Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

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

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

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

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

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

Usually wrong but never in doubt

You are here: Home / Archives for Zandar

Zandar wrote at Balloon Juice from 2011-16.

Now blogging at Zandar Versus The Stupid.

Twitter: @ZandarVTS

Zandar

It’s Barbaric, But Hey, It’s Home

by | 91 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Apparently Aladdin and Princess Jasmine are terrorist masterminds, who knew?

 

I’m gonna go ahead and bet that factoring in Democrats that we end up with that fabulous TWENTY-SEVEN PERCENT of all American voters will agree to anything thing yet again, yadda yadda America has a dangerous military Genie deficit SO LET’S BOMB AGRABAH AND GET THAT JAFAR DUDE YEEEHAAAAAA.

On the other hand, Iago is pretty suspicious for a parrot…

EDIT: Full PPP poll results in PDF form here. Far scarier than bombing a fictional country is the very real problem that having 46% of your voters wanting a national database of Muslims presents, assholes.

EDIT 2: Yep, 19% of Democrats also want to bomb a fictional Disney sultanate.

It’s Barbaric, But Hey, It’s HomePost + Comments (91)

Dispatches From Bevinstan

by | 94 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

The Kaiser Family Foundation discovers the problem with Kentucky and Medicaid expansion here now that Matt Bevin has taken office.

Majorities of Democrats (89%), Independents (75%), and even Republicans (54%) want to keep the state’s Medicaid expansion as is.

Of the people who voted for Matt Bevin last month, 50% want him to cut Medicaid.

My problem is with the 42% of Bevin voters who expect Bevin to keep Medicaid as is.  “Bevin won’t take coverage away from me“, they said. “Just, you know, those people.”  And Bevin may in fact figure out a way to do it.

But my guess is there’s going to be a substantial chunk of Bevin voters who are going to find out the hard way that when politicians tell you exactly who they are, you should believe them…

Dispatches From BevinstanPost + Comments (94)

Sow The Trump, Reap The Whirltrump

by | 169 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , ,

The Trump campaign, not racist or anything, just number one with white supremacists as Team WIN THE MORNING accidentally commits journalism to tell us.

The Ku Klux Klan is using Donald Trump as a talking point in its outreach efforts. Stormfront, the most prominent American white supremacist website, is upgrading its servers in part to cope with a Trump traffic spike. And former Louisiana Rep. David Duke reports that the businessman has given more Americans cover to speak out loud about white nationalism than at any time since his own political campaigns in the 1990s.

As hate group monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League warn that Trump’s rhetoric is conducive to anti-Muslim violence, white nationalist leaders are capitalizing on his candidacy to invigorate and expand their movement.

“Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that,” said Stormfront founder Don Black, who reports additional listeners and call volume to his phone-in radio show, in addition to the site’s traffic bump. Black predicts that the white nationalist forces set in motion by Trump will be a legacy that outlives the businessman’s political career. “He’s certainly creating a movement that will continue independently of him even if he does fold at some point.”

Yes, that movement is called “The Republican Party” as Bloomberg News reminds us.

Almost two-thirds of likely 2016 Republican primary voters favor Donald Trump’s call to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S., while more than a third say it makes them more likely to vote for him.

Those are some of the findings from a Bloomberg Politics/Purple Strategies PulsePoll, an online survey conducted Tuesday, that shows support at 37 percent among all likely general-election voters for the controversial proposal put forward by the Republican front-runner.

“We believe these numbers are made up of some people who are truly expressing religious bigotry and others who are fearful about terrorism and are willing to do anything they think might make us safer,” Doug Usher, who runs polling for Washington-based Purple Strategies, said in his analysis of the findings. “This indicates that, despite some conventional wisdom expressed in the last 48 hours, this is unlikely to hurt Trump at least in the primary campaign.”

Why would it, when the entire party is currently running a dozen nativist assholes for President and has been as loudly and as boldly racist as possible for a long time and virulently so since Barack Obama came on the national scene?  Why would it when a bunch of Republican governors are trying to kick brown people out of their states? Why would it when you have a racist asshole base that finds Trump’s nuclear-powered foghorn hate speech towards anyone darker than a paper bag a refreshing reason to vote for the guy?

Trump is not the cause, he is the inevitable result of today’s GOP, and much like herpes the body politic breaks out in overt racism and produces pustules like The Donald time and time again in American history, it’s just a matter of how big they get and how sick we get before they are lanced.  The names are different, the disease remains the same, and America has been infected with it since the start, kids.

The fact is if he was the GOP nominee, he’d get 45% of the popular vote minimum. Maybe he’d lose 55-45 to Clinton or Sanders, but maybe not. And if anything, Trump is heavy cover for the kinder, gentler racist fascism of Cruz, Rubio, Carson, and the rest of the GOP. The country club section of the party on their fainting couches saying that Trump doesn’t represent them were very happy to support calls to limit Middle Eastern immigration to Christians.

Trump is just the latest face on this evil Mr. Potato Head of nativist hatred, the problem is with all the Republicans who like the cut of his jib…and oh yeah, the Democrats looking the other way and/or still playing the “not a dime’s worth of difference” game.

We’re just going to have to weed out the garden again, and that’s going to take work.  It’s what we do, but damn it would be nice if we just got a backhoe and dug up the whole place one of these decades, huh.

Sow The Trump, Reap The WhirltrumpPost + Comments (169)

Pussyfooting Around

by | 44 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

The Powerthirst Party has to get its two-minute hate on, and nobody does it better than Stu Varney’s bad cop/insane cop routine on FOX.

STUART VARNEY (HOST): Let’s get right to the president’s speech last night on terrorism, and bring in Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. Alright, Ralph, I have a question for you. I know you watched last night. I want to know, what were you saying to the TV as the president was speaking? What was your commentary as the president’s speech unfolded?

RALPH PETERS: Well, first of all he keeps speaking about “we can’t give in to our fears.” You know, “don’t be afraid.” Look, Mr. President we’re not afraid we’re angry, we’re pissed off, we’re furious. We want you to react, we want you to do something. You’re afraid. I mean this guy is such a total pussy, its stunning. And, you know, we want — we the people, the American people, whom he does not know in any intimate sort of manner, we want action. We want action against Islamic State and then — then, when the president is telling us he is going to destroy ISIS. This is a president who has done more harm to American police departments than he has done to Islamic State. This is a president who restrains our military. He uses it not to defeat ISIS, but for political purposes for political cover. This is a president who doesn’t want to hurt our enemies. This is a president who cares more about thugs in Guantanamo, or thugs in Ferguson, Missouri, than he does about law-abiding American citizens and their right to live in safety and peace.

VARNEY: I can tell you are super angry, and I asked you what your reaction was, but I have got to call you — you can’t use language like that on the program, OK? I’m sorry.

PETERS: I’m sorry.

VARNEY: OK, accept that. Now, moving on…

Varney of course waits for Peters to get done with his rant before scolding him, because he’s polite, you see.  Not that he was going to correct Peters’s content that Obama “cares more about thugs” in Gitmo or Ferguson, just that unfortunate language was the only problem.

By the way, if “I can tell that you’re super angry” isn’t the motto of FOX, it needs to be.

Pussyfooting AroundPost + Comments (44)

Jobapalooza Open Thread

by | 228 Comments

This post is in: , ,

jorbs

Another good month for JORBS, plus 211K on payrolls for November, plus 35K upward revisions to September and October, unemployment rate remains at 5.0%, labor force participation rate unchanged at 62.5%, black unemployment at 9.4% (down from 11.0% this time last year), the U-6 at 9.9%.

68 straight months of JORBS from President Malcolm The Wiz Live Shabazz X Mo Dee, which means we should probably expunge him from the record books and just pretend the economy responded positively to Sen. John McCain and eight years of anticipation of the incoming Trump/Cruz administration.

Good stuff, but good enough for a Fed rate hike?  Markets seem inclined to believe one is coming.

Open thread.

Jobapalooza Open ThreadPost + Comments (228)

Post-Racial America Update, Alabama Edition

by | 47 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

So it turns out that even Southern state cops have their limits when it comes to racism, and that the systematic planting of evidence by cops on black men in Dothan, Alabama for the last couple of decades has finally become too much to bear.

Members of a narcotics investigation squad for the police department in Dothan, Alabama planted drugs and weapons on young black men since the mid-1990s with the approval of their superiors — one of whom is currently the state’s Assistant Director of Homeland Security.

According to the Henry County Report, Andy Hughes was a sergeant in the department while overseeing the unit. But he was also a leader in a neo-Confederate group comprised by squad members, along fellow supervisor Steve Parrish. Parrish, at the time a lieutenant, is currently the city’s police chief.

Documents obtained by the Alabama Justice Project indicate that Parrish and Hughes are frequently mentioned in an internal affairs investigation. However, then-Police Chief John White and District Attorney Doug Valeska did not notify federal or state officials regarding the probe, as is required by department policy.

What we basically have here is white supremacists running the Dothan PD, planting evidence on black men to send them to prison, and getting promoted for it.  One is now chief of the Dothan PD, the other is now the state’s Assistant Director of Homeland Security.  Internal affairs investigations were flat out covered up.  The full story linked above is devastating as several officers have agreed to come forward to support a federal investigation.

The documents shared reveal that the internal affairs investigation was covered up to protect the aforementioned officers’ law enforcement careers and keep them from being criminally prosecuted.

Several long term Dothan law enforcement officers, all part of an original group that initiated the investigation, believe the public has a right to know that the Dothan Police Department, and District Attorney Doug Valeska, targeted young black men by planting drugs and weapons on them over a decade. Most of the young men were prosecuted, many sentenced to prison, and some are still in prison. Many of the officers involved were subsequently promoted and are in leadership positions in law enforcement. They hope the mood of the country is one that demands action and that the US Department of Justice will intervene.

The group of officers requested they be granted anonymity, and shared hundreds of files from the Internal Affairs Division. They reveal a pattern of criminal behavior from within the highest levels of the Dothan Police Department and the district attorney’s office in the 20th Judicial District of Alabama. Multiple current and former officers have agreed to testify if United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch appoints a special prosecutor from outside the state of Alabama, or before a Congressional hearing. The officers believe that there are currently nearly a thousand wrongful convictions resulting in felonies from the 20th Judicial District that are tied to planted drugs and weapons and question whether a system that allows this can be allowed to continue to operate.

Members of the Henry County Report have spent weeks analyzing the documents. The originals, secured at an N.G.O. in Canada, are being shared directly with attorneys in the U.S. Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division, and are being made available to the lawyers of those falsely convicted that seek to clear their names.

You are nuts if you think this is the only police department where this is going on, too.  Once again, hundreds of black men wrongfully and systematically imprisoned by police and investigations into it were ignored or covered up.  Loretta Lynch and the DoJ need to be all over this.  A thousand wrongful convictions just in one Alabama city? What about the rest of the country?

It’s insanity, and it proves once again that systematic racism is alive and well in America and has been for a very, very long time.

Post-Racial America Update, Alabama EditionPost + Comments (47)

Skip The Middle, Go Straight To The Top

by | 89 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

The grift is on and in glorious prime-time, kids.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump threatened Monday that he may not attend CNN’s next debate unless the network forks over $5 million, which the real estate mogul said would go to charity.

Trump pulled the stunt once before, demanding that CNN donate the proceeds from its September Republican presidential debate to a charity. The network didn’t publicly comment on the request and Trump ultimately participated in the debate.

Trump again floated the idea of the network donating money to charity in exchange for his participation during a campaign rally in Georgia.

“How about I tell CNN that I’m not gonna do the next debate?” Trump said to his audience, as quoted by USA Today. “I won’t do the debate unless they pay me $5 million, all of which money goes to the Wounded Warriors or to vets.”

He may not be the game show host this city deserves, but he is the game show host that this city needs, ya see.

Skip The Middle, Go Straight To The TopPost + Comments (89)