Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

No one could have predicted…

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Bark louder, little dog.

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

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

The words do not have to be perfect.

This fight is for everything.

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

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

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

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

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

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Grifters Gonna Grift

Late Night Open Thread: Rockin’ in the TPUSA

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In case you’ve been feeling sorry for yourself about your less-than-exciting weekend plans, remember: It could be so much worse…

Since the con’s not till December, any odds one or more of the top-row speakers will’ve bolted for Russia by then?

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Repub Venality / Sportsball Open Thread: Brett Favre, Poster Boy for White Male Privilege

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Full props to the Mississippi Free Press:

And for those of us [raises hand] who have only the vaguest idea what a ‘Brett Favre’ might be…

… Favre was the ultimate let’s-do-it-and-be-legends lunatic as a quarterback, blessed with a howitzer of an arm and a ceaseless, almost megalomaniacal confidence in it: There was no throw Favre didn’t think he could make, often to his team’s detriment…

But what truly made you want to throw a brick through the TV was the way the broadcasters treated him. Favre was mistake prone, cocksure, heedlessly self-destructive, and so pigheaded that you wondered if his brain was capable of consuming and retaining new information. But to the broadcasters of his games — and the media who covered him — Favre wasn’t a foolhardy hothead. He was a gunslinger. That was the term they always used: gunslinger. He wasn’t imprecise and impulsive; he just trusted his gut. Favre was forever elevated to a sort of frontier sheriff, the final-justice cowboy of a mythical western. Other teams had “stats” and “game plans” and “rational decision-making.” Favre’s teams had Favre. And Favre ate it all up, acting the homespun Mississippi boy who just was drawin’ plays in the dirt out there. He also wrung every bit of indulgent drama out of his career — what team he might sign with next; whether he was going to support his successor, Aaron Rodgers; whether he was going to retire, or unretire, or retire again. He actually had news stations tracking his flights and bus rides from the airport. Nobody wanted the spotlight more than Favre, and the sports industrial complex was ever so eager to give it to him. Favre Rage was a phenomenon that launched a thousand bloggers…

But now it seems he has done something unethical enough that nobody — not his lawmaker friends, not his onetime legion of defenders in the press — is making excuses for him anymore. Favre is enmeshed in a truly outrageous scandal in Mississippi, where local newspapers have reported that he not only sought and received public funds for the construction of a volleyball stadium for his daughter’s team at the University of Southern Mississippi (Favre’s alma mater) but that he transferred those funds from welfare programs meant for the poorest citizens of one of America’s poorest states. And it’s not just that Favre wanted the money. It’s that he knew what he was doing looked extremely shady and was desperate not to get caught. (To make matters worse, he also suggested “the prison industry” as a possible builder for the facility.)

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Monday Afternoon Open Thread: Way to Make Yourself Popular, Sen. Sinema!

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Gosh, one wonders why she’s not more popular among her constituents!

… These numbers, from a new Arizona poll commissioned by the AARP, are pretty remarkable! Her unpopularity “crosses the aisle” like that of no politician I’ve ever seen. A solid 54 percent of Arizona Republicans don’t like her. And 51 percent of independents don’t like her (her best result!). As for Democrats? Arizonans of Sinema’s putative party simply do not like her, to the tune of 57 percent. (And that’s a distinct improvement from her 80 percent disapproval rating with Democrats in January!)

Name a demographic group, and Sinema is viewed unfavorably by a majority of them. Women? 55 percent unfavorable. Men? 53 percent unfavorable. White voters? 56 percent unfavorable. Hispanic voters? 54 percent unfavorable.

She’s not very popular with college graduates (53 percent unfavorable), but unfortunately she’s even less popular with people who haven’t graduated college (55 percent unfavorable).

Voters 50 and over? Her unpopularity with them is also 50 and over (54 percent, specifically). But young people also don’t like her (55 percent unpopularity)…

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Late Night Open Thread: Taking Pride in Taking No Pride in Their Work

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I’m told that low-level grifters sometimes choose to make their pitches look somewhat ‘amateur’, a bit imperfect, as a way of reassuring the marks that they’re not being spoken down to, that the grifter is just like them. But I think that it’s become a specific tic for the modern GOP Death Cult: They don’t care about how things look, because good design — even the self-respect of doing a job well — is for, well, p*ssies. Soyboys. Democrats!

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Late Night Open Thread: Alex Jones Update

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There are two trials running concurrently — Jones is on the witness stand in Connecticut, and his finances are being weighed in a Texas court where he lost another suit.

Jones is never going away, any more than a herpes infection does, but with a little luck we’ll be able to reduce his footprint on national media enough to seriously impair his money-making grifts, which he will consider a worse punishment than mere incarceration.

TL, DR (Anna Merlan is always worth reading):

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Late Night Open Thread: Why ‘Popularism’ Is This Year’s ‘Hot’ Political Philosophy

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Breathless op-eds touting ‘Shorism’ (Ezra Klein‘s is the least embarrassing I can find) didn’t much impress me. As far as I could tell, ‘popularism’ lurked in an Uncanny Valley between the anodyne (talk up the stuff your audience most wants to hear!) and the anti-Democratic (don’t talk about ‘divisive’ things like bodily autonomy or fighting racism / poverty !). But that’s before I was told, at length, how David Shor throws a fantastic party for all the really significant people in New York City:

At 7 p.m. on Saturday, the political consultant David Shor was setting up his fifth-floor apartment in Lower Manhattan for one last blowout party before the start of election season, when he expects to work between 65 and 70 hours a week crunching numbers on behalf of Democratic candidates across the country.

Mr. Shor, who started college at 13, built his reputation among political insiders through his innovative use of data. So it wasn’t a surprise that, as a party host, he was leaving nothing to chance.

A six-person planning committee, appointed by Mr. Shor, worked out the arrangement in Notion, a document-management system favored by tech companies. The invitation for the event, billed as a miniature version of the annual Burning Man festival, included guidance on “dress-code & vibe” through a link to a Pinterest page filled with photos of costumed revelers in the desert.

Although Mr. Shor has been credited with forecasting the behavior of voters with uncanny accuracy, he does not have a foolproof system for a successful party.

“But there are certainly best practices,” he said…

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You Love to See It Open Thread: Repubs in Disarray!

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You Love to See It Open Thread: <em>Repubs in Disarray!</em>Post + Comments (92)