Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

This blog will pay for itself.

Good luck with your asparagus.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

I really should read my own blog.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Let there be snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

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

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Too inconsequential to be sued

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

I did not have this on my fuck 2020 bingo card.

What fresh hell is this?

Women: they get shit done

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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

Accountability, motherfuckers.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

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Friday Evening Open Thread: Cracks in the GOP Wall?

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No, really — not every professional Republican is convinced that TFG is their god-emperor, going forward. Here’s Rick ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry, in Tiger Beat on the Potomac (aka Politico) — “What if Trump’s Grip on the GOP Isn’t as Strong as It Seems?”:

… Even the senior-most GOP politicians still seek Trump’s backing. Sen. Chuck Grassley, along with other top elected Republicans in Iowa, attended Trump’s rally in Des Moines the other day, where the 88-year-old senator, running for his eighth term, happily accepted his endorsement.

Trump’s rallies are still remarkably well-attended — part political events, part Grateful Dead concerts, part Andrew Dice Clay sets. The recent one in Alabama may well have been the largest political rally in state history, with roughly 50,000 people on hand…

Big majorities of Republicans tell pollsters they want Trump to run for president. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans in a Hill/HarrisX poll, and 67 percent in a Morning Consult/POLITICO poll said they want the Trump Train to depart the station once again. Morning Consult/POLITICO found that Trump has an 82 percent approval rating among Republicans.

A Pew poll came up with less encouraging numbers for Trump, with two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying he should stay politically active, but only 44 percent saying he should run for president. Still, Pew found that 63 percent of Republicans say the party should not be accepting, or at least too accepting, of GOP officials who openly criticize Trump.

And yet, despite all this, there are reasons to believe Trump’s dominance is exaggerated and that it is slowly degrading, such that by the time the 2024 Republican primaries roll around, he’ll be challengeable and beatable if he runs…

Trump’s media footprint is much reduced. The press is publishing fewer Trump stories, and there are fewer clicks on those stories. Data from SocialFlow shows engagement with Trump stories plummeting in March of this year and it took another jag down in August and September…

GOP politicians have every reason to do what they can to keep Trump and his voters on board in the interest of a unified base in the run-up to the 2022 midterms. But if Republicans take Congress next year and are worried about keeping it in 2024, they will be wary of once again needing candidates to run better than Trump in swing districts to keep their gavels…

Trump, for his part, is not exactly exuding the overwhelming concern with the interests of the party one would expect of a party leader. At a rally in Georgia, he mused that it might be better if Stacey Abrams were governor rather than Brian Kemp, the Republican who became persona non grata for not going along with Trump’s schemes to overturn the 2020 result in Georgia. He’s also threatened that Republican voters won’t show up in 2022 or 2024 if the alleged theft of 2020 is not taken care of, in some unspecified way…

The GOP is the Big Business Party, after all; if Trump and his cultists threaten its survival, the people who make their very nice livelihoods running it are not going to be sentimental about dumping him for a newer, better-performing model.

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Truth in Advertising (Open Thread)

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Federalist Society practice group chair and Claremont Institute board and faculty member John Eastman declares his legal work product on behalf of a then-sitting (well, wallowing more likely) president is hot garbage [TPM]:

Eastman told the National Review that the memos were “internal discussion memos” merely describing “available scenarios that had been floated,” and that somebody on Trump’s legal team “had asked” Eastman to write them.

“I was asked to kind of outline how each of those scenarios would work and then orally present my views on whether I thought they were valid or not, so that’s what those memos did,” the conservative lawyer said…

Eastman insisted he doesn’t actually believe in the memo’s jaw-dropping argument that House GOP could replace Biden’s electoral votes, and “anybody who thinks that that’s a viable strategy is crazy.”

Convenient that the exculpatory part was oral rather than written, huh? On a positive note, Eastman must be getting some serious side-eye if he feels the need to explain himself.

Open thread!

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Friday News Dump (Open Thread)

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No scoops to share, but the news feels like a dump anyway — maybe the dump of a wooly mammoth who’d gorged itself on candy corn (don’t get me started) and Taco Bell tacos with Flamin’ Hot Cheeto shells.

The state of Florida is paying this well-educated lunatic half a million per year to undermine confidence in vaccines and masks and urge citizens to rely on “their intuition and their sensibilities” instead.

As a Floridian who has lived among Floridians for decades, I wouldn’t recommend we trust our “intuition” and “sensibilities” to guide decisions on sorting laundry, let alone protect ourselves in a global pandemic that’s already killed one in 400 of us. Jesus Christ, I thought Rick Scott and his minions were bad, and they were. But these fucking DeSantis people are the worst.

The local dailies have done a stellar job covering the DeSantis fail parade while the worst of the Beltway gang lined up to give him tuggies. But even the locals seem to have given up. I haven’t checked every paper, but if they covered the above lunacy at all, the stories weren’t prominently placed.

All focus is on that dumbass probable murderer who maybe got himself eaten by alligators. A well-placed gator or two in Tallahassee wouldn’t come amiss.

Anyhoo, open thread.

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Open Thread: The Anti-Democracy, Anti-Voter Party

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The GOP needs to update its motto: We’re not a democracy republic, we’re a republic kakistocracy!

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Catching Up

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Condolezza Rice, still (mis)fighting the last war, in defense of ‘her’ GOP:

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Open Thread and Reminder To Send In Your Calendar Pics

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Open Thread.

Ten More Days To Get Your 2022 Pets of Balloon Juice Calendar Pics In!

We are using the same  system as last year. 

It’s a 4-step process, start to finish.  (for you)

  1. Start the process by sending an email message
  2. Use the link we supply to upload your files
  3. Check for your nym and names of your pets in the spreadsheet we’ll post later on BJ
  4. Notify us if anything is incorrect

…..

To start the process, simply send email to pet-calendar or to watergirl.  If you need more info about the exact email addresses, check out Contact Us in the white bar up top, for details.

Your message should include:

  1. your nym
  2. the names of all your pets that are going to be in the calendar

…..

Details will be sent to you by email once you send the email with your nym and pet names.

We have zero pet names for the calendar so far!

…..

Calendars will be available to order by December 1.

Beth needs time to work with the pics on the design, so fair warning: we are going to have to be firm about deadlines in order to have the calendars available to order by December 1.

Please let us know ASAP that you plan to send photos in, and the names of your pets.  Even without all the pictures, knowing how many entries there will be allows Beth to get started on the design!

The we-really-mean-it-last-date for submitting your pictures is Nov 1.  For real.

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Open Thread: Working Hard / Hardly Working

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The serfs, they are REVOLTING!

Or, as Karla L. Miller said in the Washington Post last month, “During the ‘Great Resignation,’ workers refuse to accept the unacceptable”.

Paul Waldman, also at the Washington Post — “Workers are feeling a bit more empowered, and Republicans can’t stand it”:

… This is an extraordinary opportunity to look at the economic life of the country in a slightly different way, an opportunity millions of people are already taking. But it may not last. We could look back at this period in our history as a watershed in our approach to work, but the forces of backlash are never far behind any hint of progress.

You can see it at the elite level, with those whose message to the public is Get back to work, you bums. And stop complaining…

What is now being called the “Great Resignation” has many causes. Many of those quitting are doing so because they think they can get a better job elsewhere. Some are starting their own businesses. Some have decided to retire early, even on a smaller income, because they’ve realized they value time more than money.

The quitting is happening at the highest rates in low-wage industries such as restaurants, hospitality and retail. Many have gotten fed up with low pay, difficult working conditions and abusive customers. And many who are still in their old jobs are thinking about moving on.

This isn’t happening by accident. From the beginning, the pandemic was a public health and an economic crisis, and the nature of employment was at the center. When we put the economy into an induced coma in early 2020, we began talking about “essential workers” who put themselves at risk for the rest of us. But what did they get from all those expressions of thanks? Not much…

We have long told ourselves a story about America as a land of limitless opportunity, despite the fact that we know it isn’t true. We tell and retell stories of the extraordinary people who pulled themselves up from dire circumstances to achieve wealth and success, never acknowledging that it’s precisely the exceptional nature of those stories that is the problem. In a just society, you shouldn’t have to be a one-in-a-million genius or a maniacal workaholic to haul yourself to a life free of deprivation…

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