USA Today: "Poll: Could Republicans lose the House next year?" http://t.co/GhyqUxpXlu When you've lost USA Today…
— billmon (@billmon1) October 21, 2013
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InB4 Cole shows up with a PRAISE FSM MY INTERTRONS THEY IS SAVED post in three, two, one…
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
This post is in: Election 2014, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity
USA Today: "Poll: Could Republicans lose the House next year?" http://t.co/GhyqUxpXlu When you've lost USA Today…
— billmon (@billmon1) October 21, 2013
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InB4 Cole shows up with a PRAISE FSM MY INTERTRONS THEY IS SAVED post in three, two, one…
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Dog Blogging, Pet Rescue, Readership Capture
Once again, Beth S. has most graciously agreed to assemble the Balloon Juice Pet Calendar for 2014, with all profits going to Cole’s chosen rescue group MARC (Marion Animal Resource Connection). Beth’s specifications:
I’m looking for the highest resolution images possible. The photos themselves won’t be that large, but the largest and highest resolution images people can send the better. I have photoshop and can do some remediation on images as necessary.
Send your pics (don’t be shy, neither your art nor your pet(s) need to be ‘show quality’) to [email protected]. Any problems, you can also send them to me at [email protected] (or click on my name under ‘Contact’ in the right-hand column). Deadline is Thursday, October 31, so Beth has time to put the whole massive project together and get it into print in time for year-end gift-giving.
Questions, ideas, suggestions — leave a comment below.
ETA: Stories are not required. Only photos will appear in the calendar, but if you do send a story, I may use it here on the blog as a mood-booster…
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And here’s the story that goes with the picture at the top, one of the photos already submitted, from commentor Summer:
BJ Pet Calendar 2014: Second Call for PhotosPost + Comments (38)
A little over a month ago I was walking my dogs at night when this tiny kitten came barreling out from under a car and stood in the middle of the street WAILING at us. When we walked toward her, she shot back under the car and continued crying in the particularly heart-wrenching manner of lost baby kittens. I sat next to the car and talked to her, and my dogs lay down near me. After a few minutes she crept out from under the car and sniffed at the smaller of my two dogs, the one to whom she’d seemed to directing her wails from the middle of the street.
Then she ran back under the car.
Two hours, part of a can of dog food, and the enlistment of my friend (who at one point scaled an eight-foot high fence dividing two yards) later, she was hiding underneath and in back of a shed near the car. Still crying. It was 1 a.m. And we gave up for the night.
The next day I messaged my neighbor that there might be a kitten under his car when he started it for work, and got his permission to try to catch her. Then I borrowed another neighbor’s trap and baited it with delicious canned dog food. No luck. But at 5 p.m. my neighbor showed up wearing heavy-duty gloves carrying a yowling, spitting kitten barely old enough to eat solid food.
My cat George disappeared three months ago, along with three other cats in the neighborhood. He was 15 and I’d had him for 14 years. I swore I’d never get another cat. I love birds and hate litter boxes. And I’d loved George.
But then, just like that, Gemma Pumpkin Sparkles joined the household. As she grew a little older, she clearly became Prince Harry Pumpkin. This photo captures a rare moment of quiet. Often she’s too busy attacking the dogs’ tails or feet to let them have a moment of rest. But when she’s not — he’s not — then he creeps close to them and falls asleep, purring as loudly as he is in my lap now. And all is well.
This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
Okay, maybe I’m a little obsessive about this, but Dick “Absolutely” Cheney is cementing the assumption that, as Mary McCarthy once said about a different famehound, every word he says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. Salon has a transcription of part of the CBS intereview where Cheney was shilling his new book:
Sanjay Gupta: This idea that you have this respected heart surgeon from Texas [Denton Cooley] who didn’t see you, didn’t examine you, and then writes something saying that you have normal cardiac function. That just wasn’t true, Mr. Vice President.
Dick Cheney: Go ask Denton Cooley about that.
Sanjay Gupta: But sir, you saw it.
Dick Cheney: Listen to me, I think the bottom line is: was I up to the task of being vice president? And there’s no question. I think based upon the fact that I did it for eight years that they were right.
Sanjay Gupta: How were they able to say that you were able to do the job?
Dick Cheney: The way I look at it, Sanjay, is that first of all, I didn’t seek the job. The president came to me and asked me to be his vice president. The party nominated me. The doctors that consulted on it reached a common conclusion and the people elected me. Now what basis do I override the decision making process? Do you want to have an offshoot where we come check with Sanjay Gupta and say, “Gee, is he up to the task?” That’s not the way it works.
Video clip at the link.
Remember, Dubya’s handlers chose Halliburton CEO Cheney to head a committee to pick a VP candidate who could offset Bush’s lack of interest experience, especially in foreign policy. Cheney, much to the surprise of anyone who hadn’t seen his CV, decided that the very best candidate would be Dick Cheney, and then steamrolled all quibbles about ‘appearance’ and ‘legality’ by calling the questioners anti-American Democratic plants. Once the rest of the RNC ratfvckers gamed the 2000 election sufficiently that Dubya’s daddy’s Supreme Court picks could hand Dubya the Presidency despite losing the popular vote, we were stuck with Dick Cheney, because Americans don’t vote for a VP separately from “our” presidential choice.
It’s like the RNC dug up this CREEPster as an example of what Dick Nixon might’ve been without the personal charm or social conscience.
This post is in: Excellent Links, KULCHA!, Popular Culture
Via Paul Constant, Mental Floss magazine has an online excerpt of an interview with the creator of Calvin & Hobbes:
Years ago, you hadn’t quite dismissed the notion of animating the strip. Are you a fan of Pixar? Does their competency ever make the idea of animating your creations more palatable?
The visual sophistication of Pixar blows me away, but I have zero interest in animating Calvin and Hobbes. If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served. As a comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes works exactly the way I intended it to. There’s no upside for me in adapting it.
Not to diss Pixar, but: Whew!
Your fight over protecting Calvin and Hobbes from licensing deals, and your battle to increase the real estate for your Sunday page comic, were notable—partially because they indicated your incredible autonomy over your work. Had you “lost” those battles, it appears you would have ended the strip. It reminds me of Howard Roark and his desire to blow up his building rather than see it molested by other hands. Was there a critical moment in your career that instilled such unwavering creative integrity?
Just to be clear, I did not have incredible autonomy until afterward. I had signed most of my rights away in order to get syndicated, so I had no control over what happened to my own work, and I had no legal position to argue anything. I could not take the strip with me if I quit, or even prevent the syndicate from replacing me, so I was truly scared I was going to lose everything I cared about either way. I made a lot of impassioned arguments for why a work of art should reflect the ideas and beliefs of its creator, but the simple fact was that my contract made that issue irrelevant. It was a grim, sad time. Desperation makes a person do crazy things.
More good stuff at the link. It’s really impressive how Watterson gently points out that the interview has the ‘Howard Roark’ Randroid fantasy backwards: Being willing to destroy one’s own work is not a mark of ‘unwavering creative integrity’, but a sign of suicidal desperation from someone at the wrong end of the power relationship.
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What’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
Open Thread: Bill Watterson Is A Very Wise ManPost + Comments (52)
This post is in: Open Threads, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement
Lindsey Graham: "As a party, we got to do some soul-searching." http://t.co/1EkTwG2S9B He's right: It would be nice if GOP could find a soul
— billmon (@billmon1) October 21, 2013
"The greatest trick the GOP ever played was convincing the devil they had a soul to sell." RT @WIIIAI: I'm sure Satan still has the receipt.
— billmon (@billmon1) October 21, 2013
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So y’all can bitch about my using Billmon as my Twitter RSS, and otherwise talk about stuff less depressing than kids dead of criminal negligence.
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republican Venality, RIP
Tom Foley, Democratic House Speaker between 1989 and 1994, died last week. The New Republic took to its wayback machine to pull up what’s probably the best-remembered story about Rep. Foley — Lee Atwater sending out an official RNC memo comparing Foley to Barney Frank (“Tom Foley, Out of the Liberal Closet”):
… Atwater said, “I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.” Lesser functionaries insisted that no sexual innuendo was intended. The closet metaphor, they maintained, was purely political: Foley is a liberal who pretends to be a moderate…
To accept these explanations one would have to begin by accepting the dubious theory that Frank is uniquely qualified to represent House liberals, even though he is known for the heterodoxy of his opinions (he recently advised liberals to forget about gun control, for example)… More to the point, one would have to believe that the memo’s authors were unaware (a) that the primary meaning of the phrase “out of the closet” is to denote the public disclosure of previously concealed homosexuality; (b) that Frank is a gay person who became nationally famous when he came out of the closet two years ago; or (c) that for weeks prior to the release of the memo Foley had been the target of a campaign of scurrilous but unpublished rumors suggesting that he too is gay, and perforce closeted. (“We hear it’s little boys,” an aide to Newt Gingrich, the House Republican whip, had been going around saying.)…
Barney Frank, by the way, knows about deterrence. At a conference of political operatives and reporters at Harvard last weekend, I found surprising unanimity that the decisive factor in squelching the anti-Foley smear campaign had been Frank’s threat to name five gay Republicans on Capitol Hill. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have actually done it. But then, isn’t the purpose of possessing nuclear weapons to ensure that they never have to be used?
Frank, like many others, is unhappy about the underlying premise of the closet memo flap: That calling someone gay ipso facto a smear. “But the reality is that we still have a prejudiced society,” he says. “When FDR was being called ‘Rosenfeld’ and ‘Rosenstein,’ it wasn’t inconsistent with opposition to anti-Semitism for people to point out that he was not in fact Jewish.” In any case, Frank has done wonders for the “image” of gay people by facing down the bigots….
Lee Atwater, incidentally, died horribly just a few years after that, amid rumors his brain cancer was AIDS-related.
There’s all kinds of conclusions could be drawn from this twisted little epic, but I’ll go with these:
(1) Yes, American politics have always been pretty ugly;
(2) Barney Frank is a OG gunslinger; and
(3) Sometimes we do make progress. Twenty-four years ago, just suggesting a politician might be gay was considered a political death threat; being gay still isn’t a net positive in all parts of the country, but it’s been significantly defanged as a threat, largely due to the hard work of gay activists and politicians (like Mr. Frank).
Open Thread: Progress, If We Can Keep ItPost + Comments (38)
This post is in: Cruz-ifiction, Republican Stupidity, Assholes
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Mr. Popularity explains to Robert Costa [warning: NRO link] that it’s everyone’s fault but his that the GOP shutdown tanked the party’s standing in return for… nothing:
According to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, it’s his colleagues, more than anyone, who should be blamed for the failure of the defund-Obamacare campaign — and he expects conservatives to remember come primary season.
“Unfortunately, rather than supporting House Republicans, a significant number of Senate Republicans actively, aggressively, and vocally led the effort to defeat House Republicans, to defeat the effort to defund Obamacare,” Cruz says, in an interview with National Review. “Once Senate Republicans did that, it crippled the chances of this effort, and it caused the lousy deal.”…
Cruz knows many Senate Republicans are unlikely to appreciate his advice to conservatives, or his appetite for another showdown early next year. He doesn’t care, though, since he believes his push to stop Obamcare and connect the party to disenchanted voters beyond the Beltway is critical to the GOP’s future success. “That transformation, shifting the power from the closed rooms in Washington, from the lobbyists and monied interests on K Street, and back to the American people, is the most important fight,” he says.
“I cannot help if others choose to launch personal assaults and insults at me,” Cruz says. “What I can control is how I respond, and I have not and will not respond in kind. Instead, I was elected to do a job, and that is to represent 26 million Texans. . . . Regardless of the attacks, my focus remains on the substance.”
“Every day, I jump out of bed with a smile on my face, because it is a joy to have the opportunity to stand with the American people and work to help restore people’s faith and optimism in our nation,” he concludes. “It’s an incredible honor to play a small role in expanding the American dream.”
I thought Cruz was just another grifter, but he’s a grifter who’s come to believe his own con. He’s not gonna run for President, but he’s quite willing to be anointed as America’s God-King.