Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Their shamelessness is their super power.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

When we show up, we win.

So many bastards, so little time.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

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

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,027: A Brief Monday Night Update

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A quick housekeeping note: While the congestion eased up and the fever broke yesterday, I may have pushed things a little too much today. I’m not saying I did, but I am definitely feeling munky funky, so I’m just going to run down the basics.

Last night in comments Nukular Biskits and KatKapCC asked about the origins of what is going on in Georgia. The bottom line up front is that Putin using a combination of Little Green Men combined with local native Russian speaking separatists created a pretext to scarf up South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008. Four years later, Putin’s local oligarch proxy Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream political party came t power on a pledge to integrate Georgia into the EU. Slowly at first and then faster and faster Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream parliamentarians and ministers actually moved Georgia away from the EU. There were major protests in 2023. Things settled down for a bit until Georgian Dream won what everyone not aligned with Putin asserts is a a rigged election. The election and how Georgian Dream has behaved since the election has now brought a new round of protests. The Georgians protesting want the elections voided, new elections called, and those elections properly run and monitored to ensure they aren’t rigged again by Ivanishvili and Georgian Dream. They also want the Georgian Dream’s bogus “selection” of a new president on Saturday voided too.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcripts after the jump.

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AOC Loses First Oversight Vote

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AOC is up against Gerry Connolly, a 74 year-old with esophageal cancer, for the post of ranking member of the House Oversight committee.  Here’s what happened today:

“House Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee on Tuesday voted to recommend Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee,” Axios reports.

“It’s a huge blow to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) hopes of leading the high-profile panel.”

“The House Democratic caucus still has to vote on whether to accept the recommendation – though that ratification is rarely denied.”

AOC’s response on BlueSky:

AOC Loses First Oversight Vote

I hope she knows something I don’t know.

BTW, the 5 year survival rate for esophageal cancer is 22% (all stages combined).  I’ve known two people, both younger than Connolly, who died a couple of years after their diagnosis, and were severely weakened by the treatment.  It’s a brutal disease.

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Christmas Prep (Open Thread)

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I just can’t be arsed to put up a Christmas tree this year. But I deployed this small nod to the season, and that will do nicely.

Christmas Prep (Open Thread)

Only $4.99 at Publix!

Bill doesn’t care about the holidays, and for various unrelated reasons, it’ll be just us and maybe four guests, and even they are iffy. That’s okay.

Had to run an errand today in Ocala, so I drove through some lovely country where the horsey set lives. It was a beautiful day, partly cloudy and coolish (by our standards).

The horses are nicer than the people up there, judging from all the Trump signs. I was tempted to yell “Fuck all y’all!!!” out the window, but it seemed an empty gesture.

One of y’all told me about a restaurant to try up there — Cafe Havana. I stopped by for lunch. Best Cuban food north of Tampa! Got my first proper cafe con leche in ages! Thanks for the tip.

The local public radio had a piece about the drone hysteria, which I heard in the car before I hit a playlist in self defense. The reporters treated it like a serious issue. Of course, the orange fart cloud amplified it in a news conference. I think it’s possible this country will actually die of stupidity.

Meanwhile, there’s holiday cheer to seek. Friends and family to see, cookies to bake, bad movies to watch, etc. Not even the current shitstorm can completely dampen it, at least for me. I won’t permit it.

Happy holidays, damn it!

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Another School Shooting

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Again and again and again:

A student at a private Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, has killed two people and injured six on campus, Madison police said Monday afternoon. The shooter is also dead. Police Chief Shon F. Barnes said in an earlier briefing that the shooter had killed four, but the department clarified the number in an update. At 10:57 a.m., officers received an active-shooter report at Abundant Life Christian School. Officers did not fire their weapons and found the suspected shooter dead, Barnes said. Those in the hospital have injuries that range from minor to life-threatening, Barnes said.

I thought Walz was really good at talking about the freedom to have guns, but the necessity of preventing school shootings. Who knows if we could have gotten anything done if we won,  but of course we’re now staring down the barrel of years more of absolutely nothing changing, and things probably getting worse.

(Link is to CNN live coverage, text from the WaPo, which is hard to link to.)

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The Opportunity for Democrats

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Despite Donald Trump’s election, people are not okay with what happened on January 6th.

I know mistermix mentioned this in passing this morning, so I want to share more about what he wrote.  Dan Pfeiffer from his substack this morning.

A Data for Progress poll from January 2024 found that nearly three-quarters of voters believe that those involved in storming the Capitol did the wrong thing. More than 60% believe what happened on that day was a “violent insurrection,” and only 16% believe it was a “peaceful protest.” Accounting for the whole poll, it’s clear that only about a third of Republicans believed Trump’s arguments about the assault on the Capitol.

…now should be the apex of Donald Trump’s political power. He just won 94% of Republican voters, yet only 61% of Republicans approve of the pardons.

Perhaps, the most damning find in the poll — only 1% of Americans listed pardons for the January 6th convicts as the issue the President and Congress should tackle first. So, Trump plans to spend his first hour in office doing something that 99% of the country thinks isn’t important.

The Opportunity for Democrats 1

The Opportunity for Democrats 2

Looking for opportunities to whale on Trump for his failed promises – not on the nuances but on the big lies that helped get him elected.

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Election Followup – North Carolina and More

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Zoom With Four Directions Set for Thursday at 7 pm ET 1

In any normal election year, we would have started and already completed the post-election fundraising wrap up posts by now.  Like many of you, I am still figuring out how to pick myself up off the floor after the election.  My head knows that this isn’t the time to say “well, we tried, but we lost, and I’m done”.  My heart?  My heart knows that, too, even as it’s still broken, but how to move forward still isn’t exactly clear.

Had a great conversation with the folks at Worker Power last week.  We’re going to be bringing in some of our organizations to talk with us about how we all move forward after this crushing blow, and I think we are going to start with them. These won’t be presentations so much as they will be discussions – probably on a weekend evening as we’ve done for some of our Balloon Juice zooms.

However devastating the election loss continues to be at the Presidential and US House and Senate levels, it’s important to remember that our efforts were not for naught.  That’s the beauty of our focus mostly on organizations, as opposed to candidates.  The work builds on itself, from year to year, election to election.  With organizations, it’s not about just the top-level races, it’s about state races and down-ballot races, as well.

I am really proud of all the groups we supported – there’s not even one that I regret.  In some ways the outcome is everything, but in other ways, it’s not about the outcome, it’s about doing the work, and building on that, and I have no regrets about the work we did.

We branched out to some new states, like North Carolina, to some new groups, and to some new communities.

So with that as background, let’s look at North Carolina, where we primarily focused on turning out the youth BIPOC vote.

Our first partnership was with the North Carolina Black Alliance Campus Engagement Project, and its charismatic leader, Marcus Bass.  The Black Alliance already had a fully-operational registration and turnout team at the state’s 13 Historically Black Colleges and Universities.  In Phase I, Balloon Juice helped them expand to two public colleges with substantial BIPOC student populations.  Our money helped them recruit, train and deploy on-campus canvassers.

Phase II expanded this effort to four urban community colleges in the state’s largest cities.  Both efforts were overwhelmingly successful.  In between, we flash-fundraised for security equipment for the canvassers after the mood on the street turned ugly after the Trump assassination attempt in July.

Over 150,000 provisional and challenged ballots were cast in NC, and we also funded the ballot curing efforts after the election.  All told, between our donations thru ActBlue and external matches, we raised $155,000 for NC Black Alliance.

We also helped North Carolina Asian Americans Together (NCAAT) expand their outreach to Asian American students on the state’s largest campuses.  The young women who lead this organization are impressive.  And inspiring!  NCAAT coordinated with their Black Alliance partners to make sure their ballot curing efforts were not duplicated. All told, between our donations thru ActBlue and external matches, we raised $100,000 for NCAAT in Action.

North Carolina didn’t go to Harris, but ticket-splitting in the state awarded major victories to the Democratic party in North Carolina.  Josh Stein trounced the odious Mark Robinson by 14 points to become Governor.  Democrats won other statewide races, electing Democrats as Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State.  And, flipping a seat in the state House of Representatives cost the Republicans their ill-gotten gerrymandered veto-proof super majority.  

The Republicans reacted by abusing their current supermajority power to pass a bill weakening the power of statewide offices held by Democrats and giving the Republicans more control over elections.  Read about their perfidy here.

We supported 3 North Carolina candidates, based on recommendations from Marcus at NC Black Alliance.

Allison Riggs, one of two Democrats on the seven-justice NC Supreme Court, is currently leading by 748 votes over her Republican challenger.  As of December 13, the race has not yet been called.  But it is looking good – she picked up a few votes on a partial recount.

Carolyn Thompson, an African-American incumbent justice on the NC Court of Appeals.  Alas, she lost by less than 100,000 votes out of over 5 million cast, to a very conservative white male challenger.

Raymond Smith is an African American Gulf War veteran challenging a white male Republican incumbent in Eastern North Carolina.  He hoped to flip the seat and shatter the Senate super-majority.  Unfortunatelyi, incumbent Eldon “Buck” Newton was easily reelected with a 10-point lead.

Despite all these heroic efforts, youth voter turnout (18-25 year olds) in 2024 was down 7% in the state from 2020 (60% vs. 53%).  There are many potential explanations – some universal, and some unique to North Carolina (the hurricane aftermath).  The result was beyond disappointing.

But the new voters registered and motivated to go to the polls is an investment in the future.   The NC Democratic party is well-organized and well-led by its dynamic chair Anderson Clayton.  The efforts of our partners and the state party have expanded the base of new Democratic voters – we can build on that in 2026 and 2028.  Money spent identifying and motivating new voters is always money well-spent!  As with everything we do, it’s about right now, and it’s also about the future! 

I always think about Georgia, and Stacey Abrams.  The work that gave us two Democratic Senate seats in 2020 didn’t start in 2020, or even in 2016.  That work started way back in 2010, and that’s the work we’re involved in now in North Carolina.  And 10 years later, we got the senate because of those two Georgia Senators, and Georgia got two of the finest senators around.  I would not be at all surprised if Jon Ossoff runs for president in 2028, and wins.

I thought this could be the year that NC electoral votes would go to the Democrats.  That was not to be, but electing Democrats to most state-wide offices and breaking the House supermajority will spare North Carolinians some of the worst of what the Republicans have in store for them.  The work we have done for NC, and the work we have ahead of us, may well make as many waves as GA did in 2020.

Working for a better future is an act of faith.  We took our body blows, we are licking our wounds, and in the new year we will have our work cut out for us.  I will not let Trump and his henchmen break my spirit.  Not for long, anyway.

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Morning Links

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Morning Links

Krugman looks into crypto and finds that Crypto is for Criming (and, also, speculation — the graph above shows how sports betting has also surged in the last few years).  He also explains why banks won’t get into it.

Senator Andy Kim has a thread on twitter about him going out to look for drones, and finding planes.  He went with police and civilian pilots.  (I could only see the first post on twitter until I logged in, but whatever, that’s how broken that place is.).   He’s trying to demonstrate what a sane public servant does when people are upset about something, in sharp contrast to Larry Hogan.

Here’s a gift link to Dan Pfeiffer’s latest MessageBox newsletter, showing that 1% of Americans polled think that pardoning the January 6 defendants should be Trump’s first priority when he gets into office.  It’s definitely an opportunity for Democrats to roll tape on some of the violence that’s gotten memory holed.

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