I want his press secretary give a conference TODAY and say something like:

I want The Press to engage in a thought experiment with me. Imagine if our president came out and said, "The Supreme Court has granted Presidents immunity from prosecution in matters of the official duty. Well, it is my official duty to warn America that the Court is corrupt. It has been rotted out by folks like Harlan Crow who has corrupted the already dubious ethics of Clarence Thomas into the little stooge he’s become. Both these men should be dead. So, too, should Altio and Kavanaugh. I wouldn’t lose any sleep if I woke up tomorrow to news there were three particular open seats for what was once the highest court. Heck, I might even pardon the guilty. Of course Congress would try to block me from appointing replacement Justices, but it is possible that folks like Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordon, Ted Cruz and others might meet with some tragically fatal accidents, and then maybe Congress wouldn’t have so many objections. I can’t advocate for that, of course. I might be tickled pink to see it, but I can’t tell anyone to go out and do it. I won’t even suggest it! And remember: a presidential pardon only works on federal cases. States might prosecute anyone committing such heinous acts. On the other hand, if a President had a privileged conversation about the Constitution with a State Governor, well… that Governor might decide to do a favor for that unindictable President. God Bless America and God Bless our troops.

– at which point the Press Secretary calls for questions.

Trump stole money from cancer kids. I don’t understand how anyone can miss the slime dripping off him. Yeah, I’m partisan about this.

– and while he’s at it, maybe Biden could see that Alito and Thomas met with some unfortunate fatality… and if congress does not think he should be allowed to replace them, perhaps they, too, would suddenly find their numbers shrinking as the pile of bodies mounts (I’m looking at you, Mitch McConnell).

Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/

That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.

Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?

I’m not the lego person, but I am not taking that selfie because: 1) I don’t want to clean the house to make it look all nice before judgey relatives critique the pic, 2) my phone is old and all its pics are kinda fish-eyed, 3) I don’t actually want to spend the time doing the task right now when AI can get me an image in seconds.

Watch out for the sloppy reporting in the Salon piece. For example, it states:

“Hur’s claim that Biden couldn’t remember the day his son died was an outrageous lie,” argued Tommy Vietor, a former Obama staffer and commentator.

Vietor DID tweet that, but Salon doesn’t mention that Hur didn’t make that claim. Rather, Hur claimed Biden couldn’t remember the YEAR (not DAY).

“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report said. (source NBC).

I liked Tamara Keith’s more accurate coverage posted over here: https://www.wbur.org/npr/1237745840/biden-hur-report-memory-classified-documents

I appreciate that the “Gradient Canopy” roof is covered in solar cells and collects rainwater while also letting in natural light, so maybe the problem is they didn’t do enough by not adding in some shielding, too.

In addition to the delay, the court asked for arguments to an over-broad question:

“Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

Note that they COULD have asked something more like, “Were Donald Trump’s actions on and surrounding the January 6th incidents official acts of a President and is Trump therefore immune from criminal prosecution because the conduct was both within his tenure in office and within the scope of his duties?” Of course, that is not what was asked. The actual question asks for long and careful considered speculation on all possible contingencies where the relevant case is about a specific set of actions that could be quickly assessed.

see also: https://www.salon.com/2024/02/28/the-is-indulging-immunity-claim-further-delaying-his-trial/

This Op/Ed expresses my sentiment better than I’d do: https://crooksandliars.com/2024/02/mitch-mcconnell-steps-down-senate

As gun control advocate Shannon Watts writes, “Sen. Mitch McConnell’s legacy will be that he purposefully undermined America’s first Black president, he broke the Supreme Court, he helped elect a fascist President, and he abetted up an insurrection on American soil.”

(and)

Let’s not pretend his successor will be any better. He is likely to be a Trump toady who will bow before the pressure and screw this country even more.

Msnbc’s Alex Wagner pointed out on her show that, “After all, it took just 51 days from the time Trump was kicked off the ballot in Colorado on December 19th to when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for that case – the 14th Amendment case – on February 8th. Now on December 11th, 2023, Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to quickly weigh in on Trump’s immunity appeal and to do so early , which the Court rejected! And now by the time we get to April 22nd, which is when the Court plans to hear arguments in this immunity case, it will have been 133 days since the Court was first asked to hear the appeal. So the pace is… curious? Around 50 days when it helps Donald Trump, and over 130 days when it doesn’t.”

@[email protected] draw for me a queue of very British ants

style: victorianpunk

Yet Christine Blasey Ford still came forward to tell us about Brett Kavanaugh, and Congress ignored the victim AGAIN.

This.

I don’t see how they can cry, “States’ Rights!” all this time and now try to say states DON’T have the right to set their ballots. They do. They keep various 3rd party candidates off ballots all the time for stuff like not having enough signatures to get them ON the ballot.

I heard Trump’s lawyer argue that requiring candidates not-be-insurrectionists was adding a requirement not in the Constitution – except it IS in the Constitution and even though 2/3 of Congress could give a pardon/waiver on that, the fact that they MIGHT do so in the future does not disqualify Trump in the now, which the Colorado lawyer brought up. Later, TV commentators brought up that after the Civil War, a bunch of guys DID preemptively ask Congress for waivers. If Trump got that through now, it sounds like Colorado would have to put him on the ballot.

The Supreme Court decided Bush V. Gore on just the state of Florida. It sounds like they are now deciding Trump V. [Constitution] and trying to blame it on Colorado. Sadly, they seem to want the Constitution to lose. My last hope is that they don’t make this about letting ‘one state decide the president’ because that already happens just based on who each state allows to vote. I’m hoping their decision stems from something actually in the Constitution.

It isn’t as important as a war starting, but it is significantly less common than, say, a mass shooting. I’d rate it along side whether groundhog Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow: we know it is going to happen, that it has no meaningful impact, but there are still a bunch of people who want to know how the tradition turned out.

Agreed!

I didn’'t realize eels were in short supply. When I get sushi, unagi nigiri is one of my favorites, but first comes anything with masago/tobiko style fish eggs (both are tiny eggs). I’d happily trade lab-grown eel for wild. I’d be even happier to eat lab-grown eggs, but I suspect there’s more of a trick to that.

How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?

Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all. If someone had formed a liberal Sinclair 20 years ago to gain reach into rural and small-town America, that story would be very different today.

There has in recent years been an impressive growth of nonprofit media outlets, led nationally by ProPublica and laying down roots everywhere, from the aforementioned Baltimore, where the Baltimore Banner has sometimes been scooping the Sun, to my home state of West Virginia, where Pulitzer Prize–winner Ken Ward’s Mountain State Spotlight is doing terrific reporting. These outlets are welcome indeed. They do sharp and necessary reporting. But they’re nonprofits, which, under IRS rules, cannot be partisan. They have to be apolitical.

I think one of the hard issues about making left-wing spin-machines is that a large chunk of the left would reject them. Following the old adage, “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line,” I fear that you can get the right to follow any ridiculous story because they are unified in wanting their ‘side’ to win, but a good number of Democrats would become disenchanted by fake news and may even become turncoats if asked to believe muckraking spin as Truth. Surely there’s a good number of low-interest left-leaners who would be happy to believe and follow half-truths and lies, but I doubt Democrats would get the same consensus of accepting such as good politics the way Republicans do.

I haven’t seen the show, but my guess is that the script numbers the kids in order of appearance – because it would be really confusing to get stuff ready if they weren’t numbered in order of appearance. Imagine reading the script and seeing a first mention of the kids like:

Ghoulish child #2 darts across the hall and disappears.

You wonder, “Was there a #1?” Then you see more ghoulish kids on the pages: 4, 7, 1, 5. Are there numbers 2 and 3? 6 or 8? How many costumes do we need, and are theses kids going to appear together? Were some cut? Did the script editor forget something?

If they are in order of appearance, then the kids with bigger/speaking parts might get higher billing, but they wouldn’t get earlier numbers since non-speaking/smaller parts appeared earlier.

FYI, the bot only summarized the first of three pages.

I was happily surprised there was a season 3 since they could have stopped at the end of season 2. I’m glad they didn’t. That said, the first two seasons had a more structured story line and I think it should have gotten awards then. Season 3 was good, but didn’t have the same cohesion. There were more stand-alone episodes. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I was happy to watch them all, but I can see where some people might feel it a weaker season because of that. Still, the show should have gotten more praise sooner.