Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

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

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Everybody saw this coming.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

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

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Come on, man.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

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

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

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

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

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

You are here: Home / Archives for Libby Spencer

Libby Spencer wrote for Balloon Juice from 2011-12.

"Well, it’s my turn to fill in for Doug, and no, I have no idea why he and John so kindly gave me the keys to the place either."

Libby Spencer

Every time we say goodbye

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DougJ is back so I’ll be on my way. Thanks to Doug for kindly inviting me to sit in and to everyone for the hospitality and the conversations. I had way more fun here in the last couple of weeks than I probably deserve.

Of course, this isn’t really goodbye for me. More of a farewell till we meet again. I’ll be cruising through your intertoobz, lurking in your comment threads, as always. Also blogging daily at The Detroit News and at my little hideaway where I say the stuff I don’t dare say out loud anywhere else, The Impolitic.

Oh, and I tweet. If you decide to follow me, tweet me to let me know. Code word — green balloons.

And one last thing. If anybody is wondering what happened to that kitten, turns out she was taken in by a neighbor and is happily enjoying the attention of an adoring teenager. So, anybody need two dozen cans of cat food?

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Time waits for no one

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Just found out a couple of days ago that my favorite aunt died. She was the quintessential eccentric artist. Her entire life was a performance piece. Her real name was Emily. She ran away from home at a fairly young age and changed her name to Stania. Because she thought that more exotic and better suited to an artist.

She was the black sheep of her generation in the family, just as I am of mine. I didn’t know her well. She didn’t get along with my mother. She rarely lived nearby. But we bonded when I spent a couple of weeks in SoCal with her in the early 90s.

I recognized her immediately when I got off the plane. As she did me. The very first thing she said to me after at least 20 years between visits was, “Do you smoke pot?”

Every morning for the next two weeks we had breakfast on her covered deck with the incredible view. It was so gigantic, she created three furnished rooms with living walls of tropical plants. And aquariums. So many fish. She would make really good coffee and roll herself a big fat doob. And we would sit in the breakfast nook, surrounded by banana trees, and talk about the future and the past.

In the afternoons she would show me her artworks. She was a talented artist who worked brilliantly in any medium. She was fearless. Relentlessly creative. Charmingly quirky. Hadn’t seen her since, but we had a psychic connection. For no apparent reason I was thinking about her on the night she died.

Even though I rarely saw her, I’m really going to miss sharing this earthly realm with her. RIP Aunt Stania.

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Why I’m still a semi-Luddite

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I’m not against technology. Appreciate many of the benefits but I’ve never downloaded an app and I don’t sign up for the new greatest thing in sharing information because of cautionary tales like this: How Mat Honan was hacked — hard.

Here’s what happened:

At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere. When I set it up, years and years ago, that seemed pretty secure at the time. But it’s not. Especially given that I’ve been using it for, well, years and years. My guess is they used brute force to get the password (see update) and then reset it to do the damage to my devices.

The backup email address on my Gmail account is that same .mac email address. At 4:52 PM, they sent a Gmail password recovery email to the .mac account. Two minutes later, an email arrived notifying me that my Google Account password had changed.

At 5:00 PM, they remote wiped my iPhone

At 5:01 PM, they remote wiped my iPad

At 5:05, they remote wiped my MacBook Air.

A few minutes after that, they took over my Twitter. Because, a long time ago, I had linked my Twitter to Gizmodo’s they were then able to gain entry to that as well.

New tech is great, until it isn’t. Catnip for hackers who live to find the latest exploit. Read the whole story. It’s tragic. Days later and he’s still dealing with it. Probably won’t be able to retrieve everything he’s lost.

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Let them eat their own damn cake

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In case there was any doubt the Republican Party is run by fools who never matured past 13 years of age:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) sent the Democratic National Committee (DNC) a birthday cake on Friday,

The cake read “you didn’t bake this” over a picture of President Obama. Text written in icing reads, “Happy birthday, Mr. President.” The cake marks the occasion of the president’s birthday, which is Saturday, with a play on the “you didn’t build that” controversy.

As always, the GOPers have nothing real to run on so they’re reduced to juvenile stunts. I’m sure the 27%ers found it hilarious. High fives all around. But I rather liked the Dems response:

[T]he Democrats sent the cake back.

“This is typical of Mitt Romney’s approach to the middle class,” DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell told The Hill. “He wants to ‘Let them eat cake!’ while robbing them blind. We sent the cake back to the RNC, along with a copy of the Tax Center’s report on Mitt Romney’s tax plan.”

In any event today is President Obama’s birthday. Wishing him a grand celebration and many blessings on his way to the next one.

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“I mean it is Vermont. No, nobody saw it happen”

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This story is awful on so many levels. Let me clear. I don’t approve of vandalism and I’m sincerely grateful no one got hurt. But when I read this line, I couldn’t stop laughing.

With their vehicles crushed, “We had nothing to pursue him with,” said Chief Deputy Philip Brooks.

Reading the details did not dampen my mirth. All I could picture was a Dukes of Hazard episode. Thinking the perp may have seen one too many reruns.

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And we shall know him by his advisors

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Maybe it’s just me, but I found this little noticed detail about Rmoney’s Magic Tax Plan amusing.

This week the Romney campaign was knocked on its heels by a study which suggested that Romney’s tax plan would — in addition to giving a windfall to the wealthiest Americans — increase taxes on 95% of Americans. So the guy who’s running for President to turn back President Obama’s supposedly high-taxing and deficit creating ways would actually raise taxes on virtually everyone and also explode the deficit.

But, wait, there’s more!

[J]ust look who the campaign is putting forward as the expert on the Romney Economic Boom. I’m sort of surprised no one has pointing this out. It’s none other than Kevin Hassett.

Who’s Kevin Hassett? Well, he’s none other than the coauthor of the spectacularly boomtime late 90s bestseller Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. As TPM Reader WM points out, not only was the book amazingly wrong and basically assumed the tech boom was permanent, the whole concept was based on the idea that stocks should be valued on a “formula that double-counted earnings and dividends. A true classic in wingnut economics.”

Don’t really follow economists much beyond Atrios myself, but I assume this means he’s a well regarded and often quoted expert among the far right punderati.

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Wonder if that’s her real name

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This is the most amusing thing I’ve seen all morning. “Adult” movie star Jenna Jameson endorsed Romney.

“I’m very looking forward to a Republican being back in office,” Jameson said while sipping champagne in a VIP room at Gold Club in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. “When you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.”

I wonder if she knows the Mittster pledged to crack down on the evil scourge of the carnal arts. If he succeeds, maybe she won’t be so rich anymore.

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