Balloon Juice | Nature & Respite Archives

Laugh, clowns, at your broken loves

by Sarah, Proud and Tall| May 12, 201110:30 am| 28 Comments

This post is in: Election 2012, Lizard Blogging, Daydream Believers, Good News For Conservatives

I don’t often visit the New York Times website.

There is far too much risk that I might accidentally be exposed to something written by David Brooks, at which point I would have to poke out my own eyes with a pair of chopsticks to save my sanity. At 92, I need to hang on to as many of my senses as I have left. As I noted on a thread the other day, when I was younger and had fortified myself with a good dose of anti-psychotics, I once tried writing a detailed critique of one of Brooks’ articles, only to end up with a page with the words “David Brooks is a dickhead” scribbled one hundred times.* Ever since then, I have limited myself to writing nasty stories about him being humiliated by old ladies and then posting links to them on his Facebook Wall.

Anyway, yesterday evening I was searching for shirtless photos of Aaron Schock – I know it’s wrong, but I have a weakness for men who look like they’d cry for their mommy during sex – and must have clicked on the wrong link.

On its Room for Debate page, to which Mistermix has already referred, the Times has collected together a team of crack political analysts (assuming that by “crack” one means the wide space between the top of a plumber’s shorts and the bottom of his shirt) to debate the question “Who’s Missing From the G.O.P. Race?“.

Surprisingly, the answer is apparently not “Everyone with an IQ over 4 and Sarah Palin”.

show full post on front page

Linda Chavez (whose article is wonderfully entitled “Big Egos Need Not Apply”) distinguishes herself by noting that:

The G.O.P. has a deeper bench than the Democrats…

follows it up with the suggestion that:

the Democrats are going to have a tough time with Hispanic voters, who may choose to stay home on Election Day.

and then plumps for John #notintendedtobeafactualstatement Kyl, who would surely have the brown people and the womens lining up twelve deep to vote for him.

As noted, Ramesh Ponnuru’s choice is Jeb Bush. Ramesh is careful to remain forked-tongue-in-cheek:

6) And if nominated, he could save Republicans the expense of buying new bumper stickers by picking Elizabeth Cheney as his running mate.

and even says that:

4) His presence in the race would also force an overdue Republican reckoning with his brother’s legacy. If Republicans really want to repudiate George W. Bush as a big-government conservative, rejection of Jeb Bush would allow them to do so definitively.

Nevertheless, you can feel the hope for eight more years of Bush oozing out of Ramesh like flop-sweat out of Rush Limbaugh’s back at a Snoop Dogg concert.

Fergus Cullen, aware enough to notice that the GOP has little chance of winning with the pack of whackaloons, assholes and magic underpants wearers who have currently thrown their tinfoil-hats into the ring, pines for “A Mainstream Alternative”. One of his choices is Mitch Daniels, which suggests that by “mainstream alternative” Fergus simply means “doesn’t dribble on himself that much when he speaks”.

John J. Pitney Jr and Dan Schnur each disappoint by actually making sense for whole sentences at a time, concluding that only a fucking idiot would choose to enter the race at this point anyway.

My favorite though is Peter Wehner, who inserts his tongue lightly into Mitch Daniels:

… recently delivered the best speech any major G.O.P. figure has given in years.

– frankly a pretty low bar – but then gets so excited about Paul Ryan I expect Petey had to Windex his computer keyboard afterwards:

He’s the author of the most impressive conservative governing blueprint in decades, and maybe ever … offered a comprehensive, wise and politically courageous answer … rock-solid … extremely popular … excels in his style and public discourse … philosophically well-grounded, a passionate and scrappy advocate for his views … eschews dishonest and ugly rhetoric …. personally modest and unpretentious rather than arrogant and morally preening. Paul Ryan, in other words, is the antithesis of Barack Obama.

Personally, I hope all of these people run. The more clowns there are in the primary clown car – painting their faces black and white, honking their horns, squirting each other with confetti made of hanging chads, and waving fetuses made up with sad clown makeup – the better.

* A fond shout-out to JGabriel, who noted that writing out “David Brooks is a dickhead” 100 times is actually surprisingly entertaining.

[Image: Le Trapeziste Et Le Clown – Charles Giron (1850-1914)] [Cross-posted at Sarah, Proud and Tall.]

Laugh, clowns, at your broken lovesPost + Comments (28)

Law-Abiding Hypocrites

by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix| April 30, 20118:35 am| 35 Comments

This post is in: Lizard Blogging, Our Failed Media Experiment

Let’s wring our hands, because some Democrats are using the same laws Karl Rove used in 2010 to create their own giant anonymous PAC full of corporate money:

The effort is modeled on the one Republicans started last year — with help from the Republican strategist Karl Rove — that attacked Democrats with a barrage of advertisements, mailings and phone calls. It was widely credited with helping the party to take control of the House and diminish the Democrats’ edge in the Senate last fall. One of those groups, Crossroads GPS, was set up under a section of the tax code that allowed its donors to remain anonymous, leading Mr. Obama to refer to such groups collectively as “a threat to democracy” for the way they had shielded corporate interests from view as they sought to sway elections.
[…]Republicans seized on the formation of the group and its connections to the White House via Mr. Burton and the other co-founder of the groups, Sean Sweeney, a onetime deputy to the former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, as an example of hypocrisy.

This is the same kind of “hypocrisy” that Gregg Easterbrook wanked about last week:

If Obama is in earnest about wanting increased taxes on the wealthy, then he should send the United States Treasury $182,998. That’s the difference between his Form 1040 Line 60 (“This is your total tax”) and what he would have owed at the higher rate (plus limits on itemized deductions) he himself advocates.

Politicians are always advocating for what–in their view–is a better law, while following the current law. That’s just the way the system works. But the press is always ready to dream up, or re-print without comment, variations on the theme of calling someone a hypocrite for following a law they think ought to be changed. While I’ll admit that this does happen to both sides, it happens more often for Democrats, because they’re usually trying to strengthen existing law rather than weakening it.

Law-Abiding HypocritesPost + Comments (35)

The truth is out there

by Sarah, Proud and Tall| April 27, 20117:36 pm| 44 Comments

This post is in: Lizard Blogging, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement

Goddammit. I post a righteous <a href=”https://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/04/27/why-does-peggy-noonan-hate-america/”>rant</a> about the world thinking Americans are all insane and then half an hour later the entire United States goes stark raving birther-mad just to prove me correct.

Anyway, it was the 5th of August 1961.

Keith and I had been in Nairobi undermining the more moderate sections of the Kenyan independence movement because Jack Kennedy wanted to piss off the British. It didn’t take much work in those days – either to undermine the more moderate sections of African politics or to piss off the British. Death of Empire and all that.

We’d had a very successful couple of weeks, but it finally came time for us to leave. This pleased me no end, not least because Nairobi was a pustular, pestilent shit-hole that even the Brits didn’t want. Dust, dirt, disease and not a decent bar in the entire place.

We arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport mid morning. Well, it was called an international airport but frankly it was just a room with one desk with two angry black men behind it which served for both ticket sales and check in. There was a goat tied near the door which they used to hitch to a cart for moving the luggage to the plane.

We lined up next to the goat to check in. I immediately noticed the young couple at the desk in front of us because they were a mixed race couple – he was black and she was white – which was still quite unusual at that time. He was trying to book airline tickets all the way through to Hawaii, which was causing untold confusion, while she was fussing over the most adorable tiny brown baby. It had huge ears, but a lovely smile. She kept calling the baby Barack, which I remember because I thought it an odd name.

show full post on front page

They finally sorted out their tickets and we checked in, and about an hour later we were all on our way to Heathrow via Cairo on the most terrifying plane in which I have ever traveled. I suspect they’d borrowed the airport goat to power the engines, and it was tired that day and was barely keeping the plane in the sky.

We were seated across from the couple. Keith had already fallen asleep, so I slipped on my sunglasses and pretended to be asleep myself and then listened in to their conversation to keep from being bored. She was called Ann and he seemed to be called Barack, just like the baby. She was holding the sleeping baby in her arms facing towards me. The young couple were whispering to each other about the “plan”. She seemed quite nervous, while he was acting bluff and unconcerned.

It all seemed very suspicious.

After about half an hour, Barack Sr looked around and appeared to satisfy himself that no-one was looking. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a blank form which I could see was headed “Certificate of Live Birth”, along with a miniature typewriter, and proceeded to fill in the form. When he was finished he had Ann sign the form, and then he signed it twice at the bottom, clearly using different handwriting each time, then put everything away in his briefcase.

A stewardess came up the aisle and spoke to Barack Sr. At that moment, the baby woke up and opened his eyes and both the stewardess and I could see that they were yellow and had thin pupils just like a lizard. The baby stuck out its tongue, which was long and thin and pinkish-purple and which flicked up and licked across both of the baby’s eyes and then was slurped back into its mouth.

Of course, the stewardess screamed like Tippi Hedren at a poultry farm, which woke up the entire plane. Keith leapt to his feet but I carefully remained “asleep”. Ann shrieked and clutched at the baby. Barack Sr fumbled in his bag and jumped up brandishing a weapon. It was long and silver and had flashing lights all over it. He aimed it at Keith and pressed the trigger. A long beam of red light flashed out and into Keith’s eyes. Keith froze immediately. Barack Sr then used the weapon on everyone else in the plane who was awake (except Ann and the baby, of course) and they were all immobilized as well.

I threw in a few fake snores for good measure and kept watching.

Barack Sr reached up and peeled off his face to reveal a lizard head – bright green scaly skin with vibrant yellow eyes. He took a deep breath like he’d just surfaced from the water, then began to rant like Glenn Beck with an amyl headache. He went on and on for at least twenty minutes about how nothing would interfere with their plan, how the lizard people would rise up from their oppression and conquer the greatest nation in the world and then the entire planet, how little Barry was the true hope of lizard-kind. All the while Ann and the baby chuckled evilly. After a while, he wound down, and sat back in his seat. Ann patted his hand and he put his human face mask back on.

About five minutes later Keith started to move. He shook his head as if to clear it, then looked around as if wondering what he was doing. He sat down and grabbed me by the shoulder to wake me up. Soon everyone else was waking up too. Keith had no idea what had happened. I played dumb, and all the while Barack and Ann sat there grinning like Newt Gingrich at a bridal fair, making faces at the baby and cooing.

When we got back to the US I reported everything but, of course, no one believed me.

It wasn’t until 1997 I saw little Barry the lizard baby again. It was a news report on the Illinois senate election, and I recognized those ears immediately.

Of course, now it’s far too late to do anything. The day will come and I, for one, will welcome our new lizard overlords.

At least then we will be able to stop talking about fucking birth certificates.

[Cross posted at <a href=”http://sarahproudandtall.com/”>Sarah, Proud and Tall</a>. Original post edited slightly for clarity.]

In other news, I will be vaguely live-blogging the royal wedding here on Balloon Juice direct from Westminster Abbey, commencing at about 10am London time (5am New York time) on Friday.

If any of you are silly enough to be up at that time and to give a flying crap about the <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel”>family affairs of an inbred bunch of horse-faced Germans</a>, I hope you will join me.

The truth is out therePost + Comments (44)

Sometimes You Just Have to Laugh…

by Tom Levenson| March 13, 20111:28 pm| 133 Comments

This post is in: Nature & Respite, Decline and Fall, I Can't Believe We're Losing to These People, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own

Because we’re too big to cry…but seriously, isn’t Michelle Bachmann living proof that, yes, we must needs weep for the Republic.*

Her latest, via TPM:

“What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty. You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.“

That comes as news to the fine folks who tend to one of the jewels of our national park system, not to mention how it would have shocked folks like the guy who lived here. And how about the guy who wrote that line, “the shot heard ’round the world”? His house still stands in Concord — Massachusetts, by the way — but he might have had the inner resources to focus on the humor here, rather than the gutbusting ignorance.

And then there’s this fellow, full of local as well as national pride, who would have been deeply offended to think that his fellow citizens would ever entrust such a buffoon with legislative authority.

And so on…you get the idea.

Of course, because Bachmann is a Republican and thus personally and severally infallible, she did not, she says, really make any mistake here. Oh no:

So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in New Hampshire. It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!

Uh…

Huh?

I mean, seriously. New Hampshire’s proud of lots of stuff, some of it actually deserving of such respect. (Green Mountain Boys, yes. Ridiculously high property taxes because of an income tax fetish, no. Daniel Webster, yes. Calvin Coolidge, en route here to there perhaps not so much.** Justice Souter — My Man!)

I’m sure that the citizens of that good state are indeed proud of the patriots (treasonous rebels, from General Gage’s point of view) who defended their homes (and cached arms) in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the sake of still nascent national liberty. But the fine folks of the Granite State have never, at least not in my considerable experience of the place, claimed the Minute Men and their blood and toil as local heroes. Just doesn’t happen.

And as for us worshippers of the sacred cod? Astonishingly enough, we actually take great pride and pleasure in our revolutionary heritage.

In the spirit of comity, I invite Michele Bachmann to come as my guest this next Patriots’ Day. We’ll get up at some unshriven hour and truck on out to Lexington to witness the recreation of the battle there. We’ll head next to the North Bridge and watch the muskets crack out as the British forces crest and then retreat on that bloody, militia harassed march back to the relative safety of Charlestown. She can come with me to the Jason Russell House in Arlington, MA and pick out the bullet holes that remain from the massacre that took place there 236 years ago, when British regulars invaded the house after killing its owner defending his doorstep. Later, we can visit Cambridge Common and stand by the cannon that mark the spot where George Washington took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775…

…You get the idea. Seriously, Michele, come on down! Try to learn something. And I double dawg dare you to suggest to anyone you meet that day that citizens of this Commonwealth don’t know or cherish their history.

One more thing: how can you tell Rep. Bachmann is all class, all the time? Try this for her last update on her gaffe:

And by the way… That will be the last time I borrow President Obama’s tele-promoter!

Oh man, oh man. What to say?

Well, (a): dude — if you’d used the Obama teleprompter, it would have got the fact right.

And (b): this is your modern GOP.

Somewhere, the Founders weep.

*This moment of snark offered as just a brief respite from the real tragedies in train.

**Just to make sure that per Different Cat Lady’s comment below, the joke here is obvious.

Image: Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne. “Altogether Too Stupid,” (The scene depicts a peasant woman getting her wits sharpened on the knife-grinder’s whetstone, while onlookers gather.) Before 1662.

Sometimes You Just Have to Laugh…Post + Comments (133)

Late Night Open Thread: Year of the Rabbit

by Anne Laurie| February 3, 20111:03 am| 60 Comments

This post is in: Music, Nature & Respite, Open Threads

Gong xi fat choi! — Happy Lunar New Year of the Rabbit!

Traditionally, Rabbit years are supposed to provide a respite from the turbulence of the preceding Tiger years’ political unrest and environmental catastrophes. Social, intellectual, and creative activities are favored and those who live by such activities will prosper. And as might be expected from such a change of emphasis, “Justice is everywhere. Nobody escapes the long arm of the law in Rabbit years. Stay away from clandestine acitivity.” We can but hope.

Commentor Redshift sent me .mov files of the baby bunnies they’re fostering, but I couldn’t figure out how to embed them here. So you get generic Youtube…

… and for something completely different, commentor Riggsveda suggested this animation by Edouard Sailer:

Late Night Open Thread: Year of the RabbitPost + Comments (60)

Open Thread: Senior Pet Rescue

by Anne Laurie| August 19, 20101:27 am| 50 Comments

This post is in: Dog Blogging, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Pet Rescue

From commentor Tony S:

My wife and I were dog owners as kids. When we moved to our house here in Peekskill in 1999, the place came with a dog. The place was an estate sale, and we insisted the super-elder beagle, Gypsy, be part of the package…
__
Since then, we’ve tried to adopt older dogs whenever possible. We find them much easier to deal with than puppies, and quite grateful. We’ve had 11 dogs in 10 years. People ask us how we can deal with the short time we have with the senior dogs, but it’s much more painful thinking of them trapped in some shelter somewhere, or put to death simply because they’re not wanted.
__
Here’s a pic of the current crowd. From left to right, they’re:
__
Snarls Barkly, our most recent arrival, who is an estimated 9 years old and was left in front of a police precinct in the South Bronx at 4:00 am on the night of February 14th in a condition the ASPA described as “filthy,” with a broken tail, infected ears and a large tumor on one leg. It was three weeks before he would get on our bed; he spent most his time until then lying on piles of leaves in our backyard. Now he spends 90% of his time cuddled between our pillows.
__
Field Marshal Montgomery Marshal Fields. Monty was in a family where the father died suddenly when his replacement heart valve failed. He went from having run of the house to being locked in a cage 14 hours a day, and cracked up in the process. He has papers of some kind, and is our only purebred. His favorite game is “I love you, don’t touch me. OK, now you can pet me. But I’ll scream.”
__
Twinkle Toes. Twinkles was found tied to a lamp post on our city’s main street. She’d been there so long her paws were bloody. By virtue of seniority, she is our home’s alpha, and she knows it. She is also a differently abled puppy. She must have been hit by a car at some point. Her front paw is held together with a bolt, and her back leg is held together with a wire. Must have cost a bunch to fix her, and she wound up on the street.
__
Jessicur Lynch. You can guess the time we got Jessicur. Her breed was listed as a mountain cur. She’s our guest terrier. She was sent to kill shelter in West Virginia for slaughtering chickens. Now she likes to leave dead mice as gifts for us on our bed. She’s the youngest dog we’ve adopted, and one of the craziest. I have the scars to prove it.
__
When people are adopting dogs, they should really think of seniors. They’ve wound up abandoned through no fault of their own and deserve homes.

(Keep those photos & stories coming, folks — we need the respite! And why have I not received any cat pictures yet?)

Open Thread: Senior Pet RescuePost + Comments (50)

No one could have predicted…

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

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

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

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Let there be snark.

Wetsuit optional.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail

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

What fresh hell is this?

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

Women: they get shit done

This is how realignments happen…

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

This blog will pay for itself.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals