Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Gastritis broke my calculator.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

Historically it is a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

This blog will pay for itself.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The house always wins.

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

Nevertheless, she persisted.

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

Dinky Hocker shoots smack!

Reality always wins in the end.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Too inconsequential to be sued

The revolution will be supervised.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Trump is going to draw a dick on that dog with a sharpie, isn’t he?

Shocking, but not surprising

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

You are here: Home / Archives for Betty Cracker

Florida woman, boxer wrangler and football hooligan currently deep-fat frying something in a humid swamp somewhere.

Betty Cracker has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2012.

‘Stop trying to make Comey happen!’

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As Election Day looms and polling indicates that it may bring a good old-fashioned beat-down, the malignant narcissist in the White House is desperate to pull another Comey out of a hat. But approximately four centuries have passed since Comey decided the FBI director role was too small for such a big man.

The schemes and political constraints that existed in 2016 seem as outlandish and quaint as the machinations around the Second Treaty of Ulm. Rather than Comey trampling over dithering Justice Department lawyers at the eleventh hour to take center stage and play Last Honest Man to disastrous effect, we’ve seen an open, years-long effort by Trump and his toadies to tip the scales.

But they keep coming up short. Trump got himself impeached for his personal efforts to rig the election. The henchmen he deployed to dig up dirt on the Obama administration found precisely jack and shit.

The pseudo-scandal hype-cycle on Fox News keeps raising and dashing the hopes of the network’s most avid viewer. The Barr boondoggle to investigate the origins of the Mueller probe, the “unmasking” wild goose chase, the Durham snipe hunt — all came to a sad trombone conclusion.

It’s driving the man with the remote buggy. From The Post:

President Trump and his advisers have repeatedly discussed whether to fire FBI Director Christopher A. Wray after Election Day — a scenario that also could imperil the tenure of Attorney General William P. Barr as the president grows increasingly frustrated that federal law enforcement has not delivered his campaign the kind of last-minute boost that the FBI provided in 2016, according to people familiar with the matter.

The conversations among the president and senior aides stem in part from their disappointment that Wray in particular but Barr as well have not done what Trump had hoped — indicate that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden or other Biden associates are under investigation, these people say. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions.

Rudy unzipped the latest deus ex machina and promptly fell down his own open fly. With the possible exception of Wray, there isn’t a shred of integrity among the players, so I don’t rule out an official attempt to make allegations too hinky to be taken seriously outside the Murdoch-Breitbart ecosystem a thing.

But Trump’s seething frustration as described above might be a tell that he thinks official wingnut DC has forsaken him. With all that rattling around in his tiny pea-brain, it would not be surprising if Trump is even more feral during tonight’s debate. “Fuck it, I’ll do it live,” he’s probably thinking.

Are y’all going to watch the Trash-Spill in Nashville? I’m not sure I have the fortitude, so I’m a maybe.

Open thread.

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Oh, Ruuuuuudy….

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…don’t take yer love to town:

The Guardian: The reputation of Rudy Giuliani could be set for a further blow with the release of highly embarrassing footage in Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat.

In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

This happened in July during the filming of the “Borat” sequel. And Giuliani feels good about himself because he called the cops when the Borat character burst into the room, identified the “journalist” as his 15-year-old daughter, and told Giuliani that she was “too old” for him:

“This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit,” Giuliani told the New York Post. “It was a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top, it looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive.

“This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shakedown, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away,” Giuliani said. The police found no crime had been committed.

Giuliani continued: “I only later realised it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.”

Oh my fucking GOD, 2020, can you please just STOP?

Hey, maybe Biden can use this if Trump spends every minute of this week’s debate (when his mic isn’t muted because he’s such a puling orange baby that muting presidential candidate’s mics is now a thing) bellowing about Hunter Biden’s emails, e.g., “Oh, you mean from the hard drive allegedly obtained by your personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, recently seen playing pocket perch in a hotel room with a young lady in the ‘Borat’ sequel?”

I mean, not really, but good lord, these fucking people!

I’ve never been a Sacha Baron Cohen fan — his shtick is just not my brand of humor. But kudos to him for exposing that fucking whack-job Giuliani for the repulsive old goat that he is.

Open thread.

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How the Death Star Went Ka-Boom

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How the Death Star Went Ka-Boom 1

This AP report on broke-ass fraud Trump’s broke-ass fraud campaign contains some vivid descriptions of Team Griftapalooza’s profligate ways:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s sprawling political operation has raised well over $1 billion since he took the White House in 2017 — and set a lot of it on fire…

“They spent their money on unnecessary overhead, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous activity by the campaign staff and vanity ads way too early,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant… “You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly.”

The article ticks off some of the stupid ways the flamethrower-wielding monkeys torched the cash, including buying up copies of Trump Jr.’s dumb ghostwritten book, hiring private jets to ferry surrogates around, running ads in the DC media market to pacify Trump while he watches Hannity, buying tens of millions in Trump merch and pissing away nearly a million to run ads on Parscale and Pierson’s personal Facebook pages. But nobody is crying for Covita — hundreds of millions more were hoovered up into shell corporations, destination unknown, i.e., the pockets of Trump and hangers-on.

Campaign fund management is so bush-league that even the hideous, mummified casino crook Sheldon Adelson diverted largesse away from the campaign and into super PACs that don’t have the Trumps’ greedy little fingers in their cookie jars. As a subscriber to campaign emails, I have noticed that the Team Trump begging has become more plaintive since conservative donor checkbooks slammed shut:

How the Death Star Went Ka-Boom

Reader, I did not fix that!

Anyhoo,  two weeks to go. I am encouraged by some recent district polling in Florida that came out yesterday. In an article about a current UNF poll that shows Trump and Biden in a dead heat, Florida Politics points to the Monday polls and underscores Biden’s cash advantage:

Several St. Pete Polls surveys released Monday and previously showed Trump underperforming in areas he won four years ago. For example, Trump is down 11 points in Florida House District 60 in Tampa, a district he carried in 2016 by less than one point. In House District 69 in Pinellas County Trump is down nearly 15 points. He won that district four years ago by three points. A poll earlier this month also showed Trump down more than 13 points in Pinellas County as a whole, which he won four years ago by just over 1%.

In addition to public polling that indicates Biden has an edge, the former Vice President enjoys another considerable advantage: money.

Over the past four months, Biden has raised over $1 billion, a massive amount of money that has significantly eclipsed Trump’s once-overwhelming cash advantage.

Those districts are in the fabled I-4 corridor. And I trust Team Biden-Harris not to turn flamethrower monkeys loose on their campaign war chest. Open thread!

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Handsome Hound Open Thread

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Haven’t posted a Badger photo in a while, so here’s one:

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He often walks along the top of the sofa as if he were a cat. That abused piece of furniture is a frequent launchpad when he gets the zoomies. Recently, he used that same commanding height to pounce on our Roomba.

I need to cut his damned claws, a task that we both hate. Daisy’s need to be trimmed too, but I don’t dread it as much as she’s usually not a big baby about it like Badger is. She’s stoical about baths too, whereas he acts like we’re trying to skin him alive. A big ol’ drama llama.

Anyhoo…open thread!

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Worst October surprise ever (so far)

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Josh Marshall on the “chain of custody” of the laptop featured in a New York Post story that Rudy Giuliani is trying to make happen today:

Right on time we seem to have our first Giuliani-linked foreign intelligence drops into the 2020 campaign. The New York Post ran a story today purporting to suggest Hunter Biden had introduced a Burisma colleague to his father in 2015. They appear to all be from the Ukrainian colleague thanking Biden for purportedly making the introduction.

I should note that the purported blockbuster only really amounts to anything of consequence inside the maze of Ukraine conspiracy theories but I want to focus on the alleged chain of custody. We’re told that an unidentified computer store owner had someone bring in three computers for data recovery. He/she thinks but can’t confirm that that person was Hunter Biden. They seem to base this on a Beau Biden Foundation sticker on one of the laptops. The unidentified computer store owner says the hard drives were subpoenaed by the FBI. But before turning over the drives he made his own copies of their contents and then gave a copy to Rudy Giuliani.

According to the Post, Giuliani gave the Post a copy after being alerted to their existence by Steve Bannon.

It’s about as absurd a tale as you’d imagine, given the story’s sources. The whole thing sounds like a “Plan C” that Rudy and Trump pulled out of their asses when the much-hyped Durham investigation and “unmasking” probe failed to pan out. [sad trombone]

Naturally, The Times’ crack Beltway squad amplified it. Things are going to get even stupider before this is all over with, aren’t they? Open thread.

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Barrett Hearings (Open Thread)

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It’s the third and final day of the Judiciary Committee portion of the charade. Here’s a livestream for those who want to watch it:

I’m looking forward to Senator Whitehouse’s follow-up to yesterday’s presentation, in which he detailed how phony wingnut “civic” organizations and dark money outfits create a conveyor belt that deposits ideologues on the federal bench:

Through an amazing series of coincidences, the titans of independent legal analysis the Federalist Society barfs up deliver rulings that dovetail with donor wishes 100% of the time! I mean, what are the chances?

But according to a Stanford anthropology professor who studies charismatic evangelical Christianity (writing for The Atlantic), Barrett might surprise us because Jesus:

More profoundly, these communities inhabit a world charged with divine meaning, which their members must interpret in order to know God’s will. Every decision—what to eat for dinner, where to go to school, even what to wear—is an invitation to think about what God wants. Members may feel a strong sense of having been called out by God to do their jobs.

And these calls involve a process of discovery, as members’ sense of self is always emerging out of their own growing, changing understanding of God. A skeptic will say that such a sense of God’s purpose is entirely determined by their community. But charismatic evangelicals say that God feels more real when he startles them—when he tells them to do something surprising that they would never have chosen on their own. What makes Barrett unpredictable is the possibility that she will interpret God as speaking in ways that she, and the broader conservative world, might not have anticipated.

With all due respect to the professor, it’s far more likely that Barrett’s interpretation of God’s will also just happens to dovetail with the Federalist Society donor wish list. Open thread.

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