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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Let me file that under fuck it.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

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

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

No one could have predicted…

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

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The Wingularity

You are here: Home / Archives for The Wingularity

FloridDuh! Woman: Electoral Edition

by Adam L Silverman|  August 3, 201911:40 am| 38 Comments

This post is in: America, Crazification Factor, Domestic Politics, Election 2020, Open Threads, Politics, All Too Normal, Assholes, Clown car, Clown Shoes, Floriduh Woman, General Stupidity, Not Normal, Our Failed Political Establishment, Shameless self promotion, The Wingularity

This is a little too on the nose for even Florida if you ask me.

Laura Loomer files to run against Rep. Lois Frankel. Running Loomer’s campaign: Trump’s 2016 Florida state director, Karen Giorno

FL-21 is a blue district, based in Palm Beach County, home to Trump’s winter getaway club, Mar-a-Lago pic.twitter.com/srDjzZtvu4

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) August 2, 2019

Loomer is originally from the Miami area, but who has lived in Arizona and New York as well, has, apparently recently moved back Florida just to run for Congress. The Democratic incumbent is Lois Frankel, who has been representing this district,  since 2017 and prior to that represented Florida as the representative from District 22, which after redistricting is now represented by Congressman Ted Deutch.  Frankel has also been the mayor of West Palm Beach, and was the minority leader in the Florida state House of Representatives.

From what I know of Loomer – deliberatively and almost shamelessly provocative, racist and bigoted, especially against Muslims, friendly with either those in the alt-right and extreme right circles playing footsie with white supremacists and neo-NAZIs or actually with white supremacists, neo-NAZIs, the men’s rights nutbars and Milo, as well as being a fantacist and a conspiracist – I think the real reason for Loomer’s run is both to suck up money through donations and to force social media platforms to let her back on. I fully expect that she is going to use her candidacy to try to force twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to let her back on and monetize those platforms because if they don’t they’re aiding her political opponent in the election. All while monetizing her election as an income stream because she doesn’t actually have any actual employment.

Open thread!

FloridDuh! Woman: Electoral EditionPost + Comments (38)

Extreme Self Expression

by @heymistermix.com|  January 26, 20199:03 am| 207 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, The Wingularity

I’m sad to report that this is the wingnuttiest set of bumper stickers I was able to record on my trip.  This one was captured in deepest Pennsyltucky.  I’m sure you’ve all seen more gaudy displays.

The nuttiest t-shirt I saw was at the Colorado Springs airport – I didn’t get a picture, but it went something like this:  “When North Korea Starts Dropping Bombs, the Soldiers Should Take a Knee and Let the Players Fight”.

Open thread.

Extreme Self ExpressionPost + Comments (207)

The Trump Permission Slip, Brookline High School Edition

by Tom Levenson|  December 1, 20175:22 pm| 149 Comments

This post is in: Post-racial America, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Assholes, Fucked-up-edness, Good News For Conservatives, I Can't Believe We're Still Talking About Fucking Nazis, The Wingularity

Of the many worst things about Trump’s election and his impact on American society is the way his vile racism — and the acquiescence-to-emulation of his fellow Republicans — has give the worst in our society (see: deplorables) license to display their own racist shitstains in public.

That came home with a vengeance for me over the last couple of days, starting with an email from the local high school principal and the school superintendent.  Three young men, two recent Brookline High graduates, one current student, had posted to the broader internet two  racist videos, attacking specific students of color at the school in the worst, most bluntly racist terms possible.

Today brought another email — a third video by this same trio has been found, along with racist graffiti in a boys bathroom near the cafeteria.

During a school walkout led by student leaders in the African American and Latino Scholars groups, speakers criticized the principal for not responding to the first videos faster, more publicly, with a broader expression of support. He acknowledged fault in an afternoon PA address:

Crises like these should spur each of us – every single one of us – to reflect on who we are in this community and how we help resist and fight hatred in all its forms, including racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia. As part of this reflection, we must also consider where we need to be better. That starts with me. I regret not communicating earlier than yesterday to the larger community – students, staff, and families. I made the decision to address this as an incident between a small group of students – the ones who made the initial video and the student they were targeting. In hindsight, I should have reached out to others sooner. I am sorry for this, as doing so would have put everyone in a better position to support and care for one another.

That’s a decent start, and I hope and believe more concrete effort’s coming.  I spoke to my son and a couple of his friends, one a kid of color, this afternoon and they were more or less unfazed. They regard the racists as assholes not worth their time, and they’re right about that.  But they know this isn’t usual, and they know that this is real hate, and not just teen crap.

That makes me weep, because even though I know better, this is what you want your child to believe he or she won’t have to deal with.  (I should add that my son is way more of a realist than I am on this, and I’m aware that parental fantasies are still fantasy.)

But there’s this.  Adding to my amazement as well as my disgust, this is Brookline, Massachusetts. Brookline!

For those of you who don’t happen to be familiar with every nook and cranny of Greater Boston, AKA the Hub of the Universe, Brookline is a small town enfolded on three sides by Boston proper, stretching west from, roughly, Fenway Park.

This is a well-off place, not so much limousine liberals as the dreaded East Coast Elites.  Median family income is over $90,000 — which is probably not unconnected to the fact that 14 % of the population hold a doctorate degree (I’m in the 86%, I should add), said to be the highest such proportion in the US.  Above all, it’s liberal as hell.  In the 2016 election, Clinton-Kaine received 24,583 votes to Trump-Pence’s 3,175.

All of which is to say that while my Vulcan brain knows wealth, comfort, homogeneity etc. do not inoculate against racism, as Dr. McCoy I discover that I’ve been living that cliché:  It Couldn’t Happen Here.

Clearly, it can.

Relearning that hard lesson reminds me how we got to this pass:  Donald F**king Trump and that Republican Party that’s been waltzing with racists since 1968.

Public racism, the sense scumbags who hate have of being validated and enabled by the country’s most powerful man, is one of the many tumors Trump and his party have lodged in our body politic. Getting it out is going to require major surgery, years of the political analogue of chemo, and even then, may not leave us with a viable patient.

In my corner of the world, I’m glad that the Brookline schools seem to be taking our local metastasis seriously.  Maybe we can excise this one lesion.

But damn, do I hate every sitting GOP politician who has, by tacit acceptance or full throated endorsement backed up our Bigot-in-Chief, who in turn has given voice (and perhaps more and worse) to those street level racists that can be found in literally every town in America.

I’m with Doug.  This is one of those days I hope there’s an afterlife so that our current leaders can hang with Satan till the last proton decays.

Image: Jacob Lawrence, Antagonism between white and Negro workers resulted in race riots, 1940-41 [thx, Peter H. Desmond].

The Trump Permission Slip, Brookline High School EditionPost + Comments (149)

Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Betty Cracker|  June 15, 20163:57 pm| 141 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Hillary Clinton 2016, Lizard Blogging, Open Threads, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Assholes, General Stupidity, Green Balloons, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!, Sociopaths, Sweet Fancy Moses!, The Wingularity, Their Motto: Apocalypse Now, WTF?

After revoking the WaPo’s press credentials for accurately reporting that he insinuated President Obama is in league with terrorists, Trump is now doubling down on that very same bat-shit insane accusation and tweet-wanking over his own alleged prescience yet again:

An: Media fell all over themselves criticizing what DonaldTrump "may have insinuated about @POTUS." But he's right: https://t.co/bIIdYtvZYw

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2016

The embedded article from Trump propaganda outlet Breitbart is entitled “Hillary Clinton Received Secret Memo Stating Obama Admin ‘Support’ for ISIS.” Vigorously auditioning for the role of “MiniTruth” in the dystopian hellhole of a Trump administration, the Breitbartians offer proof of nothing but their own disconnection from reality and inability to comprehend an intelligence report. Hillary Clinton is not amused:

Your @GOP presidential nominee responding to a terrorist attack with lies and conspiracy theories.https://t.co/TZJmXefmx4

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 15, 2016

Early on in this circus, someone observed that Trump’s success in the GOP primary was based on his willingness to ratchet up the insults and accusations beyond the bounds of rational discourse but that eventually, he would run out of room to escalate without sounding like a drooling psychopath.

Fellow citizens, we’ve arrived at that moment: The primaries officially ended last night, and Trump is already accusing both his opponent and the sitting President of the United States of being traitors who conspire with ISIS. I don’t believe in Peak Trump, but I am having a hard time imagining where he goes from here. The Illuminati? Chem trails? Lizard people? Help me out here…

Cloud Cuckoo LandPost + Comments (141)

Trump-proofing the Republican nomination process in the future

by David Anderson|  May 5, 20167:29 am| 153 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Grifters Gonna Grift, Republicans in Disarray!, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Fuck Yeah!, Good News For Conservatives, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!, The Wingularity, Their Motto: Apocalypse Now, WTF?

This post is speculation. It assumes that Trump will lose and lose big in November and that the Republican establishment as defined by a variety of rules committees has the power and the will to institute changes to the Republican primary process to Trump-proof the process.

The easiest way for the Republican Party to Trump-proof itself is to stop lying to its supporters. The Republican Party elite is fundamentally not trustworthy to its base voters. The core example is the promise that a Republican House and a Republican Senate could force President Obama to unwind PPACA while he sat in the White House. That was not going to happen. Trustworthy elites won’t happen as there is too much money to be made from fleecing the rubes. Once we take policy honesty off the table, rule changes are the next step.

Trump is the delegate leader (and presumptive delegate majority holder once the process plays out) with a low proportion of the total vote.

Total votes, primaries

Donald Trump ——— 10.5M

All other GOP ————— 15.6M

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) May 4, 2016

He benefited from a split field and a rules system that allowed factional plurality leaders to amass delegate strength out of proportion to their actual vote counts. Winner take all elections with more than two candidates have this common failure. There were two sets of winner take all elections in this current Republican primary. The first was state level delegates where the winner of a state received a significant bonus number of delegates and then winner take all at the Congressional District level. The Republicans assigned three delegates to each Congressional District without regard to how many Republicans actually lived or voted in that district.

538 has a good example of how this flat allocation of winner take all delegates by district helped Trump:

If Ted Cruz wins by a huge margin in Milwaukee’s suburbs, as expected tonight, he’ll get all three delegates from Wisconsin’s 5th Congressional District, which cast 257,017 votes for Mitt Romney in the 2012 general election. But in two weeks, Donald Trump could capture just as many delegates by winning a majority of the vote in New York’s heavily Latino, Bronx-based 15th Congressional District, which cast only 5,315 votes for Romney four years ago.

Three weeks ago, Trump won three times as many delegates — nine — at the Northern Mariana Islands convention, which drew just 471 participants.

This is problem #1. The GOP primary delegation process favors plurality winners and it favors candidates who can win in very low turnout environments. There is a massive variance between the minimum number of votes needed per delegate and the maximum number of votes needed per delegate. Some districts are extremely efficient and some are extremely inefficient places to win. The Republicans treat districts like the Senate treats states. The first rule change would be to scale the delegate award to some measure of Republican vote strength.

show full post on front page

Trump-proofing the Republican nomination process in the futurePost + Comments (153)

My greatest post of the year

by Tim F|  December 23, 201510:55 am| 86 Comments

This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Bring On The Meteor, Clown Shoes, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, The Wingularity, Ugh

Unquestionably this nugget.

[…] By Halloween the only way you still hear about Trump is if he takes his National Front fan base and runs third party.

polls

I guess that in the future everyone gets to be Dick Morris for fifteen minutes. Aside from Dick Morris of course, who has to be Dick Morris all the time. And Bill Kristol.

Do you have any least greatest hits of 2015 that you want to share? I could use some company.

Open thread.

My greatest post of the yearPost + Comments (86)

Everything Old Is New Again — John Rogers Is Always Right Edition

by Tom Levenson|  September 15, 20152:58 pm| 152 Comments

This post is in: Crazification Factor, Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Politics, Proud to Be A Democrat, Religious Nuts, Flash Mob of Hate, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Our Failed Political Establishment, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot, The Wingularity

Top line from today’s New York Times/CBS poll of the Republican presidential primary:

The proportion of Republican voters favoring Mr. Carson rose to 23 percent from 6 percent in the previous CBS News poll, which was taken just before the first televised Republican debate in early August. Over that same period, Mr. Trump made modest gains, to 27 percent from 24 percent.

In case any of our MSM friends are truly arithmetically challenged, that means that Donald Trump and Ben Carson — two men who have less capacity to fill the office they seek than I do to perform neurosurgery or figure out how to lose money owning a casino — combine to grab half of Republican electorate.

50%.

One out of every two polled.

Damn.

Hieronymus_Bosch_011

The key number, of course, one that I’m sure leapt out to this particular audience, is Trump’s total, that “modest” step to precisely the level that John Rogers identified, so long ago, as the crazification factor:

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is —

Tyrone: 27%.

John: … you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

John: Objectively crazy or crazy vis-a-vis my own inertial reference frame for rational behaviour? I mean, are you creating the Theory of Special Crazification or General Crazification?

Tyrone: Hadn’t thought about it. Let’s split the difference. Half just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality even though they arrive at their positions through rational means, and the other half are the core of the Crazification — either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.

John: You realize this leads to there being over 30 million crazy people in the US?

Tyrone: Does that seem wrong?

John: … a bit low, actually.

Of course, based on the recent polling gains recorded by our favorite lunatic neurosurgeon, we may be in a situation even the great Kung Fu Monkey has not yet encountered.  It’s entirely possible that we could soon see a survey that has both Trump and Carson at 27%.  Do we have non-overlapping magisteria of crazy working now in Not-Your-Grandparents’-GOP™?

Run away! Run away!

Open Thread, my friends.

PS:  Bonus link to Charles Pierce on the special snowflake that is Our Donald.  When Pierce nails an image, that image stays nailed:

Trump is so thin-skinned that, if he swallowed a flashlight, he’d glow like a Japanese lantern.

Hieronymous Bosch, Ship of Fools (detail), betw. 1488-1510. (Unsure on the color correction on this one, folks.  Been decades since I saw it in the flesh).

Everything Old Is New Again — John Rogers Is Always Right EditionPost + Comments (152)

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