Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

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

This blog goes to 11…

Hot air and ill-informed banter

I’m going back to the respite thread.

It was down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

We have all the best words.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

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

Usually wrong but never in doubt

This fight is for everything.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

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

They are all Michael Cohen now.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

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

Everybody saw this coming.

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

This blog will pay for itself.

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Reader Interactions

119Comments

  1. 1.

    PaulW

    You’re not getting dumber: you’re getting more cynical from the outright failure to hold the liars onstage accountable for their BS.

  2. 2.

    SiubhanDuinne

    You are very blond top right seated, in front of the standing guy with the wide stance, right?

    Edit: Only one in long sleeved camo.

    Edit edit: Actually, only one in camo at all.

  4. 4.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    Just remember and be happy that you’re not a Republican anymore.

  5. 5.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Trump has been totally pants’ed in this debate. I predict his poll numbers will go up.

  12. 12.

    PsiFighter37

    FWIW, I watched the Trump rally in Maine live on CNBC at work today, and I could not, for the life of me, think coherently for 15-20 minutes after it was over. It completely fried my brain.

  19. 19.

    OGLiberal

    @dmsilev: He’s trying real hard to sound like the reasonable, sane guy and he whips out Star Wars?

    Then again, he got cheers. Of course, Trump would get cheers for farting so not a very selective audience.

  27. 27.

    jl

    The GOP candidates are renewing their vows!?
    I was laughing until the vicious little creep Rubio interrupted his Holy GOP vows with filthy lies.

  29. 29.

    Marc

    I avoided the last few debates. Good God, what a raging dumpster fire. I expected someone to announce the results of a paternity test. Maybe hit someone else over the head with a chair.

  31. 31.

    mclaren

    Nate Silver’s twitter stream is a hoot:

    @NateSilver538: If a year ago you’d drawn up 1000 scenarios and ranked them from best to worst possible outcome for the GOP, this would be like No. 997.

    @ObsoleteDogma: @NateSilver538 What are the three that could possibly be worse than this?

    @NateSilver538: @ObsoleteDogma: No. 998 involves a Watergate-style scandal, No. 999 involves space aliens, and I don’t even want to think about No. 1000.

    @sungod499: @NateSilver538 @ObsoleteDogma nominate the AntiChrist.

  33. 33.

    Patricia Kayden

    @PsiFighter37: That’s the point of Trump’s rallies. It explains why he loves the “poorly educated”.

    The cop who assaulted Sandra Bland was finally fired for perjury. Just heard this on The Last Word. Good.

  34. 34.

    PsiFighter37

    Trump says he’ll support the GOP nominee. Of course he’ll say that now because it’s going to be him…

  36. 36.

    Peale

    @jl: you forgot the “lock them in a room” part of diplomacy. Because if there’s one think that’ll get a world leader to see your point of view, it’s imprisoning them.

  37. 37.

    jl

    @Peale: I think Kasich needed to show strength in a short time, so just had time to say that he would yell at countries to do stuff.

  41. 41.

    Corner Stone

    God damn, Fox is so in the tank for anti-Trump. Good Christ.
    O’Reilly is doing the damn thing.

  43. 43.

    PsiFighter37

    I wonder what happens to the polls after this.

    Today was the kitchen sink…I don’t think they can do anything else to stop Trump. If he wins, they are screwed to the max.

    The Clinton campaign must be delighted that the GOP is emptying out the oppo research file.

  45. 45.

    jl

    @dmsilev: Like the last one, when you forget that one of these hideous dolts liars and losers will be presidential nominee, parts of the garbage fire are hilarious.

    To cheer myself up by imaging any one of these clown up against HRC or Sanders in front of an audience of normal people.

  46. 46.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman: Weird note from that time. The guys in the Howitzer Batteries in ACRs wore green overalls rather than BDUs in order match the nomex the treed-heads wore. And, at least in 2ACR who I worked with, they made everyone wear crossed saber insignia. Cav is weird.

  48. 48.

    Linda Featheringill

    There is NO WAY that I’ll pollute my little brain with a GOP debate, but you guys are funny! Nice of you to endure all that for my entertainment. :-)

  49. 49.

    TOP123

    Wow, that was a sh*tshow. I listened on NPR, so my, uh, enjoyment, was not informed by visuals. My take was that it sounded like a Trump grizzly bear surrounded by a cluster of angry squirrels, abetted by a few bear-hating squirrel handlers. And the angry grizzly was just swatting the vicious attacking squirrels away with his paws like King Kong with biplanes.

  51. 51.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yes it is. I watched one of my colonels (as in I was his front line supervisor/faculty advisor) at USAWC decide to raise a point to the chair at a dining in about the cav guys and spurs. Before he go all the way through it I thought we were going to be in a fist fight.

  52. 52.

    mclaren

    Megan McArdle has a splooge up detailing all the people she knows who claim they are stalwart Republicans and have always voted R for their entire lives and are now going to vote for a Democrat if Trump is the Republican nominee.

    The Die-Hard Republicans Who Say #NeverTrump”

    Since it’s McfuckingArdle, this probably means that the chances that Trump will win are much higher than anyone thinks.

  53. 53.

    Amir Khalid

    @sigaba:
    It was okay as WWII movies go, I guess. I remember Wardaddy telling his new crewmember: “ideals are peaceful. History is violent.” That, and the fact that Brad Pitt spoke his lines in German so slowly and clearly that I understood everything he said.

  56. 56.

    beltane

    @mclaren: From what I heard tonight, they are most upset that Trump is not nearly as conservative as they would like. I did not see the media going after Romney or Bush’s business dealings in any substantive way whatsoever.

  57. 57.

    Redshift

    @PsiFighter37:

    Cruz is advocating a space-based missile defense. Jesus f’in Christ.

    Remember when the Bush Administration came into office, and the Clinton national security folks told them that their biggest challenge would be terrorism, but Condi Rice said it was missile defense, because Reagan?

    Good times.

    Pretending to be the second coming of St. Ronnie is never a bad thing for a Republican, even if it makes no sense. And they don’t have any new ideas, so they might as well recycle Reagan’s as anyone else’s.

  58. 58.

    Mike J

    @Amir Khalid:

    That, and the fact that Brad Pitt spoke his lines in German so slowly and clearly that I understood everything he said.

    He wasn’t supposed to be a native speaker, he was a soldier who had learned enough to get by. So he got it right.

    Some people actually complain about Jean Seberg’s accent in Breathless, saying she sounds like an American college student, which is exactly what the character was supposed to be.

  60. 60.

    sigaba

    @Marc: “I expected someone to announce the results of a paternity test. Maybe hit someone else over the head with a chair.”

    One of them could talk about their struggle with lupus while Trump sells the medical benefits of his Trump-branded juicer. (The Montell Williams juicer was, surprisingly, a petty good juicer.)

  61. 61.

    Corner Stone

    @PsiFighter37: Bill O’Reilly basically just threw every oppo talking point right back into Trump’s face and did his best to humiliate him in typical BO attack mode style.
    It was so blatant I am surprised Trump did not just flip him the bird and walk away, which was clearly what O’Reilly was hoping for. Near the end BO asked Trump if he was tired because he “looked pretty tired”.

  62. 62.

    Linda Featheringill

    @efgoldman:

    What I actually think is that Trump won’t be easy to defeat. It worries me that so many Dems seem to think so.

    All you military guys, didn’t anybody ever teach you to never underestimate your adversary?

  63. 63.

    Aleta

    The red lights on four fire trucks have been strobing outside the house for 40 minutes (a neighbor’s smoking dryer) and it seems an appropriate omen. Post-debate sick at heart + to my stomach.

  65. 65.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    Am I the only one who thought Rubio’s yoga bit was masterful? His best work, in my view. Low bar, but still, it was actually witty.

  66. 66.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @efgoldman:

    Her predictive powers are somewhat better than Always Wrong Bill Kristol, but if it involves counting to a number higher than 25 or so, she’s guaranteed to be wrong.

    You spelled “2500” wrong.

  69. 69.

    mclaren

    @beltane:

    Movement Republicans are also scared of Trump’s erratic unpredictability, as am I. If that guy got into the White House, who the hell knows what he’d do. Loose talk like ‘I’d do a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding’ and making Mexico pay for a giant wall on the border and invading Syria and grabbing their oil and shipping it out to our own profit is basically all the guy has when it comes to foreign policy, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Trump is all over the place. He seems to come up with this crap at random.

    As Foreign Policy magazine put it,

    “Trump’s National Security Policy Would Look Like a High School Model U.N.”

    Trump’s failure to talk responsibly or learnedly about national security, and the concurrent failure of his campaign to articulate coherent positions this late into the primary season thus must be considered in some way deliberate.

    Since the fall, there have been some heroic attempts by serious analysts to identify a method to the madness of Trump’s positions. George Mason’s Colin Dueck thinks he is a traditional American nationalist. Walter Russell Mead at Bard claims Trump has recreated a “nihilistic populism.” The National Review‘s Rich Lowry borrows from Mead’s own framework to suggest that Trump is a “Jacksonian” populist. Thomas Wright, writing in Politico, asserts that Trump has had a consistent foreign policy framework, albeit one drawn from the populism and isolationism of the pre-World War II era.

    Each of these analyses has some merit to it in the sense that sometimes Trump’s positions coincide with some of the tenets of these worldviews. And while many of his foreign policy positions bounce around erratically — he now claims he always opposed the Iraq war when, in fact, he was an early supporter of it — there are some areas where he does hold a consistent position. For instance, Trump has consistently opposed free trade. And Trump has consistently believed that our security treaty allies are ripping us off — perhaps because he is apparently unaware that our allies actually subsidize the cost of U.S. troops stationed.

    Yet, none of this adds up to the kind of coherent foreign policy framework that would allow us to make the plausible predictions that are possible with a normal candidate.

    The guy is a windbag spewing bluster to bully other countries. Everyone is scared spitless of Trump getting actual power, and with good reason.

  72. 72.

    Elie

    @Linda Featheringill:

    Linda, your fear is leading you to believe that the worst will come true. You cannot mount a strong defense and good offense from a place of fear and low confidence. I know you are disappointed that Bernie is not doing better. But that does not necessarily lead to the conclusions you are drawing. Maybe you are angry. Maybe its better to admit the anger rather than throwing shade on our energy and optimism. You want to stay at home and let Trump become President? If not, then re-consider your attitude, please. I really am surprised by what I thought I knew about you, albeit just from your comments here.

  73. 73.

    superpredators4hillary

    After all the flap of GOP destruction, if one of those clowns gets to honk his horn, the Dem party should commit seppuku.

  74. 74.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Corner Stone: The Guardian instatranscript:

    Cruz hits Trump on guns, guns, guns for everyone, and Trump gets peppy and tries to interrupt.

    “Breathe, breathe, breathe, you can do it. I know it’s hard,” Cruz says.

    Rubio: “When they’re done with yoga, can I [say something]?”

    Cruz: “I really hope we don’t see yoga on this stage.”

    “Well he’s very flexible,” Rubio says, pointing to Trump.

  75. 75.

    Amir Khalid

    @mclaren:
    Trump’s thinking on anything is about as informed and nuanced as Archie Bunker’s. I wouldn’t dignify his approach to national security with a formal name.

  77. 77.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I just deliberately turned on Fox News for the first time (I think)

    Patton Oswald ‏@ pattonoswalt 12m12 minutes ago
    Holy shit. I want to turn away but Bill O’Reilly is TRUMAN CAPOTE TALKSHOW DRUNK.

    Have to say: I didn’t see it.

  78. 78.

    WarMunchkin

    And this is why I want Sanders to stay in all the way till June. Democrats get to demonstrate again and again and again and again what substantive discussion looks like. Eventually, somebody has to make the transition from Both Sides Do It and Two Party System to Actually, It’s the Republicans Who Suck.

  79. 79.

    Linda Featheringill

    @Elie:

    Okay. Maybe you’re right and I’m wrong.

    But what if I’m right? And a confident but lackadaisical campaign on the Dem side leads to a Trump victory.

    I think we’ll have to GOTV like hell.

    Edited because I apparently can’t spell.

  82. 82.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Linda Featheringill: I don’t underestimate Trump, especially if we’re hit by either an economic shock or a terrorist attack.

    I think we’ll have to GOTV like hell.

    I think that’s true no matter who the nominee is

  83. 83.

    JCJ

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):

    FWIW I posted this earlier

    From the older thread regarding the gentleman that introduced President Obama today in Milwaukee – perhaps the autoimmune disorder he had that was possibly cured by surgery was myasthenia gravis. That can be treated with thymectomy. Also possibly ulcerative colitis. That can be treated by complete colectomy.

  84. 84.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Linda Featheringill:

    And a confident but lackadaisical campaign on the Dem side leads to a Trump victory.

    What makes you think that a grinder like HRC is going to lackadaisical? Her entire career is testimony her not ever being that. She may habeen many other thins that don’t appeal to you, but she was never lackadaisical. Why would she start now?

  85. 85.

    Corner Stone

    @beltane: Wow. The 17 and 13 year old apparently clearly vocalized their wishes, according to those reports.
    What an asshole, not that it’s a surprise.

  87. 87.

    Linda Featheringill

    It’s getting late and I’m gradually turning into a pumpkin. Night, all.

  88. 88.

    Tony P.

    The 3 non-Trumps said they will support the nominee, even if it’s He, Trump.
    He Trump allowed that he will support the nominee, even if it’s not himself.
    Those were the only statements in the entire cage match that I actually believe.

    –TP

  90. 90.

    Lamh36

    I swear you posted this pic before? or maybe it was another one?

    It’s like playing Where’s Waldo, I figured out who you were but it was kinda hard I mean ya know all u white folks look alike ???

    lol

  92. 92.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @JCJ: I just saw that, and responded.
    @JCJ: Thanks for pointing those out. I was probably too hung up on “cured.” And IANAMD though I teach intermittently at a med school.

    @Corner Stone:

    Wow. The 17 and 13 year old apparently clearly vocalized their wishes, according to those reports.
    What an asshole, not that it’s a surprise.

    Kids are smart.

  93. 93.

    Adam L Silverman

    @beltane: He did. Didn’t help that the oldest child, his daughter, testified that she witnessed him choking his then wife and dragging her down the stairs by the throat. It also didn’t help that the ex wife’s new husband is a police officer and there was a reported confrontation, started by O’Reilly and the cop when he was just dating the ex wife. If I recall the news article correctly, O’Reilly was very lucky to not wind up in jail over that one.

    http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/bill-o-reilly-assaulted-wife-front-child-report-article-1.2226846
    http://www.tvweek.com/tvbizwire/2015/05/fox-news-fixture-bill-oreilly-denies-report-he-abused-his-ex-wife/
    http://gawker.com/5834808/how-bill-oreilly-tried-to-get-his-wifes-boyfriend-investigated-by-the-cops
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2031915/Fox-News-anchor-Bill-OReilly-wifes-boyfriend-investigated-police-contacts.html

    (Full disclosure: I was made a member of the Nassau County Detective’s Association in 2006 by the Deputy Commissioner of the Nassau County Police Department who had been one of my students. I’m pretty sure it was an honorary thing, but I have a membership card, with membership #, lapel pin, and money clip with the association crest on it. I do not, as far as I know, know the detective involved in this incident.)

  94. 94.

    lamh36

    @PsiFighter37: of course they will…smh…further proving the GOP to be party of fools and racist

    so Lil Marco, why listen to you attack a Trump we know you still plan on voting for him…so why bother?

  95. 95.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Tony P.: I don’t know if McCain is actually vulnerable but I found this ad devastating, especially because it makes McCain look tired and a little confused. If this is the model Dems are going to be using, it may not flip dark red states, but i think Republicans are going to have to spend money they didn’t think they would a couple of months ago. I hope they have footage like that on Portman and Toomey.

  96. 96.

    Mnemosyne

    @Linda Featheringill:

    I think we’ll have to GOTV like hell.

    Well, yeah, but do you want to GOTV from a place of fear, or do you want to GOTV so we can run up the score and fucking humiliate those assholes with our blowout win?

    People like to be on the winning team. Let’s GOTV as the winning team who wants to win big, not the fearful underdog.

  97. 97.

    beltane

    @Adam L Silverman: It’s a good thing for the children and ex-wife that the boyfriend was a cop. Otherwise they would have had to live through years of abuse and harassment at the hands of a famous ex..

  99. 99.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    damn, I think Trump is some kind of troll master, maybe Oswald was right

    “I do think you have become negative,” Trump said.
    O’Reilly seemed surprised.
    “Me? Why?”
    Trump said he could not quite put his finger on it. “I don’t know that. You have to ask your psychiatrist.”
    Trump then took a minute to re-introduce his wife to O’Reilly, but O’Reilly wasn’t quite ready to let the exchange go.
    “I think I have been very fair to you, very fair,” he told Trump.
    “Fair, but you get carried away with yourself,” Trump said.

  100. 100.

    lamh36

    It seemed so obvious to me that Fox was attempting to sandbag Trump. I’m sure his supporters and the usual Faux viewers could see it too. And besides I sincerely doubt Trump supporters care about Trumps truthfulness…just his bigotry

  101. 101.

    Adam L Silverman

    @beltane: He got the detective’s own Internal Affairs division to investigate the detective in question.

    Also, I’ve updated the comment with links to the stories and a full disclosure I needed to make.

  103. 103.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    What states that Obama won in 2012 does Trump put into play?

    I don’t know if he puts them into play, but I’d definitely want to keep a close eye on the old Rust Belt and also some very white states. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan in the first category, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, Maine in the second.

  105. 105.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Matt McIrvin: In WI, Ron Johnson has been running consistently about 15 points behind Russ Feingold. I doubt many people vote for Feingold and then vote for Trump.

  107. 107.

    Matt McIrvin

    @beltane: I always think of New Hampshire as a crazy right-wing state because I live right next to the craziest right-wingest corner of it. It always surprises me a little when Democrats win there, as they often do.

  109. 109.

    Matt McIrvin

    @beltane: Fortunately Maine and NH are small states; Obama certainly didn’t need them in 2012. PA, OH, MI are more important.

    Colorado is the one state I could actually see swinging Republican specifically because the Democrats didn’t nominate Bernie Sanders.

  110. 110.

    beltane

    @Matt McIrvin: New Hampshire is a state where you can tell right away which way the political winds are blowing in any particular year. It’s really strange. As early as July of last year, I started seeing hand-painted Trump signs outside of homes and businesses (one particular snowmobile dealer stands out in my mind-crazy but sincere). It was obvious that the lunatic contingent had fallen for Trump.

    Outside of Portland, Maine just seems to be getting more wingnutty with each passing year. I don’t really know why.

  111. 111.

    beltane

    @Matt McIrvin: VT will not vote Republican in a presidential election in the foreseeable future. However, in 2014 we came within a couple hundred votes of electing a nasty wingnut governor. Low turnout does strange things.

  112. 112.

    mclaren

    More chaos among conservatives, more circular firing squads:

    “If Trump gets it, it’s really going to hurt the party and just the Republican image in general,” said Joseph Boisvert, a member of the Plymouth State University College Republicans. His friend, Dominic Lebel, added that “Trump is extremely dangerous for the Republican party.”
    Lebel noted that not only will Trump hurt the party at a national level, but he will jeopardize the party’s control of states. “We’re going to lose state and local elections in the state of New Hampshire,” he said. “I know our state has been turning more and more purple from what used to be a red state, and Donald Trump is going to make sure definitely that that happens.”
    And other conservatives held panels at CPAC to warn that the results of a Trump nomination could be disastrous. Conservative campaign consultant Mike Madrid told attendees that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric will doom the GOP with Latino voters for “at least a generation.”

    Source: “The GOP Civil War Is On Full Display At CPAC,” Thinkprogress, 3 March 2016.

    Loving it.

  113. 113.

    Matt McIrvin

    @beltane: The very first signs I saw in NH this cycle were actually for Ben Carson. That was the first sign of the devoted ~8% that have stuck with him this whole time. I wonder where they’re going.

    They can be deceptive. Looking at yard signs in Hampstead, Plaistow and Salem in 2012 would have convinced you that Mitt Romney was going to take New Hampshire by a gigantic margin, and of course he didn’t win it at all.

  115. 115.

    scott (the other one)

    @mclaren:

    Oh my goodness! That is just fucking ADORABLE! All those poor conservatives so fucking horrified by the guy who’s MAYBE 1% worse than Dick Cheney (if he’s not actually slightly better) but has the balls to say the same stuff aloud all the others think and do and whisper!

    \If I were a betting man–I am not–and it was verifiable, I would without hesitation wager half of my life savings (which is to say, about ten bucks) that at least half of those people will vote for Trump in November.

  116. 116.

    beltane

    @Matt McIrvin: These weren’t yard signs. They were hand-painted manifestos. Being originally from NYC, it was hard for me to believe that there were people out there who took Trump that seriously.

  117. 117.

    Mnemosyne

    @Fair Economist:

    Technically, I already have a first 60 pages or so that I abandoned a decade ago. I’m debating digging those out to see if I still like any of it, or if I should just start fresh. Leaning towards the fresh start so I don’t lose momentum.

  118. 118.

    J R in WV

    My Mom wrote a novel many years ago. Dad worked nights, and she would spend the time between putting us kids down and his arrival home at 2 or 3 am typing on a manual Remington typewriter. There were 2 or 3 inches of paper in the stack, though she kept it private. It went away some time – we never found anything when clearing out their house.

    That was kind of sad, I fear it was more her insecurity about it than the actual quality of the prose, if you see what I mean. It is awful hard to see your own fiction clearly. Even factual essay is hard to be objective about when you wrote it.

    I would have liked to have it no matter how hackneyed it was. Not that I expect it was hackneyed. She was a police reporter who covered what was probably the most famous murder in our home town. A couple having an affair were killed on a little road below the country club… never proven who did it, actually.

  119. 119.

    JimL (CW4-R)

    John, you ever get over to the little gasthaus in Rasdorf? They had a homebrew Jaegermeister they served that would warm you all the way to your toenails. Of course, I was there way before your time in an ’83 REFORGER.

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