I have jury duty today, so here’s an open thread, courtesy of the NY State court system’s wi-fi.
Open Thread
by @mistermix.bsky.social| 41 Comments
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.
Their freedom requires your slavery.
The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.
Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.
The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.
Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.
The words do not have to be perfect.
Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.
Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.
Technically true, but collectively nonsense
Hot air and ill-informed banter
Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.
Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.
Usually wrong but never in doubt
“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”
Motown is Joe-Town!
Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.
The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.
Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.
Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.
Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?
Raven
In Georgia you cannot take ANY devices or reading materials when you are on jury duty. My wife was an alternate on a two-week long trial and she had to sit in a room with nothing the entire time.
debit
@Raven: I would have to kill someone. The only reason I no longer have books in my car is that I always have a Kindle or an Ipad with the Kindle app in my bag.
jibeaux
I just wanted to share with you the words of David Plouffe, who is trying to do the pre-debate dampening of expectations but can’t quite keep his tongue completely out of his cheek:
gogol's wife
@jibeaux:
Yeah, “in his pocket” is hilarious.
Gin & Tonic
Give ’em the chair. They still do that in NY, right?
Thoroughly Pizzled
I’m going to a talk by Politico hack Mike Allen tomorrow. Anything I should say to him?
Todd
Here’s a hint – if you wind up in the venire for a white collar crime, a serious assault, a murder/manslaughter, a civil fraud or a wrongful death/negligence case, you’ve already made up your mind for one side or the other and no amount of evidence will shake that opinion.
Trust me – you’ll appreciate the advice later.
Randy P
So we went to see “Dark Knight Rises” last night and I’m confused about a few things.
It was kind of a surreal experience as we were practically alone in an Imax theater. It was at the Franklin Institute (Philly science museum) and we’d just been to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. We bought the last tickets of the day for “Dark Knight” and I guess most people didn’t feel like being out late on a Sunday night at the science museum.
Anyway, the nature of the theater meant volume was cranked way up and action was 3 stories high and sometimes hard to follow. I don’t think this is really a spoiler if I mention that Blake was referred to as “Robin” in a late scene, but I couldn’t hear any more of that dialog. What the hell was happening in that scene, who was the lady who called him “Robin” and why?
Also, Michael Caine’s native Cockney accent was really pronounced in this film. That’s not the usual accent he uses for films, is it? I’m trying to remember, but I could swear I’m not usually so conscious of the Cockney. Did he use this accent for Alfred before?
PurpleGirl
@Raven: NY even lets me take crocheting into the Jury Lounge with me, and they have computers that people can use who don’t bring their own machines with them. NY courts have invested a lot in making jury duty as comfortable to do as they can — it helps keep people doing it and keeps them from trying to get out of it. In the Queens County courts I think the rotation of names is now something like 5 years between calls, maybe even more.
Suffern ACE
@Raven: Are you sure she was being honest about being on jury duty? With restrictions like that it sounds like she was actually the one on trial.
piratedan
caught some of the replay with Gregory and Plouffe on MTP that was being replayed. Watched Gregory try and catch Plouffe up on the Administration’s “gaffe” in calling terrorism, terrorism with the Bengazi consulate attack. Gregory is perfectly capable of asking a difficult question when he wants to, shame that he can’t actually be a journalist and do his job when a Republican is in the chair. Was appalled when the upcoming panel discussion was including Ralph “child labor is perfectly acceptable” Reed on the panel. Don’t these scumbags ever just go away? Made me change the channel before I lost any more brain cells.
Face
Does this make you a moocher or a looter?
MikeJ
@jibeaux:
Was telling people in advance that Romney has prepared zingers the dumbest thing the campaign has done? It sounds almost as stupid as calling half the voters deadbeats.
Telling people, “oh boy, he’s been working on this great joke for two months” seems to be right up there with Akin’s guy comparing him to David Koresh.
Steve
@Raven: Restrictions like that are understandable once you’re actually on a jury. If you mean you can’t even have a book while you’re sitting in the big room with the other potential jurors waiting to be called, that’s ridiculous, though.
@Todd: It’s going to be a drug case. It’s always a drug case.
One of my colleagues had a jury trial last week, here in NY. The weird thing about NY, at least in civil court, is that you pick a jury without even having a judge present. They bring a bunch of potential jurors into a room and the lawyers question them and a judge never gets involved unless there’s a dispute or something.
So they spend a whole day and they finally get a jury picked. Now they need a judge! In NY, the judge who’s been handling your case all along isn’t going to be your trial judge – why would you want the benefit of a judge who’s spent 2 years getting to know what your case is about? So they come back the next day to wait for a judge, with the jury presumably cooling its heels in a room somewhere, except no judge becomes available. So after a whole day of waiting everyone goes home for the weekend.
They come back on Monday and finally get a judge. The judge reads up on the case and starts encouraging the parties to talk settlement, so they do that. They spend the whole day negotiating and finally reach a settlement. So the jury, having now spent 1 full day in jury selection and 2 full days just sitting in a room wondering what’s going on, is now discharged without even knowing what happened. I can only imagine how fucked-up the whole system looks from their perspective.
Bruuuuce
@PurpleGirl: ISTR that the last time I was released from jury duty (here in Queens County) they said that I wouldn’t be called for six years.
I need to get to bed (yes, I know; I work the overnight shift, though), but wanted to share a terrific link with the group, found at Metafilter: Why liberalism works. It’s a bit geeky, a bit nerdy, and a bit wonky — which means many of the folks here will eat it up.
Napoleon
@MikeJ:
I think they did that in a desperate attempt to keep the press from talking about the Hindenberg nature of the Romney campaign.
gnomedad
Romney actually looked human debating with Ted Kennedy.
Mark S.
@Randy P:
If I hadn’t already read about that Robin part, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed she calls him Robin. The second half of that movie had gotten so stupid that by that time I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
And I always thought Caine was completely miscast as Alfred. Caine just doesn’t seem like a butler to me. And the character is written so poorly that half the time you get the suspicion that he actually hates Bruce Wayne, but then he starts bawling and becomes the most codependent butler in the world.
jibeaux
It certainly amused me. Oh, he’s memorized “zingers” that he’s been practicing since August? Watch out, we got a bad mothafucka over here!
MikeJ
@Mark S.:
Alfie got older and found out what it’s all about.
Steve
Those are going to be some great zingers. Why, he said he’s actually thinking of repeating Reagan’s “there you go again” line. What a risk-taker!
Citizen Scientist
So, can anyone point me to a good web resource for simple truth/counter-arguments/liberal perspectives on the typical talking points you here from hardcore rightwingers?
I usually don’t have much problem countering their ideas, but my wife needs help. She’s attending meetings in Vegas this month and will be one of the few non-conservatives there, and asked me for some facts to shoot down their talking points. I swear I saw a good read on Alternet a few weeks ago, but have been unable to find it (e.g., ’20 ways to counter Repub talking points’). If I tried to distill all the details of what I know for her, she would just end up getting confused.
That, and she told me the last night of the DNC that all people on welfare should be drug tested. My head almost exploded…
Dennis SGMM
@jibeaux:
Now that a good showing in the debates is Romney’s last hope it must have been a severe blow to his counter factual, vague, campaign to realize that their guy is going to face a president whose command of the facts and the numbers would make their guy look like Rick Perry.
They have to know that he also risks showing his angry, dismissive side and/or putting his foot in his mouth (Again) so they loaded him up with scripted lines. While that isn’t a good strategy to look presidential it may keep Romney from looking like what he really is.
Linda Featheringill
Romney zingers:
Talking about the zingers ahead of time was major dumb.
I’ll bet a penny that Team Romney intended for this plan to be secret, to not be talked about, so they could spring it on the world during the first debate. Romney, of course, can’t be trusted with a secret so now everyone knows.
The smart thing would be for Romney to drop the zinger plan entirely and do something else in the debate. Maybe he could actually answer questions.
1badbaba3
If they’re getting the ‘zingers’ from the same place the trolls do, I have little doubt they’ll be hil-fuckin’-larious.
Hopey McChangey, indeed.
PurpleGirl
@Linda Featheringill: Maybe he could actually answer questions.
But that would be so radical, so risky, so so leftist. Mitt would never do that.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Randy P: Blake was there to pick up the duffel he received via Bruce Wayne’s will. The woman couldn’t find his name on her list, so he asked her to check under his real name, Robin.
DPB
Is anyone else worried that the right-wing talking points about skewed polls is the first step in stealing the election? The Secretaries of State in most of the swing states are Republican, and they control how the data from voting machines is processed. When Romney is declared the surprise winner on Nov. 3, the MSM will have its built-in excuse for explaining the discrepency between the pre-vote polls and the actual vote tallies.
TooManyJens
@Todd: I got called on a child molestation case when my daughter was seven months old. I was fighting back tears just listening to the bare-bones description of the charges. Fortunately for me, I happened to know the state’s attorney assigned to the case. We weren’t close at all, but saying that I knew him socially and felt that might bias my judgment (which was sort of true, though I probably could have overcome it) got me off of that case.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@DPB:
I still think this has been their plan all along. Between impeachment of Holder (to discredit him pre-election) to Dick Morris et al attacking current polls, we’re being prepped.
But it seems as though they expected it to stay close: If Obama can keep his margins high, it will be a lot harder to steal without causing an incident. If it tightens to within 2 points in the swing states again, look for signs of theft. Miraculous Romney victories in OH and VA, especially.
I do have a feeling that, if stolen, the public won’t be quite as complacent as it was back in 2000. After 12 years of treasonous GOP bullshit, some of us are seriously ready for a Brooks Brothers Beatdown should it come to that.
Central Planning
Are you really on jury duty, or just hanging out to see if you get dismissed?
I would love to be on a jury, to be part of the judicial process. Unfortunately, I am always dismissed because people settle. Too bad there isn’t a way to be a professional juror.
Jay C
New York State/City have made a lot of strides towards making jury duty/calls therefor a lot more efficient than it used to be: I’ve been lucky: I first got called twenty years ago (after impressing [and failing to influence] the clerk with a vast number of “deferrals”), and the first couple of times, each day’s herd got to mill around in a room all day with little to do, and then be dismissed (entirely). Nowadays they’re a lot more efficient in moving folks though to the cull-out stage. At which step I’ve been passed over, thankfully: the last case I was in line for was some sort of financial fraud or embezzlement: weeks of trial in store for the “lucky” citizens….
muddy
@Central Planning: I am 51, have voted in every election since I was 18. I have never once been called. I think it would be interesting (at least once) and am annoyed they have been spurning me all this time. I’m super nit-picky, hyper-critical and quite jaded, I think I’d be a natural.
ThresherK
My own experience is that the “lockdown” is only after voir dire. At the time my greatest concern about having to recuse myself from voir dire was the possibility that the suspect could potentially be a client at the service agency my spouse works at.
shortstop
This is hilarious. The unskewed polls guy has discovered a huge and heretofore secret trove of black and Hispanic Romney voters. Turns out Romney gets 49 percent of black voters and 62 percent of Hispanic voters — just what the librul media doesn’t want you to know!
KnaveRupe
“A priest, a minister and a rabbi walk into a bar. I’m not exactly sure what happened after that, because I’ve never been inside of an establishment that serves liquor. But I suspect that they discussed how President Obama and the Democrat party are hostile to religion!”
#MittZinger
PNW_WarriorWoman
The NFL refs and the teachers….lots in common with respect to The Billionaire Boys Club.
Hill Dweller
@piratedan:
Gregory completely fabricated an Obama quote while trying to trip Plouffe up. He is a Republican shill.
cckids
@muddy:
I agree! I’m 49, & have never been called either. My son, who is severely disabled, both mentally & physically, at 28 has been called 3 times. Each time I have to get a notarized letter from his doctor, stating that he isn’t able to perform jury duty. It wasn’t till the last time, earlier this year, that they agreed to permanantly remove him from the list.
And only because he now uses a respirator, not because he has a mental age that is around 7-8. Oy.
Hypatia's Momma
@cckids:
That might depend on what type of trial you’re called for. Earlier this year, I was called for jury selection and was all excited at the idea. Then we learned it was for rape charges, including a lot of “forcible” stuff AND apparently the victim was rather young at the time. Then it was less “interesting” and more “oh, great, ptsd-episode time”.
Also, the defense attorney managed to infuriate me such that I hated his client by proxy. That’s never a good thing to do.
Howard Beale IV
Ross Perot has resurfaced.