Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Second rate reporter says what?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

A Senator Walker would be an insult to the state and the nation.

Consistently wrong since 2002

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Optimism opens the door to great things.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

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

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Site Maintenance

We’re Doing This Live

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Hello all- I just wanted to let you know that we now have a firmish date for rolling out the new iteration of Balloon Juice. We expect to have it live one day between 6-8 November, so basically in two weeks. I am very excited, and as many of you have seen the new version, I hope you are, too.

I do want to take a moment to thank everyone who tested- you have no idea how helpful that was (although I have to say that I was ready to stab myself in the face on about page 30 of the submissions that Watergirl forwarded to me). I also want to remind everyone of a few quick things:

1.) Just because you submitted something you would like to see changed does not necessarily mean it will be. We have to balance the needs of the many over the desires of the one individual. We took all the information at heart, but some things are the way they are for a reason.

2.) There are still going to be some mistakes and problems with the new site. That is inevitable. But we will work to fix them when we know about it. Your feedback really helped to remove a lot of them, but there will still be something we missed.

3.) One of my personal goals for this rebuild was to address accessibility issues. I think it is very important that this site be accessible for everyone, and I think as a liberal blog we should do more than just talk the talk on this. Therefore, be prepared for some things to change as we work to address those issues that are not to my satisfaction.

Also, I am totally not ready for your acrimonious bullshit, but we’ll deal with that in two weeks.

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The Contact Form Is Offline

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Folks,

The contact form is offline and shall not return, but do not fret, we’ve still got balloon-juice.com email addresses you can use. We just don’t like to publish them in machine-readable format to reduce the bots harvesting them, then harassing us.

I copied these instructions from Watergirl’s post last evening:

Quick note: I have mentioned several times that we are changing the method for contacting a front pager, but in case anyone has missed it, I wanted to call attention to it in the title.

You can reach any front pager by email simply by addressing email to their nym at balloon-juice.com.  If their nym has is made up of multiple words, you put a dash in place of the space.  If the front pager is Humpty Dumpty, you would send email to Humpty-Dumpty at balloon-juice.com; and yes, sending email to humpty-dumpty at balloon-juice.com also works.

This system has been in place for at least a couple of months now, but the Contact a Front Pager form is being taken down tonight, so please start using the new method now.

Since some folks may have missed that post last night, I wanted to ensure that the announcement had maximum exposure.

 

Open thread, I’m not around, just wanted to post this and now, back to packing.

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Request From WaterGirl For Testing The New Site

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From an email (thanks to valued commenter and tester M. Bouffant):

Hey everyone, WaterGirl here.

You are receiving this message if you volunteered to test the new website and supplied information about your devices, but never followed up by sending email to [address deleted]

I am starting to get our ducks in a row for whenever testing will start.

Please write back to [address deleted] — one way or another — to say that you’re in for testing or that you don’t want to be contacted about testing again.

Hope to hear from all of you one way or another, very soon!

Thanks, WaterGirl

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Afternoon Moment of Zen

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Had the camera handy so filmed my morning ritual with Mr. Large and in Charge:

He’s a very good boy.

At any rate, in the least surprising news ever, the website is doing weird shit. Honestly, I’m just done having people worry about it on the back end. We’re just going to limp this listing, smoking hulk into drydock and hopefully nobody torpedoes us before we have the new one in the water and combat ready. In other words everything is fucked and we’re out of duct tape and shits to give so we’re just trying to hang on with as few casualties as possible until the new ship is ready. Basically, a metaphor for our current political situation.

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Redirects Banished?

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Folks,
This is a new post about the porn and other redirects happening on this site.

 

We think the problem is handled, but since it can’t be replicated on-demand, I’m asking for your help in testing this for a few minutes a few times today.  Most-to-all reports have been on iOS devices, mostly iPhones. Turn off the ad blocking as it is bad ads causing issues.

Then load the site and click on links – to posts, Twitter, comments, etc. Just go to the site and read and click and click some more.  It’s the clicking that gets redirected, and it happens to both internal and external links.

Should something happen, please let me know details here. Also, if you can, write down the domain or company so we can see if that info helps track things down.

 

After a bit of testing, please remember to re-enable your ad blocker and enjoy safe surfing.  In an hour or so, try again, and repeat as you can today. If you have issues, please post them here.

Thanks so much for your help, everyone.

 

ETA:  Please use the Safari browser for testing. Chrome, etc. aren’t quite the same, it appears. And don’t forget to disable the ad blockers.

 

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Porn Ghosts? Happy Monday!

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Folks,

It appears that the porn demon may in fact still be lurking. I’ve had one report of being redirected to porn from clicking on a Twitter link, but I can’t replicate this and for this user, it’s a non-repeatable event.

So – should you have any continuing porn redirection, please let me know in this post and we’ll see what we can do. It should no longer be an issue but this user’s experience clicking on a Twitter link from a post this morning pretty much rules out a stale link from before we applied the fix.

The thing is, I saw some continuing bad behavior Saturday afternoon from clicking on some links on the site (internal and external). So leading indicators are that we still have a problem.

The issue only seems to affect the mobile site, so this isn’t an issue for desktop users that I’m aware of.

Your help is appreciated. I have some obligations this morning, so I may or may not be in the comments, but when I’m back at my computer, I’ll review them all.

 

Porn Ghosts? Happy Monday!Post + Comments (31)