Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

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

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

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

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Come on, man.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

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

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

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Is trump is trying to break black America over his knee? signs point to ‘yes’.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

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

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

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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.

The Politics of AI

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I don’t hate AI per se. I’ve used Le Chat occasionally for stuff like planning itineraries, and I know people who use AI on the job in all kinds of useful applications, including research.

My main objection is that a staggeringly high percentage of the people who are competing to build the dominant AI platforms and many of the technology’s most prominent boosters seem to be sociopaths.

That’s bad! And then there’s what’s already happening in schools:

I understand why chatbot cheating happens but every time I read about it I want to gently remind everyone that the point of schoolwork is not for the submission to exist. Teachers are not just greedy for more essays or solved equations. The point is to do the work WITH YOUR OWN BRAIN, FOR LEARNING.

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— Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) February 24, 2026 at 2:37 PM


Prompt engineering may become a valuable skill in its own right, but it isn’t going to teach people to think for themselves. Also, I hate bullshit framing like this:

How does A.I. stack up against some of the world’s best human writers? Take our quiz.

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— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) March 9, 2026 at 6:00 PM

Fuck their stupid quiz!

It’s no coincidence that tech oligarchs and AI boosters aligned themselves with the political movement that needs to make the truth meaningless and keep people angry, divided and dumb to retain power.

But you know who else finds AI deeply suspect? Lots of voters, across the ideological spectrum. NBC News did a poll, and here’s an article about it that’s interesting if you can ignore the reflexively anti-Dem framing.

A couple of excerpts:

Voters are worried about AI and don’t trust either political party to handle the rapidly evolving technology, according to a new national NBC News survey.

A majority of registered voters, 57%, said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits, compared with 34% who said the opposite. What’s more, a plurality of voters view AI negatively and don’t believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology.

Just 26% of voters say they have positive feelings about AI, compared with 46% who hold negative views.

Trump and his cronies are all in on AI because they are greedy pricks and also authoritarians. They hope to socialize the risks during the development phase, privatize any profits that emerge and then use AI to fire workers and create a surveillance state.

As noted, that’s bad, but maybe it’s also an opportunity?

Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies, which conducted the NBC News poll along with the Democratic polling firm Hart Research Associates, said the findings indicate AI is an issue that’s “up for grabs” by both parties to try to seize a political advantage.

The demographic groups with the most negative views of AI are voters ages 18-34, among whom the net favorability rating for AI is minus 44, and women ages 18-49, who reported a net AI favorability rating of minus 41. The two groups with the most positive views of AI are men over 50, with a plus 2 favorability rating, and upper-class voters, who also have a plus 2 favorability rating.

I don’t know how the politics of AI will develop, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Open thread for this or any other topic.

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Cruel Shoes II

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There’s an insane story in the WSJ about how TeMussolini has a new dementia game. He guesses the shoe size of male appointees and cronies, then has a minion order Florsheim shoes for them in the size he guessed.

He expects giftees to wear the shoes in his presence. Doesn’t always work out so well.

Rubio in too-large shoes

Real Caligula appoints his horse as consul stuff!

I wonder if the shoe recipients hobble around in ill-fitting shoes indefinitely, or do they order the same shoes in the right size and make the switch on the down low?

I hope it’s the former. They deserve cruel shoes.

Open thread.

ETA: Piggy is supposed to give a speech right about now. It will be lies, so I’m not gonna bother watching.

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Happy International Women’s Day!

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I noticed this historical marker on the main drag in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood last year.

Historical marker with palm trees and a brilliant blue sky and puffy white clouds in the background.

I’d seen it before, but friends, it sure landed differently when I saw it in 2025, my own country freshly in the grip of a triumphalist fascist regime that openly (and rightly) recognizes antifascists as their enemy.

Here’s how the local county government page described the march the marker commemorates:

On May 6, 1937, 5,000 Latinas from Ybor City assembled here on 7th Avenue to protest the rise of fascism in Spain and around the world. They marched from Ybor City to downtown Tampa to address Mayor R.E.L. Chancey at City Hall. Once there, a marcher presented the mayor with a petition on behalf of the Ybor community and said:

“As citizens and residents of a peaceful and democratic nation, we feel morally obliged to give all possible aid to Spanish cities that defend their democratic government against fascist aggression, thus maintaining the standard of peace and democracy in the world.”

Ybor Latinas, as well as their neighbors, waged an antifascist campaign during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), literally sending tons of food and clothing, plus 20,000 cigars, 4 ambulances, 1 x-ray machine, and $7,000 of medication to Spanish Republican forces.

Cigars because Ybor City! I am sure the stogies boosted morale despite what we now know about their danger to health.

My paternal grandfather fought fascists in Europe about seven years after the women marched in Ybor City. Many years later, he told me that when he was climbing off a landing craft with a rifle on a Normandy beach, he was preoccupied by concern that the cigars he carried in his breast pocket would get wet.

I now believe the story about the cigars was a polite fiction my grandfather concocted to avoid telling a child about the horror and fear he actually experienced that day. He rarely talked about the war.

Anyhoo, I am somewhat surprised the current authoritarian government in Florida and/or the fascist U.S. regime hasn’t deemed the commemoration of the 1937 Women’s Antifascist March an example of wrongthink to be expunged from historical records. It’s always a priority for petty, strutting, power-mad men, whitewashing the record.

But Ybor Latinas marched and supported the democratic forces opposing Franco, throwing subtle shade on their country’s reluctance to join the fight. And later, country boys from places like North Central Florida picked up rifles and marched across France and into Germany to end Hitler.

We can remember and be inspired by their courage, no matter what the current small men in search of a balcony officially decree.

Open thread.

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The GOP’s Nazi Problem

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South Florida Republicans brag about how multicultural their coalition is, and it’s true that it’s much more diverse than average GOP electorates. But a bombshell report from the Miami Herald (gift link) reveals how their campus youth leaders talk when they think no one else is listening:

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”

In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.

The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair. The group chat — verified by two people in the group — reveals the extent of racism and extremism within the highest ranks of campus Republican Party leadership in Miami at a time Florida’s Republicans are reckoning with an increasingly emboldened far right.

If you’re keeping score at home, this isn’t the first Young Republican group chat leak that suggests the party’s youth organizations have a Nazi problem. In October, Politico published an article exposing thousands of similar private comments from Young Republicans in multiple states.

Even though most of the chat participants in that incident were grown men, a few with jobs in the Trump administration or working as GOP operatives, JD Vance brushed it off:

JD Vance sought to downplay the revelation that leaders of a group called the Young Republicans exchanged hundreds of racist, sexist text messages – including one in which rape was called “epic”, and another in which someone wrote “I love Hitler” – as youthful indiscretions…

“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives.”

As a tech fascist’s protégé, it’s possible Vance has a more visceral understanding of the vital role Nazi edgelords play in the GOP coalition than, say, Donald Trump does. Trump is a hardcore bigot, but he seems to mostly form transactional rather than ideological ties.

But maybe he’ll get schooled on how the “neo” in neo-Nazism works if his endorsed candidate in the upcoming Florida gubernatorial primary hits the rising Nazi youth buzzsaw.

Leading Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, who is Black, denounced what he called the “woke right” during a speech in Miami last fall, a phenomenon he said has risen in the wake of the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Donalds seemed to be using the term as a stand-in for the far right, describing it as those that oppose all immigration and espouse “soft bigotry” on social media.

His opponent James Fishback — a relative political unknown who has used racist and white nationalist rhetoric throughout his campaign — is highlighting the generational divide around extremism on the right in Florida.

One University of North Florida poll found that while only 6% of likely GOP primary voters supported Fishback, he had the support of 32% of 18-34 year olds, four times what Byron Donalds got among that age group.

Ouch.

To be clear, I don’t think Fishback’s mostly virtual campaign will ultimately go anywhere. But if Donalds gets the nod as expected, maybe the combined effect of old school bigots and Nazi youth sitting out the election might allow someone like David Jolly to squeak into the governor’s mansion if he’s the Democratic nominee.

Nationally, Trump’s Iran war is unpopular with the GOP’s neo-Nazi faction, which is why Vance, usually a prolific troll, has been mostly mum so far. It’s also why Trump is now publicly excommunicating former dining companions like Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly via tweet.

Normally, evidence of infighting among this large group of deeply terrible people would cheer me up, but I’m not feeling it today. It underscores anew the scale of the problem, which isn’t just a GOP Nazi problem but a problem for every one of us.

Open thread.

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“One day, he is not going to be president anymore…”

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Becca Balint (D-VT) tells Noem accountability is coming.

Balint to Noem: "You're the secretary of DHS — for now. And you think you're immune from accountability. But I promise you this: one day he is not gonna be president anymore. And when that day comes, we will still be here. And in hearings like this, we are going to continue to prove your guilt."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 4, 2026 at 2:13 PM

Noem and all the other sociopaths who are terrorizing people at home and abroad need to hear that message. (Please, Congress, do Hegseth next.)

They all need to hear that. WE all need to hear that.

Thank you, Representative Balint.

Open thread!

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Underpants Noem (Open Thread)

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The incompetent twatwaffle Donald Trump appointed to run the sprawling Department of Homeland Security agency appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It didn’t go well for her. Here’s a fellow Republican who voted to confirm her:

Tillis to Noem: “A 14 month old dog is basically a teenager in dog years. You decided to kill that dog bc you hadn’t invested the appropriate training, then you have the audacity to write a book & say it’s a leadership lesson! … Those are bad decisions not unlike what happened in Minneapolis”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 3, 2026 at 12:55 PM

Tillis is retiring, so he went full honey badger, later calling for Noem’s resignation and threatening to throw sand in the Senate’s procedural gears if she keeps stonewalling on answers Tillis has demanded about how DHS fucked up investigations in North Carolina.

***

In other news, the demented president embarrassed the country in front of a foreign leader again. In a press avail with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump wrongly claimed his own shitty father was born in Germany.

The odious Fred Trump was actually born in an outer NYC borough. It was Trump’s cathouse-running grandfather Drumpf who was born in Germany and then kicked out for being a draft dodger, after which he made his way to the U.S.

Sounds like Trump would like to tariff Spain into supporting his unpopular war, but oops, SCOTUS:

Trump: “Spain has been terrible. I told Scott to cut off all dealings with Spain. They said we can’t use their bases. We could use their bases if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody is gonna tell us not to use it.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 3, 2026 at 12:04 PM

But actually, Trump WON on tariffs, actually, despite SCOTUS plastering a big red L on his mottled orange forehead:

Trump: “We won on tariffs, actually. Somebody said, ‘You actually won the case.’ We won on tariffs. You had a decision that was wrong.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 3, 2026 at 12:11 PM

Oh, and invading Iran is super popular — and gas prices are going to fall back to $1 a gallon real soon, just you wait.

Trump on going to war with Iran: “I have never had more compliments on something I did. So if we have a high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends these prices are gonna drop I believe even lower than before.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 3, 2026 at 12:09 PM

To sum up, what a pack of whiny-ass, buffoonish and incompetent losers.

Open thread.

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How to Dispel That Musky Smell

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Jason Sattler, aka LOLGOP on Bluesky, published an important essay yesterday on Elon Musk’s social engineering con to reelect Trump in 2024 and how Musk plans to use his ill-gotten gains to fuck with the upcoming elections. I almost never say “read the whole thing,” but seriously, read the whole thing.

It’s titled “America Needs to Prepare for Elon Musk Like He’s a State-Sponsored Cyber Attack.” That’s a good way to put it because in terms of resources and connections, Musk is the equivalent of a state actor. Sattler starts by reviewing how Musk pulled off the con in 2024:

Let me walk you through what it actually did, because the details would repulse a society with anything like a healthy gag reflex, and because they reveal the one thing Musk actually believes in: his power to loot America dry, a position that puts him in exact sync with the man he spent more than any individual in the history of the planet to elect.

Muslim voters in Michigan saw pro-Israel ads praising Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing Israel’s military. Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, targeted by the same operation, saw ads claiming Harris wanted to cut off U.S. arms to Israel. Young liberals got headlines about how Harris had sold out the progressive movement. Working-class white men in the Midwest were warned she’d impose race-based hiring quotas. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats were coming for their menthol cigarettes.

Every one of those messages, totally contradictory and engineered around each target’s specific fears and identities, came from the same organization, routed through a dark-money structure designed to hide that fact. 404 Media documented the Snapchat ad buys in granular detail: same PAC, same campaign, opposite messages, sorted by ZIP code, with Musk as the obscured original donor behind a dark-money nonprofit. In information security, this is called spoofing.

As Sattler points out, this kind of appeal works because it’s microtargeted and emotionally charged. Crucially, it’s also anonymous, so the recipients don’t know they’re being played for suckers.

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