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You are here: Home / Archives for Tom Levenson

Tom has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.

Tom Levenson

The Grift Goes On Forever

by Tom Levenson|  April 15, 20218:29 pm| 42 Comments

This post is in: 2020 Elections, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel

The GOP is Trump’s party; Trump’s party is the GOP.

Which is to say that the grifter in chief (the one title he did not surrender on 1/20), as we here know full well, is not some aberration, but is rather the personification of the Republican Party in its current state of devolution. Trump never cared about politics as it is commonly understood; he was in it as he was in everything that preceded it, for the attention, and above all, to dip his beak.

So it was no surprise to learn recently that Trump’s campaign systematically and intentionally looted their own supporters, surreptitiously ensnaring contributors into doubled amounts and weekly repeats of attempted one-time donations–at a point in the fall when his election effort was running out of cash. That became a mini-scandal only in the last couple of weeks, and it seemed a perfect postscript to the most corrupt presidency in memory. Of course, Trump would rip off his people, because they weren’t his people: they were just the nearest and easiest marks.

The Grift Goes On Forever 6

The story broke finally, and it turns out that all that fund raising around the “stop the steal” treason was actually a way of refilling the tank to refund anyone who got round to complaining (while pocketing the spoils of those who never figured out the theft). And perhaps, in a kinder, more innocent age, that would have been that. A scumbag ran a con for a while, got caught, and that particular scam would be put to be for at least a bit.

I confess I thought something like that would happen. Even now, it seems, I don’t fully credit the degeneracy of the GOP:

The political arm of House Republicans is deploying a prechecked box to enroll donors into repeating monthly donations…

The language appears to be an effort by the National Republican Congressional Committee to increase its volume of recurring donations, which are highly lucrative, while invoking former President Donald J. Trump’s popularity with the conservative base. Those donors who do not proactively uncheck the box will have their credit cards billed or bank accounts deducted for donations every month.

Even better, and by better I mean worse, the leg breakers ate the NRCC warn their victims of consequences if they don’t make the big each week:

The Grift Goes On Forever

The Republican program as articulated by McConnell et al. is itself a bust-out operation, run on the entire country–cut every tree, lease every well, let out as many no-bid contracts as possible to Friends of the Party–so it’s no surprise that the Family runs all of its operations on the same lines.

They are who they say they are; and because I think that non-political-junky-types can get the nastiness of this kind of petty cheating better, in some ways, than the grand con that the Congressional caucus hopes to run on us all, I hope we hammer home every instance of “You Just Can’t Trust A Republican” every chance we get.

And with that, I hope I’m back in more regular rotation here at the home of fine mustard and better cats. I make no promises–it’s been a tough several months for me here in the Hub of the Universe, and while I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I’m not quite sure. But here’s hoping, and a couple of images to express my felines about this fine flock of jackals. (Do jackals flock?)

The Grift Goes On Forever 1

 

The Grift Goes On Forever 2

The Grift Goes On Forever 4

The Grift Goes On Forever 5That’s enough.

This thread: it is open.

Image: Louise Moillon, Market Scene with a Pick-pocket, first half of the 17th c.

The Grift Goes On ForeverPost + Comments (42)

Breaking: Mass Shooting in Atlanta. Alternate Title: Fuck Guns

by Tom Levenson|  March 16, 20219:56 pm| 20 Comments

This post is in: Gun Issues

Eight people have died in shootings at three locations in Greater Atlanta.

Five of the dead, all Asian women working at two massage parlors in Atlanta across the street from each other, were killed in what appears to be one continuous sequence of events. Three more were killed at an Asian massage parlor in Cherokee County, north and a hint west of central Atlanta. A suspect is in custody, a 21  year old white man named Robert Aaron Long.

There isn’t much more to say with any confidence yet. It’s possible this is a hate crime, anti-Asian racism. It may not be; maybe incel misogyny is part of or the whole reason. Other factors could weigh in, or be the whole story. We don’t know, but we will soon, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t leaping to conclusions, including about what role was played by the words of a formerly very powerful person who has said a lot of stuff about China over the last year. But the truth is I don’t know anything, and I’m not going to say out loud what I think just yet.

But one thing is overwhelmingly clear: guns are poison.

Breaking: Mass Shooting in Atlanta. Alternate Title: Fuck Guns

They destroy society. Their mere presence threatens the concept of a commonwealth: you can’t have a true public sphere if some members of society arrogate to themselves the private right to make life/death decisions anywhere, anytime. And in the reality  in which we live, they wreck lives. They ruin the worlds of those who own them; gun suicides amount to about two thirds of all gun deaths–and every life thus lost shreds those of uncounted more who loved the one they’ve lost.  And they destroy whole universes in and around the victims of others’ choices to pull a trigger–including the half of all women murder victims, killed by their intimate partners.

We can have a civic society, and as the Atlanta murders remind us in all the awfulness of these crimes, we can have one in which existing while female isn’t a capital offense, if and only if we radically change access to guns in America.

That’s it. Got nothing more in the face of yet another story that will be “too soon” for politics until it’s deep enough in the past to have no impact on politics.

Fuck guns.

Image: Johannes Helder, Man with a pistol, 1899.

Breaking: Mass Shooting in Atlanta. Alternate Title: Fuck GunsPost + Comments (20)

ETA: There IS Joy in Mudville

by Tom Levenson|  February 17, 20211:02 pm| 118 Comments

This post is in: domestic terrorists, Goddamned Traitors, Open Threads

Following up on Adam’s bulletin below, my son just introduced me to the crab song and meme.

It is the perfect funerary dirge for one Rush Limbaugh:

I’m so with Clarence Darrow on this one:

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

Open thread. No nil nisi bonum restriction on this one.

ETA: There IS Joy in MudvillePost + Comments (118)

Always Be Grifting

by Tom Levenson|  February 12, 20217:56 pm| 101 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads, Trumpery

Donald Trump is indeed an ethnonationalist would-be dictator who, despite his defeat in November and the failure of his subsequent insurrection in January, is still preparing the ground for another run at power. But before, through and after his dreams of il Duce-hood, he’s a petty crook, a con-man. So, when he rouses the rubes to “stop the steal” or march into prison via that detour eastwards up Capitol Hill, he’s also, always, making sure he gets his cut. If he had to choose between power and cash, I’m at least 60-40 he’d grab the green.

Always Be Grifting 3

Flash forward from today’s miserable vision of Republican senators proving themselves to be wholly subject to Trumpismo to a strangely puissant date (for some): March 4.

In case y’all missed this in the pity and the sorrow–and the disgust for Republican cowardice and complicity–of the impeachment trial, it seems that the Q folks have seized on a variety of disconnected facts and fact-like statements to conclude that March 4 is the date for the true and valid inauguration of Donald Trump’s second term:

For some QAnon conspiracy theorists, March 4, 2021 is a date circled in red Sharpie on the calendar. The truly devoted believe that, on this special date, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 19th president of the United States.

The theory borrows from the sovereign citizens movement, which espouses that a law enacted in 1871 secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation and ended the American government put in place by the founding fathers. Accordingly, the true inauguration date was not January 20, as the rest of the world believes. The conspiracy theorists contend that the real inauguration will happen on March 4, the date on which presidents were sworn in prior to the 1933 passage of the 20th amendment. Still following? QAnon followers believe that Trump will return to power on March 4 as the 19th president of the United States. The last true president, the theory goes, was Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president, who was in office in 1871 when the United States turned into a corporation. Got it?

OK. So that’s crazy, in the same vein as prior Q lunacy, with the cherry on top (as the article linked above notes) of growing interpenetration between Q and older and violent anti-government extremists. But you know what’s special?

This is special:

At the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, the least expensive room option is the deluxe king, ranging in size from 350 to 475 square feet. At this time of year, it normally runs anywhere from $476 to $596 per night.

Interestingly, on March 3 and 4, the same room is selling for $1,331 per night. That’s 180% above the base rate and more than double what you’d pay any other night in February or March, according to the hotel’s website.

As the article notes, this price hike appears to be exclusive to Trump’s property. No other DC hotels are trying to cash in on crazed delusions in support of armed attempts to overthrow the United States government.

Trump wants power to hurt those he hates. But he never forgets the real prize. There are followers to be shorn. He must shear them.

I repeat myself, but…always be grifting.

Also: for all the grim comedy to be found in the notion of “economically distressed” Trump cultists forking over serious coin for the privilege of seeing him…hang out in Marred a Lago, anything to do with that festering hemorrhoid on the body politic leaves  a bad taste. So, because I am not a gratuitously cruel human, here’s a little Champ and Tikka to chase the foulness away.

Here’s Tikka’s response to Trump’s lawyers today:

 

 

Always Be Grifting

 

Tell me that gaze doesn’t have you remembering every sin you committed in third grade…

Here’s Champ, working on the left jab she picked up watching old Ali fights:

‘Always Be Grifting 1

And here’s Tikka, letting the little one know that there are limits:

Always Be Grifting 2

This thread. It is so open.

Image: Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Misanthrope, 1568

Always Be GriftingPost + Comments (101)

Incompetence Is Its Own Reward

by Tom Levenson|  January 19, 20211:09 pm| 77 Comments

This post is in: Dolt 45, Open Threads, Politics, Trumpery

Here’s a bit of contextually good news:

President Trump’s last-ditch effort to remove civil service protections from tens of thousands of career federal employees appears to have lost steam, facing time constraints and legal hurdles as the administration prepares to leave office, officials said.

This was to have been the finishing blow in Trump’s and the GOP’s long attempted murder of the independent Federal civil service.

Incompetence Is Its Own Reward

Instead, it collapsed in a broad spectrum display of gaffers.

The order gave agencies until Tuesday to review potentially affected jobs. But as of Monday night, no…federal agencies had delivered a list of affected employees to White House officials for review, with the exception of the Office of Personnel Management, which also rushed to reshuffle much of its staff of roughly 3,500 people into the new category.

My guess as to why? An administration whose baseline level of competence was never that high found itself embroiled in weeks of election denialism. Eyes flew off the ball.  If Trump had won, this would have all sailed through sometime over the next month or so. Without that luxury of time, and with a fair amount of WH staff distracted or disengaged, and confronting a bureaucracy that had less than zero interest in complying with Trump’s command? Not a chance.

This is a big Biden deal. If the White House had managed to drive this through, and especially if they had then managed to salt the executive branch with the same kind of folks who peopled the Iraq occupation, the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.

Trump and his cabal have still managed to do plenty of damage in the last two and a half months, of course. But thank Dog for the small mercy that they just aren’t good enough to swing the wrecking ball as far and hard as they want.

Image: John William Waterhouse, The Remorse of Nero After the Murder of His Mother, 1878

Incompetence Is Its Own RewardPost + Comments (77)

May FSM Have Mercy On His Soul…

by Tom Levenson|  January 12, 202111:21 am| 116 Comments

This post is in: Artists In Our Midst, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity

…Because I sure won’t.

Sheldon Adelson is dead.

My reaction to the news:

May FSM Have Mercy On His Soul...

No f**king nil nisi here. His major competition for most destructive asshole (not holding political office) of our time is Rupert Murdoch, with whom he kept common cause.

When (apocryphally) the eulogist at Louis B. Meyer’s funeral asked  “does anyone have anything good to say about the deceased,” the silence was only broken when someone replied, “he’s dead.”

So it is with Adelson.

Also: this is a reminder that democracy needs confiscatory estate taxes. Bad enough that Adelson fucked with our politics so thoroughly and for so long. Why should his heirs to the ultimate generation have the same power?

So: a spit-on-his-grave open thread.

Image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril (poster), 1904.

May FSM Have Mercy On His Soul…Post + Comments (116)

Respite-ish Open Thread

by Tom Levenson|  January 8, 20216:08 pm| 284 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

A friend from college sent me this, and while it hurts too much to be all the way funny, I have to confess, dear reader…

I laughed:

Respite-ish Open Thread

I’ve got a longer post cooking about the fact that the GOP is the New Shimmer of politics: both the party of treason, and one that ideologically and intellectually can’t actually do government in the 21st. c. world. But that’ll have to wait until I get my syllabi done and/or another front-pager does it sooner, briefer and better than I would.

In the meantime, this is the thread in which to let the full Jackaltariat gift for snark, mean humor, pitiless ridicule and everything else delicious, rain down on the enemies of the Republic.

Respite-ish Open ThreadPost + Comments (284)

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