Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Good luck with your asparagus.

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

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I personally stopped the public option…

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Just a few bad apples.

It’s been a really long fucking year.

There will be lawyers.

Yes we did.

Han shot first.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

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

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

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

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

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

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

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Tim was the first person invited by John Cole to join him as a writer at Balloon Juice. That was way back in 2005!

Where we stand and what we need to do

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I think people need to appreciate that third parties almost certainly did not do this. Disaffected Bernie voters simply could not explain the sweeping victory that we saw last night. For one thing the geography was all wrong. Less well off white people, especially in poor and rural communities, literally came out of the woodwork for Donald Trump. Something he said galvanized them and in so doing almost completely rewrote the electoral map. He accomplished something that George Wallace tried and utterly failed to do.

I think some of Bernie supporters’ critiques hold water here. Hillary gambled on three more years of Obama, and while a lot of people really like Obama, they were getting restless. I recognize fully that a large, probably decisive fraction of their discontent came from the successful Republican strategy to gum up Washington completely. The basic logic says that more patience will probably deliver the same returns, so elect someone who will kick the machine. Bernie Sanders was clearly ready to kick the machine. Obama ’08 was definitely the candidate for giving the machine a swift kick where both McCain and Romney were basically warmed-up Republican leftovers. Voters had seen a dozen times already.

Would Bernie have won? There are too many counterfactuals to say. The primaries are long done and I hope that everyone to the left of Paul Ryan (possibly including Paul Ryan) wants to find out what the hell just happened and do what we can, together, to reverse it. My Bernie friends are no happier about this than anyone else. Let us all air our grievances with respect and then, please, let’s move on to fight fascism.

The first thing I want us all to do is survive. Pour some cereal and cheer up your kids. America is more than the presidency. We have institutions, and even a sizable faction of the Republican party, that Trump can’t just order around. Dick Cheney he’s not.

Then, wen you shake the dust off this morning, look around for someone else who is hurting. It won’t be hard. Maybe just listen to someone’s grief or see if they need anything. It feels good to help someone else, but I have more than that in mind. We need to start thinking this way a lot more. It takes a resilient community to survive hard times. Whatever network of support you have (family, friends, activism), strengthen it. Expand it. I have not done any LGBT or religious freedom activism since forever, but you know what? LGBT Americans are my people. Minorities are my people. Religious minorities are my people. All of them. Anyone the redshirts might bully is my people. Look for a chance to build contacts and build mutual support. Rather than recriminate or argue, we need to build solidarity and start looking out for each other right now. I guarantee that someone’s survival depends on it.

Where we stand and what we need to doPost + Comments (335)

This one’s for Susan

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Our family unit hoped to open the polling place this morning, but somehow 32 people snuck in ahead of us. When a booth opened up I took our daughter while Dr. Mrs. Dr. F. voted on her own. DMDF Jr. selected Hillary on the screen and then pushed the blinking red button for me, so now history can record that my wife and our three year old girl both voted (helped vote) for America’s first Madam President.

A memorable tweet from the primary…

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We used to have a word for that

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From what I can glean from recent articles (for example), it sounds like a rogue unit of FBI agents went way off the reservation after Comey wound down their Clinton investigation, to the point that they cooked up a scheme to undermine the FBI director (waiting three weeks to report the laptop put Comey in a no-win position, with the implicit threat of leaks if he delayed the letter) and worked on behalf of Russia against American democracy.

If James Comey cared sbout his Bureau’s credibility, a different FBI unit would be kicking in their doors right now.

***update***

Ok to clarify I do not mean that anyone has reported that agents are taking orders from Putin. Rather I mean to say that Russia is singularly, deeply committed to Trump to the point of subverting an American election. If you torpedo Clinton from a privileged position in the DOJ then you are clearly subverting democracy. That part is pretty cut and dried. You would also be serving Russia’s nefarious behavior in this election, whether you explicitly mean to or not. I was being over-cute with language to emphasize the point when frankly (if I interpret the direction of reporting correctly) the basic Hatch act stuff would be plenty to get a trial started.

…in retrospect I would say ‘alongside’ rather than ‘on behalf of’. Different people, same immediate goal. Blogging from your phone while pissed off can produce inelegant results. But I’ll leave the original so that comments left pre-clarification still make sense.

***update 2***

As Josh pointed out at the link and Kevin Drum observed as well, we have basically two hypotheses: either James Comey delayed the story for maximum effect or else some agents put him in this position by not reporting this laptop up the chain until the last minute. Reporting suggests the rogue agents idea, but more than that I just think we know enough about Comey to feel pretty confident that he would not willingly set the election on fire like this. It would be too easy to discover after the fact that he knowingly cooked the grenade. It would ruin him. If that is the case, James Comey really needs the rogue agents hypothesis to pick up steam. I think ‘need’ might not be strong enough a word. If he can persuade people that a group of bad actors maneuvered him into an impossible position, that might restore some confidence in his leadership and the Bureau in general. Some.

One of my governing maxims is that incentives drive behavior. At least equal to nature and nurture you have this intangible web of rewards and punishments that surround and guide everyone. The director of the FBI has a profound incentive to burn the guys who embarrassed him. You could call it an existential need. That could have an interesting effect on the direction this story takes.

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Um, holy sh*t

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Science is f*cking rad.

Scientists Create Fully Functional Eggs from Skin Cells

Using skin cells extracted from mice, researchers in Japan have produced fully functional egg cells that were used to produce healthy mouse pups. Should the method work in humans, it could introduce powerful new ways of treating infertility—and even allow same-sex couples to produce biological offspring.

Although I have friends who routinely create muscle cells, bone and neurons out of stem cells, a viable egg is a major and possibly the holy grail of stem cell science. No we cannot have this tomorrow, although I would wager whichever private firm buys the license will work night and day to get approval for human tests.

However before getting too excited I want to throw out the usual caveat about medical breakthroughs and mice. It turns out that rodents make really, really great patients. We have can cure or treat almost anything in mice – diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases, most cancers etc etc. Your pet mouse could almost literally live forever as long as you have enough money and a suitably equipped veterinary center / world class research institute nearby. Unfortunately we’re not mice. Human trials have too often been the cruel rocks against which promising medical breakthroughs get dashed. You could explain away some of that by pointing out that animal studies have a relatively low bar to meet. Human trials get intense oversight that makes it much harder to pull off the kind of sloppiness or flawed experimental design that you see in papers that don’t hold up when someone tries to repeat it later. But there is also a real biological difference between most mammals and us. The Korean guy who cloned dogs and sheep got himself in so much trouble precisely because he assumed that the techniques for cloning other large mammals would work in humans. He filled in a bunch of results based on what he expected to get and then published the filler data as if it was real, like giving a Powerpoint talk with that nonsense Latin filler still in every slide. To his dismay none of that stuff he learned from sheep and dogs did him any good. Another team finally reported success in 2007, two years after the UN banned growing any cloned humans to term.

With that in mind I would say that egg cells on demand is still far from guaranteed, and even if it does happen FDA approval will be a long time coming. But the odds of people alive today having a simple alternative to infertility just got a whole lot better.

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Also too

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I ran twelve seasons in high school (we had winter track). I also competed in college, if briefly and not well. In my experience locker room chat generally goes like this, roughly in order of frequency:

* Getting our shit together so we can get to practice or get home. Most people don’t want to linger all day in a smelly room in their underwear.
* Talking about practice, or the meet coming up, or who needs a ride home
* School business. Who is busting kids’ balls this year, upcoming exams etc
* What is going on this weekend
* Who is dating whom, who got SO drunk, etc
* Girls you plan to ask out and what are you going to do if she says no (try a John Cusack routine? ask someone else?)

Generally sexual matters were a bit private to throw around in a locker room with half the school around you. When that stuff did come up everyone seemed well schooled in the idea of consent. If anyone had bragged about violating women like that I am confident someone would have called the cops. Of course we were a crappy school athletics-wise so we never had untouchable superstar athletes. Maybe things were different in Steubenville. All I can say is Trump’s nonsense does not sound like any locker room that I know or would want to be in. Apparently a whole lot of pro athletes feel the same.

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Tonight’s big take home

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Trump lost his goddamned mind in this debate. Nobody in a western democracy threatens to jail their opponent on live TV. This guy wants to be Vladimir Putin. I literally cannot believe that reporters will talk about fine details of this or that exchange when an American candidate for President went gibbering insane in front of the country. Folks honestly need to contact your media outlets and complain every time someone acts like this is remotely normal behavior.

Also he said bragging about sexual assault was ok because ISIS is worse.

***Update***

A couple random thoughts.

(1) Two scientific polls said that she won the debate. That is a relief, because the Luntz focus group was honestly wigging me out a little. Then I remembered that he must have dug pretty deep to find a double digit number of people who haven’t decided and never heard about the grab-her-crotch tape.

(2) Reading Michael Steele’s twitter feed is a surreal experience. In the top ten or twenty tweets he fist bumps Ezra Klein about Trump kneecapping his own VP and retweets Sipp E. Cupp trashing Trump for his bassackwards claim that Iran, Assad and Russia are targeting ISIS. As doc Tam once said while gazing up at a statue, this must be what going crazy feels like.

Tonight’s big take homePost + Comments (329)