Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

This fight is for everything.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

White supremacy is terrorism.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

We still have time to mess this up!

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

People are weird.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

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

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

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

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

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Readership Capture

Arsenic and outer space old lakes

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Suck on this, carbon-based life forms:

At its conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon will announce that NASA has found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, shares the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While Wolfe-Simon and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

Update: h/t Origuy.

Update update. h/t Zandar too.

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Ain’t too proud to bleg

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My therapist said to stop reading Bobo (she said he’s like a disease without any cure…don’t think you’re clever for saying the next line is true too btw), but I am now engaged in an epic battle to make my totebagger uncle stop taking him seriously. Beyond the classic Sasha Issenberg take down from the Philadelphia magazine, are they are any other definitive anti-Bobo treatises you are aware of? Any from official-looking places? My uncle isn’t the type to take it seriously if it’s from a place with a name like “Balloon Juice” or “No More Mister Nice Guy”.

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Artists in Our Midst: Holiday Shopping Edition

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There are any number of gifted artists and crafters among the Balloon Juice readership. If you are one of them, this is the place to add a comment linking to your paintings, needlearts, sculpture, photography, music, cooking, house-building, graphic novel/comix, etc. website or contacts. If your highest art form is shopping, here’s your chance to browse for gifts without having to put your shoes on… and you can buy stuff for other people, too!

Pictures here by commentor Tim, who gets pride of place because he demanded it. From his website:

Legendary pop entertainment icons such as Madonna, Bette Midler, Judy Garland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Cher, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe, re-imagined in bright acrylic paint, enriched with pastels, charcoal, pencil, and pigmented glazes.
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I often surround my finished paintings with solid, industrial-inspired frames which I design and embellish with steel spikes, nails, chains, ceramic spheres and hand painted metallic highlights in silver, copper, bronze, gold and pewter over rich black-lacquered wood.
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My celebrity art has been evolving ever since I began making it just three years ago after leaving a 20- year career in public relations and advertising. In the beginning the portraits were exaggerated, cartoon-inspired caricatures of a sort. Then they took on a more realistic aspect but maintained an illustration/graphic novel feel, at which point I began to refer to them as “Portraicatures.” I felt they were something between a representational portrait and a caricature…

So, readers… What’s in your studio?

Added: If FYWP is skrwing your link, send it to me at [email protected] (or click on the link near the top of the right-hand column). The farce is strong tonight…

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My local paper

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Our local newspaper is a Gannett paper and, as much as I worry about smaller newspapers disappearing, I won’t be that sorry to see it go:

A local blogger summarizes:

North Korea attacks the South … a tense run-up to Congress’s lame-duck session … a cliffhanger local Congressional election on the verge of resolution … implications for special session of State Legislature … controversy over airport body scanners … there’s a scout troop short a child, Krushchev’s due at Idlewild — and here’s November 23rd’s top headline in what passes for a newspaper in Rochester.

Maybe I just don’t understand media very well, but I just don’t see how some bs story that is probably already on every bs pseudo-news website in the world can really drive readership.

By chance, last week, while driving to work, I listened to a local reporter talk on the radio about a slow response to a shooting, the new police chief, speculation about who the new mayor will be etc., all in mind-numbing detail…and it was mesmerizing, like listening to an episode of the “The Wire”, even though I understood only half of it. That has to be more interesting to a lot of people than reading about boomers’ sex lives (right?).

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