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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

Shelter in place is one thing. Shelter in pants is quite another.

We have all the best words.

Han shot first.

This blog goes to 11…

I really should read my own blog.

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

How does anyone do Gilligan’s Island as trump world and not cast Jared as Gilligan?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

This is a big f—–g deal.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

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

This is how realignments happen…

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

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

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Call the National Guard if your insurrection lasts more than four hours.

Good luck with your asparagus.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

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

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You are here: Home / Archives for 2016

Archives for 2016

Open Thread: FAREWELL 2016!

by Anne Laurie|  December 31, 201611:57 pm| 118 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Daydream Believers

By now, no doubt, Ms. Sarah P&T is passed out enjoying a well-earned sleep in a tangle of healthy young limbs. A hero to all us bawdy old ladies! And yet, I shall celebrate the demise of this godsforsaken year with nothing naughtier than televised fireworks, good chocolate, and the Spousal Unit… that’s as much excitement as I have the stamina for…

Here’s to a better and happier 2017 for all of us!
.

Open Thread: FAREWELL 2016!Post + Comments (118)

Happy New Year: Ireland Man Edition!

by Adam L Silverman|  December 31, 20169:35 pm| 96 Comments

This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, Because of wow., Open Threads, Popular Culture, Silverman on Security, Fuck Yeah!, Someone Somewhere Is Having More Fun Than I Am, THIS WAS AWESOME

We have an early entrant in the bizarre things that occur on New Year’s Eve contest. This one courtesy of Ireland Man (like Florida Man, but with a better accent!).

(h/t: https://twitter.com/AMoCS/status/815302062829404160)

Hope everyone’s festivities or quiet night’s in are going to plan!

Stay frosty!

Happy New Year: Ireland Man Edition!Post + Comments (96)

Open Thread: New Year’s Eve at the Court of the Fake-Sun King

by Anne Laurie|  December 31, 20169:20 pm| 102 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Republican Venality

Trump-owned resort sold tickets to New Year’s Eve party with Trump https://t.co/QdHgKfEuhn pic.twitter.com/e6SyUzXwhI

— The Hill (@thehill) December 31, 2016

However unsatisfactory your own evening’s plans, at least you’re not spending it in the company of people who’ve paid good money to hang around Lord Smallgloves. Per Politico:

Mar-a-Lago, the pricey private resort in Palm Beach, Florida, sold hundreds of tickets at more than $500 a piece to an annual New Year’s Eve extravaganza planned for Saturday night that will feature a very special guest: the president-elect of the United States of America and his family.

President-elect Donald Trump owns the members-only luxury resort, which each year sells tickets to swank parties it throws on holidays and special occasions, including New Year’s Eve, Thanksgiving and Christmas…

Sean Spicer, Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, on a Friday morning conference call with reporters, said the party is already “sold out” with more than 800 people scheduled to attend, including actor Sylvester Stallone and music producer Quincy Jones, in addition to Trump, his wife, incoming first lady Melania Trump, and their son Barron Trump.

A person who travels in Palm Beach society circles said that tickets to the party were being sold for $525 each for members and $575 each for guests…

Incoming White House Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks rejected criticisms that Mar-a-Lago was selling access to the president-elect.

“The transition is not concerned about the appearance of a conflict,” she said. “This is an annual celebratory event at the private club, like others that have continued to occur since the election. Additionally, the president cannot and does not have a conflict.”…

“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

***********
Just got back from our wrap-up-the-year dinner at an ‘upscale chain’ burger joint (because it’s close enough we didn’t have to trust our luck on the freeway). Contemplating whether I should take a nap before watching the midnight fireworks on television, or maybe invite the Spousal Unit to join me for a Netflix movie instead. The predicted ‘light wintery mix’ is just starting to precipitate… and for the moment, my life is perfectly satisfactory.

What’s on the agenda for the night, celebratory or otherwise?
.

What are the odds Trump spends some real time pondering if he can charge for White House tours? https://t.co/AtJLH5MeFj

— Schooley (@Rschooley) December 31, 2016

Open Thread: New Year’s Eve at the Court of the Fake-Sun KingPost + Comments (102)

You’re So Vain

by John Cole|  December 31, 20165:23 pm| 262 Comments

This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment

This is a pretty good place to start off a discussion:

In an extraordinary development Thursday, the Obama administration announced a series of sanctions against Russia.

Thirty-five Russian nationals will be expelled from the country. President Obama issued a terse statement seeming to blame Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails.

“These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government,” he wrote.

Russia at first pledged, darkly, to retaliate, then backed off. The Russian press today is even reporting that Vladimir Putin is inviting “the children of American diplomats” to “visit the Christmas tree in the Kremlin,” as characteristically loathsome/menacing/sarcastic a Putin response as you’ll find.

This dramatic story puts the news media in a jackpot. Absent independent verification, reporters will have to rely upon the secret assessments of intelligence agencies to cover the story at all.

Many reporters I know are quietly freaking out about having to go through that again. We all remember the WMD fiasco.

“It’s déjà vu all over again” is how one friend put it.

Apparently, our media is so desperate to learn a lesson from the way they were played in the Iraq WMD debacle (as always, the excellent Operation Desert Snipe from 2003 sets the standard) that what they have chosen to learn is nihilism and nothingness with a dash of learned helplessness.

There simply is no comparison between the WMD story and the Russian hacking. The Obama administration has no Office of Special Plans ginning up fake bullshit about the Russian hacking, feeding it directly to the media through backchannels, all in direct contradiction to what the intelligence services are actually saying. There is no Doug Feith, Ahmad Chalabi, Paul Wolfowitz or Judy Miller. John Kerry isn’t standing before the UN lying about what the Russians have done like Colin Powell and his fucking aluminum tubes.

But that is where many in the media are today, pretending it’s the same thing, and it’s all so shadowy, and we can’t know anything, and who knows what Obama’s motives are, and we can’t trust anything the intelligence services say (and these are the same people who will turn around and cite Bush as culpable for not paying ample attention to the infamous August 6th, 2001 briefing on Osama bin Laden’s intent and act appalled that Trump is not attending intelligence briefings). That’s the benefit of nihilism- you can believe in everything and nothing at the same time, and push both as capital T Truth simultaneously.

So that is where we find ourselves now- in an asymmetric warfare in which we believe nothing that the intelligence services say (and trust me, I think healthy skepticism is good and I don’t trust those fuckers as far as I can throw them and with my bad shoulder, blah blah Ferris Bueller), but everything leaked by the Russian hackers. We demand proof, but then dismiss anything that is offered- “It’s not enough! We need more,” knowing full well that publicly offering more would jeopardize data collection methods, reveal what we know and how we know it, reveal sources, and burn agents. It’s almost like in a rush to learn things, they forgot about Valerie Plame.

It’s fertile ground, this nihilism. You get to say that Obama’s actions are both too much and not enough. You can say it was too late, and that it was unnecessary anyway. When you believe in nothing, you are never wrong and always right. You can pretend someone making a mistake is the same as intentionally lying or hysterical (all the while giving fodder for those who want it to ignore everything). You’re always the smartest kid in the class when you shout out the answers after the test have been graded.

And to maintain this, you have to really work to believe nothing. You have to thoroughly dismiss Trump’s long record of fellating Putin. You have to ignore Paul Manafort’s Russian connections. You have to pretend Rex Tillerson doesn’t exist. Or Carter Page. And Roger Stone never said this. And that Julian Assange does not have an agenda.

You must also feign concern about pointing out Russian hacking might lead to nuclear escalation. Now it’s been decades since my foreign policy courses in poly sci. and seminars named things like Superpowers of the Nuclear Age, but I don’t recall the mutual masturbation society that is the current Trump/Putin relationship being discussed in the MAD sections. The only real danger we have right now is friction burns as Trump and Putin dryhump each other on twitter.

It’s also not surprising that many of the people who are outright dismissing the Russian hacking were some of Clinton’s biggest critics. A part of me thinks that dismissing the Russian hacking is part of their unwillingness to cede any of her loss to Trump to anything other than her being the absolute worst person in the world and an even worse candidate. Now let’s be clear, because I know I will be misquoted. I don’t think that the leaks were THE reason she lost. But they were a reason. To deny this is absurd. The leaks were taken out of context, pushed on every front page of every newspaper, and elevated everyday campaign talk into something sinister. Hell, I have listened to people around here conflate the Clinton email server with the DNC email hacks as proof that Clinton violated the law and was unsafe with her emails, all of which ignores the fact that Clinton was never sending action items or top secret stuff through her emails to begin with, because there is a whole separate system for that kind of communication. I still don’t think most journalists fucking understand THAT, which is in and of itself another reason for my current disgusted viewpoint on our failed media experiment.

Clinton lost for a number of reasons. She had high negatives (Clinton fatigue) due to a 30 year campaign by the GOP. She had a media relentlessly flog minutae over substance. She could have visited a few battleground states more. She had Bern or Busters and Jill Stein idiots sapping the vote. She had voter suppression killing the vote in several key states. She had the media flogging a ridiculous fucking email story. She had the unprecedented and unconscionable behavior of James Comey. And she had the Russian hacking and DNC emails.

Let me put it this way. In medical care, there is a phrase/condition called multiple morbities. What it basically means is that a number of conditions can co-occur and ultimately lead to a patient’s demise. When people die, more often than not, there were a number of things going on, each of which could be fatal in its own right. You can suffer from diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, obesity, high cholesterol, hypertension, liver failure, etc. When a patient dies, the doctors don’t sit around saying things like “ONE THING IS FOR SURE, THE OBESITY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.” The hacking isn’t what killed the patient, but it sure contributed. But that’s what the deniers want you to believe.

The absolute worst thing about this nihilistic behavior is that they think they are masquerading as heroes speaking truth to power, lauding themselves for their skepticism. Except they aren’t. They’re getting in some parting shots at Obama (who was never good enough for them anyway- HE KILLED SINGLE PAYER- THE 60 VOTES WERE THERE! JUST ASK ANYONE AT THE NOW DEFUNCT FIREDOGLAKES COMMENT SECTION!) and enabling the real power, which is the unified Republican House, Senate, and White House, and soon to be Supreme Court, as well as the several dozen Republican statehouses, who, as we saw during the Bush years, are more than willing to destroy anything and everything, including intelligence agencies, if it means they can starve poor people, start wars at will, keep women and minorities in line, and cut taxes in the rich.

So thanks guys for your fucking service to the nation, you dickheads.

*** Update ***

The fact that people think the Russians hacked the election is not proof of Democratic or intelligence services or WH perfidy, it’s just more evidence that the American people are really fucking stupid and partially because you are so fucking bad at your job. Here’s example fucking A:

Talk about disappointments. The US government’s much-anticipated analysis of Russian-sponsored hacking operations provides almost none of the promised evidence linking them to breaches that the Obama administration claims were orchestrated in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

Interfering with the election is NOT fucking hacking the vote totals, and no one has claimed the latter, you fucking pinhead.

You’re So VainPost + Comments (262)

College Football + Other Stuff Open Thread

by Betty Cracker|  December 31, 20162:59 pm| 132 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Sports, Someone Somewhere Is Having More Fun Than I Am

LSU has dispatched Loo-uh-vull, and Georgia Tech handily dismantled Kentucky, so now it’s on to the games with title implications: ‘Bama vs. Washington starts at 3 PM ET (Roll Tide!), and Ohio State and Clemson play at 7 PM (Go Clemson!).

I’ve got ropa vieja simmering in the kitchen (following this recipe, more or less, only I use Goya Adobo instead of assembling the spice mix described in the recipe because ain’t nobody got TIME for that shit!) and am enjoying the beautiful weather outside.

A beer would complete the circle of my domestic contentment, but I gotta pace myself: I want to make damn sure I’m awake at midnight to watch motherfucking 2016 die!

Open thread for both sportsball and non-sportsball talk!

College Football + Other Stuff Open ThreadPost + Comments (132)

Excellent Read: “David Fahrenthold tells the behind-the-scenes story of his year covering Trump”

by Anne Laurie|  December 31, 201611:24 am| 155 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Excellent Links, Hail to the Hairpiece, Let A Thousand Watergates Bloom

My year of covering @realDonaldTrump: how a rally in Iowa and a campaign mgr's falsehood set the stories in motion. https://t.co/RRrpLzvwW2

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) December 29, 2016

A well-deserved victory lap, with a promise for the future:

“Arnold and Tim, if you’d come up, we’re going to give you a nice, beautiful check,” Donald Trump said. He held up an oversize check, the kind they give to people who win golf tournaments. It was for $100,000. In the top-left corner the check said: “The Donald J. Trump Foundation.”

Along the bottom, it had the slogan of Trump’s presidential campaign: “Make America Great Again.”…

That was the start of nine months of work for me, trying to dig up the truth about a part of Trump’s life that he wanted to keep secret. I didn’t understand — and I don’t think Trump understood, either — where that one check, and that one question, would lead…

***********

The idea for this story had come from our executive editor, Marty Baron. One night, as we both waited for an elevator, Marty offered a suggestion.

Why don’t you go beyond Trump’s promises to give to veterans, he said, and look at Trump’s giving to charity, period?

The logic was that Trump had just tried to wiggle out of a charitable promise he’d made on national TV. What, Marty wondered, had he been doing before the campaign, when nobody was looking?

Working with one of The Post’s ace researchers, Alice Crites, I went digging for records that would reveal Trump’s charitable giving, going back to his early days as a Manhattan developer in the 1980s. We looked at old news clippings, detailing Trump’s public statements. And we looked at tax filings from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which had been dug out of storage by New York state.

Those two sources told two very different stories…

I kept looking, posting details of my search to Twitter. Soon I had attracted a virtual army, ready to join the scavenger hunt. I had begun the year with 4,700 Twitter followers. By September I had more than 60,000 and climbing fast. I began hearing from celebrities and even a few personal heroes, offering their assistance out of the blue. The barbecue columnist for Texas Monthly — an idol to me, as a journalist and a native Texan — was watching videos of other people’s parties taken at a Trump golf resort. He thought he’d spotted the painting in the background (he hadn’t). Kathy Griffin, the actress, called me with her memories about visiting the set of Trump’s “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner, was sending me links on Twitter, new leads on Trump promises…

The point of my stories was not to defeat Trump. The point was to tell readers the facts about this man running for president. How reliable was he at keeping promises? How much moral responsibility did he feel to help those less fortunate than he?

By the end of the election, I felt I’d done my job. My last big story about Trump started with an amazing anecdote, which came from a tip from a reader. In 1996, Trump had crashed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity opening a nursery school for children with AIDS. Trump, who had never donated to the charity, stole a seat onstage that had been saved for a big contributor.

He sat there through the whole ceremony, singing along with the choir of children as cameras snapped, and then left without giving a dime…

A few days [after the election], I was interviewed by another German reporter. He asked if these past nine months, the greatest ad­ven­ture in my life as a journalist, had been for naught.

“Do you feel like your work perhaps did not matter at all?” he said.

I didn’t feel like that.

It did matter. But, in an election as long and wild as this, a lot of other stories and other people mattered, too. I did my job. The voters did theirs. Now my job goes on. I’ll seek to cover Trump the president with the same vigor as I scrutinized Trump the candidate.

And now I know how to do it.

Excellent Read: “David Fahrenthold tells the behind-the-scenes story of his year covering Trump”Post + Comments (155)

Slim hope open thread

by David Anderson|  December 31, 201610:38 am| 73 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUDS

My only hope for the new year is that 2017 is not telling 2016 “hold my beer and watch this…..”

 

Open thread

Slim hope open threadPost + Comments (73)

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