Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Reality always wins in the end.

Verified, but limited!

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if I ever tried to have some of you killed.

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

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

Tick tock motherfuckers! Tick fucking tock!

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

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

Consistently wrong since 2002

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

I’m only here for the duck photos.

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

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

This really is a full service blog.

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

Han shot first.

The willow is too close to the house.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Everybody saw this coming.

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Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Another Reason to Scotch the Iowa Caucuses

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The summertime corn dogs are bad enough. You just know this atrocity would be forced on the (mostly) innocent volunteers and voters sitting through endless caucus evenings…

… The new pizza, made with Froot Loops and cheese, is one of the new breakfast pizzas Fong’s is rolling out at their Fong’s location at 3018 Forest Ave., Des Moines. (As we all know, Iowans have a thing about breakfast pizza.) Alongside cereal pizza, there are steak and eggs, bacon popper and vegetarian breakfast pizzas on the menu.

“Making pizzas that are outside the box has always been a staple of Fong’s,” owner Gwen Page said…

Out of the box and straight into the trash, if you’ve got functional taste buds. I’m no food snob, but ‘breakfast pizza’ means last night’s leftovers — straight from the frig, if it’s vegetarian.

As for ‘dessert pizza’: There’s dozens of respectable dough-based desserts, why play with ‘pretend’ mock-ups once you’re old enough to use a credit card? Get some chocolate-chip cookies, if your local delivery service doesn’t offer cannolis or baklava!

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Good News, Except in Texas / Mississippi

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Abbott *really* wants to be the next Trump, only worse, doesn’t he?

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Jill Biden, First Lady

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Isn’t it nice to have normal back on the schedule? Per the Washington Post:

… Biden came to Richmond to visit Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University downtown. There, on a panel discussion, she acknowledged that communities of color have been “carrying a heavier share” of the country’s more than 500,000 deaths to covid-19, and she spoke with doctors about ways to get more minorities into clinical trials and cancer research. “It’s time to address the health disparities in this country,” she said.

But just as resonant as her public remarks was her detour to Brewer’s Cafe, a Black-owned, family-run establishment located on a side street in Richmond’s Southside, a gentrifying, majority-Black neighborhood that Brewer likens to “Southeast D.C. 20 years ago.”

It was her third “casual” pit stop as first lady. The others included a trip to pick up Valentine’s Day treats at the Sweet Lobby, a popular D.C. bakery that is owned by Winnette McIntosh Ambrose, who originally hails from Trinidad; and a visit to the Newsroom, a D.C. bodega and newsstand run by a Stephen and Ana Maria Bota, a husband and wife from Kenya and Guatemala, respectively…

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Monday/Tuesday, March 1-2

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Late Night Open Thread: CPAC L’Envoi

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They Have A Book to Sell Open Thread: “Luck Favors Only the Prepared Mind”

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Louis Pasteur, as per the quip in the title, knew a thing or two about succeeding against the odds. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes are media mudlarks; they make a living rooting through the sewage outflow of politics, looking for nuggets they can resell. Hey, it’s a living!

Lemieux quotes at length from Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada’s review, “Joe Biden won the presidency by making the most of his lucky breaks”:

… Four years ago, Allen and Parnes co-authored the best-selling “Shattered,” an examination of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign, in which they placed the blame largely on the ineptitude of the losing side. In this sequel, they are only slightly more generous with the Democratic nominee. Joe Biden won, of course, but mainly because he “caught every imaginable break.” He was the “process-of-elimination candidate,” emerging from a crowded set of more exciting Democratic contenders. He was “lousy in debates and lackluster on the trail,” prevailing despite “a bland message and a blank agenda.” Biden, they argue, got lucky.

The fiasco of the Iowa caucuses, where the app designed to report the results failed miserably, temporarily obscured Biden’s fourth-place showing. “This was a gift,” a campaign aide later explained. Luck returned when rival Democrats such as Pete Buttigieg (who ended up winning Iowa) and Mike Bloomberg (who won American Samoa) suffered debate night takedowns by Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren — and when Biden survived his own hit from Kamala Harris over his past positions on school busing and desegregation. (That almost cost Harris the subsequent veep nod, Allen and Parnes report.) Fortune smiled again when the entire Democratic Party establishment rushed to Biden’s side after his victory in the South Carolina primary, even if it was less about devotion to him than panic that Bernie Sanders might secure the nomination. “On Super Tuesday, you got very lucky,” President Donald Trump told Biden at their first debate. The Democrat did not disagree…

A simplistic focus on identity is evident throughout the Democratic field, with new aides often hired to make staffs look young and more diverse — only to complicate things by, you know, having ideas of their own that diverged from those of entrenched advisers. Allen and Parnes portray a Biden campaign split along “deep fault lines mostly based on generation, race, ideology, and time in Bidenworld.” Biden was in the middle of it, in every sense, hewing to centrist positions on health care, racial justice and law enforcement, no matter the pressures from his campaign team and his party. He may not have been “Sleepy Joe,” but he remained “Unwoke Joe,” Allen and Parnes quip. “That was the ugly truth many Democrats had to face in the aftermath of the 2020 election: To beat Trump, they had to swallow their progressive values and push forward an old white man who simply promised to restore calm.”

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Respite Open Thread: Last Night’s Golden Globes

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Since it’s very difficult to tell, these days: Yes, satire:

I’m kinda hoping, by this time next year — politics willing and the pandemic numbers don’t rise — we’ll have the mental bandwidth to spend a Sunday evening discussing dopey drunken movie award shows again.

Also, frankly, that preview parody makes more sense to me than ‘See, it’s the INTANGIBLES’ stories than this one…

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