Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

This really is a full service blog.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Be a wild strawberry.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Stand up, dammit!

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

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The Israel-Hamas War of October 2023: Monday 9 October Update

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Just a brief update on what is going on.

First, the Israelis have mobilized 300,000 reservists.

https://twitter.com/NTarnopolsky/status/1711297526890893808

That’s a lot of personnel, but remember a lot of those reservists will be tail, not tooth. They’ll be working logistics, maneuver support, medical, all the things that have to be done so the combat arms folks can actually be effective. That said, the majority of Israel’s premier special operations unit – the Sayeret Matkal – are reservists. About 200 of them threatened to resign if Bibi pushed his reforms through in late July/early August. I expect they’re all back now.

Before the jump I want to focus on one self mobilized retiree: Major General Yair Golan.

https://twitter.com/gadishamia/status/1711240299987562977

If you don’t live in Israel or consume Israeli media, you don’t know who Yair Golan is. He is a 61-year-old retired Major General in the Israel army and a former parliament MP. Spend a minute to read this story.

Yesterday, when IDF and the police were in complete chaos, Golan put on his old uniform, took his weapon, and drove into the war zone multiple times to rescue civilians under fire. He rescued two young adults hiding under a bush after 260 of their friends were murdered at an outdoor party. He answered a call from a journalist that his son was hiding under fire and simply said, “Give me his location, and I will bring him back home.” An hour later, the son called his father from Golan’s car.

Golan collected a small crew and went in and out of the war zone, rescuing dozens of people while exchanging fire with Hamas terrorists. He is 61, he could have stayed home, but he chose to risk his life for people he does not know.

Golan is one of the strongest voices from the Israeli left and was constantly attacked by the right wing in Israel. But when the time came, he was first fighting the barbaric attack. The same brain wiring that supports peace, is often the same wiring that drives people to do the right thing.

A true hero.

Golan has been consistently vilified by Bibi, his supporters, and everyone else on the far right in Israeli politics for well over a decade. All because he has a different vision for Israel politics, society, relations with the Palestinians, and has opposed Bibi and his even more extreme coalition partners. Every insult you can imagine has been sent his way from being an internal fifth columnist to selling out and betraying Israelis and Jews. Golan, unlike Bibi, unlike the convicted terrorist Ben Gvir, unlike the Kahane protege Smotrich ran to the sounds of gunfire to help all while his detractors continue to try to cover their self exposed tuchases and shift the blame on to Israelis like Golan.

The frantic tweets of Nir Gontarz, the journalist whose son Golan rescued after the jump.

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Odds & Ends Open Thread

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Is there any situation this asshole can’t make even worse? (Rolling Stone)

AS VERIFIED ACCOUNTS on X, formerly Twitter, continue to spread misinformation on the violent conflict between Hamas and Israel, Elon Musk directed his nearly 160 million X followers to follow accounts known for disseminating lies.

“For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors & @sentdefender are good,” Musk posted on X Sunday morning. He added, “It is also worth following direct sources on the ground. Please add interesting options in replies below.”

In his own post, CNN’s Jake Tapper took a screenshot of Musk’s post next to a screenshot of a derogatory message from the War Monitor account to a user named Avi Kaner. In the caption, Tapper wrote, “Elon Musk lauds this bigot as a good source of information, part Infiniti.”

A year ago, the War Monitors account thanked Kanye West in a Twitter thread and claimed that “the overwhelming majority of people in the media and banks are zi0nists” and told another X user in June “go worship a jew lil bro.”

The “derogatory message” Tapper highlighted from the so-called War Monitor account was “mind your own business, jew.” Musk deleted the tweet, but he frequently amplifies antisemites. There’s no plausible explanation for this well-established pattern other than that Musk in an antisemitic piece of shit himself.

The good news is that despite the happy talk from X CEO Linda Yaccarino* about “monetizable daily active users,” Musk is rapidly tanking his own platform. With any luck, his current social media reach will shrink to D@ily St0rm3r proportions eventually.

***

Josh Marshall at TPM posted about a report that an Egyptian official directly warned Netanyahu 10 days prior that there would be an attack from Gaza:

Ynet is reporting that ten days before the attack the Director of the General Intelligence Directorate of Egypt, Abbas Kamel, called Netanyahu and warned “something fierce will happen from Gaza”. Netanyahu, according to this report, reacted in a nonchalant fashion and said the IDF had its hands full with events in the West Bank.

Needless to say, this claim is going to loom over everything that is unfolding. The Prime Minister’s office has officially denied the report. But I suspect a huge amount will turn on the specifics of just what is being alleged and denied…

This may seem like just the details of getting caught totally off guard. But it plays almost like a morality play of Netanyahu’s government – that he was so focused on having the IDF coddle the misbehavior of his settler allies that he dropped the ball on the most foundational of the state’s responsibilities: protecting Israeli civilians from attack.

Shades of GWB’s reaction to the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” memo, if true. There’s usually a “rally around the leader” effect when there’s a mass casualty attack — GWB certainly benefited from that, to our (and the world’s) great cost.

But Israel and the U.S. — especially the pre-9/11 U.S. — are very different countries. Isn’t the whole point of a figure like Netanyahu to prevent this sort of thing?

***

Turning to more trivial matters, Ron DeSantis is so desperate to get back in the 2024 conversation that he’s leaving the con-media safe space to appear on Morning Joe tomorrow as part of a sustained “media blitz,” according to Politico:

On Tuesday, the Republican presidential hopeful is set to appear on MSNBC’s Morning Joe — a show that has placed a highly critical eye on his candidacy along with much of the GOP field. According to an adviser, the Florida governor is expected to follow that up in the coming weeks with an appearance on CNN, another platform that has drawn the ire of conservatives…

DeSantis spokesperson Andrew Romeo said the governor was looking to “drive his message across a diverse swath of media to share his plans for what he will do as president to reverse America’s decline.”

Go on Rachel’s show or go home, chickenshit.

***

Speaking of trivial, vainglorious chickenshits, Kevin McCarthy told Hugh Hewitt he’s willing to serve as speaker again, according to WaPo. The House GOP’s biggest regret is that their own dysfunction is preventing them from blaming the conflict in Israel on Joe Biden.

They’re making that charge in front of any operating camera, of course. But the bright red rubber noses and floppy shoes Repub reps are wearing makes it hard for anyone to take them seriously (so far).

Open thread.

*Speaking of Yaccarino, did y’all hear about her mega-cringe interview at the Code Conference last week? Stockholm syndrome! 

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Youngkin Is Shattering GOP Fundraising Records in Virginia

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In case we didn’t know before just how important the Virginia elections are, we only need to look at the nearly 7.5 million dollars Youngkin’s PAC raised in the past 3 months.  And that doesn’t even include the 2 million from a TikTok billionaire.

Republican mega-donors are out in force, and not just for the governor!  They are rescuing some of the R candidates for state Senate and the House of Delegates with their enormous donations.

Republican Megadonors Help Youngkin’s PAC Shatter fundraising records

TIME IS SHORT.  PEOPLE ARE VOTING.  LET’S DO THIS.

So let’s fight with what we’ve got here on Balloon Juice – our small dollar fundraising and political action, and our postcards.  Helping Virginia – one donation and one postcard at a time.

I don’t know who Chaz Nuttycombe is, but Virginia peeps seem to listen to him.  This is the good news:

With 30 Days Until VA Election Day 2023, Chaz Nuttycombe’s Latest Ratings Have Dems with 71% Chance of Senate Majority, 57% Chance of HoD Majority

Three races have just been designated as toss-ups in this last leg of the race, and two of them are the races we are funding!

The third race that he considers a toss-up isn’t as compelling (candidate-wise) as the two we are funding.  But there is another race that is “tilt” blue, which is a very soft blue, and that one is compelling.

So as soon as we hit $15,000 for our two awesome young black people who are running in toss-up races, we will think about helping to go for the “tilt blue” race, which is more compelling than the third toss-up  By then fundraising numbers will hopefully be out, too.

CAN WE GET TO $15,000 today?

  • We are currently at $10,901.
  • We still have $125 available on Patrick’s match. Angel match is complete!
  • That plus Patrick’s $500, would take us to about $11,500  takes us to $12,271!

Which means we are asking BJ peeps who can afford to donate to help us get the $3,500  $2,700  $2,500 that will get us to $15k today.

(Sorry, no more matching Angels in waiting, but we are so grateful for the ones we have had!)

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Sunday Night Open Thread: Embracing TFG As A Trauma Response

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The tweet above crossed my path, reminding me I’ve meant to talk about Cassidy Hutchinson’s book tour — specifically, about how her (now ended) devotion to Trump was sparked by growing up with an intermittently absent / abusive father. Monica Hesse, in the Washington Post [unpaywalled gift link]:

Cassidy Hutchinson’s parents had separated only recently when her father sent her a text saying he’d left her a present. He hadn’t handled the split well, the former White House aide writes in her new memoir, “Enough,” but there he was, telling her there was a surprise in the mailbox of the New Jersey home where she lived with her mom. Teenage Cassidy went out and retrieved “something weighty wrapped in aluminum foil.” She unwrapped the package at the kitchen sink and found two deer hearts, “still warm and dripping with blood.”

Was the gift a threat? A performance? Was it the only convoluted way that a man like him — a hunter untrusting of government and hospitals and appendix removals and “wimps,” in his daughter’s telling — knew how to express love? Hutchinson doesn’t plumb the event too deeply in the book, in which the bloody heart gift is just one in a series of kooky behaviors from her complicated dad. But if you’re reading “Enough” not as a political potboiler but as a character study in what a nice girl is doing in a place like this, then, boy, the deer heart is going to haunt you for days…

I cannot count the number of times, during the Trump administration, that I looked at the young women surrounding him — the Hope Hickses and Alyssa Farahs and Sarah Matthewses — and wondered what in God’s name they were doing there. John F. Kelly, Mark Meadows, you could understand. They must have decided they could either steady the ship or party on down with it — and if the latter happened, hey, they had their entire careers in the rearview mirror. But when you’re a 20-something woman, what about Trump’s mangy persona or misogynist tendencies made you decide to serve at the pleasure of this president?

“Enough” is most interesting when it serves as a case study to answer that question. Hutchinson didn’t come from money. She didn’t go to Harvard. She was wait-listed from her dream school, which wasn’t even an Ivy but a decent liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania. She ended up at Christopher Newport University, a fine institution in Virginia that you will be forgiven if you’ve barely heard of. She didn’t have a buffet of family-connection job offers awaiting her upon graduation. She got a little lucky with a college boyfriend whose family let her live with them rent-free in the D.C. area so she could work unpaid internships. But otherwise — this was a young American who got patriotic stars in her eyes the first time she visited Washington as a child, and who decided then that she’d do what it took to work there as soon as she graduated college. It was her bad luck that the White House administration coinciding with her job eligibility was an absolute toilet bowl.

“Enough” is a profile in courage, but it’s equally a profile in panic. A profile in realizing that the toilet is never going to flush you out into an open ocean of possibility; that you just work in a toilet now. You are 24 years old, caught in the middle of something far bigger than you, and it turns out all your mentors are snakes.

In the background of all of this is Hutchinson’s father. Her descriptions of him paint a picture of a needy, aggrieved man who delighted in mocking weakness and thrilled at considering himself a “warrior,” who demanded Hutchinson’s fealty while offering jeering and insults in return. If this sounds an awful lot like someone else in her life (and ours), it won’t surprise you at all to hear that “The Apprentice” was her dad’s favorite television show. Her father, Hutchinson writes, “fixated” on Trump and on the important business lessons he felt the man was sharing with the country.

A daddy metaphor feels a little on the nose here. But reading this book about Hutchinson’s bid at redemption makes you wonder about how ours might go, as we careen toward 2024 and the likelihood that most Republicans are sanguine with the idea of restoring Trump to the White House, despite what Hutchinson and others have told us about what it was like in there with him in charge. Legions of young graduates need to decide where to direct their résumés and their loyalty. The future may be advertised as a gift. But it feels like the country is standing at the kitchen sink, unwrapping a wad of aluminum foil, dreading whatever is inside.

I know this has been said before, but: Trump himself grew up with an abusive father, part of a deeply dysfunctional family. A childhood like this induces a form of PTSD, and its survivors have a well-known tendency to end up as abusers themselves… or as enablers, who seek out abuser who will make them feel safe, inside the kind of horrorshow where they’re comfortable as performers, unlike the wimps and weaklings who don’t understand What It Takes. HRC was right to talk about ‘deprogramming’ MAGAt legislators, because of course the only way to break a cycle of abuse is to help its survivors understand there is a better way to live.

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War for Ukraine Day 592: The Ukrainians Stand for Israel

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Art by NEIVANMADE of a Ukrainian painted black and outlined in blood red kneeling in grief with hands covering the face surrounded by the bodies of Ukrainians killed by Russians on a grey background. "Russia Is Committing Genocide Right Now" is across the top center of the image.

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Quick housekeeping note. I’ve just updated the Israel-Hamas war post from earlier with the reporting from The Wall Street Journal that Iran, specifically the IRGC, helped plan and approved Hamas’s attack followed by Barak Ravid’s warning that until/unless there is additional sourcing, that this is just Hamas spreading RUMINT.

https://twitter.com/RabbiUkraine/status/1711085846617608491

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1711073167517581322

https://twitter.com/NTarnopolsky/status/1711107518032654514

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

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The Israel-Hamas War of October 2023 Update

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Just a bit of an update regarding the Israeli-Hamas war of October 2023.

Before we dig into the news, I want to briefly explain what I think are the key issues here:

The first is, as we delineated yesterday, that Bibi has allowed over 2/3rds of the IDFs units in the south to be redeployed to the West Bank because that’s where the convicted terrorist and mentee of Meir Kahane he’s empowered, put in his coalition, and made ministers – Ben Gvir (convicted terrorist) and Smotrich (Kahane’s mentee) – want them. They want them in the West Bank to protect the reactionary ultradevout/ultranationaist settlers from the consequences of their own bad behavior. This has left Israel wide open in the south and east, which is the opportunity that Hamas exploited yesterday.

The second is I do not know how anyone misses Hamas stockpiling over 2,000 missiles and then caching them in strategically important locations. Just a massive failure of Israeli’s intelligence and security services.

The third is that Hamas is as much a creation of Bibi’s as it is of the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been Bibi, at every turn since the early 90s, who has empowered Hamas as a foil he can both act tough against and a weapon he can deploy to diminish the Palestinian Authority and Fatah. He specifically does this so that he can claim that Fatah and the PA are too weak to be allowed to form a government for an independent Palestine and therefore not worth negotiating with while Hamas cannot be negotiated with. Heads Bibi wins, tails the Palestinians lose. Here’s video of Smotrich actually delineating this strategy back in 2015 before Bibi empowered him by bringing him into the coalition.

Machine translation of the tweet:

“Hamas is an asset” – this is how MK Bezalel Smotrich previously defined the terrorist organization, referring to the fight in the international arena \ #הארכיון_לא_שוכח : “On the international field, in the game of delegitimization – the Palestinian Authority is a burden and Hamas is an asset. Watch a segment from #אולפןפתוח , broadcast on #כנסת99 in October 2015

What is happening is as much the result of Bibi’s cynical strategies to manipulate and exploit the various Palestinian factions, as well as the US, to achieve his own objectives: A) never having to give up power, B) stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, C) never facing any consequences for any thing he does or any decision he makes.

The fourth is that everyone in Israel that is paying attention and has an IQ higher than my socks knows all what I’ve delineated in item 3. Even his coalition partners whom he has empowered because they will allow him to achieve his three real objectives while he makes it possible for them to create the Jewish herrenvolk illiberal managed Israeli democracy/theocracy they dream of. As such, no one trusts Bibi. Not his allies, not his partners, and not the opposition. But the opposition actually cares about Israel and Israelis. So Lapid and Gantz will continue to make overtures for a national unity government and if I have to guess, I expect Gantz will eventually take Bibi’s offer to join the current coalition, rather than shed the extremists and create a clean national unity government. If things go from bad to really worse, pressure will be on Lapid to do the same. Bibi has always depended on the good intentions of others. The reservists, especially all of those who have been protesting since April, will all either come when mobilized or volunteer and they’ll fight, but they also know that Bibi is already throwing them and their leadership under the bus. That started yesterday AM when Bibi’s networks on social media began framing this failure as “Hamas decided we were weak because the Reservists all boycotted Bibi who is just trying to keep Israelis and Jews safe.” Bot after bot after bot and then re-amplified by the trolls until it makes its way from the pro-Bibi astroturfed fringe into more mainstream channels.

I think that’s where we are.

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