Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

People are complicated. Love is not.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Let there be snark.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

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

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

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Archives for 2024

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Sympathy for Speaker Emerita Pelosi…

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Nancy Smash might actually snap & smack some Butt our hooorse-race!!! ‘journalist’ upside the head over the next six weeks, and I for one will argue that they’ll have earned it…

Longer clip, same interview:

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Sympathy for Speaker Emerita Pelosi…Post + Comments (109)

Screw the Recent NYT Poll for AZ – Arizona Is Absolutely in Play and Operation Blue Arizona is Laser-Targeted to Keep AZ Blue

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Arizona is absolutely in play.

So, as one of Cole’s favorite sayings goes, Fuck those guys!  And their stupid poll, too.

As you surely all know by now, Operation Blue Arizona is a multi-faceted effort by Balloon Juice to:

  • keep Arizona’s 11 electoral votes
  • flip the closely-divided legislature from red to blue
  • unseat two virulently anti-choice state Supreme Court justices
  • elect the Democrat to oversee elections in Arizona’s most populous County, with over 60% of the state’s population

Here’s the original Operation Blue Arizona post, in case you want a refresher.

Balloon Juice Operation Blue Arizona

Who could miss the jittery pundit hand-wringing over last weekend’s NYT Siena poll, which purportedly showed Trump resurgent in Arizona?  The poll has Trump up 49% to 45%, the exact opposite of the result of the same poll in August (Trump is up 47-42 if you include third party candidates).

The same poll reflected Ruben Gallego polling 9 points ahead of batshit crazy quasi-human Kari Lake, suggesting some “ticket-splitting” may be at play in the Grand Canyon State.

Fun Facts

  • AZ  is experiencing rapid growth with a massive population churn
  • with a youthful voter base
  • and a substantial number of voters registered as “independent” (35%).
  • all of which make Arizona notoriously difficult to poll
  • and most importantly, neither our partners on the ground nor the experts are panicking!

More Fun Things to Consider

  • According to semi-reformed Republican strategist Matthew Dowd, the Arizona poll does not reflect the actual voting habits of Arizonans.
  • In the last two elections, all Democrats ended up within 2 to 2 ½ percentage points of each other, reflecting relatively little ticket-splitting in the end (despite early polls showing otherwise).
  • So we’re supposed to believe that Ruben Gallego is up by 9 points and Harris is down by 5 points?
  • Further, the same NYT poll reflected Harris up by four points in August 2024.
  • It defies logic that the candidates’ relative standing would have flipped in Trump’s favor after the debate.

Our partner, Worker Power is knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors motivating Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters to turn out.  They have over 500 trained canvassers in the field registering new voters in key swing districts. 

Our partner, Four Directions is expanding their efforts to turn out the vote in Indian Country by hiring more paid relational organizers.   The AZ Native community alone could deliver the state to Harris.

Whats at Stake?  (besides everything!)

  • 11 electoral votes for Harris
  • 2 flipped US House seats
  • Ruben Gallego’s Senate seat, which would help Dems keep the Senate.
  • Democratic majority in the AZ House instead of Republican control
  • Democratic majority in the AZ Senate instead of Republican control
  • a possible AZ democratic trifecta (governor, state House and state Senate)

Let’s do this!

So let’s buck up and kicks some Republican ass, shall we?

The registration deadline is October 7.  Early voting starts on October 9.   Every day matters.

Let’s prove the FTFNYT and its stupid polls wrong AGAIN!

I’l leave you with the words of Worker Power’s Executive Director:  Arizona is a must-win state for Trump, and we have the power to ensure he never steps foot in the Oval Office again.

Addendum: There has been some discussion about additional Congressional candidates in the comments.  There is a lot more money sloshing around in 2024 than in 2022, which is not surprising in a Presidential election year.   For the most part, we’re very temporarily holding our fire on most of these candidates until Q3 fundraising numbers come out (as early as next week).

Stay tuned for some possible specific candidate flash-fundraising in the very near future, as soon as we meet our goals for these two great organizations.

We have Angels for Four Directions (4x match until we hit $25k) and Worker Power (2x match).

Four Directions  (4x) – Angel is silvery!    completed!  (thank you silvery!)

Four Directions  (4x) – Angel is Marleedog!  

Worker Power  (2x)  – Angel is a lurker!

As always, to be angel matched, tell us about your donation in the comments or send email to WaterGirl.


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Screw the Recent NYT Poll for AZ – Arizona Is Absolutely in Play and Operation Blue Arizona is Laser-Targeted to Keep AZ BluePost + Comments (88)

Ignore Them and They’ll Go Away

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Ignore Them and They'll Go Away 1
This juxtaposition was incredibly easy to do – just pick the Times’ current headline on Trump and then find what he actually said. It would work pretty much every day that Trump is doing an event.

Scout211 mentioned this piece by Drew Magary at SFGate, and he’s about where I am with regard to the NYT:

[…] I work in an industry that’s been gutted from the inside out this century — you’ve heard about that part, too — leaving the Times as the dominant primordial beast in the serious newsgathering business. It has the biggest readership of any paper by far and, as such, critics like me have treated hate-reading the Times as an act of public service. My opinion was that the Times’ influence was so vast, especially among higher-ups in both the federal government and the private sector, that it had to be called out anytime it failed to call things as they clearly were (daily). To dump on the Times was to speak truth to power.

I no longer hold that opinion. Harris is winning this election right now in large part because she has avoided legacy outlets, the Times foremost among them, altogether. Her team understands that it behooves these outlets to have a close race, which means that they’ll seize on any gaffe Harris makes if it gives them a chance to falsely equivocate her remarks to those of Trump screaming, “THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS!” to kick up a racial holy war. Team Harris has no interest in helping the Times sanewash Trump more than it already has, so they’ve decided that the only way to win the game is not to play.

It was the right move, and it’s proven that the Times’ influence is exactly as large as you and I pretend it to be. It has a big-ass readership, but that readership is mostly there to play Wordle and, as ESPN’s Mina Kimes noted, the vast majority of them are already in the bag for Democrats anyway.

The extended tantrum thrown by the failson running that place over Biden’s refusal to sit down for an interview set them up for a faster ride to irrelevance.  The more pouty and bitchy they get, the less reason Harris has to interact with them, because their attitude almost guarantees that the outcome of an interview will be negative.

In addition to the Times’ readership being mostly Democrats, it’s also mostly engaged voters, and Harris has to reach the unengaged possible voters — still more reason for her to ignore the Times.

Also related to this was DougJ’s set of tweets over the weekend, on another platform that is not that relevant except that journalists keep using it.

Ignore Them and They’ll Go AwayPost + Comments (76)

Missouri People: Vote Against Retention of SC Justices Kelly Broniec & Ginger Gooch

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The vote was 4-3 to keep the reproductive freedom amendment ON the ballot in Missouri.

These two justices voted against it.

Kelly Broniec

Ginger Gooch

VOTE THEM OUT.

https://twitter.com/piper4missouri/status/1838317173674320135

If the MO Supreme Court justices are not retained, the Missouri Governor chooses replacements from 3 candidates.  I am not familiar enough with the process to know whether they would be replaced with justices who are just as bad.

If you live in Missouri, send a message.  Fight back.  Vote them out.

The rest of us?  We should spread the word.

Open thread.

Missouri People: Vote Against Retention of SC Justices Kelly Broniec & Ginger GoochPost + Comments (20)

What Is It with All These Republicans Killing Dogs?

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What Is It with All These Republicans Killing Dogs
This is Loca, the alleged victim.

Woke up this morning to this:

The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.

Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 while he was working as a still relatively unknown history professor at New Mexico State University.

At least Kristi Noem had the good grace to use a gun when she dispatched poor Cricket.  A shovel seems both more brutal and more on-brand for the guy who dreamt up Project 2025.

What Is It with All These Republicans Killing Dogs?Post + Comments (152)

Teatime Open Thread

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It’s 4 p.m. here, 11 a.m. at Balloon-Juice HQ. An ideal time for a hot beverage:

mugs that go hard

A dear friend who’s a good step or five to my left, politically, made that mug for me as a one-off. She has others here; I may get the “Perhaps Today, Satan!” one.

I was going to vent about local politics (it’s not a spoiler to say that Labour’s newborn government is failing to thrive at 11 weeks old) but I’m on call to help with algebra homework. Talk amongst yourselves.

Teatime Open ThreadPost + Comments (134)