Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Everybody saw this coming.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

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

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

When I was faster i was always behind.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

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

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

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

Shut up, hissy kitty!

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

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

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Fire All of Your Guns at Once and Explode Into Space

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Fire All of Your Guns at Once and Explode Into Space
If you look closely behind JD, a dozen eggs is $2.99 at the store he visited, not $4.

Jamelle Bouie is a good follow on TikTok and on Bluesky.  He has a new video out where he includes some of Trump’s recent rally rhetoric and compares it to a Dave Chappelle Klan rally sketch.  Trump’s ranting about immigrants is pretty much indistinguishable.  JD has decided to take the Platonic path of the noble lie to keep the rubes in line.   They’re hammering their lies as hard as they can, yet every poll I’ve seen shows Harris gaining ground, and her favorables are still growing.  Polling also seems to show that independents are rejecting the dog and cat eating stuff.

To put it crudely but simply:  wad, shot. So what’s next?  This is a serious question.  There are 44 days left, and one-trick ponies get pretty dull in 6 weeks.

If you haven’t seen Jasmine Crockett’s questioning of some clown brought in to claim (falsely) that no money has been spent on rural broadband, it’s worth a watch, but the last piece could describe the Trump campaign as well as most other Republican efforts:

 The final thing that I will say is that this election is the best example of why y’all are so afraid of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Because then you can’t have a simpleminded, underqualified White man somehow end up ascending. Instead, you’ve got to pay attention to the qualified Black woman that is on the other side.

In addition to Trump, JD is also underqualified, and despite his Yale education, he’s simpleminded.   Trump just chickened out of a debate on 10/23 on CNN.  JD has way more discipline than Trump, but I’d bet that he won’t do the campaign any good in the VP debate, because he’s clumsy and robotic.

Panicking and trotting out the deeply racist shit that should be reserved for mailers sent, and ads aired, during the last few days of the election remains a stupid choice.

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What’s on the Agenda for Today?

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Here’s what’s on the agenda Balloon Juice-wise for today.

We have an Artists in Our Midst post from Dan B at 3 pm.  An artist in a different medium!

We have “Take Two” of Jennifer Schiff’s Authors in Our Midst post at 5pm.  Rudely interrupted last week by the golf course incident!  How can that have only been a week ago?

We have Medium Cool at 7 pm.  Song lyrics, I think it could be a good one, but of course you never know.

We have the Double-Angel Matching going on until midnight tonight.  I didn’t want to put up another post, so I linked to yesterday’s post in the sidebar.  I say “midnight”, but anything that’s in there when I get up early on Monday that’s matchable will be matched.

There’s a new comment policy for Balloon Juice.  Everybody please read it.  There will be a quiz.  The comment policy is in the footer of every page.  But here’s a direct link.

And we have car magnets available for order at Cafe Press.  Tunch, Dark Tunch, Steve, Dark Steve, Woke not Weird with a peace sign, Woke not Weird with a raised fist (female!) and Woke not Weird Pride version.  If you don’t find all of them up there, please let me know.

Link

Friday Night Open Thread 20

The Balloon Juice Store looks like crap because Cafe Press took it down, scrambled everything, basically threw all the piece into a box.  So it’s functional enough to purchase but will need a lot of work.

Also note that these designs are available in buttons, golf balls, baby bibs, and (apparently) thongs!  Cafe Press does that automatically, and beth tries to hide the worst of them, but Cafe Press keeps adding them back in.  (We hate Cafe Press.)

What’s on the agenda for you guys?

Open thread!

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Fall Equinox (Open Thread)

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Sunrise in the swamp
Bill was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. It’s brutally cold there in the winter, he says.

He couldn’t wait to get out. When he finished high school and his father was pressuring him to go to college, Bill snuck off one summer day and joined the U.S. Air Force instead.

Next thing he knew, he was on a bus to Texas. A drill sergeant met the bus in a blazing hot parking lot and screamed at and insulted the new recruits for many long minutes after they disembarked.

Bill felt the first pang of homesickness then. With tears in his eyes, Bill wondered if joining up was a mistake.

It wasn’t. He stayed in the USAF for several years and got to live in Europe for most of it, doing cocktail sets at fancy NATO parties, playing keyboard with the USAF rock band at remote outposts in Turkey, town squares in Greece, etc., entertaining fellow troops and the local public with pop songs like 99 Luftballoons. 

When his hitch was up and Bill was trying to figure out what to do next, he knew he couldn’t endure another Buffalo winter. He thought back to a brief trip to a base in Florida that had palm trees and agreeable weather. It was MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, so he moved there.

Bill has lived in Florida ever since, but he retains a Buffalonian’s vestigial fondness for summer. There’s really no excuse for that anymore, in my opinion. He damn well knows Florida summers are to be endured rather than enjoyed, much like Buffalo winters.

Having grown up in a humid swamp, I never had any illusions about summer. I hate it. I’ve always hated it. But this was the worst summer ever for me personally since I was ill for pretty much all of it.

All this to say I am so grateful for the autumnal equinox, which arrived today like a glorious gift. When I carried my cup of coffee to the porch early this morning to watch the swamp come alive, there was a cool breeze. It will get to near 90 F today, but summer is over. Good fucking riddance!

Open thread.

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War for Ukraine Day 941: Russia Hits Civilian Targets in Kharkiv, Kryvih Rih, & Nikopol While Ukraine Hits Another Military Target in Russia

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A painting by Ukrainian artist NEIVANMADE. The words "NEVER AGAIN" are repeated over and over, from left to right and top to bottom, in a faded, washed out black against a white background. Red, the color of blood, runs and drips down across 2/3rds of the painting. "WHILE YOU TOLERATE TYRANTS" is written/painted in the bottom white corner below the three rows of "NEVER AGAIN".

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is still doing great. Thank you for all the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, I’ve gotten some sleep. Today’s acupuncture treatment – so far – seems to be making a major difference.

Russian continues to target civilians and civilian infrastructure all over Ukraine:

Russian airstrikes on Kharkiv injured 13 civilians, including three children, who experienced acute stress reactions. Among the victims is a 49-year-old patient at a hospital near the site of the bombing. He had been hospitalized earlier in the day for injuries sustained from a russian strike in another part of the city. Tragically, the man was wounded again during the night attack.

📹place_kharkiv

Kharkiv is currently under attack again. More on that after the jump.

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

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Money and How to Spend It

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Money and How to Spend It
This is what you do when your campaign has plenty of money, is way ahead in the polls, and the candidate has nothing but time to burn.

Quite a contrast:

Kamala Harris’s campaign raised more than four times as much as Donald Trump’s effort in August, capitalizing on the surge of Democratic enthusiasm during the first full month of her presidential campaign. But the super PACs aligned with Trump are continuing to raise large sums from high-dollar donors as the two candidates enter the final sprint before November.

Harris’s campaign raised $190 million in August, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on Friday night, and she spent almost $174 million in August — ending the month with $235 million in cash on hand. The campaign spent more than $135 million on media buys and ad production; more than $6 million on air travel; about $4.9 million on payroll and related taxes; and $4.5 million on text messaging.

The Trump campaign’s report showed that he raised $43 million in August and spent $61 million, with $135million in cash to spend at the beginning of September. His campaign spent more than $47 million on advertisements, alongside $10.2 million on direct mail to potential voters and around $670,000 on air travel.

Let’s drill into Trump’s super PAC “strategy” for a minute:

America Pac, one of the largest and the most ambitious of the groups supporting Donald Trump’s campaign, is replacing its voter turnout operations in the crucial battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The political action committee, backed by billionaire Elon Musk, has ended its contract with the September Group and will hire a new company to knock on doors with fewer than 50 days left until the election.

I don’t disagree with the Harris campaign that the bulk of money spent to support Trump this cycle will come from super PACs, but hitching your campaign’s wagon to, for example, the vanity project of a ketamine-addled racist, leads to a predictably mediocre result:  paid canvassers doing a shitty job, a deluge of poorly targeted mailers, and ads that may or may not carry the message that the campaign wants to send.  That said, even Elon isn’t dumb enough to give directly to the Trump campaign, because the skim on that transaction probably approaches 100%.

Moving on, the $670K on air travel is a reflection of the anemic campaign Trump is running — Harris is spending almost 10X that amount.  I just checked his events page and he has two public events scheduled next week in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.  JD has five, and Tulsi Gabbard and Olivia Nuzzi’s sexting partner are co-hosting an event in Vegas.  I can’t find a good events calendar for the Harris/Walz campaign, but it’s certainly more events, and more diverse events (like the recent Oprah appearance.)

One of the many unstudied mysteries of political campaigning is how much money is enough.  It’s certainly true that early money is better money than money dumped into a campaign at the last second.  I think we’ll all agree that money spent to support face-to-face efforts using volunteers is better than a firehose of ads.  Whenever I see an ad from a PAC promising to support a Democrat, I sure hope that anyone donating to that PAC has already maxed out their direct donations to the campaign.  And I certainly think that the fundraising we do here is gold standard.  The rest is for Baby Jesus and your corner bookie to fight about.

Part of the reason Trump’s spending is so low is because they think they’re going to steal this election, so give early and give often to Democrats up and down the ballot, but only if you can afford it.

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