Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Let’s finish the job.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

The frogs are rarely mistaken.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Bogus polls are all they’ve got left. Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls a year from now.

Second rate reporter says what?

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

You are here: Home / Politics / Activist Judges! / Open Thread: Don’t Think of It As Plagiarism — Gorsuch Just Declared ‘Eminent Domain’ on Lesser Writers’ Words

Open Thread: Don’t Think of It As Plagiarism — Gorsuch Just Declared ‘Eminent Domain’ on Lesser Writers’ Words

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*Is* Neil Gorsuch a plagiarist? As an intro to the way Our Media works, the Twitter storyline is kinda fascinating…

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35Comments

  1. 1.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    “Eminent domain” made me laugh. I’m going to tell my niece she can declare eminent domain over her brother’s cookies.

  2. 2.

    scav

    See also criteria for “first lady” speeches.

    Oh well. Can’t expect legal philosophers (or apparently supreme court jurists) to uphold the rules and practices we expect of mere undergraduates and even some fifth-graders.

  3. 3.

    burnspbesq

    Fuck him.

    All da haterz got fucked today. The en banc Seventh Circuit held, in a case involving an Indiana community college, that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The case is Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana.

    As if you needed any more reasons to oppose his nomination, I want him nowhere near the Supreme Court bench when this case gets there (as it likely will).

  4. 4.

    Thru the Looking Glass...

    I think it’s pretty safe at this point to assume that whatever comes out of a Republican’s mouth is BULLSHIT, period… and right now, I’m more afraid of Twitler starting WW III w/ a nasty tweet than damned near anything else imaginable…

    What did Judge Judy say once?

    Don’t pee on my leg and try to tell me raining outside…

  7. 7.

    burnspbesq

    Is there any reason for Gorsuch’s wranglers to have arranged for a pre-buttal, other than certainty that if this ever got out they would have a major shit-storm on their hands?

  8. 8.

    Keith P.

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: And there’s a pretty choice Trump tweet about Biden’s plagiarism floating around somewhere. Naturally, the trumptwitterarchive.com search feature hangs both my browsers (web 2.0, or whatever today’s web is called, fucking blows…amateur coders trying to do shit they’ve got no business trying to do, different browsers being shitty for different parts of it), so I can’t actually dig it up, but it was something like “Biden the plagiarizer shouldn’t be allowed to run for president”

  11. 11.

    efgoldman

    We (mrs efg and I are too old for this shit.

    Water rising in the basement. Our fire department is wonderful; they brought a pump. Problem is, it’s (thank FSM) shallow water; when the pump runs dry it stops.
    “Go get a shop vac” they tell me. “Don’t buy a cheap one” my insurance guy says. OK. I rush to Lowe’s (nearest mega home store) before closing, buy the next to the biggest (35 gal). Some [spelled “a-l-l”] assembly required. Actually not so hard. I mean, a couple of screw holes don’t line up, but it’s easier than a bicycle, harder than some kids toys.
    Assemble the shop vac, wrestle it downstairs. Did I mention THEY BUILT THE HOUSE [IN 1962] WITH NO FUCKING CELLAR DRAIN??!?!??!? Also too, no laundry sink. Washer empties by a kludge to the main drain.
    We ran a long hose from the fire department’s pump out the front door to the driveway. Not being experienced in the way of these things, silly me, I thought you could do the same thing from the shop vac. Nope. It filled up in about 30 seconds, have to empty it by bailing.
    Well, easy enough: put the fire department pump inside the shop vac. Except it wouldn’t start. Called the fire department again, showed us how to prime it. We should be OK until morning.
    Insurance agent says (as we know) this isn’t covered. Best guess is the end of the French drain is clogged in the middle of the lawn. That’s what happened about 15 years ago. We didn’t even have water in the cellar in the melt from the huge snows of two winters ago.
    I asked my insurance guy what remediation company to use. He said, don’t call any. It’s not covered, and they will rip us off. But we are going to have to find someone to clean the wet shit out, and another guy to waterproof the basement floor. This is RI, so you hire who somebody with whom you already do business recommends. It’s usually cheaper, and the work gets done.

    We are DEFINITELY too old for this shit!

  12. 12.

    Ian

    Please stop quoting Maggie Haberman. It seems you do it every day. What part of she is a both siderist monster who cared more about emails than anything Ill douche ever did makes you want to consider her a valid source?

  14. 14.

    opiejeanne

    @efgoldman: Ugh. My sympathies.

    We don’t have a basement but the builder did have the forethought to raise our house’s foundation a bit more than most houses here so we haven’t had a problem with flooding, yet. The water level in the garden is about 6 inches below the top of the dirt which we found out by digging a hole to plant a cherry tree, and the hole promptly filled with water.
    We need to find a better place to plant the cherry.

  15. 15.

    TenguPhule

    At this rate it will not surprise me to learn that Gorsuch had a habit of killing small animals as a child.

  16. 16.

    efgoldman

    @opiejeanne:

    We don’t have a basement but the builder did have the forethought to raise our house’s foundation a bit

    We’re at the top of the valley, about 200 feet above the Blackstone River bed. It’s ground water seeping up. Making sure the French drain is unclogged should take care of it. Need daylight to find the outlet, though.
    Going to price waterproofing anyway. Our insurance agent is also a RE agent, and wants to sell the house when we move. He’ll tell us whether it’s worth the cost on the resale end.

  17. 17.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @efgoldman: My sympathies.

    After voting today(city elections), I decided to move my recently purchased car to the other side of the street. Put my hand on the door handle and it opened, pressed the break and pushed the start button…NO WELCOME TO PRIUS!!! Got out pressed the handle to lock, no sound. Went to Home Despot and got a replacement battery for the FOB, no difference. I removed the battery and it’s charging now, I hope.

    ETA: You shouldn’t use French drains but REAL AMERICAN DRAINS, there’s ya problem right there.

  18. 18.

    Anne Laurie

    @Ian:

    What part of she is a both siderist monster who cared more about emails than anything Ill douche ever did makes you want to consider her a valid source?

    That’s exactly why I use her as a source — on ‘hot’ topics like this, whatever she’s saying or repeating is the conventional wisdom in the Media Village Idiots’ Church of the Savvy. She’s not a moron herself, but she’s a reliable indicator as to what all the higher-up-the-media-ladder morons will be repeating.

    And, unlike those actual blue-check-verified morons, she also tweets fun and useful stuff, she doesn’t make me ill reading her twitter feed. You know how Cole has a category, I Read These Morons So You Don’t Have To? That’s how you want to think of Maggie Haberman, IMO.

  20. 20.

    Ian

    @Anne Laurie:
    You are providing clicks (hence revenue) to a “news” organization that knew Ill Douche was a pussygrabber twenty years before the billy bush tapes and yet did not feel the need to inform us of Ill douche’s handling problems.

  22. 22.

    zach

    @Keith P.: Not according to all Tweets containing “Biden”, but there’s this: “Morning Joe Panel is stealing many of my statements and ideas to better America without giving credit — the story of my life!”

  24. 24.

    Pangloss

    I think the Fascism Forever Club was deadly serious. And his mother was a piece of work, actively dismantling the EPA while son Neil was just getting old enough to learn how to set fires.

  26. 26.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @Anne Laurie:

    she doesn’t make me ill reading her twitter feed.

    I can understand why readers throw-up when seeing her, she was the queen of eghazi and Clinton-bashing. I mean, the only reason she was hired by the Clinton-hating, garbage, Vichey Times was her years of Clinton bashing for GOPolitico.

    Is the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman really this stupid, or just pretending?

    “Did Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman really write this crap?“

  27. 27.

    Patricia Kayden

    @TenguPhule: Or killing them now as an adult. Several of his rulings suggest that he still has a cruelty streak and disregard for suffering.

  30. 30.

    Shalimar

    @Ian: None of us clicks the Maggie Haberman tweets. That extra penny or two in revenue isn’t worth the effort to bitch about.

  35. 35.

    J R in WV

    @efgoldman:

    Many years ago I went downstairs right at bedtime to move some laundry from the washer to the drier, and as I did so in the quiet space, I heard a sound, like the sound of a water fountain, a merry little liquid gurgle.

    The house is built against the stone holding up the mountain on the west side, with a tiny hillside creek out front on the east side. The back wall is 10 inch block with rebar in it, filled with high strength pea gravel concrete. There is rebar inside the footers up into the concrete filling the block wall. So strong. And both tar and a plastic layer on the outside of the wall, and perf pipe wrapped in geo cloth and buried in stone for drainage.

    I was dismayed, and called the wife for help. We used a shop vac to keep the slow flood under control for a while. I found a tube of tub and shower caulk, and cut off the tip, jammed it into the tiny opening the water was squirting up out of, and stood on the tube to force the sealer into the opening.

    Unbelievably, it stopped!!! We cleaned up more of the water with the shop vac – every few gallons I would carry it to the basement door and poor it over the hillside into the creek.

    Then, 6 inches above the floor, along the expansion joint in the wall, the spring found a new outlet, instead of shooting up an inch above the floor, it was shooting 2 or 3 inches out of the wall. We gave up, packed a bushel of beach towels into the center of the wall, and went to bed, exhausted.

    In the morning, I made tea and coffee before going down to what I firmly expected to be a flooded mess. Imagine my amaze when I went into the utility space to find it dry. The gob of towels was damp on the bottom, but it must have stopped springing into the basement by the time we were in bed!!!

    I spent the whole next summer laying drainage control in the space between the house and the hillside cliff. We dug a ditch, laid perforated pipe wrapped in cloth, buried in pea gravel, all hauled in buckets, and then laid rubber roofing to drive surface water to the drain, and covered that with mulch.

    Also paid some attention to the gutters and their drains.

    Between all that, except for some high rainfall events while I was getting the surface water under control, when I used very shallow (1/4 inch or less) pumps to control the water, things have been tight.

    But I relate to your plight. I worry about what I would do if the spring comes back. Probably chop a trough in the concrete and install a serious sump pump. You do what you gotta do. There’s no way to get a hoe behind the house without tearing out a lot of stuff, so rebuilding that deeply buried french drain isn’t an option. There’s tons of river rock in there too, so not really digable with a shovel either.

    I guess you could go at it like a well digger, with short 36″ diameter pipes to stack up as you dig and lower the shaft lining, and put a sump pump at the bottom of that well… a whole lot of work!!! Probably 12 or 14 feet to get to the bottom of the foundation.

    Good luck with your cleanup and rehab!!

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