Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You cannot shame the shameless.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

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

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Bark louder, little dog.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

It’s possible to be a liberal firebrand without crapping on the party.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Everybody saw this coming.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

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Florida woman, still rocking a punk rock ethos in the 2020s, which is kind of sad. Betty Cracker has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2012.

Butter Lamb 2026

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Here’s this year’s edition:

Lamb made out of butter with peppercorn eyes on a counter.

Here’s what it looked like before I began applying the pelt curlicues:

Vaguely lamb-shaped butter sticks.

Butter lamb tutorial and back story here.

Overall, I’m pleased with the 2026 edition. We have hotter weather this year than last, so it took longer to put together because I had to periodically refrigerate the lamb in progress so the ears wouldn’t melt off and the pelt (made by extruding butter through a garlic press) would stick to the chassis.

We’ll be having Easter dinner with the in-laws as usual. Bill is currently undergoing extensive dental work, poor guy, so he has to stick with soft food right now. He also hates dealing with holidays.

He said something to his peeps the other day about skipping Easter this year, attempting to use his teeth as an excuse. They told him that’s fine if he didn’t want to show up but that I was still expected since I’m bringing the butter lamb. We’re both going.

Open thread!

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Bondi Shit-Canned, Plus That Fucking Speech

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Might as well go straight to the regime’s legacy propaganda organ for the scoop: (Fox “News”)

FIRST ON FOX — President Donald Trump reportedly has already fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to two sources familiar with the matter who spoke with Fox News Digital.

Bondi met with Trump in the Oval Office Wednesday night ahead of his speech to the nation on the war in Iran, where she reportedly was informed of her ouster, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

One of those sources said that by the time Trump took his place behind the podium for the address, Bondi already had lost her job and was on her way back to Florida.

No indication that Bondi received a face-saving, make-work job like Noem’s Shield Maiden of the Americas gig. That’s because Bondi screwed the pooch on the Epstein cover up. Sucks to be her.

***

Speaking of that awful speech last night, I think the Associated Press is usually a decent mainstream news source. But like other legacy media outlets, they’re still trying to cover an authoritarian cult of personality as if it operated within the traditional civic democratic ecosystem of yore.

So they end up lying on the authoritarian’s behalf with jaw-dropping whoppers like this analysis of the speech Trump delivered last night:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump used his first major address since launching his war in Iran to assure Americans that all of his military objectives will be completed “shortly” and urge an increasingly skeptical electorate to give him a little bit more time.

Trump in his Wednesday evening speech dialed back the bluster that’s dominated his rhetoric in recent days as world markets convulse and a badly battered Iran is still landing some effective blows on Gulf neighbors’ infrastructure and U.S. bases.

No one who watched that speech and aimed to describe it honestly could make such an assertion. Here are verbatim excerpts that are textbook examples of bluster dialed up to 11 with the knob on the Blusterator™️ ripped off:

In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. Victories like few people have ever seen before. Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them, terrorist regime, they led, are now dead.

Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing and America, as it has been for five years under my presidency, is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before.

Before discussing this current situation, I also want to thank our troops for the masterful job they did in taking the country of Venezuela in a matter of minutes. That hit was quick, lethal, violent and respected by everyone all over the world. After rebuilding our military during my first term, we have by far the strongest military anywhere in the world.

First, and perhaps most importantly, I killed General Qassem Soleimani. In my first term. He was an evil genius, brilliant person, a horrible human being, however, the father of the roadside bomb. And he lived, just horrible what he did. Iran would have been perhaps in a far better, stronger position had he lived. We would have had probably a different conversation tonight. But you know what? We’d still be winning and winning big.

There would have been no Middle East and no Israel right now, in my opinion — the opinion of a lot of great experts — had I not terminated that terrible deal. I was so honored to do it, I was so proud to do it, it was so bad right from the beginning.

As I stated in my announcement of Operation Epic Fury, our objectives are very simple and clear. We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or reject power outside of their borders. That means eliminating Iran’s navy, which is now absolutely destroyed, hurting their air force and their missile program at levels never seen before and annihilating their defense industrial base. We’ve done all of it. Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Their missiles are just about used up or beaten.

The United States has never been better prepared economically to confront this threat. You all know that. We built the strongest economy in history. We’re going through it right now, the strongest in history. And one year we’ve taken a dead and crippled country. I hate to say that, but we were a dead and crippled country after the last administration and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far, with no inflation, record setting investments coming into the United States, over $18 trillion and the highest stock market ever with 53 all-time record highs in just one year.

Tonight, every American can look forward to a day when we are finally free from the wickedness of Iranian aggression and the specter of nuclear blackmail. Because of the actions we have taken, we are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world. And I’ll tell you, the world is watching. And when we do, when it’s all over, the United States will be safer, stronger, more prosperous and greater than it has ever been before.

“Sane-washing” seems too tame a word for the practice of describing the stream of bloodthirsty, juvenile drivel that dribbled out of Trump’s misshapen and increasingly saggy piehole as “dialed back bluster.” So does “hackery.”

Anyhoo, open thread.

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War Piggies, Etc.

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It’s horrifying to acknowledge that the theocratic authoritarians who govern Iran are more credible than the demented U.S. president and the band of appointed psychopaths currently running this country, but here we are. From the Wall Street Journal’s breaking news coverage:

Trump, Iran Trade Barbs Over Control of Strait of Hormuz

President Trump said “Iran’s new regime president” had just asked the U.S. for a cease-fire, in a post on his Truth Social network. Iran has a new supreme leader but not a new president. “We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear,” Trump wrote. Trump plans to address the nation on the war Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the Strait of Hormuz remains firmly under its control and dismissed Trump’s “performative actions,” while the Foreign Ministry said Trump’s statements about Tehran’s request for a cease-fire are false and baseless. An Iranian official said the country’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, “is in full health” but staying out of the public eye due to “wartime conditions.”

I mean, who knows if the junior Khamenei is in one piece or not, but the tell on Trump, as the WSJ notes, is that Iran doesn’t have a new president, and oops, we killed the last one. It’s possible Trump is DMing Borat.

***

Bill is home today and watching news coverage on TV, so I’m involuntarily exposed to it too. According to the reporters on CNN, Trump’s bid to overturn the 14th Amendment didn’t fare well. (Also, we learned that Solicitor General D. John Sauer, clownishly making the clown admin’s clown case, has a voice that is as grating as RFK Jr.’s.)

My guess? Alito and Thomas will be the only two of the six corrupt GOP ideologues to rule in Trump’s favor. The court will release the decision along with another decision that finishes gutting the Voting Rights Act, and the dumber pundits will praise the court’s “moderation.”

***

That’s all I’ve got, besides this adorable flamingo content from Bluesky (H/T: espierce):

Here are ten seconds of Flamingoes feeding underwater.

[image or embed]

— DAPPER DON DHARSHI (@dapperdondharshi.bsky.social) March 30, 2026 at 9:39 AM

The odd shape of the beak totally makes sense now.

Open thread!

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Squishable Open Thread

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Artemis II is scheduled to launch at 6:24 PM Eastern time at the Kennedy Space Center.* I plan to be on a riverbank more than 100 miles from the launch site this evening, looking to the east to catch a glimpse of the 322-foot rocket’s rise on its way to a moon flyby.

Commander Reid Wiseman will be at the helm, joined by U.S. astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. According to Wikipedia, this will be the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Wow. A lot has changed since then, some good, some terrible. Godspeed!

***

About two and a half hours after the scheduled launch, the demented cockwomble currently serving as ceremonial president of the United States is supposed to address the nation about the progress of the pointless, expensive and deadly war he started.

Han Solo, CP30, Chewbacca and Princess Leia looking worried in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon with the caption "I've got a bad feeling about this."

I think War Piggy is tired of the war and desperately wants a face-saving offramp, but only one that allows him to avoid the intolerable narcissistic injury of being perceived as a loser. The thing is, it’s not solely up to him anymore. Other people, some of whom are motivated by more than profitable transactions, get a say in the outcome.

So Trump is no longer in control, but his increasingly hysterical threats and peevish insults may indicate construction of a self-soothing cocoon to which he can retreat. Maybe then he can focus on more interesting things, like the tacky ballroom (currently stopped by the court) or the corrupt monstrosity of a presidential “library” and for-profit hotel his hell-spawn are erecting in Miami, complete with a golden statue of himself.

I’ve never been a fan of Miami (except the Dolphins, and the café con leche is first rate), but even that city doesn’t deserve what’s planned for it. I hope the disaster can be averted, and I’m glad some elected Democrats are firing shots over business titans’ bows by saying publicly that Trump may be immune from prosecution, but YOU aren’t.

***

I really enjoyed the thread under yesterday’s post that featured Martin’s guest commentary. Lots of ideas shared and assumptions challenged! For me, it was a throwback to the pre-social media app internet, when it seemed like being online could be a good thing.

One last thing: It’s April 1, so be careful out there. Open thread!

*I hope Piggy doesn’t spot the opportunity to slap his accursed name on the Kennedy Space Center. I’m sure he doesn’t read Balloon Juice (or anything else), so I feel safe expressing that wish here, but nobody say “Kennedy Space Center” within earshot of a cultist, okay? Thanks. 

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The Seat of Left* Power: Feat. Guest Commentary from Martin

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In a recent wee hours open thread, commenter Martin flagged an article published in Dissent magazine that had the following title and subtitle:

The Case for a Third Reconstruction

The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking.

Refreshingly, the topic of that article isn’t about messaging, personalities or policy, i.e., the usual stuff political nerds fight about, but rather structure. In a nutshell, the question is what kind of governing theory should the opposition Democrats adopt as they contemplate how to fix the shit Republicans broke and prevent the rise of another democracy wrecker like Trump?

Martin raised it as a potentially interesting discussion here, and I thought it would be too, so I asked Martin if he’d be interested in writing up guest commentary on the topic as a conversational hare for the baying Balloon Juice hounds. He generously agreed, and his submission follows:

So, I was going to write a whole piece, but Jamelle Bouie found the same blog I’d been reading so read him – he’s smarter and a better writer: What Is the Left’s Theory of Power? (Link goes to Bouie’s 3/21 column at a non-paywalled archive site.)

On this site we talk a lot about candidates and policy and not much about structure. Personally, I don’t see how any potential Democratic president in 2028 armed with any possible policies would reverse the damage done under Trump as all such work will sit on a foundation of sand.

Changes in governmental structure and power seem essential at this point. So some of us are interested in seeing more discussions of how Democrats wield power – the recent shift on redistricting being a good example of Democrats identifying that they need to wield power here – temporarily at least reversing a view that power should reside with the electorate. We’ve talked about Supreme Court reform many times. We don’t talk much about Congressional reform other than expanding the House and the filibuster.

Trump had project 2025, which laid out that structural shift toward a unitary executive at the expense of states rights and the free market, and Democrats will need a comparable effort if only to wind back what Trump implemented, let alone establish our “core claims about who should wield state power and on what terms.”

So the starting questions seem to me to be: What are our core claims? Who should carry those on behalf of the party? The Heritage Foundation did this for the GOP. How would this get implemented in the time frame of probably a single Congress? And how hard should we push for Democrats to support and fight for these claims over typical policy positions, as this is likely to not align with our usual notions of left/right or even insider/outsider?

There’s a lot of reading around this over at the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project Blog, and I think a good starting point is The Case for a Third Reconstruction.

Emphasis added by me. As context for such a discussion, I second Martin’s recommendation of the Bouie column, linked above to an archive site where, presumably, his employer won’t record a click. Bouie cites a post at the LPE blog by law professor Beau J. Baumann called “What Would a Russell Vought of the Left Look Like?”

Bouie juxtaposes a left theory of power with that adopted by Republicans, which Bouie describes as “neo-Bonapartism, with Trump as the man on horseback.” Here’s a brief excerpt of Bouie’s commentary for folks who won’t leave the boat:

So where does the left find power? And how does it root this authority in the constitutional order? What, again, are the constitutional politics of the left?

Baumann’s answer is Congress, and so is mine. Last year, I wrote briefly of the need for an imperial Congress, by which I meant a legislature that claims the full suite of powers and prerogatives granted to it under the Constitution.

This would be a Congress that could radically reshape the executive branch, seizing power back from the president. A Congress that could curb, curtail and discipline the Supreme Court. It could marshal public support behind a broad-based political and economic agenda and take a leading role in governing the nation.

We all realize this will be a heavy lift, as Bouie (and everyone else linked above) acknowledges. But I think he’s right to note that we need a theory of the case, and Baumann and Bouie make a good case for reinvesting power in Congress, as laid out in the Constitution. What do y’all think?

Open thread.

*Please note that “left” in this context means any political actor who is left of center, from Michigan U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin to Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL). So, here, at least, “left” may include but is not defined by your annoying ex-friend who went scorched earth over Bernie in 2016.

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Pulling a fast one…

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NBC News says Republicans are positively giddy about a possible deal with Dems to fund DHS. Here’s a link to the full article, and below is an NBC reporter’s post on Bluesky that summarizes it:

NEW: Senate Republicans believe they have a solution to break the logjam and reopen DHS

Two-step plan, 4 sources tell @nbcnews.com

1) Fund all of DHS except ICE/deportations to win Dems and get to 60

2) Fund ICE/deportations in reconciliation PLUS elements of SAVE act to win Trump

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) March 24, 2026 at 1:01 PM

Predictably, some folks on Bluesky are getting out over their skis and criticizing Dems for “caving,” seemingly based solely on the fact that some Repubs are happy that a solution may be in sight, in the absence of any legislative verbiage, let alone a vote. I’m not going to embed the Nervous Nelly posts here, but you can easily find them under the Kapur post linked above.

However, this morning, John Light at TPM outlined something that I think is a more likely scenario, i.e., that Repubs in Congress are trying to pull a fast one on Trump. Here’s a link to the article and an excerpt below:

Politico reports that, yesterday, Trump agreed to back this new deal to partially end the DHS shutdown, so long as Republicans get aspects of the SAVE Act into a reconciliation package.

But budget reconciliation is only meant to be used for, essentially, budget stuff. A sweeping voter suppression bill is not budget stuff. Not at all. So what is happening here?

Some Senate Republicans have been contending there is a way to get the SAVE Act through with budget reconciliation. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) earlier this month proposed his conference hire “a really smart lawyer” to figure it out. This hypothetical individual could supposedly “help us craft a SAVE Act that can survive a Byrd bath,” the process through which the Senate parliamentarian strips out from a reconciliation bill any measures that don’t qualify for reconciliation…

Passing the SAVE Act would be a disaster for American democracy. But we’re not sure that’s what Senate Republicans are really up to here.

We’ll be watching to see if this is a genuine attempt to pass the SAVE Act, or an effort to kick the can, get Trump off their backs, and disclaim responsibility when they find that — even with some smart lawyers — they can’t get the SAVE Act through using reconciliation after all.

That sounds more plausible to me, but who knows? I think it’s objectively true that the shutdown and inability to pass the voter suppression act is hurting Republicans more than Dems.

Senator Thune is a Trump flunky as are virtually all elected Repubs. But unlike Trump, Thune is smart enough to know that the filibuster generally hurts Dems while protecting Repubs, so he hasn’t knuckled under to Trump’s attempts to force that issue.

Also, Light points out that in the recent past, Thune refused to disregard Senate parliamentarian rules to score a quick political win, maybe for the same reason. Light also notes that the current standoff over the voter suppression bill is hurting Repubs because Trump can’t get Paxton out of the U.S. Senate race in Texas without signing the voter suppression bill. That’s the condition Paxton set for exiting the race.

Anyhoo, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if Repubs reopen DHS without ICE funding and without the voter suppression bill, that’s a win, if not for Democrats, for the country. Repubs were always going to be able to add ICE funding via reconciliation, so that’s on them. If the voter suppression provisions fizzle in reconciliation, as they should, democracy will have dodged yet another bullet.

Open thread.

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Resist, Refuse, Ridicule

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Anyone going to a No Kings rally next Saturday? I will be there with signs and extra signs for friends. I already made a couple of signs. (“Release ALL the Epstein Files!” and a drawing of a crown in a slashed red circle with the words “NOPE since 1776” under it.)

Still mulling over ideas for two more — hit me up in comments if you have any ideas. I might go with “Impeach. Convict. Remove.” for one of them and possibly something related to the Iran war for the other.

Jason Sattler at The Farce (LOLGOP on Bluesky) wrote a piece the other day that’s pertinent to the upcoming protests. The title is “Donald Trump is fighting an unwinnable war to prove he’s not a loser. And he’s losing.” Link to the whole thing here, excerpt below:

The only thing that has toppled autocracy in U.S. history and in other countries is civil resistance. A sustained, unrelenting group of people showing, not telling, being out in the world, demonstrating their resistance, their refusal, and their ridicule. Not asking the right Democrats to find their spines. Not the devastating editorial. The people in the real world make the failure visible and refuse to let it be replaced by his narration of events.

(Anat) Shenker-Osorio is precise about the sequence: resist, refuse, ridicule. Ridicule specifically — not because it is funny, but because it is the one input his system cannot process. The ultimate aim of an authoritarian movement is to erode the will to resist. As long as people are resisting, refusing, and ridiculing, it is costly for them. A man who requires centrality, who wins by being watched, who lies not to persuade but to exhaust — that man has one remaining vulnerability. Being seen as small. Being laughed at. Having “already won” placed next to the casualty count every single day until the gap between the claim and the reality becomes impossible for even his own voters to ignore.

What sways public opinion is social proof. People do the things they think people like them do. A resistance visible enough to change what people think other people think is not a side effect of the movement. That is the only way it works. The Montgomery bus boycott didn’t work because it asked nicely. ACT UP didn’t work because it petitioned the right Democrats. They broke into the New York Stock Exchange and hung a banner where the bell is rung. By the end of the month, the price of AZT had dropped. Showing, not telling. The thing you do in the world that makes the person walking past on their way to work register that something is happening.

I think there’s truth to the social proof theory. A sustained, unrelenting resistance won’t change every mind; nothing does that. But it’s visible proof — in the space where one lives — that not everyone swallows the narrative, so it’s worth doing, in my opinion.

So I’ll be there with my goddamn signs, even though I’d much rather be chasing after birds or watching spring training baseball. How about you?

Open thread.

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