Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Consistently wrong since 2002

I really should read my own blog.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

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

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

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

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

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

Hot air and ill-informed banter

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

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

I did not have this on my fuck 2020 bingo card.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Every MSM headline appears to be written by DougJ. i hope he’s getting paid.

Late Night Open Thread: Florida Woman…

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… New Jersey man:

======

… ‘Honest (deluded) small businesswoman’:

A vendor at the Biketoberfest in Daytona Beach, Florida, revved up controversy last week by selling hats featuring Nazi symbols and imagery, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported…

The Biketoberfest is a massive annual biker rally in the city that sees participants numbering in the hundreds of thousands…

“It’s absolutely disgusting to see a vendor selling Nazi and SS gear, but it’s even worse that the only reason they would do so is because people are actually buying it,” said visitor Jonathan Davis, who took photos of the items and shared them over Facebook, sparking the outrage, according to the News-Journal…

I wondered about that quote, too. Per local site AskFlager.com:

… As shown in the picture [at the link], the hats were being sold alongside Trump hats. But they were not an endorsement of white supremacy, says Jenny. She wanted patrons to see them as a tribute to the World War II veterans who defeated Nazi Germany...

Late Night Open Thread: Florida Woman…Post + Comments (8)

Friday Evening Open Thread: Cracks in the GOP Wall?

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No, really — not every professional Republican is convinced that TFG is their god-emperor, going forward. Here’s Rick ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry, in Tiger Beat on the Potomac (aka Politico) — “What if Trump’s Grip on the GOP Isn’t as Strong as It Seems?”:

… Even the senior-most GOP politicians still seek Trump’s backing. Sen. Chuck Grassley, along with other top elected Republicans in Iowa, attended Trump’s rally in Des Moines the other day, where the 88-year-old senator, running for his eighth term, happily accepted his endorsement.

Trump’s rallies are still remarkably well-attended — part political events, part Grateful Dead concerts, part Andrew Dice Clay sets. The recent one in Alabama may well have been the largest political rally in state history, with roughly 50,000 people on hand…

Big majorities of Republicans tell pollsters they want Trump to run for president. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans in a Hill/HarrisX poll, and 67 percent in a Morning Consult/POLITICO poll said they want the Trump Train to depart the station once again. Morning Consult/POLITICO found that Trump has an 82 percent approval rating among Republicans.

A Pew poll came up with less encouraging numbers for Trump, with two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying he should stay politically active, but only 44 percent saying he should run for president. Still, Pew found that 63 percent of Republicans say the party should not be accepting, or at least too accepting, of GOP officials who openly criticize Trump.

And yet, despite all this, there are reasons to believe Trump’s dominance is exaggerated and that it is slowly degrading, such that by the time the 2024 Republican primaries roll around, he’ll be challengeable and beatable if he runs…

Trump’s media footprint is much reduced. The press is publishing fewer Trump stories, and there are fewer clicks on those stories. Data from SocialFlow shows engagement with Trump stories plummeting in March of this year and it took another jag down in August and September…

GOP politicians have every reason to do what they can to keep Trump and his voters on board in the interest of a unified base in the run-up to the 2022 midterms. But if Republicans take Congress next year and are worried about keeping it in 2024, they will be wary of once again needing candidates to run better than Trump in swing districts to keep their gavels…

Trump, for his part, is not exactly exuding the overwhelming concern with the interests of the party one would expect of a party leader. At a rally in Georgia, he mused that it might be better if Stacey Abrams were governor rather than Brian Kemp, the Republican who became persona non grata for not going along with Trump’s schemes to overturn the 2020 result in Georgia. He’s also threatened that Republican voters won’t show up in 2022 or 2024 if the alleged theft of 2020 is not taken care of, in some unspecified way…

The GOP is the Big Business Party, after all; if Trump and his cultists threaten its survival, the people who make their very nice livelihoods running it are not going to be sentimental about dumping him for a newer, better-performing model.

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Truth in Advertising (Open Thread)

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Federalist Society practice group chair and Claremont Institute board and faculty member John Eastman declares his legal work product on behalf of a then-sitting (well, wallowing more likely) president is hot garbage [TPM]:

Eastman told the National Review that the memos were “internal discussion memos” merely describing “available scenarios that had been floated,” and that somebody on Trump’s legal team “had asked” Eastman to write them.

“I was asked to kind of outline how each of those scenarios would work and then orally present my views on whether I thought they were valid or not, so that’s what those memos did,” the conservative lawyer said…

Eastman insisted he doesn’t actually believe in the memo’s jaw-dropping argument that House GOP could replace Biden’s electoral votes, and “anybody who thinks that that’s a viable strategy is crazy.”

Convenient that the exculpatory part was oral rather than written, huh? On a positive note, Eastman must be getting some serious side-eye if he feels the need to explain himself.

Open thread!

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Friday News Dump (Open Thread)

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No scoops to share, but the news feels like a dump anyway — maybe the dump of a wooly mammoth who’d gorged itself on candy corn (don’t get me started) and Taco Bell tacos with Flamin’ Hot Cheeto shells.

The state of Florida is paying this well-educated lunatic half a million per year to undermine confidence in vaccines and masks and urge citizens to rely on “their intuition and their sensibilities” instead.

As a Floridian who has lived among Floridians for decades, I wouldn’t recommend we trust our “intuition” and “sensibilities” to guide decisions on sorting laundry, let alone protect ourselves in a global pandemic that’s already killed one in 400 of us. Jesus Christ, I thought Rick Scott and his minions were bad, and they were. But these fucking DeSantis people are the worst.

The local dailies have done a stellar job covering the DeSantis fail parade while the worst of the Beltway gang lined up to give him tuggies. But even the locals seem to have given up. I haven’t checked every paper, but if they covered the above lunacy at all, the stories weren’t prominently placed.

All focus is on that dumbass probable murderer who maybe got himself eaten by alligators. A well-placed gator or two in Tallahassee wouldn’t come amiss.

Anyhoo, open thread.

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Open Thread: The Anti-Democracy, Anti-Voter Party

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The GOP needs to update its motto: We’re not a democracy republic, we’re a republic kakistocracy!

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Catching Up

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Condolezza Rice, still (mis)fighting the last war, in defense of ‘her’ GOP:

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Thursday / Friday, Oct. 21-22

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