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The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

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

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

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

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

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

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

T R E 4 5 O N

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

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You are here: Home / Archives for 2024

Archives for 2024

On The Road – Captain C – Road Trip, April 2024 Part 11: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Part 3: Women in Baseball

by WaterGirl|  December 10, 20245:00 am| 11 Comments

This post is in: On The Road, Photo Blogging

Captain C

In the movie A League of Their Own*, the last scenes of the movie take place in a new Women in Baseball exhibit, with the members of the AAGPBL (All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League) being there for the dedication.  While the exhibition has changed since then (and is smaller than it was in the movie), there’s still a tribute to women in baseball, from the early days in the 1800s through the AAGBPL to current times.  This photoset covers that exhibit.

On The Road – Captain C – Road Trip, April 2024 Part 11: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Part 3: Women in BaseballPost + Comments (11)

On The Road - Captain C - Road Trip, April 2024 Part 11:  National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Part 3: Women in Baseball 7
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, NYApril 19, 2024

Entering the exhibit.

2025 Pets of Balloon Juice Available on Cafe Press

by WaterGirl|  December 9, 20248:34 pm| 31 Comments

This post is in: Balloon Juice, Open Threads, Pet Calendar

Link for Calendar A

Link for Calendar B

FINAL CHECK: Find Your Guys in 2023 Pets of Balloon Juice Calendar B! 11

beth hopes to have another cover option with Dobby later this week, but time is passing quickly so we wanted to get these out there.

PLEASE LOOK CLOSELY AT THE CALENDARS ON CAFE PRESS before you order.  If something changed between when you checked the pages I put up and now, there is no recourse once you have ordered.

 

 

2025 Pets of Balloon Juice Available on Cafe PressPost + Comments (31)

Monday Evening Open Thread: Let Us Learn from the Koreans…

by Anne Laurie|  December 9, 20247:35 pm| 201 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Information Warfare

To summarize: The Korean president told the army “hey guys, come over here, I’m doing a coup” and they came with unloaded guns and just kinda dicked around and when he was like “wtf is u doing” they were like “hey man, you said *you* were doing a coup.”

[image or embed]

— Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty (@irhottakes.bsky.social) December 5, 2024 at 11:56 PM

Trump and his henchmen have been saying a lot of terrible things, because ‘saying’ is all they’ve got at the moment, and the thought of doing terrible things to people who can’t retaliate is what gives them joy. But talk is cheap, and the actions they propose require coordination — a degree of cooperation we can make sure they don’t get.

Korea has, I am informed, a rather different social culture than ours (‘ornery’ seems to be the default term), a textbook dictatorship on its border, and a living memory of what civil war actually entails. These factors seem to have given the Korean public a head start on stopping the Six-Hour Coup. But we can learn from them!

I'm gonna hit the Clausewitz bong for a sec
What we're trying to do is create friction.
Everything is very simple in war, and the simplest thing is difficult.

[image or embed]

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:06 PM

Those little speedbumps might individually mean little but in aggregate, they run down the clock and force the GOP to expend political capital where they don't want to

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:06 PM

If I'm gonna run with "war is politics by other means, therefore politics is war by other means" I need people to understand that tactical defeats do not result in strategic ones and the costs we can impose over the course of those tactical defeats will have consequences that can be exploited

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:33 PM

This wasn't over on November 5th, it won't be over on January 20th, and it won't be over if he declares himself god-emperor of America
It will be over when all of us are dead

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:34 PM

Monday Evening Open Thread: Let Us Learn from the Koreans…Post + Comments (201)

War for Ukraine Day 1,020: War Without End

by Adam L Silverman|  December 9, 20246:51 pm| 29 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Military, Open Threads, Russia, Silverman on Security, War, War in Ukraine

Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is doing great. She had her one month post chemo appointment with her oncologist this morning and the vet was thrilled with how she looked, the bloodwork, the information about the walks.

Second, my sinus infection seems to be improving, though I’m still going to just run the basics tonight.

During his trip to Paris, President Zelenskyy told President Macron and the President-elect that Putin does not want the war to end.

💢 Zelenskyy: I told Macron and Trump that Putin doesn’t want war to end, so he must be forced

[image or embed]

— Ukrainska Pravda 🇺🇦 (@pravda.ua) December 9, 2024 at 11:03 AM

Zelenskyy comments on his conversation with Trump about freezing the war.
t.me/c/1377735387…

[image or embed]

— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) December 9, 2024 at 12:40 PM

From Ukrainska Pravda:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stated that in a conversation with his counterparts, French President Emmanuel Macron and US President-elect Donald Trump, in Paris, he emphasised that Russian leader Vladimir Putin does not want the war against Ukraine to end and must be forced to do so.

Source: Zelenskyy on Telegram

Quote: “I told both President Macron and President Trump: first and foremost, you will see – Putin does not want this war to end. Therefore, he must be forced. He can only be forced if Ukraine is strong. A strong Ukraine, in the context of any diplomacy, means a strong military on the battlefield. It means a strong army, weapons packages, long-range systems, including, of course, ATACMS, Taurus, Storm Shadow, and SCALP missiles.

All of this is critically important for us. And yes, it is exclusively for strikes on military targets, and we emphasise this.”

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

show full post on front page

War for Ukraine Day 1,020: War Without EndPost + Comments (29)

Hush Hush, Keep it Down Now, Voices Carry

by @heymistermix.com|  December 9, 20242:46 pm| 291 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

Part of the reason I’m so focused on the Democratic response to Trump is due to something Seth Moulton said in his interview with Jon Lovett on Pod Save America a few days ago:

This [slandering trans folk without rebuttal] was exactly what the Republicans were able to do with immigration.  I remember being on the House floor last year, and there were some people / colleagues running for the this position of Democratic Messaging like Committee Chair, so supposedly in charge of Democratic messaging for the House, and I asked one of the candidates how she thought we should deal with immigration.  She said we should not talk about immigration.  I said, well, I actually think a lot of people are concerned about it because it does seem there’s a real problem with the southern border.  She said, nope, it’s dangerous to talk about it because it’s used against immigrants.

The whole Moulton interview starts around 1:42 on this YouTube recording.  Now, is Moulton lying?  I doubt it.  He did a terrible job talking about trans people in his NYT interview the other day, and he takes some lumps from Lovett on that regard, but he does make the point that Democrats not responding on major issues where Republicans are making a lot of noise (like trans rights) is not good for the party.  His anecdote raises an important question about the Democratic leadership’s attitude towards messaging.

Now, when I write that the Democratic leadership has not responded to Trump’s interview, I mean almost the whole of the Democratic leadership has been silent.  I covered what was said on Sunday shows yesterday, and none of it was a response to Trump’s comments.  Jim Clyburn, who didn’t cover himself in glory yesterday with his talk of pardoning Trump, went on CNN today and compared Trump’s desire to jail the January 6 committee to the time when Jim Crow became the law of the land.  Adam Schiff stood up to Trump on X earlier today.  That’s two.  Are there others?  I’ve been looking pretty hard and can’t find any.

Of course, Liz Cheney was out with a tough statement.  That’s because she’s a Republican who understands what the fight is.

People got upset in the last comments about me posting Will Bunch’s crack  about sending the Democratic leadership to space, but if you’re not responding to at least one of the dozen bad things Trump said, and voicing the Democrat’s position opposing it, you might as well be orbiting the fucking planet for all the good that you’re doing.  If the person who was running for chair of messaging had the attitude that Moulton relayed, then we have a big problem to even have that person be considered for the position.  Messaging means relaying your message, not sitting in silence.

I’ll close with some good news.  Ken Martin, one of three candidates for DNC chair (the others are Ben Wickler and Martin O’Malley), understands the assignment:

Martin, the Minnesota state chair, says the party must invest “significant resources” in a comprehensive, granular mapping out of how different political demographics get electoral information, including via non-news sources. Martin also sees the information problem as directly linked to a Democratic brand problem, in which “the majority of Americans now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor.” As Martin notes, Republicans have been allowed to keep up a “constant drumbeat hammering away at our brand.”

“Because we’re not in these information spaces, we’ve allowed the Republican Party to define us,” Martin said. “We’re not defining them. We have to be present in every channel.” Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has aptly termed this the “loudness gap.”

To counter it, Democrats must enlist an army of “trusted messengers and validators” in those spaces, Martin said, to “remind people who we are and what we’re fighting for.” Martin noted that during the campaign, Trump reached deep into various nonpolitical markets (as Ilyse Hogue details, Trump worked male-heavy audiences particularly hard). Democrats must find their own large niche audiences as a means to giving “people a sense that you’re one of them,” Martin said, adding: “It can’t be inauthentic.”

Importantly, Martin argues that the Democratic consultant class still remains too wedded to traditional paid advertising. During the campaign, some Democrats criticized the leading Super PAC, Future Forward, for spending too much on overly tested ads on network television. Martin declined to fault the group directly but said the party must reorient generally away from broadcast ads made by Democratic admakers.

This is the kind of attitude we need in our leadership, not the notion that we need to shut up about important issues where the Republicans are killing us in the media.

 

Hush Hush, Keep it Down Now, Voices CarryPost + Comments (291)

Closing In?

by @heymistermix.com|  December 9, 202412:48 pm| 178 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

This is the latest on the hunt for the killer of the UHC CEO:

Police are reportedly questioning a man in Pennsylvania in connection with the New York City shooting death of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.

NBC New York reported that the man being questioned on Monday was in or around Altoona, Pennsylvania – and had been found with a gun similar the one used in Thompson’s killing.

A separate report from CNN said the person being questioned was traveling by bus and had a firearm suppressor as well as a number of false identifications. Citing a senior law enforcement source, the New York Times reported that the man being questioned was confronted at a McDonald’s – and showed the same fake New Jersey identification that police believe Thompson’s killer presented when he checked into a hostel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on 24 November.

This whole manhunt has re-surfaced a lot of hatred towards the police.  It begins with the disproportionate response to this killing versus the killing of others.  It continues into the lackadaisical search of Central Park that was on the news yesterday and roundly mocked on the social media I saw.  (The social media I saw also included this report that NJ State Police essentially stopped enforcing traffic laws after racial bias was found.)

Some of this is pretty unfair, of course — the killer took enough precautions that this wasn’t going to be an easy case to crack.  But when years of copaganda about how massive police budgets will help keep us safe bump up against the ugly truth of police incompetence, anger and resentment ensue.

Closing In?Post + Comments (178)

ACA Open Enrollment Reminder

by David Anderson|  December 9, 202412:00 pm| 7 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance

Just a reminder, Open Enrollment for the ACA has its first big deadline at 11:59PM local time on December 15th. Individuals who choose their plans before that time will have their policies go live on January 1, 2025. Individuals in all states other than Idaho will have Open Enrollment Periods extend to January 15, 2025.

Even if you like your policy this year, go in and check things out. Your networks might change, your premium subsidy likely changes (work under review right now), and your options might change. Spend 20-30 minutes confirming that this hugely consequential decision is still a decent one.

ACA Open Enrollment ReminderPost + Comments (7)

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