Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
AOC is on Bluesky now. Here are the Balloon-Juice Bluesky basics, courtesy of Mousebumples, for anyone who missed them. DougJ is also there.
As Adam mentioned the other day, there are resistance grifters out to take your money and occupy your time. Here’s a blocklist of those folks. Again, choose who to block or mute based on your preferences.
[Optional soundtrack for the post]
So 2024 has completely changed my relationship with the weather. I used to believe I would make a good Seattle resident because I love rain so much. Gray, cloudy days don’t depress me at all. As long as I can loll around indoors, they make me feel snug and cozy.
Now, after the biblical deluge that temporarily flooded us out of our home, I look askance at clouds. We’ve had mostly bright, sunny days during our displacement, but today was cloudy, and it rained a little bit.
I was pissed at the rain! Fuck off, clouds!
Open thread!
I have two big reminders on my refrigerator.
Yeah, I know, this is a blog, we don’t need to be helpful or inspiring or kind. Or even constructive.
But we are in crisis, and everyone I know (except for Trumpers) is standing on very shaky ground, and I don’t think we can go wrong thinking about those things right now.
The second reminder is a hand-written note:
We are experiencing catastrophic loss, like the death of a parent, a child, a loved one.
At the same time, we are facing an existential threat.
Not a good combination, and we need our friends and allies now more than ever.
They say that depression is anger turned inward. Is that true? I don’t know. But I do know that this blog is something that many of rely on as part of our support system, so maybe instead of pointing fingers and arguing about who was right and who was wrong and how we got here and whose fault it is, we need to figure out what the fuck we are going to do.
We need to be fighting mad, not feuding and pointing fingers.
I do know that the Democratic Party taking aim at itself is not going to get us anywhere good. As David Anderson might say, figuring out what happened is not a today problem. Today’s problem is what the hell are we going to do to protect ourselves and others as much as we can and get through this apocalypse in the strongest possible position for the next election.
We can say “oh my god, there might not be any more elections”, but we have to prepare ourselves to be in the strongest possible position if there are. Because we will need to win those. And for that we need friends and allies, not former friends and former allies who were driven away by the fitting squads and infighting.
If you’ve lost a parent or a child or a partner or anyone you love, it’s not helpful to dwell on “we should’t have gone to that park” or “I shouldn’t have taken that job that took up too much of my time” or “I shouldn’t have walked down that street”. Or a thousand other things We did fucking go to that park. We did take the fucking job. We did walk down that fucking street.
So what do we do now? Besides putting one foot in front of the other. Besides getting out of bed and feeding our dogs and our kids. Besides doing what we need to survive. Because we have a whole shitload of pain and problems ahead of us, and I don’t see how we get through it if we’re just planting our own gardens or buying a gun and personally preparing to survive the apocalypse.
I have no idea yet what it’s going to look like, but we are going to need each other for collective action.
Trump’s latest appointments, Elise “Tracy Flick” Stefanik for UN Ambassador, Little Marco Rubio as SoS, Lee Zeldin at EPA, Rep. Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor and Kristi Noem as head dog killer and Homeland Security Secretary, all show that supine sycophancy is a great strategy for being part of Trump’s second term.
That said, all I really care about is the wake of special elections that Trump’s flotilla is leaving behind. The only one that could possibly be close is probably Stefanik’s, who is in R+9 NY-21. We have flipped red districts in specials in New York as recently as Kathy Hochul’s short-lived tenure in NY-26 starting after a special election in 2011. But 2011 is not 2024 — lines have hardened, and Stefanik’s north country district has gone hard for Trump in the last two cycles.
I don’t know anything about Waltz. Noem is term limited out as SD Governor, so she’s making the best political move that she can. Lee Zeldin is a perennial losing candidate in NY, so it’s a good move for him. It’s Stefanik and, especially, Rubio, who are making a career-ending move here. Rubio is 53, and Stefanik is 40. I’ll guess that her shelf life as UN Ambassador is probably the whole of Trump’s term, because he doesn’t really give a shit about the UN. But I’d be surprised if Rubio lasts more than a year or two, because he’ll piss Trump off and get fired. Then, he’s off to some kind of wingnut welfare, a well-deserved end to a completely lackluster career.
AP Race Call: Democrat Ruben Gallego has been elected Arizona's first Latino U.S. senator. pic.twitter.com/vmUrR5KKcw
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 12, 2024
Per the Washington Post:
… Gallego’s win reflects the steady rise of Democrats in a state that was reliably Republican until 2016. Although Trump is projected to have carried the swing state this election, Arizonans have rejected Trump-backed candidates in every statewide election since 2016…
Gallego, a Marine who saw combat in the Iraq War, joins Sen. Mark Kelly (D), another military veteran, as Arizona’s representatives in the Senate.
The Phoenix area congressman focused much of his campaign on his background as the son of a single immigrant mom, who grew up working class, attended Harvard, then served in the military. He will become the state’s first Latino senator.
Throughout the campaign, he positioned himself as a moderate in a state where longtime Republican Sen. John McCain was beloved for his reputation as a “maverick.” He has at times admonished the left for failing to connect with working class families and challenged them on issues such as military spending. He also called out Democrats for not doing enough to court Latino voters across the country.
Gallego all but declared victory on the night of the election as votes were still being counted, but he had a sizable lead. “While we’re still waiting for results to come in, I believe that when all those ballots are counted … a poor Latino boy who grew up sleeping on the floor, will be headed to the floor of the United States Senate,” he said.
Gallego’s win marks the end of a heated campaign against Lake, a polarizing hard-right candidate. Lake relentlessly attacked Gallego, baselessly speculating about the circumstances around his divorce and spotlighting the criminal past of Gallego’s long-estranged father. Republicans also sought to portray Gallego as a left-wing extremist, because he is a past member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and has championed some more left-leaning policies.
Gallego attacked Lake for her previous support for a Civil War-era abortion law and emphasized that her position on abortion and on other issues was out of step with Arizonans. Arizona last week passed a proposition that will enshrine abortion access in the state…
Downballot Democrats performing just fine in swing states/districts suggests that people like Democrats and blame the president for inflation (like they keep telling us.)
— Shadow Of The Nerdtree (@agraybee) November 12, 2024
Democratic wins:
• Flipped KY Supreme Ct
• Kept MI, MT Supreme Ct
• Broke NC supermajority
• Defeated vouchers in NE & KY
• Abortion rights enshrined in AZ, CO, MD, MO, MT, NV, NY
• No-excuse AV in CT
• Prop 8 repealed in CA
• Minimum wage increase & sick leave in AK, MO— Henry David (@0henrydavid) November 11, 2024
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Bright Spots, Where We Can Find ThemPost + Comments (196)
Some of you are asking about this so here’s my best guess. Reports were Musk looked at something on his phone and said Trump won hours before it was called.
Having sat with a lot of election and data analysts on election night, I can tell you that anyone who’s worked enough… https://t.co/xCPQWxhUgI
— Mallory McMorrow (@MalloryMcMorrow) November 10, 2024
…Having sat with a lot of election and data analysts on election night, I can tell you that anyone who’s worked enough elections knows how to analyze data, and there were people I was with who saw lower than expected Dem votes in key counties in MI, PA, Wis etc who had a sinking sense that Harris might lose all of the swing states. It wasn’t official and wouldn’t be for many hours still, but they knew where the votes needed to be to win and just weren’t seeing them. This was all from publicly available data on various states and county elections websites as results were being posted in real time.
(Mallory McMorrow is the Michigan State Senate Majority Whip.)
https://t.co/7NTLSqPnln https://t.co/eLYZZAMT7j
— Mallory McMorrow (@MalloryMcMorrow) November 10, 2024
Monday Evening Open Thread: Since There’s Talk About Vote Rigging…Post + Comments (114)
(Image by Satwinder Sehmi)
A quick housekeeping note: Rosie is still doing great. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.
We’ve made it to another Veterans’ Day. Which, as everyone is tracking, is different in the US than for the rest of our allies and partners that observe today as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. For us, today is about celebrating those who have or are serving. It is about the living, while Memorial Day is about those were killed in action or who have subsequently passed on. Though America being Mericuh and Americans being Mericuns, there’s a lot of confusion between the two holidays.
That aside, on this the 11th day, at the 11th hour, of the 11th month of 1918 the guns in Europe fell silent and World War I came to an end. I’d like to highlight two more recent military histories that I think are important not just for our understanding of World War I, but for where we are now because while history may not repeat, it rhymes.
The first is Christopher Clark’s history of 1914 entitled The Sleepwalkers. Clark’s primary thesis is that with the exception of the extremists, none of the key leaders or actors in 1914 wanted war. They all thought they were communicating clearly in words and deeds and that what they were communicating was being received and understood clearly and as intended. Because what they were communicating was not clear, nor being received and understood as intended, they sleep walked into what we know as World War I. His secondary thesis is that no women were involved, just a bunch of men working within their states’ and societies’ traditional understandings of masculinity and militarism. I think this is a good shorthand for what we’ve been watching and dealing with in the Middle East for the past year. And that includes the secondary thesis. You’ll notice that there is not a single female diplomat or decision-maker involved in the Israel-Hamas or Israel-Lebanon negotiations. Nor the attempts to cut a deal with the Saudis.
The second is Gerwarth’s The Vanquished. Gerwarth’s work is a revisionist history of the ending of World War I, the interwar period, and the start of World War II. His central thesis is that both world wars are simply the two interstate and large scale combat operations (LSCO) phases of the same conflict. Between them was an almost twenty-year period of low intensity conflict between non-state actors and between some of these non-state actors and the states and societies that they were part of. Or, in some cases, apart from.
We are at a current set of inflection points that are akin to what both Clark and Gerwarth have written about.
To adapt COL McRae’s final verse:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though sunflowers grow
In Ukraine’s fields.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
