Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

I did not have this on my fuck 2024 bingo card.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

People are complicated. Love is not.

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

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

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

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

In my day, never was longer.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

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

I really should read my own blog.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

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

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Read a fucking book.

mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.

The Impossible Project

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I’m old enough to remember the excitement of the Polaroid SX-70: it spit out a piece of paper, and you watched a picture develop in front of your eyes. Pure fucking magic, at a couple of bucks a shot.

Polaroid went out of the instant film business a few years ago, after a complete marketing failure. One highlight of their decline was the official response to the OutKast video “Hey Ya!” (Shake it Like a Polaroid): a warning that shaking a Polaroid might distort the image.

After Polaroid failed, a couple of artists bought their plant in Holland and started The Impossible Project, an effort to resurrect that plant and create new instant film. Today, they’re launching their first new product, a line of black-and-white film that fits in old SX-70 and Polaroid 600 cameras. Color’s coming by the end of the year.

Their site is gorgeous, and the whole thing is testament to what a few very determined people can do. I hope they make it.

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Opposite Day

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The “I’m rubber and you’re glue” strategy of Obama critique has Larison completely fed up. The latest example is Heritage Foundation nitpicking about Obama’s decision to cancel his trip to Indonesia and Australia so he could lobby for HCR:

Apparently it isn’t enough that they have lost the largest policy fight of the last decade, but some of them also have to embarrass themselves with tantrums about a minor snag in Obama’s itinerary. This ranks with the reaction to the missile defense decision and the outcry against the imaginary “apology tour” as one of the most dim-witted criticisms of Obama available, so naturally it is catching on pretty fast.

In another post on the topic of Israel, Larison nails it:

The only people who seem to be “almost giddy” these days are conservative and Republican critics of Obama, who seem to think that their ludicrous obsession with demeaning Obama’s support for Israel is being vindicated by events. Of course, they cannot point to any decrease in Obama’s actual support for Israel, because there has been no decrease of any kind, so they are reduced to talking about “subtle shifts in perception,” feelings, moods, and changes in style. These shifts are so subtle that they can only be seen by the trained eye of the ideologically-motivated pundit. As I have said before, Obama’s critics were once obsessed with his supposed superficiality, and now it is they who cannot stop talking about purely superficial things when criticizing him.

Of course, I’m an anti-semite for even thinking that Larison could be right, not to mention linking to him.

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Two Hundred Boys

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Father Lawrence Murphy worked at a Catholic school for deaf boys for 24 years. In that time, he abused as many as 200 deaf boys. Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, intervened to halt the canonical trial that would have possibly led to his defrocking.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

I used to think that the notion that the Catholic Church is an institution devoted to fucking young boys was just a joke. But it’s clearly a fact.

They are very thorough. The rest is all busywork.

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Not an Economist, But I Have a Working Brain

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McMeghan has a typically fact-free post containing a bunch of reasons why healthcare reform will not increase the number of small businesses. Because even she can recognize that an argument conjured from thin air, moonbeams, and the tears of Andrea Mitchell is a little weak, she later amended the post with this column by an economist who could actually use a statistical website. Here’s his “argument”:

The latest Small Business Economy an annual publication of The Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration explains that 60.7 million people have employer-sponsored health insurance from their employment (people covered by their spouses don’t matter here because they don’t face job lock). Therefore, 607,000 additional people per year would begin the entrepreneurial process if we eliminated health insurance job lock.

But not everyone who begins the process of starting a business manages to get one up and running. In fact, analysis of the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics data by Paul Reynolds shows that a new business results from about one-third of startup efforts. So we will get about 200,000 new businesses if we can eliminate the job lock that comes from employer-sponsored health insurance.

Again, not an economist, but isn’t it just possible that some businesses fail because of high healthcare costs or the uninsured illness of a founder? If I were an economist, wouldn’t I want to at least mention that possibility, and maybe allow that a few more businesses might succeed if healthcare weren’t such a burden? And why don’t spouses count as job locked? Lots of small businesses are family businesses, and maybe that spouse is stuck in her job instead of helping out the business, because her job is the only way for the family to get insurance.

(While I’m asking stupid rhetorical questions: Is there any profession whose practitioners debase themselves more often in the service of ideology than economics? )

If you’re interested in learning something about healthcare and small business, this mommy blogger is far more informative than either of the two aforementioned idiots. She started a family media company a couple of years ago. Because of some minor illnesses (such as hay fever), she had to get “high risk pool” insurance for her family. She’s a perfect example of a business owner more likely to succeed now that the bill is law. She also got a great teabagger flyer in her door, and her reaction shows just how alienating teabagging can be.

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Bon Mots

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If you read today’s New York Times opinion page, you’ll never have to read another Moustache or MoDo column ever again, because the Grey Lady has published the immutable, eternal archetype of each of their standard emissions:

Friedman:

That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center.

Dowd, in a column headlined Hail the Conquering Professor:

The Democrats were walking around in a state of shock.

Holy cow, they were saying to themselves. We’re not total wimps!

Did Pinch or Punch or Biff or whatever inbreed runs that place outsource the opinion page to the Onion while we weren’t looking?

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Rushenfreude

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Just for kicks, I listened to a few minutes of El Rushbo yesterday. His first call after a long tirade about how “no legislation is permanent in DC” was from a serious young dittohead who asked how, exactly, repeal was going to work if Obama still has a veto and Republicans don’t have a veto-proof majority. I really don’t think the guy was trolling: he was expecting Rush to have an answer.

Rush blathered on for a few minutes on that one, saying that a real revolution could occur and get veto-proof Republican majorities in the House and Senate. But even he seemed to admit that was magical thinking. Of course, left unsaid was the fact that getting a veto-proof majority in the Senate is impossible, and entitlements like Social Security and Medicare have not been, and will never be, repealed.

I really think that it’s hard to understate how stupid and ineffective the “repeal the bill” strategy will be as an election message. I still think Democrats are going to lose some seats this Fall, but jobs and the economy will do the work, not the horseshit that the de-facto leader of the GOP is trotting out.

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