Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I was promised a recession.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

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

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Second rate reporter says what?

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

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

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

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

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

“But what about the lurkers?”

An almost top 10,000 blog!

The words do not have to be perfect.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

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

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

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Because of wow.

Sunday Afternoon Open Thread: Words to Live By

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You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of current reality, whatever they might be.

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The Idiot

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There is nothing like helping a friend. Barring it involving moving a body*, it’s usually a sign of Being A Good Person. However… I have learned that this is not necessarily a sign of being a smart person.

Yes, I did lift those. Yes, that’s a heavy band around my legs. Yes, those are velvet shoes.

A few days ago, I went with a friend to their parents’ house, which is being sold, as their father passed last year and it’s become too much for their mother. To say the family dynamic is stressful is a classic case of “My Culture Has a Case of the British Understatementitis”, so I wanted to be there for them. There was also a car. A car that has sat in the garage for about 3 months and is now an ex-running car. The desire was to jump the car, use it to take beloved furniture back to friend’s own home, possibly eat some pizza in a furniture laden home. The best laid plans, juicers, something something, I got distracted, maybe it was important, maybe not.

There’s a surprising amount of time lifting things for no reason on my calendar. & Looking like a Flashdance extra.

Said car is a luxury vehicle. As in, a Lexus. Did I mention it’s a 2017 Lexus SUV? Someone had to stay in the vehicle to steer the non-running thing & someone had to push. Being a clever person, I was not about to steer a car I have no clue about, with friend’s expensive car too close, and possibly lose control, crashing expensive SUV into parents’ house or a neighbor’s house. I’m not saying I’m disaster prone, I’m saying I have a tendency to defy statistics.

Piece o’cake!

So, your pal pushed a 4 ton vehicle about 20 feet. It charged up, was driven back into the garage. It died again. So, I did the feat of strength, again. We did some what was needed, we went back to our respective homes. All was well!

Until… I woke up the next day with the most incredible pain in my left shin, ankle & foot. I’ve been laid up for a couple of days and can only walk moderate distances with a cane. I have no idea what happened, so don’t ask me. It seemed really simple at the time. I did push the thing, it moved, I kept pushing until we had the space we needed. Why my body didn’t signal, “Girl, you crazy? Call AAA!”, i dunno. I’m breaking down the scar tissue and slowly regaining mobility, but that was, in hindsight, probably stupid. But good intentions? Ah, well. I can take loving well, if not wisely. Open thread, laugh at my pain, but remember, I did move an suv.

“You’re supposed to be smarter, WTF.” “Forget it, Odo. Mom can’t even hunt.”

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Lest We Forget: The Liberation of Auschwitz

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As world leaders gather in Poland Monday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi-run Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland, Edith Friedman Grosman will be far away in Toronto. On Monday, the energetic 95-year-old, who was on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, plans to live-stream the ceremony from home, but only if she feels up to it.

She’s already returned to Auschwitz four times, and that’s enough.

“I’m glad they’re doing something for Auschwitz 75,” she told The Washington Post. “But they have to do something in 100 years and 125 years, too.”…

They were told they would be registering for three months of work in a shoe factory, and that it was their patriotic duty to help in the war effort. But when they showed up to “register,” they were strip-searched, loaded into trucks and taken away. Most were teenagers, some were in their twenties, and a handful of mothers in their forties boarded in place of their daughters. None of those mothers would survive.

Over the next few days, Jewish girls were swept up from all the surrounding villages. By the end of the week, Friedman Grosman, then 17, and her sister Lea, 19, were on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, arriving by train on March 27, 1942…

These young women arrived at a pivotal moment in the concentration camp’s history. At first, it had been a Nazi prison for Poles of every ethnicity, then for Soviet POWs. By 1942, the Nazis were focusing on gathering up Jews, though they had not yet started their “Final Solution” — mass extermination.

In fact, the girls’ real job wasn’t to make shoes, but to build the very infrastructure that would convert the camp into a death machine. Over the next year, they were brutally forced to demolish old buildings with their bare hands, empty trash out of frozen lakes and build dozens of new barracks. For clothing, they were given the bloody uniforms of dead Soviet soldiers and a few striped dresses with no undergarments. Their entire bodies were shaved, and their shoes were flat pieces of wood with flimsy cloth ties.

Most of them died that first year — of starvation, disease, beatings, medical experiments and suicide. Friedman Grosman’s sister was sent to a gas chamber after she caught typhus. More than 77 years later, her grief is still deep…

At her apartment in Toronto on Saturday, friends brought by so many dishes for Friedman Grosman that she worried she would have to throw food away. In between visits, she told The Post she had one message for the world: “Don’t hate. Because hate brings criminality and hate brings death. I saw it, I was there.”

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(Ass) Blast From The Past

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Get up, human, it’s breakfast time

Look at that face. Adorable, elegant, lovingly demanding. Let us step back to Hime’s first Christmas with the family.

Rock & Roller Gal

There she is. A delicate little flower.

2 Handfuls of Cat For Christmas

Brother Odoriki had the kitty snuffles when he was adopted, hence the booger snout. Hime was just naturally perfect. Or so I thought. So, on Christmas Day, Hime demonstrated she had a tender stomach. And a bad case of the runs. Worse, she was intimidated by the litterbox. And shadows, slight motions, a slight breeze. She was a complete coward about everything and still is Queen Jitters. After the 3rd cleanup of a poop spill outside the low box, I was determined that this time, I’d wait patiently and just help her keep her tiny butt in the giant litterbox.

This, of course, did not go well. It’s Christmas morning, I’ve been cleaning all week and the result of my frustrated attempt at kitten corralling was… a tiny white projectile spraying liquid shit across the linoleum, the carpeted downstairs, up the stairs and under the sofa.

I really wanted to cry. My lovely quiet Christmas was a fetid, poop garlanded mess. My housemate came down to see what the hubbub was about and managed to pin Herself. We looked at each other and just burst out laughing. Finally, after capturing the little biological weapon, I called my friend’s dad, who’s a large animal vet as well as the head of an NGO that teaches about zoonosis & husbandry in African countries, and drove her over for a Christmas freebie checkup. We cleaned EVERYTHING, including her butt and put her on very simple food for a day or so. The rest of Christmas was lovely, since she forgave her humans for daring to pen her and get her muddbutt checked out.

Yes, I was still finding little poop spots days later. But I feel very loved. Merry Not Stinky Christmas!

Merry Christmas To All & To All A Good Night

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Late Night Open Thread: Vroom!

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I want one of these cycles, and I’m not even chairbound (yet)…

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Open Thread: SOMEBODY Is Not Having A Good Day

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