Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

The revolution will be supervised.

This blog will pay for itself.

Just a few bad apples.

Consistently wrong since 2002

I can see Russia from this blog!

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

I personally stopped the public option…

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Too inconsequential to be sued

What fresh hell is this?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

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.

Representation Matters

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I’m not a Pete person,* but the effect of his candidacy on this kid (and millions of other kids we don’t see) is a wonderful thing:

It’s a big fucking deal that an openly gay person won a statewide contest for one of the two major party’s presidential nomination. That’s never happened before.

Sometimes I think we (Americans who aren’t homophobic assholes, I mean) should pay more attention to that. For all the dismissive talk about “identity politics” in some quarters, what it really comes down to is that people need to know their country values them as equal human beings who have as much right to participate in their democracy as anyone else. There is no default setting for “American,” or at least there shouldn’t be. Representation matters.

Open thread.

*If Buttigieg wins the nomination, I’ll become a Pete person so damned fast it’ll make my head spin.

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Justice Sotomayor Calls Out SCOTUS Bias

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The Trump administration has been a Category 5 shit-storm for three years and change, so if you didn’t notice its abnormally frequent reliance on “emergency” SCOTUS relief to enforce its shitty policies, it’s no wonder, what with the galloping authoritarianism and all. But Trump’s flunkies have run to their stacked court more than the Obama and Bush administrations COMBINED. Justice Sotomayor noticed. Here’s her dissent in the recent “can’t we just restrict immigration to white Europeans” case:

The Supreme Court unveiled a 5-4 decision on Friday to allow the Trump administration to deny entry or green cards to immigrants based on a “wealth test,” claiming that low-income immigrants were likely to become a “public charge” and use social programs such as food stamps or Medicaid. All four justices nominated by Democrats voted against the case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored the blistering dissent and accused the court’s conservatives of bias in favor of Trump.

Sotomayor said the administration has too quickly gone to the Supreme Court to appeal unfavorable decisions made by lower courts, and that by taking the cases, the Supreme Court is “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of” the president.

“Claiming one emergency after another, the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited court resources in each,” Sotomayor wrote. “And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow.”

“It is hard to say what is more troubling,” she added. “That the government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.”

I suspect Chief Justice Roberts has no issue with Trump administration policies, but he cares very much about maintaining the fiction that the SCOTUS is above the political fray. Kudos to Justice Sotomayor for declining to participate in that ruse.

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Sunday Evening Open Thread

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Here are a couple of birds I saw today. First, a kingfisher perched on a channel marker early this morning:

Kingfisher

The kingfishers are entertaining this time of year. Well, they are fun to watch all year, but when the highly territorial little birbs are in courting mode, they’re especially fascinating to watch. I’ve seen some amazing aerial combat maneuvers.

Right around sunset, we spotted this big old wood stork perched in the top of a large cypress tree:

Sunday Evening Open Thread

Wood storks are fairly common around here, but I can’t remember ever seeing one land in the top of a tree. Usually they’re on the ground near a body of water or flying somewhere.

Anyone watching anything good on TV? My husband is watching “Hunters” on Prime. I’m not a fan. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for that type of show right now.

Earlier, we were watching the Westminster Dog Show, which was a lot more pleasant, IMO. It was on last week, but we missed it, so we watched it on YouTube today. Wilma the boxer won the working group!

I’m a frequent TV sporting event watcher, and it occurred to me that dog show announcer chatter most resembles golf tournament broadcasts. There’s not a TON of action to provide a play-by-play narrative, so they delve into all sorts background information.

The blurbs they recite about the different dog breeds strike me as somewhat suspect. For example, they claimed that French bulldogs got their start as the favorites of lace-makers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That seems too specific to be true. Also, virtually every dog breed that originated in Asia was allegedly bred to guard monasteries, which also strains credulity.

Anyhoo. Open thread.

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‘Sad and pathetic and hypocritical…’

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Anderson Cooper burns Blago to the ground, whisks the ashes into a dustpan, deposits them in a toilet and flushes…

Well done, Anderson Cooper!

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Listen Up

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I almost did a post about brokered conventions, but then I remembered something my old gran used to say about “borrowing trouble” and thought better of it. Instead, here is quite possibly the coolest song ever recorded, Só Tinha de Ser Com Você, from Brazilian singer Elis Regina and singer-songwriter-pianist Antônio Carlos Jobim:

Ah, that’s better.

Did your old gran have a saying about borrowing trouble? I had two old grans and was lucky enough to keep both decades after most of my peers lost their old grans; both of mine died within the last 5 years. They were very different women.

One was a ferociously judgmental yet adventurous school teacher, Baptist preacher’s wife and health food nut who lived in town and only listened to Christian programming on the radio. The other was the occasionally foul-mouthed, cigarette-smoking wife of a long-haul trucker who lived out in the country and listened to Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline.

They had one thing in common: both were known for making cutting remarks. (Maybe it’s an old Southern lady thing.) Oh, and the other thing they had in common: all the vegetables they cooked were bacon flavored. In fact, until I was an adult, I thought all vegetables just were.

Schoolteacher Gran once took a look at me and asked if I used a lawn mower to cut my hair (it was the late 80s, and my ‘do was quite stylish for the time, thankyewveramuch!). Country Gran once informed a plumpish cousin that while the top the cousin was wearing might be sold in that size, that didn’t mean she should wear it. Ouch!

PS: If you do want to read something about brokered conventions, Charles P. Pierce covers it here.

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Delete Facebook

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From The Post:

Facebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent.

In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.

“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.

I’m old enough to remember how Republicans successfully cowed pre-internet mainstream media outlets with bullshit accusations of bias. That led directly to the utterly dysfunctional, view-from-nowhere Fourth Estate we have today.

It’s happening again, and as we’re learning, it’s impossible to maintain a functioning democracy when distinctions between truth and lies are erased. Glad I deleted my account in 2016, and here’s hoping the next Democrat in a position to do so cracks down on these shitty companies.

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Stone Sentencing! Plus, Debate Hot Takes Part Trois

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TPM is live-blogging the Roger Stone sentencing here. I hope Judge Berman Jackson throws the book at Ft. Lauderdale’s most enthusiastic Batman villain cosplayer, but she’s made some noises about sentencing guidelines that could be interpreted as not encouraging? Hard to tell. Anyhoo, I’ll pop back in with the final word when available unless someone beats me to it.

ETA: Sentence: 40 months, $20K fine.

Meanwhile, if you’re up for another debate hot take, mine is below the fold…

show full post on front page

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Debate about the debate

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I had to look at my calendar to see what day of the week it is just now. It’s only Wednesday. What the goddamn fucking hell? It should be Thursday at the very least. But then I would have missed the Vegas debate. Preview of me watching the debate later tonight:

Debate about the debate

Not really. I’m not even sure I’ll watch it. I just want it all to be over before we lose our fucking minds. Primaries were a lot more fun when there wasn’t a giant orange fart cloud suffocating the globe.

Here’s a fresh thread for your pointless sniping needs! ;-)

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The ‘Centralist’

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This 2019 Bloomberg clip is getting a lot of play on progressive-leaning sites because of Bloomberg’s shitty comments about transgender people and his allegation that identity issues hurt Democrats:

“If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people,” Bloomberg said.

I thought this excerpt about running for president in 2020 was interesting. Bloomberg says he can’t run as a Republican because Trump and then talks about how he wouldn’t be a viable candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination either because the party has moved so far left and his views are “centralist.”

Bloomberg says he’d have a ceiling of 30% in the Democratic Party and that his candidacy would only work if he went on an “apology tour” for his views. He’s on that tour now. In the clip, he also says he’s too old to run. This was last year, and he’s no younger. What changed?

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Pardon our dust

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You can’t subvert justice without creating some rubble. Trump is on a pardon/clemency-granting spree today. Here’s the tally so far:

  • Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who tried to sell Obama’s senate seat and former Apprentice contestant
  • Crooked cop Bernie Kerik, former NYC police commissioner and frequent pro-Trump Fox News guest
  • 1980s-era insider trading crook Michael Milken
  • Edward DeBartolo Jr., former 49ers owner

I read somewhere that Kushner urged Trump to spring Blago months ago because he (Kushner) believed the move would build good will with Democrats. Don’t know if that account of Kushner’s thinking is true or not, but it sounds dumb enough to be something he would believe. Maybe Trump is flooding the zone to minimize he impact of his ongoing activities to corrupt the DOJ and tamper with the judge and jury in the Roger Stone case. The strategy of piling outrage upon outrage has served him well so far.

Open thread.

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Red, White and Barr

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Donald Ayer’s article in The Atlantic is making a splash today. The author is a former U.S. deputy attorney general under George H. W. Bush, and the piece is entitled: Bill Barr Must Resign. More than 1,100 former DOJ officials are also calling on Barr to resign.

Spoiler alert: Barr won’t resign and will almost certainly not be impeached, but Ayer’s piece is definitely worth one of your free monthly clicks, IMO. An excerpt:

Barr’s Federalist Society speech suggests that he is ready to say nearly anything in pursuit of his lifelong goal of a presidency with unchecked powers. As Napoleon is reputed to have said, the man who will say anything will do anything. That Barr has also repeatedly used his authority as attorney general to tailor the position of the United States, in court and in legal opinions, to empower such an unworthy incumbent as Donald Trump to do whatever he wants suggests that this is correct.

The benefit of the doubt that many were ready to extend to Barr a year ago—as among the best of a bad lot of nominees who had previously served in high office without disgrace—has now run out. He has told us in great detail who he is, what he believes, and where he would like to take us. For whatever twisted reasons, he believes that the president should be above the law, and he has as his foil in pursuit of that goal a president who, uniquely in our history, actually aspires to that status. And Barr has acted repeatedly on those beliefs in ways that are more damaging at every turn. Presently he is moving forward with active misuse of the criminal sanction, as one more tool of the president’s personal interests.

Bill Barr’s America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go. It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached.

All true, but here’s my question: why did any experienced legal analyst or past DOJ official give Barr the benefit of the doubt in the first place since, as Ayer points out, Barr has been peddling kooky theories about the imperial presidency since God was in knee pants? Barr’s Wikipedia page tells the story: he grew up in the right place and went to the right schools.

We really do have a “coastal elitists” problem in America, but it’s not city dwellers looking down on gun-fondling NASCAR fans. It’s benign assumptions about deranged and/or incompetent people if they emerge from centers of power. It’s a serious problem!

Ayer calls Barr “un-American,” an adjective I dislike because it usually implies that civic virtues are uniquely American and erases societal depravities that are all too American. But given that Barr is attempting to undo the American Revolution and restore a species of monarchy, the descriptor may be literally true in his case.

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Hold onto your mail-in ballots?

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Florida voters who requested a vote-by-mail ballot received them this week. My husband was among them. (I prefer showing up at the polling place in person, so I’ll be doing that on March 17.) The Tampa Bay Times editorial board took the unusual step of asking its vote-by-mail readers to hold onto their ballots:

Florida Democrats, don’t mail that presidential primary ballot | Editorial
The race is too fluid and the stakes are too high to vote now for a candidate who may not be viable by the March 17 primary.

More than a million Florida Democrats have been sent their mail ballots for the March 17 presidential primary, but they should let those ballots sit on the hall table or the kitchen counter for a bit. The race for the Democratic nomination is too fluid for Florida Democrats to pick a candidate now who may not be competitive by Election Day. They should not waste their votes, and they should keep their eye on the goal: Backing the candidate who has the best shot at beating President Donald Trump in November…

The first two states are hardly reflective of Florida or the nation. They are small, overwhelmingly white and lack any urban area as large as Tampa Bay. In fact, Tampa Bay alone has twice the population of New Hampshire and matches the population of Iowa. More Tampa voters cast ballots in last year’s run-off for mayor than Bernie Sanders received as the top finisher in raw votes in the Iowa caucuses. So Democrats should keep the results of the first two contests in perspective…

Let’s see more election results. Let’s see who convinces more Democrats in more diverse states they can best challenge Trump. Let’s see who builds momentum and who fades. Florida Democrats, don’t mail those ballots yet.

The editorial board also declined to endorse a candidate as they usually do the week ballots are mailed; they say they’re in wait-and-see mode too. Fascinating. I understand why they’re doing this, but I hope FL Democrats who heed their advice don’t lose their ballots!

 

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Schiff warned them…

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Remember when Adam Schiff told senators that if they let Trump get away with flagrantly abusing power to extort a foreign government for election assistance, there would be nothing to stop him from playing demented games with politicians here at home for profit and personal amusement?

Tweet from Trump that reads: I’m seeing Governor Cuomo today at The White House. He must understand that National Security far exceeds politics. New York must stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment, start cleaning itself up, and lowering taxes. Build relationships, but don’t bring Fredo!

Trump has been bellowing like a herniated warthog about multiple ongoing lawsuits in New York. He changed his legal residence to Florida in a fit of pique (as if we weren’t already at maximum asshole capacity) and ranted about it on Twitter.

Trump’s ban on New York’s participation in programs like Global Entry sure seems like blatant political retribution, and now he’s publicly telling Cuomo to knuckle under or else because why the hell not? Thanks, Senate Republicans!

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Warm Fuzzies Open Thread

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I don’t think I’ve shared this photo before, but if I have, forgive the rerun — seems like we could use some warm fuzzies around here regardless:

Warm Fuzzies Open Thread

I took this photo of a limpkin parent and chicks last April. Prospective parents for the 2020 limpkin crop are keeping me up all night with their piercing screeches; it’s courting time in Limpkinville, and good lord, they are loud. Chainsaw loud.

The lady who wrote The Yearling and Cross Creek, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, lived not too far from where I live now. Her 1930s cracker shack is preserved in a state park. Rawlings published a lesser-known cookbook that featured a recipe for limpkin. But the limpkins are safe from me.

Open thread!

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Courage at Justice?

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A lead prosecutor on the Roger Stone case, Aaron Zelinsky, abruptly resigned from the case after the DOJ said it would claw back a sentence recommendation issued yesterday. NBC:

The lead prosecutor in longtime self-described political dirty trickster Roger Stone’s criminal case abruptly resigned on Tuesday after the Justice Department said it planned to reduce the recommended sentence for the longtime Trump associate.

The Justice Department pulled back on its request to sentence Stone to seven to nine years in prison after President Donald Trump blasted the sentencing proposal as “a miscarriage of justice.”

“The department finds the recommendation extreme and excessive and will clarify its position later today,” a senior department official confirmed to NBC News.

Good for him. Barr is openly corrupting the DOJ to protect Trump and his criminal cronies. Career DOJ people will have to stand up for the integrity of the organization if they truly believe it’s worth defending.

ETA: Another resignation:

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