Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Bark louder, little dog.

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

I really should read my own blog.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

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

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

White supremacy is terrorism.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

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

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

This fight is for everything.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

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Getting the Gang Back Together

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Getting the Gang Back Together

So apparently a reporter at the Washington Post wrote a story saying the name of a person behind some tiktok account I had never heard of (libsoftiktok) who apparently posts all sorts of random shit allegedly making fun of left wingers. I don’t really know what they do, to be honest, because for whatever reason I had never heard of it until today. I’d like to pause here and thank the algorithm at tiktok which has kept my feed at a steady stream of 50% animals, 25% cooking and DIY, 10% politics, 10% humor targeting middle aged gen xers, and about 5% attractive women with Australian accents. That is all.

At any rate, the person behind the account has rebranded herself multiple times, and I don’t even know if she actually believes but I think she’s just someone smart enough to keep rebranding and riding a wave of instant yet anonymous celebrity to keep tons of royalty money rolling in. And good for her. She’s also signed her actual name to openly available information that apparently was easily obtainable, and is no longer “anonymous.”

You can look it all up yourself because honestly I have no wasted all the time I intend to on something that I have never seen, but instead, I wanted us to all unite in the glory of the screenshot above, which immediately transported me back in time to 2005. I mean would you look at that lineup there- that is some CPAC honoree circa 2008 shit right there. Captain Ed! Ye Old Perfesser! Breitbart! Red State! Box Wine Anne! I mean if we could find Malkin and if the Confederate Yankee hadn’t offed himself or if Pam Gellar and Hoft were still around, we’d have the whole gang back.

Can’t you just feel the excitement? We could go over all the greatest hits! The terrorist fist jab! Flight 93 Memorial is a nod to Islam! Rachel Ray’s scarf is terrorist! Marble Countertops! Let’s mail rock salt to Olympia Snowe!

Almost twenty fucking years and not one iota of personal growth from these idiots. I guess me either, because I am still pointing at them and laughing.

*** Update ***

Whole lot more to the story, and boy howdy was I off on Libsoftiktok. Total scumbag. Click here for a great Anne Laurie post.

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Grifters Gonna Grift Open Thread: Project (No) Veritas JO’Ker Is At It Again

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James O’Keefe illicitly acquired a private citizen’s diary, and used it for dramatic readings in an attempt to get GOP dark-money donors to keep his grift going for a few more months. The fact that some of the people who threw money at Sydney Powell found O’Keefe too sketchy to bankroll might’ve given a brighter dude pause, but not our Jimmy. They’d probably give him a moderate sinecure at some ‘investigative channel’ think tank if he’d stop fumbling around the edges of serious crime, but apparently O’Keefe just can’t bear the idea of leaving the circus…

Lots of damning details here:

I did not enter with high hopes, but I was still surprised by how quickly my interview with James O’Keefe went downhill. “You’re a former prosecutor, right?” the founder of Project Veritas asked just a few minutes after we began. “Why should I have any reason to believe that you’re gonna be fair here?”

The question might have been reasonable were it not for the fact that it was Project Veritas that had reached out to me to do a story about the organization and its legal troubles. They are the subject of a federal criminal investigation into the possible theft during the 2020 election of a diary that belongs to Joe Biden’s adult daughter Ashley. The group obtained the diary that September after she left it at a home in Florida and considered running a story about its contents but ultimately did not. After Joe Biden won in November, Project Veritas gave the diary to police in Florida along with other belongings of hers that they had obtained…

As a fact-gathering exercise, the discussion turned out to be a deeply frustrating experience; O’Keefe was evasive and demonstrably unreliable. As a window into his methodology as a political and media operator — a combination of deflection, self-aggrandizement, and self-aggrievement, depending on what is most useful in the moment ­— it was an illuminating encounter if nevertheless rather annoying to endure and strangely pathetic to witness.

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Late Night Open Thread: Tucker Carlson’s Well-Tanned… Ideas

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I know, I know — but Cheryl Rofer found the ABSOLUTE BEST comment, and it’s at the end of this post…

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C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: Hail to the Chief (Sh*tposter)

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A November 2021 post from Roy Edroso, professional Cassandra, is being recirculated around Twitter — “Operation Overlord: Why Elon Musk will run for President”:

Predictions are a mug’s game, as we all know, but I’ll lay one down right now: I think there will be a serious push over the next twelve years (assuming the nation lasts that long) to nominate Elon Musk as a Republican candidate for President of the United States. Since he’s not a native-born American this would require amendment of Article II of the Constitution, so I expect that to happen as well.

You may wonder why the Republicans would bother to elevate someone whose nomination would require all that extra groundwork. First of all, amending the Constitution would not be that big a deal; it’s not as if they respect the thing any more than they do the other instruments of government they’re always fucking with, and they might even enjoy the perverse challenge to put their shit-stains on the old parchment just as a flex; they might make “Let’s Go Brandon” the National Anthem while they’re at it.

My contention is that, from what we know about Republicans, policy no longer has anything to do with their decisions, and they mainly want be represented by someone who fits their idea of American greatness — which, as we see from their current avatar Trump, means their champion must be vicious and boorish and, above all, project a winning air. In my view Musk laps the field…

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Saturday Night Open Thread: The End(s) of Tucker Carlson

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According to lore, all Christians are celebrating the Resurrection, which leaves a crypt open for any last shreds of Fishsticks Goebbels’ dignity.

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Late Night Open Thread: Nicolas Kristof Is Well Pleased With Himself

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#GOLIKEHELLMACHINE lives in Oregon, as it happens…

People have perfectly reasonable biases against Olivia Nuzzi, but as a journalistic assassin, she’s bettered only by Isaac Chotiner. From NYMag, “How the lauded Times columnist lost the race for governor of Oregon before it even began”:

By the time I arrived in Yamhill, Oregon, Nicholas Kristof’s political career had already ended in a face-plant. “I didn’t feel any burning ambition to be a politician whatsoever,” he told me. Good thing. From start to finish, from his decision to quit the New York Times to the state Supreme Court decision that ruled him ineligible to hold the office, his campaign for governor lasted all of 114 days. Now he was no longer a columnist or a candidate, and about this outcome he claimed to be at peace…

A Pulitzer Prize winner once described as the conscience of a generation of journalists, Kristof devoted his life to chasing stories of poverty and genocide in places like Darfur and Sudan before epidemics of addiction and homelessness called his attention back to his home state. “I spent so much time reporting abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq and thinking this is really important and trying to convince people in the U.S. that this is important. And I deeply believe it was,” he told me. “But last time I calculated, every three weeks in the U.S., we were losing more Americans to drugs, alcohol, and suicide than Americans who died in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

He became convinced that he could help save Oregon, he said, after the 2020 publication of Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, the oddly chipper book (and companion documentary) he wrote with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, to document working-class suffering through the decline around Yamhill. “People will always come up and say, ‘Oh, you should run for office. We need you here,’ ” he said. It happened at book signings and Q&As and receptions after his speeches. “I just dismissed it,” he said. Until he didn’t. The Democratic-primary field looked weak. Tightrope had functioned, intentionally or not, as a briefing book for a better candidate. And Kristof could swear he detected a vibe that communicated the public was desperate for “transformative change,” the redundant inspirational slogan favored by Establishment technocrats plotting a revolution of efficiency powered by the consultant class. He came to believe that he could become governor and that he ought to be governor…

Kristof looked the part when he greeted me at the farm in a vest, a flannel, frayed jeans, and the kind of practical and unsightly footwear favored by those who have accrued more than their fair share of REI Co-op Member Rewards points. He made his way past the Honda Accord and Subaru with COEXIST and I’LL BELIEVE CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE WHEN TEXAS EXECUTES ONE bumper stickers parked in the garage, while his two dogs, Chloe and Connie, darted ahead into the grass. (Asked later about the Subaru, Kristof said that it belongs to his 89-year-old mother.)

The vineyard was teeming with the buds of Pinot Noir grapes that Kristof plans to harvest for the first time in the fall (already, a mile down the road in Carlton, Kristof Farms cider goes for $11 a bottle at a deli on Main Street, where the girl working the cash register reports it’s been selling pretty well). As he led me to a trail beyond its edge, he talked about his friends and neighbors who had overdosed or committed suicide. Just that morning, an addict he knew had posted a suicide note on Facebook. “I don’t think that most people appreciate that most years, alcohol kills more people than drugs,” Kristof told me, though he clarified that he does not believe this is true of the type of alcohol that he makes. He also does not think that profiting off the sale of alcohol and lowering rates of alcohol addiction, two of his stated immediate goals, are in conflict. “You know, I’ve lost friends to alcoholism, but I haven’t lost any to Pinot Noir alcoholism,” he said…

The Poors — they just can’t handle intoxicants, unlike those of Our Class. It wouldn’t be a true Second Gilded Age without professional Goo-Goos giving high-minded lectures for the betterment of us proles.

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Late Night Open Thread: Musk Buys Into Twitter

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Musk gets himself crosswise the SEC just tweeting, never mind attempting to influence the whole platform, but when you’ve got that much money I guess you have to keep shoveling it out of the yacht just to stay afloat. As a publicity stunt — EM’s main business form, AFAICT — it’s already accomplished its presumed goal, making The Richest Man both richer and more notorious in a single day. Per Reuters Opinion:

Unlike Twitter (TWTR.N), Edgar isn’t a household name. But occasionally the latter – the Securities and Exchange Commission’s public filing database – can be a more powerful platform. Tesla (TSLA.O) boss Elon Musk disclosed in a filing on Monday that he has acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter (TWTR.N). That sent the company’s shares up more than 20%, adding $7 billion-plus to its market capitalization. It’s the ultimate attention-grabbing post.

As a measure of engagement, it’s hard to think of many posts on Twitter’s own platform that do better. One rare example might be Musk’s 2018 tweets that he was preparing to take Tesla private. Those posts sent the electric-car maker’s shares soaring. The SEC was unamused, forcing Musk to agree to let Tesla lawyers screen his posts.

Both the regulator and Twitter have come in for Musk’s ire. Musk has claimed the SEC is unfairly persecuting him. And he has tweeted about possibly creating an alternative to Twitter. Attacking how platform owners police content and threatening to move to a breakaway venue is a hallowed tradition – perhaps especially among popular posters like Musk, who has 80 million followers. He has elevated the practice by spending billions of dollars on Twitter shares…

Twitter is used to being entangled with critics. Silver Lake’s Egon Durban sits on its board after Twitter signed an agreement with the private equity firm and activist Elliott Management. Musk may stick around, tweeting as he goes along. When it comes to airing his opinions about Twitter itself, though, the SEC’s Edgar platform may have an edge.

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