a while—but he seems to be taking things even further lately. Why might he be going this far? What’s in it for him?

Charlie Warzel: It’s complicated, but it’s also deceptively simple. We can’t be inside this guy’s head, but he does seem to truly feed off of and love attention. Musk has been moving in a right-wing direction for a long time. But his purchase of Twitter and how he mishandled it—with advertisers, and de-verifying users—really alienated people and accelerated his turn. Many people used to think of him as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century. He was branded as this innovator and savvy businessman. When he walked into Twitter and made a mess of it, he lost cachet among this group of people who saw him as a genius. Now he’s trying very hard to appeal to the only people who really care about him anymore—including those who reside in the far right corners of the internet.

Lora: Why is Musk getting so involved in this presidential election, and with Trump (who apparently said he would give Musk a role leading a government-efficiency commission if he wins)? Is he making some kind of play to be a great man of history, or is he after power in a potential Trump administration?

Charlie: Elon Musk basically bought Donald Trump at the top. He endorsed him moments after the first assassination attempt, when Trump was riding a wave of positive attention, when Joe Biden was still in the race and it looked like Trump was probably going to dominate him. So much has changed since Musk endorsed Trump in July. If he were truly a savvy political operator, he would be hedging his bets right now, saying I can’t fully alienate myself from one political party, because I have all these government contracts and so many other interests that I need to be able to at least sit in a room with with Democrats.

I think the fact that he has effectively just become the in-house social-media team for Donald Trump speaks to the fact that he’s not just making a political calculation. He’s not playing a game of 3-D chess. It seems to me that he’s truly radicalized.

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: What Happened to Elon MuskPost + Comments (173)

North Carolina Is In Play!

by WaterGirl|  September 29, 20244:18 pm| 31 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Targeted Political Fundraising 2023-24

Repeat after me: North Carolina is in play.

North Carolina is a voter-suppressed state, and BIPOC Youth are going to make a difference.  We’ll find in just a month or more, but they may make not just “a difference”, but THE DIFFERENCE.

Ballot Curing in North Carolina

Our partners in North Carolina (NC Black Alliance and NCAAT in Action) have, with our help, flooded North Carolina campuses with canvassers and “ambassadors” to register, educate, and turn out the newly-energized BIPOC youth vote.  With their other in-state partners, they’re working together to avoid duplication of effort.  This fundraiser will also continue to support this effort.

But mostly with this effort we are helping with Election Protection in NC.

Our NC partners predict that there will be 150,000 ballots in November that need “curing” to correct minor things that must be fixed in order for a person’s vote to count.  Not a typo:  150,000 ballots!

There is so much work to be done post-election in order for people’s votes to count:  identify, contact, and assist voters whose ballots are challenged as deficient by the Republican voter-suppression juggernaut.

Here’s an NPR article explaining “ballot curing.

In an election likely to have razor-thin margins, these challenged votes could change the outcome! 

We’ll have separate thermometers for NC Black Alliance and NCAAT in Action.

Key Candidates in North Carolina

There is a lot of money sloshing around in North Carolina.  So we asked our NC partners for a short list of candidates who could really use our money and whose election would make a difference in the lives of North Carolinians and protect the state from its corrupt and overreaching Republican party.   They had one question for us:  Candidates at what level?   My answer was “any level; we want to support the most strategic races.”  Based on their recommendation, it clear that their focus was on the courts.

Allison Riggs – NC State Supreme Court Justice (KEEP)

The seven-justice NC Supreme Court has a 5-2 Republican majority.  The MAGA court threw out a voting rights case and allowed the legislature free reign to gerrymander the state.  Justice Riggs is a social justice attorney who was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper, and is up for partisan reelection against a Republican challenger who ruled that life begins at conception while on the Court of Appeal.  More about Judge Riggs here.

Carolyn Thompson – NC Court of Appeals  (KEEP)

Incumbent Judge Thompson is also up for partisan re-election.  She is African-American and focused on victims of domestic violence while in private practice.  As a state legislator, her opponent, Thomas Murry, tried to exempt NC from the ACA and pushed draconian voter ID laws.  More on Judge Thompson here.

Raymond Smith – Challenger, State Senate (FLIP!)  

Raymond Smith is an African American Gulf War veteran and former NC state Assembly member.  Smith was drawn out of his district (total coincidence, I’m sure!)  so he is running to flip a Senate seat in the Goldsboro area and shatter the Republican super-majority.  Let’s hope the Republican power move backfires on them.  His opponent, with the Republican-sounding name of Eldon “Buck” Sharpe Newton III is Chair of the Judiciary Committee.  Good ‘ol Buck championed outlawing public mask wearing in protests and shepherded a performative measure limiting voting rights to citizens.  More on Raymond Smith here.

We trust our engaged and on-the-ground NC partners to recommend candidates, but we’ll also revisit other potential candidates in NC and elsewhere after Q3 fundraising totals are released (shortly).

Again, no thermometers just yet, but I wanted to let you know about one of the directions we’ll be heading to this week.

There’s just too much going on for a *single post.

*Not if I want anyone to actually read it, that is.

North Carolina Is In Play!Post + Comments (31)

Low Hopes for the VP Debate

by @heymistermix.com|  September 29, 20243:34 pm| 133 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

Low Hopes for the VP Debate

Welp,

NEW YORK (AP) — CBS News, hosting vice presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz for the general election campaign’s third debate next week, says it will be up to the politicians — not the moderators — to check the facts of their opponents.

The 90-minute debate, scheduled for 9 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday in a Manhattan studio that once hosted the children’s program “Captain Kangaroo,” will be moderated by the outgoing “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan.

Vance comes off as far more coherent than Trump.  He’s smarmy and full of shit, but at least he can stay focused.  I trust Walz to do a good job, but there’s really only so much he can do if the debate is going to be like the first CNN debate, where the moderators just read off questions while Trump lied his ass off.  Also, Vance is desperate and without any moral core, and desperation will yield some pretty shocking shit.

Speaking of desperation, I’m sure that CBS is doing this out of a desperate desire to still be relevant, even though anyone who’s been paying attention realizes that national TV news is pretty much irrelevant to viewers who aren’t in the market for laxatives, statins and hemorrhoid cream.

In general, I have low hopes for any of our weak institutions.  This includes our federal criminal justice system, which is hopelessly infected with Trumpism from the top to all of the red state districts.

This doesn’t mean that I’m ready to give up — far from it.  What it means is that I don’t want to put energy into media criticism of the old, creaky, failing institutional press*, or into hope about the federal Trump prosecutions.  I’d rather see what’s happening on Bluesky, TikTok and other social media, where most of the voters who decide this election are getting their news.

What gives me the most hope is that the Harris campaign seems to realize that what Atrios would call “the celestial hall monitors” aren’t going to do shit for them, and are best ignored.  I do wonder whether it really matters that the Times or the Post is spending their time wishing and hoping and thinking and praying that Trump is elected.  The proof will be in the election, and I’m pretty optimistic that Harris is going to win despite the worst efforts of our weak and corrupted institutions.

——–

* I fully acknowledge that I won’t be able to break old habits, but it’s worth a try.

Low Hopes for the VP DebatePost + Comments (133)

Heads Up – Enter Nebraska – In a New Way

by WaterGirl|  September 29, 202411:52 am| 51 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Targeted Political Fundraising 2023-24

I talked with our Four Directions peeps this morning to let them know that we had completed our latest $30k fundraising for Four Directions AZ.  And I let them know that we are about to embark on another round of funding for Four Directions MT, because I’m tired of all the “Jon Tester can’t win” gloom, which is bullshit.  I believe that you fight hard, and the chips will fall where they fall.  No regrets.

I also let them know that I got pissed off at Josh Marshall’s nay-saying about Nebraska, dismissing the likelihood of a win even though the latest polls show them as neck and neck – so we’re about to do another round of fundraising for Dan Osborne, the Independent who has the incumbent on the ropes.

I was thinking of calling the upcoming efforts for Jon Tester and Dan Osborn “The Senate’s not dead yet!“, or possibly “A Flip and a Keep!”

Our friends at Four Directions have put me in touch with the someone close to the Dan Osborn campaign, who in turn is putting me in touch with the Field Director for the Osborn campaign.  So this looks to be a great opportunity for us to help with this Senate race in a very boots-on-the-ground way!

I’ll give you all an update after we talk.

My name is Dan Osborn. I'm an independent labor leader running for Senate in Nebraska. I'm down only 1 point to Republican incumbent Deb Fischer! This could be the upset of the decade.

Check out our NEW ad. 👇 pic.twitter.com/TRIdjTp8EI

— Dan Osborn (@osbornforne) September 24, 2024

In the meantime: this is the same ad, but not on twitter.  If you find this on YouTube, let me know.

https://app.frame.io/presentations/523bf80a-0db4-4eca-a9e4-6b2e66da3fef

Here’s a great article:

Princeton Election Consortium  (aka Sam Wang)

But then, enter Nebraska.

The Nebraska race escaped my attention until several close polls came up. There are not many surveys, but Republican incumbent Senator Deb Fischer only leads her challenger, independent Dan Osborn, by a median of 2 percentage points. That is rather amazing, considering that in 2018, she won re-election by 19 points. What’s going on?

First, Senator Fischer is pretty low-profile. She has not made much news during her time in the Senate. She did not cast aspersions on the honest conduct of the 2020 Presidential election, which distinguished her from her election-denier colleagues. That might make her a bit bland by current Republican standards.

Dan Osborn is an interesting candidate. He’s a steamfitter by trade, and became well known in 2021 for leading a successful strike at a Kellogg’s plant in Omaha. This year he competed for the Democratic Senate nomination – but then turned it down. Walking away from the Democratic Party is probably good for one’s reputation in Nebraska. And he’s gotten the support of the Legal Marijuana Now Party (LMN), which has ballot access in Nebraska but withdrew its candidate to make way for Osborn.

Osborn trails narrowly by a median of 2 points (see FiveThirtyEight, which provides our data feed).

But in one survey, when respondents were read his biography and Senator Fischer’s, he jumped to a 53%-39% lead. So he has considerable upside potential.

I don’t know if he can go the distance; that might be tough for an independent. Recall that in the 2014 Kansas Senate race, Greg Orman ran as an independent and kept things close, as I wrote at NewYorker.com at the time, but he faltered at the end. But for now, Osborn might be a game-changer.

Also, great job hitting our goals for Arizona – for Four Directions and Worker Power!

Anyway, no thermometers yet but I wanted to let you know about one of the directions we’ll be heading to this week.

We’re also going back to North Carolina this week, which I will tell you about in a separate post.

Open thread!

Heads Up – Enter Nebraska – In a New WayPost + Comments (51)

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Dreaming of A Lost (Purple) World

by Anne Laurie|  September 29, 20249:21 am| 179 Comments

This post is in: Music, Open Threads, Popular Culture

Watch: Airbnb is offering Prince fans the chance to immerse themselves in the world of the Kid, 40 years after the film’s premiere. pic.twitter.com/RpU11Hwgnm

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 29, 2024

Feeling lucky, music lovers — or creative? Per the Associated Press, “Prince fans can party overnight like it’s 1999 with Airbnb rental of ‘Purple Rain’ house”:

For a short time, up to 100 Prince fans visiting the music superstar’s hometown will have a place to stay when the party’s over that will let them go crazy over his cultural legacy, a home featured in the film “Purple Rain.”

Although the white, two-story home with brown trim in Minneapolis looks unassuming from the outside, there’s plenty inside to make the late icon’s devotees delirious over this new, limited-time Airbnb rental. Upstairs, a big closet with paisley wallpaper and leopard-spotted floor displays iconic outfits worn by Prince behind glass and has other outfits available to make renters the beautiful ones.

“And then what guests will be able to do themselves is actually play around with a selection of really iconic ‘80s outfits and looks and styles that they can kind of engage their inner rock star themselves,” said Ali Killam, an Airbnb spokesperson.

The rentals are within reach for fans who don’t own diamonds and pearls — just $7 a night per person for up to four guests. The price is based on Prince’s favorite number and there will be a total of 25 nightly stays available over seven weeks from Oct. 26 to Dec. 14.

The Airbnb rentals are a sign o’ the times — the 40th anniversary of the movie. It starred Prince as The Kid, a musician and band leader with a rocky life in the home featured on screen.

The film, along with the hit album of the same name, made Prince a superstar through songs like the title track, “Let’s Go Crazy,” and “When Doves Cry.” Those followed other hits, such as “1999” and “Little Red Corvette,” and he sold more than 100 million records with a gender- and genre-defying blend of rock, funk and soul. He died April 21, 2016, of an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 57 at his Paisley Park estate in Chanhassen, Minnesota…

If U would die 4 Prince, you can request a booking online, starting at 6 a.m. Pacific time on Oct. 2 and through 11:59 p.m. Pacific on Oct. 6. Airbnb says a pool of potential guests will be chosen at random, and the final invitations to rent will be based on fans’ answers for why they want to stay there.

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Dreaming of A Lost (Purple) WorldPost + Comments (179)

Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Powellsworth Powellswood Gardens, WA

by Anne Laurie|  September 29, 20245:25 am| 22 Comments

This post is in: Garden Chats

Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Shade in Powellsworth Gardens, WA 6
 
A report from Mike in Oly:

Last weekend my iris club visited a local garden and nature preserve north of us in Federal Way, WA. It was a real treat. We did not get to hike the 37 acre nature preserve due to a variety of factors (aged members, steep muddy trails, etc.) but the gardens were delightful.

I’ll split it in two – the shade borders and the tropical garden. Hope you enjoy.

Today, the shade garden…

Top photo: A quiet spot to sit and contemplate the setting, surrounded by a multitude of green tones and textures.

  • Near the garden entrance was this striking rubber plant, tucked into a planting of rhodies and ferns. It sure made an eye-catching focal point with its bright red flower.
  • Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Shade in Powellsworth Gardens, WA

  • Several of the shade beds had these chunks of columnar basalt with bowls carved out for water and flowers floated in them. I would love a few of these for my own garden.
  • Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Shade in Powellsworth Gardens, WA 3

  • A part shade/part sun border stuffed with ferns, hydrangeas, rhodies and other lovely plants.
  • Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Shade in Powellsworth Gardens, WA 2

  • A couple more of the basalt bowls.
  • Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Shade in Powellsworth Gardens, WA 1

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    Sunday Morning Garden Chat: <del>Powellsworth</del> Powellswood Gardens, WAPost + Comments (22)

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