Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

So many bastards, so little time.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

In my day, never was longer.

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

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

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

We are aware of all internet traditions.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

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

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

The lights are all blinking red.

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

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

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Balloon-Juice After Dark: They Really Are That Weird

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Please let this be AI, please let this be AI, please, please, please…

 

Image

Text: JD Vance Full Family Kit (and I cannot believe I just typed that)

This is going to haunt my dreams tonight.   Please someone tell me this is just some fake shit someone made and passed off as real. Because, just no. First it was diapers, then it was sanitary napkin ear pads, now this?

We have got to vote these folks out and pray they don’t reproduce.

Open thread

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Brilliantly Named Doctor Weighs In On The Pandemic

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If you were the president for one day, what would you say in the daily briefing?

I would begin the press conference by saying “Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Ron Klain—he was the Ebola czar [under President Barack Obama], and now I’ve called him back and made him Covid czar. Everything will be centralized under one person who has the respect of both the public health community and the political community.” We’re a divided country right now. Right now, Tony Fauci [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] is the closest that we come to that.

Are you scared?

I’m in the age group that has a one in seven mortality rate if I get it. If you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention. But I’m not scared. I firmly believe that the steps that we’re taking will extend the time that it takes for the virus to make the rounds. I think that, in turn, will increase the likelihood that we will have a vaccine or we will have a prophylactic antiviral in time to cut off, reduce, or truncate the spread. Everybody needs to remember: This is not a zombie apocalypse. It’s not a mass extinction event.

 

I’m now following him on Twitter…as I pare down some of my follows for their hysteria, both political and pandemic…and introduce more reasonable voices to my timeline.

Yesterday we had a wild, wet snowstorm that took out my satellite, and boy did I need a break from all the news. I’m going to try today to pretend it’s still out and focus on other things. Later today I’m hoping to share a list of resources one of our jackals put together of all kinds of online concerts, entertainment, storytimes, etc.

How are you coping? Check-in and let’s support each other.

Open thread

 

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‘Tales of Thrilling Adventure’ Open Thread: Chris ‘Mad Bitcher’ Cillizza & His Talking Points of Derpitude

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<em>‘Tales of Thrilling Adventure’</em> Open Thread: Chris ‘Mad Bitcher’ Cillizza & His Talking Points of DerpitudePost + Comments (12)

Sad Trombone Open Thread: When the Poles on the Horseshoe* Snap Together

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The Cosplay Socialists are determined to set up President Obama as the next ‘No True Progressive’ boogeymonster. (Hillary can’t live forever, and Liz Warren is just not ‘unlikeable’ enough for their needs.) As LBJ once said, “… it gives him a warm feeling, but nobody else much notices.”

But they will definitely work their hardest (wearing blisters on their thumbs, as they batter the social media barricades) to ensure that Preznit NObama never gets a third term…

… I’m sure Obama is confident enough in his political radar that he truly believes his path is the only viable one. It’s probably why he intervened to install Tom Perez over Keith Ellison as chair of the DNC. And he has been railing against imagined enemies like “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds” and “wokeness,” not just recently but for years. But there’s something brittle in this approach. A two-term president who engenders generally warm feelings among the population should not be so sensitive to criticism. Perhaps he reveals too much in his prickliness.

The truth is that Obama, who reiterated his comments to donors in San Francisco on Thursday, presided over a country where inequality continued to worsen, where dominant monopolies continued to consolidate, where regions continued to slip behind a handful of cities on the coasts, where all of the post-recession gains went to those at the top. Obama wasn’t the only factor in this sclerotic improvement; he was handed a deep recession by his predecessor and a right-wing Congress two years into his tenure. But those electoral losses, among the largest for a two-term president since World War II, do reflect the inadequacies of market-driven incrementalism to deliver accountability for the sins of the financial crisis and tangible relief to the millions who suffered as a consequence. If it did, the wealthy donors Obama spends time with while criticizing the left would have less in their bank accounts…

But let’s be honest about the endgame. Obama is intervening on behalf of a cramped, self-censoring politics, one that dreams big but fights small, one that comforts the well-off by assuring them their fortunes will be safe and the game will proceed to their benefit. He has said, according to the Times, that the eventual primary winner “will come back to me when they need me,” and they will. But they might not come back to his policies, and that’s apparently unacceptable…

This is pure fanfiction. (I know the genre; I wrote some of it, back in my late teens, when it was just us Trekkies & the term hadn’t entered into popular use.) It’s a little too dense and allusive for non-believers to follow, but that’s part of the appeal. We few, we happy few, who understand the Canon and cannot be led astray by arguments about ‘verisimilitude’ or ‘scientific possibility’…

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Friday the 13th Falls on A Wednesday This Month!

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On what may be the last post of the old blogsite: Ave atque vale!

In case anyone missed it, Watergirl posted yesterday evening:

… As John mentioned, the transition to the new site will start somewhere around 6 am tomorrow. It may not start right on the dot at 6, and you are welcome to stay on Balloon Juice until the moment the old site is taken down. Who will be the last person to comment on the last thread on the current site?

So what can you expect for tomorrow? When you see a message come up on balloon-juice.com instead of the website, that’s how you will know that the process has started.

It takes awhile to count each of the 5.5 million comments as we move them to the new site. Okay, we’re not actually counting them, but you knew that. It still takes a long time to move everything over!

We are unlikely to have anything to report until at least 10 am, but John will provide updates on his twitter account whenever there is something to say. Anyone can view John’s twitter account at this link: https://twitter.com/johngcole…

Since I’m the backstage Unofficial Official Stress Tester, I’m planning to schedule a late-morning post on Erdogan’s visit, just to see when (if) it shows up on the new site. So you’ll have something fresh to look for, Murphy the Trickster God willing…

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Late Night Open Thread: Something Is Rotten, But It’s Not Denmark

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{FacePalm} Open Thread: Greenland, Unlike the Trump Administration, Is Not For Sale

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“Losing” — ?!?

{FacePalm} Open Thread: Greenland, Unlike the Trump Administration, Is Not For SalePost + Comments (202)