Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

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

You cannot shame the shameless.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

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

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

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

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

We still have time to mess this up!

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

This fight is for everything.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

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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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Sad Trombone Open Thread: When the Poles on the Horseshoe* Snap TogetherPost + Comments (139)

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)

Local Elections Open Thread: What of Iowa’s Staunch GOP?

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The down-home, folksy variant I remember was “You’ve only got two hands”, but maybe Senator Ernst was thinking of “Four legs good, two legs better”?

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst returned Monday from a trip to the U.S-Mexico border with a message for her constituents: “The humanitarian crisis at our southern border is absolutely real.”…

“I saw firsthand what is going on there, and what I want to get out first and foremost is that our border patrol agents are doing a tremendous job,” said Ernst, describing the men and women as “good-hearted” and “extremely compassionate.”

“They were taking dollars out of their pockets — when Democrats refused to step up and help us fund the items necessary for these areas — to pay for diapers and formula and hygiene items for the men and women that are there,” she added…

Ernst said she was told the migrants were “receiving [medical] care,” but it was obvious the system was “overwhelmed.”

“It’s overwhelmed,” Ernst said, describing her observations as she walked through the facilities. “But I felt completely safe and at ease.

“Even walking in and around the migrants, I felt comfortable,” she said. “Not all of them were in restricted areas. Some of them were sitting, waiting to be processed and some were going through their health screenings — and they all are going through health screenings. They’re being provided medical care.”…

It’s hard for the old-school mom & pop white nationalist heartland populists to compete when the national megachain moves in on their markets. Look at what’s happening to Steve ‘Pigmuck’ King, who thought he had a sinecure for life! Ed Kilgore, in NYMag, “Is Steve King Finally Running Out of Money and Luck?”:

… National Republicans would just as soon hand King an anvil and show him the nearest cliff. But he’s not going away quietly and is running for a tenth term in the House in his very conservative fourth district of Iowa. He is not, however, doing very well on the fundraising front, as the Des Moines Register noted after second-quarter reports came in:

King raised a total of almost $92,000 this period and ends the quarter with about $18,000 on hand.

In comparison, [primary opponent Randy] Feenstra raised $140,000 in the second quarter and ended it with almost $340,000 on hand.

Feenstra is a prominent state senator who is generally regarded as King’s toughest opponent among the three who are currently in the race. He is running not so much against King’s racism as against the loss of clout the state and district have suffered thanks to the incumbent’s disgrace, which is probably smart in a district where Donald Trump won 61 percent of the vote in 2016. But then again, even Trump is keeping his distance from King so far…

More likely, Trump’s handlers are doing their best to keep King well away from the Oval Office Occupant.

… In 2018, after a campaign dominated by discussion of his pithy views regarding the Lesser Breeds, King came within three points of losing to an actual Democrat, J.D. Scholten, who outspent the incumbent by nearly a four-to-one margin.

National Democrats would very much like Scholten for an encore in 2020, but he’s instead eyeing a Senate race against Joni Ernst (even as Chuck Schumer tries to clear the field for another candidate, Theresa Greenfield) — probably because the presidential race could make the fourth district a tougher climb than in 2018, and possibly because, if King loses his primary, the general election will be all but unwinnable for a Democrat (barring some third-party run by the incumbent on the White Supremacist ticket)…

More bad news for Pigmuck King: Talibangelical ‘Family Leader’ Bob Vander Plaats has endorsed King’s primary opponent Feenstra, supposedly on the grounds that King has been saying the quiet parts a little too loudly. (“In January, he tweeted that King’s comments were “a bridge too far.””) Since Vander Plaatz is supposed to have an unerring instinct for what will work for his flock, it seems like the remoras may be deserting their shark.

Local Elections Open Thread: What of Iowa’s Staunch GOP?Post + Comments (145)