Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

What fresh hell is this?

Han shot first.

Yes we did.

Wetsuit optional.

Word salad with all caps

Reality always wins in the end.

We have all the best words.

Women: They Get Shit Done

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Lighten up, Francis.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Too inconsequential to be sued

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Verified, but limited!

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Also, too.

No one could have predicted…

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Just a few bad apples.

Nevertheless, she persisted

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

This blog will pay for itself.

You are here: Home / Archives for Anne Laurie

Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: One More Day

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I don’t blame Maggie; some shepherds keep a llama or two with their flocks to deter coyotes, and it seems to work! (Video is from a private post-Harvey ‘sanctuary’ for abandoned livestock.)

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Data / Information) – Tuesday/Wednesday, March 31 – April 1

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Tuesday/Wednesday, March 31 – April 1

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Israel:

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Tuesday/Wednesday, March 31 – April 1

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“There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule.”

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Late Night ‘Trump Crime Cartel’ Open Thread: Profiteering on the Pandemic

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And then there’s GOP fundraiser Mike Gula!

I figure it’s even odds Gula doesn’t actually have access to this mysterious supply, any more than that Nigerian ‘prince’ online has access to ONE MILLION DOLLARS (US$). But if desperate people wire him a bunch of money for stuff that doesn’t exist… who’s gonna complain they were rooked?

And if they do, well, it’s what a BSD salesguy does, overselling his prospects, sure he may have exaggerated his holdings slightly in the heat of the deal, but his intentions were only the best!

(He just better be giving the Oval Office Occupant a taste, something to wet his beak, is all I’m saying…)

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Respite Open Thread: The Goats of the Great Orme

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Respite Open Thread: The Goats of the Great OrmePost + Comments (119)

Election Year Excellent Read: The Financial Times Interviews Rep. Jim Clyburn

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Whether Trump likes the idea or not, there will be an election this fall. Among other things, some interesting suggestions from Rep. Clyburn on Biden’s potential VP:

… I met Clyburn for the first time shortly before last month’s South Carolina primary, where his endorsement of Joe Biden almost single-handedly saved the former vice-president’s campaign. The 14-term lawmaker would not say then which candidate he was going to endorse. But he had told some people at his accountant’s funeral the previous week — because, he says confidently, “they would never betray Jim Clyburn”.

As we sip our drinks, I ask him when he told Biden. The pair met on the USS Yorktown, an old aircraft carrier turned museum, six days before the primary. He delivered the good news, but included a stern warning to his friend to stop reading speeches from a script.

“Here’s what I said to him,” Clyburn tells me. “You know these issues well enough not to be reading from a text . . . People can’t feel you when you read it.”

Using lessons he learnt from his father as a “PK” (preacher’s kid), he gave Biden some advice. “There’s a reason that preachers preach in threes,” Clyburn recalls saying. “I want you to answer every question in three ways: here is what my presidency will mean to you, here’s what it will mean to your family, and here’s what it will mean for your community.”…

Armed with Clyburn’s backing, Biden won in a landslide; according to the exit polls, 61 per cent of the voters said the endorsement influenced their decision. That dramatic victory then propelled Biden to win in a slew of states the following week, earning him clear frontrunner status over the leftwing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

Clyburn is used to having power in his state. For the past three decades, he’s hosted a fish fry during the Democratic primaries which has become virtually mandatory for would-be candidates to attend. In the course of the 2008 primary, Clyburn criticised Hillary Clinton; on the day that Barack Obama beat her in South Carolina, Clyburn remembers Bill Clinton phoning him at 2.15am, bellowing, “If you bastards want a fight, you damn well will get one.”

Did he ever think his endorsement of Biden would have such an impact? Clyburn says that people underestimated the latent support for Biden — before proudly adding that two women approached him after the primary to say, “Thank you for saving the Democratic party.”

Clyburn has come a long way since his youth in Sumter, a city near Columbia. In his 2014 memoir, Blessed Experiences, he recalls how his high-school band was asked to participate in the Sumter Christmas parade in 1955, the year after the Supreme Court struck down the segregation of public schools. But he and his black bandmates were forced to march at the end of the parade, behind the horses…

He says he lives by an adage from John F Kennedy, which goes something like: “I never get mad, but I will get even.” I joke that Oscar Wilde said it first, with “revenge is a dish best served cold”. Clyburn breaks into a smile: “Kennedy stole a lot from other people, he might have stolen that line.”…

But inexorably the conversation is drawn back to Biden. Clyburn says he would restore civility in politics. For instance, he says, Biden shuns the “bombastic” approach taken by the “Bernie bros” — the moniker for the most radical wing of Sanders’ movement.

Centrist Democrats worry that, should Biden win the nomination, Sanders will hold back from actively campaigning for him. Clyburn does not sound confident that Sanders will help unite the party, or rally his supporters behind Biden. “What’s that old mafia saying — that fish rots from the head.” As he slowly knocks off his crustaceans one by one, he has a warning for one famous supporter of Sanders.

“When I say, ‘I don’t get mad, I get even’, there’s one person who is going to hear from me. His name is Michael Moore,” Clyburn says. The film-maker and longtime Sanders supporter claimed after Biden’s victory in South Carolina that the state was “not representative” of the United States. “I don’t want to say much but I’m going to have a lot to say.”

Come on, I press, and he happily obliges. Reminding me that Biden won more than 60 per cent of the black vote in South Carolina and bigger percentages in Alabama and Mississippi, he says: “According to Michael Moore, South Carolina doesn’t matter because here’s what ‘the people’ want.” He says Moore is dismissing the voices of the most important segment of the Democratic electorate — black voters.

I ask whether Clyburn thinks Biden will pick Stacey Abrams, 46, the African-American former minority leader of the House in Georgia and rising Democratic star, as his running mate to help woo younger voters in November.

“I doubt it,” he says. “There’s something to be said for somebody who has been out there.”

Clyburn does want to see a black woman on the ticket, though. And some Democrats believe that Biden, who has vowed to pick a woman, will also be under heavy pressure to repay Clyburn for his critical endorsement.

Clyburn says there has been a lot of talk about Kamala Harris, the California senator who struggled in the Democratic primary. He says a “sleeper” in the race is Susan Rice, who served as national security adviser to Barack Obama. But he also stresses that “the bench of black women is much deeper than people think”.

While he believes Abrams does not have enough experience, he has his eyes on another Georgia politician. “There is a young lady right there in Georgia who I think would make a tremendous VP candidate, and that’s the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms.”

It’s getting late, so we secure “one for the road”. I ask the former history teacher how he sees America’s place in the world. “We’re where Germany was in 1933 after the election of Adolf Hitler,” he warns. But he adds a note of optimism, saying that African-Americans can lead the charge against Trump. He cites as inspiration a hero of the 1930s: Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics…

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Take Your Friends Where You Find Them

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(Explanation at the bottom of this post)

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Good for the workers, if less so for those of us in self-isolation:

Good explainer, from the Washington Post, here.

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Monday/Tuesday, March 30/31

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Monday/Tuesday, March 30/31

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Retweeted by James Palmer, Deputy editor at Foreign Policy, ex-Beijing :

Elsewhere in the same city:

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Semi-Respite Open Thread: DUCKS!

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Not ducks, just a few Brooklynites failing to observe proper social distancing:

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GOP Venality Open Thread: Hey, It’s National Doctors Day!

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And he doubled down today! Per ABC News:

As health care workers on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis warn about shortages of masks and other protective equipment, President Donald Trump insinuated over the weekend people might be taking masks from hospitals “out the back door,” suggesting they might be being sold on the black market.

He was reacting to an account by a mask company executive who said the demand had skyrocketed at one New York City hospital, which they did not name, from 10,000 to 20,000 a week to 200,000 to 300,000 masks a week.

The New York Greater Hospital Association and New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo have since pushed back on Trump’s claims…

Trump implied, without evidence, that there was a nefarious reason for the shortage in masks, which states have criticized the federal government for not providing. Meanwhile, nurses and doctors across the country have resorted to re-using protective equipment, accepting donations, buying their own PPE (personal protective equipment) and other workarounds to keep themselves safe.

“How do you go from 10 to 20 to 300,000? 10 to 20,000 masks to 300,000? Even though this is different, something’s going on. And you ought to look into it as reporters,” Trump said. “Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? How do you go from 10,000 to 300,000 — and we have that in a lot of different places,” he said, though he didn’t mention any other examples of hospitals that have reported stolen masks.

“I hope I didn’t get any of your clients in trouble, but it could be that they are in trouble,” Trump said, referring to hospitals as “clients” and speaking to the CEO of the mask-production company, who accompanied Trump at the briefing.

While there have been a handful of small-scale reports of people stealing masks, gloves and hand sanitizer from hospital waiting areas or other health centers across the country as anxieties over supply shortages rose, many quickly criticized Trump for seeming to put the blame on hospital workers…

At his daily coronavirus briefing in New York on Monday, Cuomo deflect questions about Trump’s comments, saying, “I don’t know what he’s trying to say.”

“In terms of a suggestion that the PPE equipment is not going to a correct place, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what he’s trying to say. If he wants to make an accusation then let him make an accusation. But I don’t know what he’s trying to say by inference,” Cuomo said…

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases and a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, said Monday morning that he wasn’t familiar with the issue but suggested that there could be more demand because “many more” patients need them.

“You know, I have not looked at that carefully, so I can’t really can’t comment. I mean, it could be that there are many more patients there that need them and they’re actually not walking out the door, they’re actually being utilized. I don’t know. I mean, that discussion came yesterday. I really didn’t know what was going on. I’d have to check that out later and find out what they were talking about,” Fauci said on CNN…

[Side note: Dr. Fauci’s not long for this administration, and is all too aware of that fact.]

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Walk in Beauty

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Some upcoming events of possible interest:

And this guy, in the future, will confine his off-hour hobbies to “… building shelves, making furniture and doing some tiling”:

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Sunday/Monday, March 29/30

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Looks like Russia’s response will combine all the worst features of China *and* Italy:

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COVID-19 Update (Domestic) – Sunday/Monday, March 29/30

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New York:

Maine –

Thread, from the Land of Lincoln:

Bleeding Kansas:

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