Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

You can’t love your country only when you win.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Not all heroes wear capes.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

T R E 4 5 O N

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

You are here: Home / Archives for $8 blue check mistermix

Read a fucking book.

mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.

The Obvious Rears Its Ugly Head

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Since there’s always more than enough time to do things the right way after all other approaches are exhausted:

In an about-face, the Mexican government has begun refocusing much of its energy on attacking social issues in Ciudad Juárez, in what officials say privately could be an experiment for other Mexican cities that are consumed by drug violence.

This will probably require more CBO-scored, PAYGO-tested legislation, since the last billion we sent to Mexico went for “helicopters for the army, X-ray equipment for customs, training for judges and a new police academy for federal police recruits.”

Also, not to rouse slumbering giants, but why isn’t the usual crew of pearl-clutchers yelling for Obama’s scalp over this? When some lone nutcase crisps his ‘nads on a plane, we’ve failed as a country to prevent terrorism. But when State Department employees and/or family members are executed in broad daylight by a private army operating less than a mile from our border, it’s just another day in sunny Mexico.

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Crazy

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Is it really possible that Rielle Hunter thought that a photo of her in a dress shirt and panties sitting next to Barney and Kermit on her kid’s bed wouldn’t make GQ?

Hunter reportedly “cried for two hours” after she saw the pictures she deemed “repulsive” that accompanied the 10,000 word interview she did with GQ magazine, according to Barbara Walters.

I realize this isn’t a question of great importance, so consider this an open thread.

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Larison is Shrill

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Douthat has his panties in a bunch about the lack of subtle shades in the movie “Green Zone” :

[…] the idea that many debacles flow from choices made by decent, well-intentioned human beings is more difficult for us to wrap our minds around.
[…] The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare.

Larison unloads:

Yes, the problem might be that we do not have artists capable of rendering contemporary architects of a war of aggression that was based on shoddy intelligence, ideological fervor and deceit in a sufficiently subtle, even-handed manner. If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not?

Interesting to see one of the sanest and most civil bloggers around driven to complete frustration by Douthat’s mealy-mouthed horseshit. His whole response is worth a read.

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Catastrophizing

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Some of the Apollo astronauts are upset about the Obama Administration’s decision to cancel the Moon missions. Here’s Jim Lovell’s overheated take:

Personally I think it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology[.]

And here’s Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon:

I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership… to seek knowledge. Curiosity’s the essence of human existence.

In the last decade, we’ve been the only country to successfully land a robotic probe on Mars. We landed three, and two rovers that were supposed to last 90 days are still working after six years.

We have two major space telescopes in orbit (Hubble and Chandra), and we’ve contributed most of the instrumentation to the another big orbiting observatory (Herschel). We’ll soon launch a space telescope that has a mirror so big (8 times the light-gathering capacity of Hubble’s) that it will unfold in space.

If that’s a catastrophe, put me down for season tickets to this apocalypse.

To his credit, Neil Armstrong was at the same conference as Cernan and Lovell and, as usual, kept his mouth shut.

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It’s Nice to be Liked, But It’s Better By Far to be Paid

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The Times has a good round-up of how the Iraqi economic stimulus is helping at home:

Investigators looking into corruption involving reconstruction in Iraq say they have opened more than 50 new cases in six months by scrutinizing large cash transactions — involving banks, land deals, loan payments, casinos and even plastic surgery — made by some of the Americans involved in the nearly $150 billion program.

Some of the cases involve people who are suspected of having mailed tens of thousands of dollars to themselves from Iraq, or of having stuffed the money into duffel bags and suitcases when leaving the country, the federal investigators said.

I’m glad the CBO carefully scored the Iraqi reconstruction bills to show that they were deficit neutral and followed PAYGO rules, because imagine what would have happened if that spending were subject to the same lax oversight that dogs Medicare and Medicaid.

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A Site to Visit

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Whatever else he is (secret Muslim, socialist, hater of America and Real Americans), Obama is arguably the first, and certainly the second (after Carter) technocrat President. Technocrats tend to appoint other technocrats to technology positions, instead of making those spots political rewards for clueless insiders. Nowhere is that more obvious than the FCC, which is now run by an asskicker named Julius Genachowski. He replaced a Clinton-appointed and Bush-promoted mediocrity, Michael Powell (son of Colin).

It’s too early to tell whether Genachowski’s efforts will turn into real change, but he’s making a lot of the right noises. Here’s a love letter from a normally skeptical tech site, written a few months back:

The Genachowski-led FCC has been relentless in its effort to disrupt the status quo. In office for six months, Genachowski and team are drafting a national broadband plan; working on net neutrality rules; fingering companies like Google, Apple, and Verizon; dealing with spectrum reallocation; handling the nuts-and-bolts of white space device deployment; threatening to extend neutrality rules to wireless networks; and considering the transition from traditional circuit-switched phone networks to a full-IP communications network. Now, we can add “shaking up the cable industry” to the list.
[…] So Genachowski doesn’t seem to be a radical, but he does appear to be both relentless and ambitious in his quest to see these ideas carried through to their maximum potential for disruptive innovation. And he’s not above irritating just about every major incumbent with a network to do it.

This is a long-winded way of saying that everyone ought to visit the latest FCC effort, broadband.gov, and test your broadband connection. The FCC is collecting data about Internet speed across the country to find out where broadband stimulus money can best be spent. If that site gets a ton of hits, not only will it collect good data, but the FCC will have more proof that the public is watching and gives a shit.

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First Thing We Do

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I’d missed yesterday’s Times piece on Lehman, but it’s worth mentioning that US corporate lawyers come off looking pretty good:

Here, the investment bank used repos to temporarily park assets off its books to make its end-of-quarter debt levels look better than they did — while calling them sales instead of loans.
The accounting tactic, first used by Lehman in 2001, had one catch, according to Mr. Valukas: no American law firm would sign off on its use.

Of course, after Lehman found some British lawyers who would sign off on this fraud, their accounting firm, Ernst & Young, dutifully fell into line.

Remember Enron, brought to you in part by Arthur Andersen?  Maybe if Ernst & Young  is destroyed by this, as Andersen was, auditors will raise their ethical standards to the lofty heights of corporate lawyers,  or at least Catholic Popes.

And let’s not forget that the 2002 response to Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley, created an “overly complex regulatory environment” for financial services firms like Lehman.

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