Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

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

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

It’s the corruption, stupid.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

The National Guard is not Batman.

The revolution will be supervised.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

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NC Black Alliance Found Us an External Match, Let’s Take This Home!

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North Carolina Black Alliance Campus Engagement Project:  Let’s recap, shall we?

We jumped in and started our fundraising while the good folks at NC Black Alliance were still working on a match, because except for that, the timing felt right.  We raised the $30,000 for Phase I and we now have an external match for that.  So whatever your previous donation was, whether it was 2x  or 4x (4x if we had a double-angel match) it has retroactively doubled because of the match.

We were about halfway through our fundraising for Phase II and decided to pause while they worked on securing an external match for that.  Today we got the fabulous news – they were able to secure the external match for Phase II.  They got it done!

Anybody remember what Phase I was about?  Phase II?   Bueller?

The short answer is that Phase I focused on campus engagement at TWO 4-year colleges that are not HBCUs, but have high enrollment of black students.  Phase II is about extending the campus engagement to FOUR 2-year colleges.  If you want more of a refresher than that, click just below to read one of the original posts where we explained the goals.

It’s Up To Us Now, Next Stop, North Carolina!

The four carefully chosen target community colleges:

  • Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, the state’s largest single campus community college
  • Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem
  • Durham Technical Community College in Durham
  • Wake Technical Community College, a multi-campus institution in Raleigh, North Carolina’s largest community

In total, these four urban campuses have over 150,000 students.

No, that is not a typo with an extra zero.

According to the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research, all four of these campuses serve an even higher percentage of minorities than the population of their service areas.

With this fundraiser, we’re funding canvassers and support staff to hit the ground running when the students return.

Let’s  do this!  Let’s help make North Carolina the next blue state!!

Do we have a North Carolina Balloon Juice Angel to help get us started?  Yes, we do!  Matching up to $100 per person for donations in the comments or in an email to WaterGirl.  Between the external match and the angel match (while it lasts) donations will be 4x.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Taking the Campaign on the Road

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Taking the Campaign on the Road

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)

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Late Night Open Thread: JD Vance & the Rage Furby, Texting Buddies

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Some of you vintage blog readers may remember Chuck ‘Floorsh*tter’ Johnson, a/k/a ‘Not the Little Green Footballs Charles Johnson’, going back to the days when he was a favorite chewtoy at Tbogg’s joint. He bobs up like a turd in the right-wing septic tank every so often, but until I did a cursory search on earlier posts here, I’d completely forgotten he was another one of Peter Thiel’s ‘intellectual’ beneficiaries.

So *of course* when the Rage Furby reached out to a newbie Repub senator, he would not be shunted off for an intern to deal with… Per the Washington Post, “JD Vance in texts with far-right figure: Profane and off-the-cuff” [gift link]:

The day after JD Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, he received a congratulatory text from Charles Johnson, a blogger and entrepreneur who has zealously promoted right-wing conspiracy theories.

Johnson assumed the posture of a wise mentor, cautioning the first-time officeholder to choose his staff carefully and repeatedly pressing him on his committee assignments. “Got to keep you out of trouble,” wrote Johnson, who now describes himself as a government informant seeking to protect the United States from foreign influence.

Their correspondence over the next 20 months — extending into the weeks before former president Donald Trump picked Vance as his running mate — offers a glimpse of the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s off-the-cuff musings, often matching his public expressions but voiced with much less polish and more profanity. Vance was just as casual in discussing America’s foreign alliances as he was in evaluating his own private alliances with the GOP’s moneyed class. With Johnson, he pondered responsibility for the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and crudely described his aversion to the Ukrainian government and refusal to consider its pleas for U.S. assistance.

“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” he told Johnson in October, about three weeks after House Republicans blocked additional aid to help Kyiv repel the Russian invasion. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”

In response to questions about his correspondence with Johnson, Vance spokesman William Martin said the two were never close and don’t share the same politics. “Chuck Johnson spam texted JD Vance,” Martin said. “JD usually ignored him, but occasionally responded to push back against things he said.”…

The mostly friendly conversation with Johnson reflects how Vance gravitates to people on the political fringe — a cohort emboldened by Trump’s insurgent campaign in 2016 and highly active online in the years since. After Trump picked Vance as his running mate on July 15, Johnson has been criticizing his onetime interlocutor and threatening to release their communications. He said he has grown disillusioned with Vance, especially over the senator’s favorable view of the Israeli prime minister, and now supports President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.

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Changing of the Stars

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In a post this morning, I challenged BJ peeps to write an ode to Biden, an ode to Kamala, an ode to Walz. Or a poem, a rhyme, a limerick, a story.

We got some good ones!

On The Road - BillinGlendaleCA - The Milky Way Reimagined. 6
Photo by BillinGlendaleCA

Here’s something thoughtful from Damien that I wanted to share tonight.

Changing of the Stars

Folding quietly, unable to sustain but afraid to fall
A colossal success, the faded sun reviewed its work
Warmth, light, energy, its burn had fueled lives it would never know
Unwilling to abandon the lives its work had nurtured
The sun would not, could not, see its fading
It would not, could not, see the footman with its coat
Arrived and patient, the fearful rush of time implacable
Fear. Fear imperceptible in the lives it saved
Fear of what might come once the sun took on the coat of eternity
Fear readied the sun for darkest collapse
Its love would kill the very lives it wished to save
A maw of malevolent nothing on prowling periphery
Accepting of its own time passing, the sun, the star, fought back
In the only way it could anymore
It gave up its dream of a few more years
To sacrifice for new energy
A bigger star
A stronger light to fight the bitter blackness
The sun gave up its place
For a super nova

Open thread.

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Harris & Walz Fight for Red State Citizens

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In an homage to himself and the colossally unself-aware sloganeering featured in his flaming Hindenburg of a GOP primary campaign, shitty far-right Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently wasted $60K in taxpayer funds to change state line welcome signs to read “Welcome to the free state of Florida.” (Source: Tampa Bay Times)

It probably won’t matter in the final Electoral College* tally, but as one of the taxpayers whose contributions have been wasted on the sour kumquat’s hard-right vanity projects, I’m grateful that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have both been attacking the DeSantis anti-freedom agenda for years and hope they keep it up throughout the next 90 days.

Last year, when the DeSantis admin dumbed down the public school black history curriculum to protect the extra-dainty feelings of white snowflakes, Harris came to Jacksonville to call the change what it is: distorting history with far-right propaganda and lies. (Source: NPR) This year, she visited the state after the 6-week abortion ban became law and said “the government should never come between [a woman] and her doctor.”

Meanwhile, from his perch as a fellow governor, Walz has steadily slagged his odious Florida counterpart: (Source: TBT)

On social media, Walz has posted articles about books being removed from Florida school shelves, saying that “while we’re focused on banishing hunger with free breakfast and lunch, they’re focused on banning books, bullying LGBTQ+ students, and attacking teachers.”

In response to Florida effectively banning AP Psychology last year because the curriculum acknowledged the existence of people who are LGBTQ, Walz said, “My message stays the same: If you want to live in the year 2023, come to Minnesota. We’re protecting freedoms here – not taking them away.”

DeSantis talks often about all of the people who have moved to Florida since he became governor to flee liberal states. Walz, in an interview with NBC News last year, said Minnesota’s track record could appeal to people wanting to leave Florida and find another home.

“Like no time in my lifetime, the choice in states you could pick could not be greater,” he said in the NBC interview. “Folks don’t really care about the woke corporation fights, they care about the roads and water treatment plants.”

If I wouldn’t literally freeze to death in Minnesota, I might consider it, Governor Walz.

DeSantis takes credit for the sun, spinning the in-migration as a response to his crackpot far-right policies rather than the continuation of a trend that has seen the state’s population nearly triple in my lifetime. (It’s the sunshine and lack of a state tax, stupid!)

Anyhoo, “more of this, please,” etc. It’s meaningful to Democrats in red states when our national leaders push back on the fascist GOP culture war bullshit that takes away our freedoms, makes it harder for us to access healthcare and complicates raising our families.

Open thread.

*After we cross “crush fascism” off the to-do list, we should really make a more sustained effort to abolish the anti-democratic vestige of deference to slave states known as the Electoral College. The appeal could be fairly simple: In a democracy, all of our voices matter, so let’s stop making the citizens of a handful of swing states super-voters whose ballots outweigh everyone else’s. Maybe framing it as a fairness issue could work. 

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I Guess the Stalking Wasn’t a Joke

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So this morning I posted about JD’s incel/stalker tour of the same places Harris/Walz are visiting.  I didn’t mean to say he’d literally stalk her, so I guess my understanding of just how creepy and weird this guy is needs to be revised, because he stalked her.

First, JD walked over to Harris’ plane and talked to the press, saying “I just wanted to check out my future plane” and that he “wanted to go over and say hello to the Vice President and ask her why does she refuse to answer questions”.  Then he posted this:

I Guess the Stalking Wasn't a Joke

OK, bro.  And then he said this:

I Guess the Stalking Wasn't a Joke 1

Can you smell the flopsweat mixed with Axe body spray on this fucking gross incel?  What a weak attempt to do god knows what with that statement.  He sure isn’t acting like a guy whose nomination has one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel.

If some guy did this to my daughter, I’d tell her to file a restraining order.

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The Absurdity of It All

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Do you ever have a moment when suddenly you see something in a completely different light?

That happened to me last night when I looked at (fake) Jack Smith’s twitter feed.

How is it possible that the crackpot who would write these things can be seriously in the running to be president of the United States?  For a second time!  Is half the country under a spell?

Calling people stupid names like a 10-year-old boy might do, and thinking it’s funny.

It’s totally absurd.  The man needs professional help.

I know we’ve seen these rants for years, but this is nuts.  Have we seen so much of this that crazy-meters aren’t picking up the signal?

Enough from me, I’ll let Liberal Redneck take it from here.  It only took him one line to describe Trump exactly as I did up top.  h/t eclare for Liberal Redneck.

Open thread.

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