Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

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

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

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

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

Second rate reporter says what?

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Open Thread: Wrapping Up the First Day of Judge Brown Jackson’s Nomination Hearing

Open Thread: Wrapping Up the First Day of Judge Brown Jackson’s Nomination Hearing

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The sorrows of an aggregator… I’ve been collecting links about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for weeks, and there’s never been the right time to sort through them to present to y’all…


The Disloyal Opposition seems to be following the predicted scripts — with the addition of Marsha Blackburn as the Designated CRT Crazy-Talker…

… Part of what may drive acrimony, if it develops: Several Republicans on the committee are kicking the tires on a 2024 presidential campaign. They’ll seek a moment that cuts through the noise and raises their profile. Democrats, including then-Sen. Kamala Harris, were in the same position with Kavanaugh four years ago and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020.

None of the criticism of Jackson is likely to derail her confirmation, said John Malcolm, vice president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Republicans will nevertheless want to highlight Jackson’s rulings – including those that sided with labor unions or against President Donald Trump – to draw contrasts with Biden.

“They’re going to want to portray themselves as fighting the Biden agenda,” Malcolm said. “Republicans will point out, quite rightly, that when you have a Democrat in the White House and a Democrat-controlled Senate, this is the … nominee that you get.”…

Reader Interactions

158Comments

  1. 1.

    Joe Falco

    this is the … nominee that you get.”…

    A judge committed to the rule of law and not to the highest bidder?

  4. 4.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    bitching about nutty home ec major Marsha Blackburn questioning KBJ’s credentials feels like a respite thread these days

  9. 9.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    I am shocked to see the Conservatives haven’t declared Judge Jackson over prepared.

    “I am sorry, but I am forced to tell the committee my vote is no on Judge Jackson. My fellow senators, imagine what kind of a drooling idiot Justice Kavanaugh going to sound like every day in court next to Judge Jackson. No, ladies and gentlemen, the kind of competence we are seeing with Judge Jackson is beyond the pale for the Supreme Court.” Senator Tombs R (Lockjaw)

  10. 10.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage:

    On January 4, 2022, Cornish announced her resignation from NPR to join “The Great Resignation” and “try something new.” Co-host Ari Shapiro noted that NPR is “hemorrhaging hosts from marginalized backgrounds.”[17] Cornish’s exit follows the recent departure of NPR hosts Noel King and Lulu Garcia-Navarro, all of whom are persons of color.[18]

    I must admit I’ve pretty much stopped listening to NPR over the last couple of years, except occasionally for Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (and even that has lost its charm) and didn’t realise there was a “Great Resignation” underway (knew Garcia-Navarro had departed, but didn’t know she was part of a trend). I’m going to have to look into that.

  13. 13.

    eclare

    @JPL:   I just googled.  Marsha Marsha Marsha is married with two kids.  So I guess she only had sex twice.  Seems about right.

  19. 19.

    jnfr

    I couldn’t listen to the R’s because it’s too much insanity for me, so I followed along via some reporters livestreams and TPM. Sounds like both Blackburn and Graham were loony, and hacks like Hawley continued to be hacks.

    I’m amazed this clearly kind and very accomplished woman puts herself through all this. Nerves of steel and an iron grip on her tongue.

  21. 21.

    eclare

    @jnfr:   I did not watch or listen either, but a friend who watched said Blackburn made Tom Cotton look moderate.

  25. 25.

    cmorenc

    @eclare: @JPL:

    @JPL:   I just googled.  Marsha Marsha Marsha is married with two kids.  So I guess she only had sex twice.  Seems about right.

    …in the dark both times, so she didn’t need to see this awkwardly icky thing that was happening to her if she was ever going to have any offspring.

  26. 26.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @jnfr: every time you think Lindsey Graham can’t sink any lower…

    The Recount @therecount 6h

    “We’re all racist if we ask hard questions — it’s not gonna fly with us. We’re used to it by now, at least I am. So it’s not gonna matter a bit.” — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) getting ahead of any pushback at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing

    @germy: until they scrolled her name I thought that had to be some kind of fake. The writers were a little too on the nose with that flashback.

  27. 27.

    Martin

    Couple of random items:

    Today is World Downs Syndrome Day. If you don’t have any people in your life with Downs Syndrome, take this as a reminder to move some of our non-neurotypical language front of brain, and give it an extra moment of thought before you hit submit. Lord knows I’ve had to do a lot of this in my life.

    Also, extra congrats to the USA for scoring 9 mass shootings in one weekend. Break out those foam fingers everyone, we did it!

  31. 31.

    MisterForkbeard

    @NotMax: Congrats! I also hope to join the New Car Club later this week. I ordered a Volvo C40 (the fully electric compact SUV) back in December and it’s showing up a month early. Supposed to arrive sometime this week.

    Can’t wait. There’s something about a new (good) car, you know?

  32. 32.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Martin: The “I can’t hear you, it’s too loud” to the cultist trying to ask him why he’s slowing things down was just great. Because of all the impotent honking.

  35. 35.

    debbie

    @NotMax:

    My very first car was a Maverick — no power steering or power brakes. I trust yours is better accessorized. Congratulations!

  36. 36.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The idiotic opinion in the WaPo that the Federalist Society hack wasn’t considered by Biden marks how much the Village needs to be nuked from orbit.

  38. 38.

    Martin

    Well, I joined the No Car Club this weekend. We’ve reduced another vehicle. My ebike does about 95% of my trips, leaving my wife’s plug-in hybrid to take me to a handful of things that are too dangerous to ride to (still looking for safe routes to those).

    My ebike costs nothing per mile to operate. If I used my utility, it’d be about $0.15 per charge (40 miles) at peak rates. Off my solar, it’s nothing. I’ve yet to find a destination I can get to faster by car than by bike (door to door). Parking is usually the determinant, since I don’t need to deal with that. Not only is is carbon-free, but my impact on road infrastructure is around 0.006% that of a typical car. So, I can cover about 200x as many miles before road infrastructure needs to be repaired/reconditioned as a single car, including an EV. Also lower emissions and particulates due to tire and brake wear. Also, no impact on parking and land usage.

    A car requires about 350 square feet of parking space, and we have 8 spaces per car. So, each car requires 2,800 square feet of land to be dedicated to its existence. That’s 2800 square feet not being paid for, but being subsidized in goods and services, and it’s 2800 square feet that could be used for housing, lowering the cost of housing. And because parking lots are in desirable places, putting housing there is basically putting people where the people ultimately want to be. It serves quite well for low income housing.

    I’m not trying to advocate for no cars. I still need access to one. I’m trying to advocate for fewer cars, and fewer car miles. Give it a try. EBikes are really fun.

  42. 42.

    eclare

    @Martin:   No way in hell I would ride a bike on Memphis city streets.  I don’t feel safe in my car.  When I first moved here within a five year period I was side swiped once and hit from behind twice.  Drivers have to get a lot better before I would even consider it.

  44. 44.

    Martin

    Catching up on video, “Lord give me the patience of a black female Supreme Court nominee in a Senate hearing” needs to become a thing. I’ve got way too much white male entitlement in me to not jump in and take those assholes to task.

    And here’s a pro tip for the GOP: You won’t be accused of racism if you don’t lie about your position or Jacksons’. You get accused of racism because you lie, and prebutting that accusation actually makes your case worse because it’s an admission. If you tell the truth, you’ll be fine. Hell, even if you say ‘I won’t vote for her because she’s a black woman’ will probably get you fewer accusations because it’s at least an honest statement. It stands on its own. We don’t need to opine on it.

  46. 46.

    Martin

    @eclare: It’s a catch 22, though. It’s the equivalent of ‘I have to carry a gun because everyone else carries a gun’.

    The only way to win is to not play.

  47. 47.

    eclare

    @Martin:   Oh I know. Just be grateful you feel safe enough to bike where you are.  Not everyone does.

    In bike v car, car wins every time.

  48. 48.

    Faithful Lurker

    @NotMax: Us too. We picked ours up on the 17th too. So far, we love it. Our Ford dealer in Port Angeles WA told us that they had 120 people sign up to buy a Maverick but only 6 families would get one. Did your dealer tell you something similar?

  49. 49.

    JaySinWa

    @Martin:we have 8 spaces per car

    I don’t understand that part of the statement.

    We have downsized from two cars to one. I suspect the replacement will be an EV but a few years out. An E-bike might be fun, but I am not sure I’m age appropriate anymore or at least not for long. The possibility of taking a spill looks more problematic the older I get.

  50. 50.

    Old Man Shadow

    Oh joy. We’ve got more days of performative trolling before an outcome that is already predetermined.

  51. 51.

    Geminid

    @Martin: Charlottesville, Virginia does not have a lot of gun violence, but there was a shootout early Sunday morning that left 100 shell casings in the parking lot of the Fry Springs Beach Club. The incident made only local news because there were just two people wounded (so far as police know). The gunfight occurred in the aftermath of a music show benefiting the local organization “Peace in the Streets.”

  52. 52.

    Kay

    Dillon? Reisman!
    @dillonthehuman
    5h
    would love if someone asked Ted Cruz which 1960s SCOTUS decisions are his least favorite: interracial marriage (Loving)? Miranda warnings? The right to counsel (Gideon)? Birth control and privacy (Griswold)? cmon, lets get it out there.

    The only good things that ever happened on that court happened because of liberals. All the conservative decisions are shit.

  54. 54.

    Mike E

    @Martin: What e-bike are you riding and which others did you consider before opting for it? I’m getting to the point where I’d like to make my current car (’14 Camry) my last owned ICE vehicle but going car-free is definitely a dream of mine.

  55. 55.

    Martin

    @eclare: Oh, I know. But at some point you gotta stand up. I bike in the places that are reasonably safe. I avoid the ones that don’t. That’s required me to go into a few places and tell them ‘I can’t shop here any more because the road here is too dangerous’, or ‘because you don’t have bike racks’. That’s actually resulted in bike racks being installed in two places.

    The problem right now is the pervasive assumption that nobody wants to bike, because nobody does. At some point we need people to register their opinions that ‘I’d like to bike here, but your policies or inaction makes that impossible’. If we better understood how many people would like to bike, because those people spoke out, then we might see some political movement in cities, etc.

  56. 56.

    eclare

    @JaySinWa:   I’m thinking eight spaces per car means taking in all parking spaces: stores, malls, stadiums, etc.  Not just personal.

    Just a guess.

  58. 58.

    eclare

    @Geminid:   There was a shooting in AR over the weekend.  One dead, over two dozen wounded.  Also for some kind of peace rally.

  60. 60.

    trollhattan

    @debbie:

    I’m truly dazzled there was still a new one in inventory.

    Tragic cars, but more dependable than the competing Vega. Both had a propensity for shedding unwanted (by the car) body parts; Vega engines proved Detroit had yet to figure out making engine blocks from aluminum.

  61. 61.

    eclare

    @Martin:   Again, until drivers here get noticeably better, no biking for me. No city policy is going to change how well people drive.  My dad used to ride some for fun/exercise.  Drivers intentionally came at him for fun.

    Like that group in TX that was mowed down by the kid in the huge pickup.

  62. 62.

    Mallard Filmore

    @Kay: 

    would love if someone asked Ted Cruz which 1960s SCOTUS decisions are his least favorite: interracial marriage (Loving)?

    Are Welsh allowed to marry Scotts? //

  63. 63.

    Another Scott

    @Martin: Based on some of your earlier comments about your bike I’ve looked into them off-and-on.  My commute to work is only about 20 minutes driving, so in principle it would work, but the bike route really isn’t ideal (about 70 minutes according to Google).  My ’04 TDI is paid for and averages 42-44 mpg commuting, so it’s appealing to keep it alive as long as I can and just use it less.

    I’d really like to find something electric that has a decent amount of luggage space (at least 2 standard grocery bags) so I could stop at the store on the way home, but I’d also like it to weigh less than 50 pounds and not be 15 feet long so I could schlep it up stairs if necessary without killing myself.

    ;-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  65. 65.

    Steeplejack

    This is worthy of Betty Cracker! Scott Lemieux:

    Josh Hawley, the son of Joe McCarthy and a Costco bucket of Axe hair gel, continues to go QAnon at the Supreme Court hearing.

  66. 66.

    Martin

    @JaySinWa: Various ordinances require a certain number of parking spaces to be built for businesses, etc. Taken together, for every car that is in the US, there are 8 parking spaces. I know that seems counterintuitive when there’s never a space when you need one, but think about a sports venue that might have 50,000 spaces that are all empty almost all the time. Turns out there’s a lot of that. Schools, stores, etc. For all the money we dump into cars and roads, most of the time every car in the country is sitting still, in a driveway or parked in front of a house doing nothing, and there’s 8 parking spaces, 2800 square feet of developable land doing nothing (probably being lit up though) because that car is where it is.

    A fun thought experiment is to think of the cost of ownership of a car per hour you use it. Median new car price is $35K. Median mileage before sale is 100,000 miles. Median speed driven is 25mph. So, at 25mph, you’re spending about 4,00 hours in your car, or about $8.50 per hour for the cost of acquisition. Add in gas, insurance, maintenance, other fees, and every car is $10-$20/hr. Even if it’s an EV. Those 8 parking spaces allocated for your one car cost about $160,000. That cost is spread across your lifetime, but the land taxes aren’t. So the restaurant who needs to dedicate 50% of their land to parking (if they’re lucky, many cities are much worse) are going to have to make up that cost, plus paving, plus resurfacing, plus lighting, etc. on the goods and services they charge.

    Cars are this masterful exercise in hidden costs.  I think EVs are a red herring with regard to climate change. They don’t help enough, fast enough, given the aggregate cost. Convincing consumers to turn over several trillion dollars in vehicles isn’t going to happen fast enough, especially when the EV does nothing about the various hidden environmental costs of paving roads and so on. And the US is great about talking about the numerator when they secretly shift the denominator. All the fuel economy we gained the last decade – out the window, because we took those savings and made cars bigger and heavier and wound up in exactly the same place as we started. You’re already seeing it in EVs. Let’s add 1000 lbs here and there. Sure, the electricity is cleaner than the gas, but you’re also using it as an excuse to increase the weight of the vehicle and consume more electricity.

    And because infrastructure impact is proportional to the 4th power of the weight of the vehicle per axle, if you double the mass of the vehicle, you increase its infrastructure impact (roads, etc.) by 16x. What emissions you save in gas you end up making up for in increased asphalt or concrete. But nobody wants to say that part out loud because nobody wants to break the news that addressing climate change will require a change in lifestyle. We can choose that change or have it imposed upon us, but it has to change. Mass transit and bikes and walking with some cars vs, what? Texas is burning like California right now, but we’re going to keep selling the message that we can keep on as we’ve been keeping on, just swap that F-150 for the Lightning version and it’ll all be good. But it won’t. Not even close. And that’s depressing.

  68. 68.

    geg6

    @trollhattan:

    Heh.  My first car was a Vega.  Orange with a white racing stripe.  It was only a couple years old when I got it.  It leaked everything except gas.  My older sister borrowed and totaled it.  I used the insurance money to get a Chevette.  A marginally better buy.

  69. 69.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Martin: You sound like my sociology professor, who often commented/ ranted about “mandatory car ownership”  and its hidden costs in the suburbs.

    He lived in Hyde Park ( Chicago) and biked to Union Station to grab a train to Naperville to teach.

  70. 70.

    gene108

    @Kay:

    would love if someone asked Ted Cruz which 1960s SCOTUS decisions are his least favorite:

    In think for almost all Republicans (greater than 90%), in 2022, all the 1950’s and 1960’s Warren Court and the chief justice after him’s decisions were all bad and led to terrible outcomes that have totally destroyed society.

    Brown makes legal discrimination harder, so conservatives are just left to pick on transgender kids, which is a smaller portion of the population than non-whites, and not bake cakes for gay people.

    Loving is the basis for gay marriage

    Miranda, IIRC from growing up in the 1980’s was responsible for the explosion in crime from the 1970’s to mid-1990’s. I remember hearing about how police couldn’t do their jobs anymore and crooks always skated on technicalities.

    Also, I think almost all Republican politicians are mostly interchangeable sock puppets for their wealthy donors. What they believe as individuals does not matter. At the end of the day, any Republican politician will fall in line with what their donors want.

  71. 71.

    NotMax

    @tom

    Yup yup. Hybrid XL.

    @

    Nothing similar crossed the lips of the dealer folk. Salesman did let slip it was the first one he’d seen that had the optional bed mat.

  74. 74.

    Martin

    @Mike E: I have a Reise and Mueller Homage. It’s a high-end bike with all the bells and whistles. Belt drive, hub transmission, full suspension, all that jazz. I’ve never had a high-end car (never even paid $20K for a car before), but I got a high end bike. If I was going to make this move, I needed to make sure I’d look forward to the bike over the car. That’s just how I work.

    I put ebikes into 3 categories:

    Low end: $1000 or less. Basically a standard bike with a battery pack over the rear wheel and a hub motor. Perfectly good choice. Not fast, might struggle with hills, but cheap and if you decide you like biking, easy to sell and trade up from because your sunk costs are low.

    Mid range: $1000-$5000. Lot of variety here. You can get batteries integrated into the frame, belt drive, motor in the body rather than the hub, more power to climb hills, options for class 3 bikes that can do 28MPH, which sounds dangerous but often keeps you up with traffic, which I feel is less dangerous. Lots of different tradeoffs to make here. If you don’t have hills, you can downgrade the motor and upgrade something else. This is the fat part of the car replacement market. You can get folding bikes here, you can get off-road bikes here. This is a good place for a comfortable daily commuter or a higher end bike for fun.

    High end: $5K up. This is the no compromise area. I have a fancy computer on mine so I can see my battery charge on my watch. I have a full suspension including the rack so my shit doesn’t bounce around (groceries, etc.). Belt drive which is quiet and reliable. The transmission changes gears with a button and will automatically downshift to a gear of my choice when coming to a stop so I’m in the right gear when I start. Disk brakes. Integrated bike lock keyed the same as the battery lock. It’s overkill, but it allowed me to get rid of my car, and sometimes you need some emotional payoff to do that. Set me back about $9K. Sounds expensive, but insurance is much less (rider on homeowners), no gas, almost no maintenance, and the maintenance is much cheaper (new set of tires is under $100). Saved $800/yr on parking at work. Taken together, it’s $2K-$3K cheaper per year to operate than my car, so it would pay for itself in about 5 years, even assuming a car was free to buy. As it is, it’s half the cost of the cheapest car you can buy, and ¼ the median cost. I would argue that it’ll hold its value better, but I sold a 16 year old car for half of what I paid for it, so in the current environment, the car is holding value quite well. I don’t expect that to last. We’ll hit a point that a gas car is a liability, and resale value will plummet. No idea when that’ll be.

    My wife was concerned how we’d get lumber home and on and on. And yeah, it’s poorly suited to that task, but the savings are MORE than enough to pay for delivery a couple times per year, or to rent a vehicle. It just requires us to think differently about how to do that stuff.

  75. 75.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I want KBJ to retort to a GOPig  at some point ‘I will have you call me Judge Jackson if you’re nasty.’ Also, to Blackburn in particular, ‘I like whiskey. You like whiskey don’t you Marsha?’ BTW does Marsha Blackburn ever comb her hair. She seems to have bedhead every damn day.

  76. 76.

    WaterGirl

    @Martin: Also, it’s a different world for males than it is for females.

    edit: I’m 5’3″ and a very long time ago my 6’5″ boyfriend could not understand why I locked the door as soon as I walked in the house.  He judged me for that.  He was not my boyfriend for much longer.

  77. 77.

    texasdoc

    @Martin: I agree that increased bike use is important, but there is a lot of work to do to make drivers aware of cyclists, so that it is safer.  I lost one of my friends from med school just this weekend, a hit and run.

  78. 78.

    sab

    I really really wish my granddaughters couldn’t see this horrible confirmation hearing of this amazingly qualified candidate.

  80. 80.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin:

    My miles driven per year dropped something like 3/4 when LA Metro opened a train station across the street from my work.  One thing I’ve really noticed is how much of a hassle car ownership really is.  That’s not to say the convenience of being able to go directly to your destination isn’t important, but owning a car is a bunch of work:

    • Maintenance and repairs take time, even if it’s just dropping the car off at the mechanic.
    • Fueling, washing, etc.
    • Traffic
    • Time spent looking for and walking to and from parking.

    I was really surprised by the parking issue a couple of years ago when going to a restaurant near downtown LA.  I had thought about taking public transit, but I wasn’t sure about walking from the train stop to the restaurant.  It turned out that all the parking near the restaurant was full.  All the time I might have saved by driving rather than taking the train was wasted looking for a parking place, which wound up being further from the restaurant than the train station.  That’s an extreme example, but people who talk about how convenient cars are have selective amnesia about all the time they spend dealing with the hassles of car ownership.

    Not to mention that cars are only as convenient as they are because we’ve engineered our cities to make them convenient.  Those massive parking lots around every business that make cars more convenient than other forms of transportation represent a societal choice to privilege car ownership.

  82. 82.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Martin:

    @eclare: It’s a catch 22, though. It’s the equivalent of ‘I have to carry a gun because everyone else carries a gun’.

    The only way to win is to not play.

    It very much depends on where you live.  I live in northern Calvert County, MD, and in 20+ years in this area, I’ve never once felt unsafe riding the back roads of northern Calvert and southern Anne Arundel counties.

    But before then, we lived in Bristol down on the VA/TN line.  I didn’t ride on the roads down there because it just wasn’t safe at all.  If it hadn’t been for the Virginia Creeper Trail (a really nice bike trail from Abingdon through Damascus, VA to Whitetop mountain), I’d have done no cycling at all when I lived there.

  85. 85.

    Roger Moore

    @JaySinWa:

    I don’t understand that part of the statement.

    There are way more parking spaces than vehicles.  Think about every place near you that has parking.  For cars to be really convenient, each of those places needs enough parking spaces to accommodate everyone who will park there on a typically busy day.  But each place is busy at different times, so there’s a lot of duplication.  Churches are an especially egregious example.  They need enough parking for the whole congregation, even though they’ll only be remotely full one day a week.  When you add up all those parking spaces, it is several times- 8 according to Martin, who I’m sure has numbers to back it up- as many as the number of cars.

  88. 88.

    sab

    Off topic. I have used a cast iron chicken fryer for at keast 50 years. I just bought an actual dutch oven a month ago. The chicken fryer has a lid with the handle on top. The dutch oven has two handles on the side.

    I tried to sneak some herbs into the pot of the new dutch oven. Couldn’t just lift the lid like on the chicken fryer.  Nudged it aside to dump stuff in. Big mistake. Scalding hot, and I mean scalding.

    So accidentally seriously scalded my right paw, because i didn’t lift the lid with two potholders to put stufff in. Serious scald. Thumb is covered with blisters, and it hurt like hell all last night. Oozing blisters today. Hope no infections in my future.

  89. 89.

    burnspbesq

    If you have friends or family north and east of Austin, you may not hear from them for a while. Tornadoes in Round Rock, Taylor, Granger, Elgin.

    The one that touched down in Round Rock moved across I-35 in the middle of rush hour. One of the local TV stations had a crew there to see it.

  90. 90.

    Martin

    @Roger Moore: The US has more land area dedicated to parking than to housing. We don’t have a housing crisis, we have a parking crisis. And it’s pretty clear what Americans value based on our policies. Lots of policies to ensure there’s plenty of parking. And not only aren’t there policies to ensure there’s housing, there are policies to ensure there *isn’t* housing, because that’s how you drive up home prices. That’s what R1 zoning ultimately does.

  94. 94.

    eclare

    @burnspbesq:   Thanks.  A friend in Dallas said his power was out, I texted back why and haven’t heard back.  Assume he’s trying to save battery life.

  97. 97.

    Kirk Spencer

    @Martin: On the other hand…

    I’m on the up side of 60. I live 22 miles from where I work – wanted to get something closer, but after 30 attempts to be ‘first’ I took what I could get. I have to be at work well before the sun rises, and my workday is 10 to 12 hours long. (Man, that depresses me when I write it out. But I digress.) There is no bike-specific route, and none of the route options are bike-safe along their lengths.

    What I’d love is a good mass transit. Except, well, Dallas isn’t terrible. It’d just take me 2.5 hours each way to make those 22 miles. (4 block walk to bus. bus to train. Train to train. Train to bus. Bus to bus. half a block walk to the work entrance.) Oh wait, it’d be longer. Because I’d have to start during maintenance hours to be at work before 5.

    I’m not unique in this. But while your statements weren’t sanctimonious, I’ve heard far too much scoffing of how I could find a way if I wanted from people who don’t work in a physical labor field 10-12 hours a day. So I raise the counterpoint – and vent, just a little.

  99. 99.

    Kirk Spencer

    @eclare: I’m on the east side of Dallas. The wind I hear outside is quite audible.

    I’m not going out to strike up a conversation.

  101. 101.

    eclare

    @sab:   Ouch!  Best wishes for healing.  Might be worth it to go to a minor med for pain relief and antibiotic cream.

  102. 102.

    Martin

    @texasdoc: Sorry to hear that. I’ve lost two friends to motorists.

    The problem isn’t that motorists need to be more aware of cyclists, it’s that cities need to design road networks so they don’t need to be. And this isn’t a new thing. The first protected bike lanes in the US were in Davis CA back in the 60s. CA has had studies and road design patterns for pedestrians and cyclists going back to the early 70s. We know how to solve this, and bike infrastructure is cheap. The whole reason that Brussels built out bike infrastructure was that they were broke. They couldn’t afford to build car infrastructure.

    But traffic is a great way for your city council to get voted out. So it’s a catch-22. Solve the traffic problem with bikes, and you get voted out because the folks who insist on driving even when they have faster alternatives get mad. So, we add more infrastructure for cars, which we can’t afford, and which doesn’t help, because we take the benefits of the better infrastructure and buy bigger cars. The US is the only industrialized country right now where pedestrian deaths are rising because we’ve swapped out hatchbacks for pickups and SUVs with big fucking A pillars and shit visibility, plus double the kinetic energy. And what people don’t understand is that a big truck has the same contact patch as a hatchback but a lot more weight, so it takes longer to stop from a given speed than a lighter car, which results in more pedestrian fatalities. But are we reducing vehicle speed limits to compensate for this? No. Are we widening lanes to improve visibility? No, we’re doing the opposite – narrowing them so we can squeeze another in.

    And my two friends that died, the driver wasn’t charged. It was an ‘accident’. A car has about the same kinetic energy as a stick of dynamite or a couple of hand grenades. And we’re okay with people using them carelessly because they have to be used so frequently. And so many people have no alternative, because there’s no bus, or train, or trolly, or safe bike lane. We tolerate it because we give ourselves no choice but to.

    But I don’t need to tolerate it.

  103. 103.

    Kirk Spencer

    @sab: I’ve done that. You have my sympathy for the upcoming couple of weeks. And from that experience, please consider talking to a doctor if the blisters even think about getting infected.

  106. 106.

    sab

    @Kirk Spencer: Your blisters thought? Mine are stupid. Stupider than my thumb which never thinks about anything.

    I will keep an eye on them ( the blisters.)

  107. 107.

    Martin

    @Kirk Spencer: Oh, yeah, cars aren’t going away. Everyone is going to need them at least once in a while, if not regularly like you.

    The problem is that we’ve created a trap – the people that really need something like a pickup truck are getting fucked over by the people who don’t. It’s not the bike riders pushing or the folks worried about climate change. We could accommodate the pickup trucks and the folks that really need to use their vehicles if not for all the people who pretend to need them. But nobody wants to do what’s right for the greater whole. No, we’re all rugged individualists, and don’t need to think about the impacts of our decisions on anyone else. Honestly, the best thing that people who really need a pickup could do is demand they be classified as commercial vehicles, pay the extra in registration fees and kick out 90% of pickup owners from the club. But they won’t do that.

    See also: guns.

  108. 108.

    Roger Moore

    @Kirk Spencer:

    I don’t think Martin is dismissive of people in your situation.  The problem is that some of your difficulties are caused by cars as much as they’re solved by them.  If fewer people had cars, we’d have to compensate by making public transit better, especially by increasing frequency of service.  Just a guess, but I’m betting a big chunk of the 2 1/2 hours it would take you to get to work by public transit is waiting for connections to lines that run infrequently, and that would improve with more frequent service.  If we didn’t need to devote so much space to parking, we could have denser cities that would make your commute shorter and would make good public transit that much easier.

    The point is that we’ve collectively made a choice that makes cars not just desirable but practically necessary.  You need a car because your life would be impractical without one.  So do most of the people around you.  To make all those cars work, we have to add a ton of parking, which makes our cities sprawl.  Sprawl makes cars more necessary, which makes parking necessary.  It’s a vicious circle that can only be solved by collective action.

  109. 109.

    Martin

    @Baud: Basically everywhere you don’t want to be at that moment. When you’re at work, your extra spots are at restaurants, sport stadiums, the mall, churches. When you want to be at the mall, your extra spots are at work, churches. When you want to be at church, your extra spots are at work, the mall.

    You see how this works?

  111. 111.

    Geminid

    @Honus: I listened to WINA on my commute this morning and caught  the story there.

    That’s a good news source. I have friends in Charlottesville who have traded in “old media” like radio and TV for podcasts and documentaries. I catch about five minutes of WINA local news a week and know more about what’s going on in their town than they do, and I live twenty five miles away.

    But I’m glad you commented, because I’ve been wanting to ask you to shoot me a text. I can’t pull up your number from my phone.

  112. 112.

    Ken

    Is it wrong of me to feel schadenfreude at seeing Mike Huckabee hawking sleep-aid pills on late-night MeTV commercials?

  114. 114.

    Mike E

    @Martin: Nice, thanks. I like riding bikes, but was never a “cyclist” so to me they are a means to an end that I’d gladly add an electric motor to without batting an eye or get indignant about it.

    As far as the lumber question: I recently purchased a bargain mattress from a warehouse store and ponied up the extra $60 to rent a U-Haul van to bring it home where Miss E lent a hand to help me switch out the beds (we drove the old one to a local cat adoption themed thrift store). Only gas prices spiking up will make Americans break the nasty habit of driving aimlessly and get serious about making the transition to a sane energy policy/lifestyle.  About damn time.

  117. 117.

    Ohio Mom

    If you’ve ever seen a map of the trolley systems we had before Detroit went on their campaign against public transportation (the better to sell more cars), well, Martin is right, we’ve created our car dependency through changing the built environment.

    My dream is to spend my dotage in a walkable neighborhood that has a reliable, frequent bus route. There are a few neighborhoods in Cincinnati that could work for me and my family.

    I hate driving but I am hardly a good candidate for a bike. There are a lot of us who for various reasons — disability, living in a snow belt, having to transport children, working far from home, living in an extremely hilly area, etc. — are never going to be bikers.

  119. 119.

    Kirk Spencer

    @sab: Of course they think. Don’t yours?

    I mean, they outsmarted me often, maneuvering to make contact with things just to watch me yelp. Well, detect me yelp. I never saw an eye on a blister.

  121. 121.

    Fair Economist

    @Martin: I love biking to places (just a pedal bike, not an e-bike) but my issue is definitely safety. Even though I live next to a bike path, there are relatively few destination I can truly safely bike to. I can do my drugstore and the local town center, which is basically restaurants as far as I’m concerned, a Barnes and Noble and a (very pricey) Mother’s supermarket. My doctor’s and regular supermarkets require dealing with traffic sewers. I did bike to a jury duty appointment once, which took a lot of sidewalk riding. So I’m staying car-light; we still have two cars although I’m only putting 20 miles a week on my car. Since my husband drives a Tesla, we laugh at high gas prices. We literally go two months between needing fill-ups.

  123. 123.

    danielx

    @Martin:

    Truth. Read a quote from an auto salesman to the effect that pickup truck owners come in two varieties: 1) those who need them for work and 2) assholes. As a practical matter, I will guarantee that big shiny jacked up trucks do NOT get used for work – too likely to get scratched up on a construction site.

  124. 124.

    MagdaInBlack

    @danielx: The salesperson is correct, and you are correct about the vanity trucks. 25 years in the collision repair business has taught me both are true.

  126. 126.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Ken: The only people you should feel sorry for in this scenario are the marks buying the shitty product Fuckabee is hawking.

  128. 128.

    Fair Economist

    @Roger Moore: One of the things I noticed when I deliberately started walking or biking when reasonable and safe was the enormous amount of space wasted on parking spots, which are all empty most of the time. Those endless parking lots look horrible, and I’m acutely aware of how much of my walking time is because I have to walk past all those ugly empty lots.

  129. 129.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @danielx: My family is thinking about getting for our cabin in northern WI.  Something old and dented that can haul wood, take things to the dump, etc.

  134. 134.

    Fair Economist

    @sab: Ouch, sorry about the burns.

    I got a cookbook a while back which frequently recommends cooking things in stovetop pans  – in the oven. Of course I remember to use a potholder to get it out of the oven but after juggling other parts of meal prep sometimes i forget the handle can stay very hot for some time afterwards. The second time I burnt myself on the handle after forgetting that I decided to not put stovetop pans in the oven anymore, and I modify the recipes to do all the cooking on the range now. Never got a burn as bad as yours; I’d second the recommendation to have it checked out.

  137. 137.

    danielx

    @Raven:

    I was thinking of you and Ozark while I was trying to edit my earlier comment with qualifiers. I get that, people drive pickups for all kinds of reasons and blanket statements are usually wrong.* But – neighbors across the street have two. One a Jeep Gladiator which is a pickup truck in name only, and a loaded GMC/Chevy crew cab (big v8 etc etc) which is a $65k+ vehicle. I have never seen either one used to carry a damn thing in the bed. They’re nice enough people, but why buy a vehicle these days which might get 15 to the gallon on a good day if you don’t have a really good reason?

    *Okay, “all Republicans are assholes” has some merit.

  138. 138.

    laura

    @Mike E: I have a Coppenhagen Wheel on my step-through old lady station wagon bike with panniers and it rocks my world! Spouse is a serious bikey guy who routinely logs 500+ miles per month; and is on track for 750 miles for March Madness; and this bike allows me to keep up with him on occasions in which we ride together. I’d strongly recommend you check your local bike shops which distribute the Coppenhagen Wheel. Swear to God, you turn the pedal and your hair flies out and the years start falling away and suddenly, the joy of riding a bike is so wonderful. Try it, you’ll like it.

  141. 141.

    Ruckus

    @Martin:

    That’s depressing. It may be but this is the life we have and until we put in tracks for reasonable electric trains and while an electric bus will not have the total cost per mile as an electric car, what other real choice do we have at this time? Rebuild all the housing in say LA county to high rise so we don’t need to drive as far as often? Maybe if humans weren’t involved… Our country is spread out, even in most every big city area, we had land, we’ve used it. That isn’t going to change for most of us. And what if you live in east bumfuck nowhere? I moved a mile away from where I worked, when I worked, and walked, now it’s food and doctor visits for most of my travel, but I’m the exception, not the rule. In many other countries they have better rapid transit than I have available to me but in this country, with very few exceptions what I have is as good as it gets. Electric cars are an advantage over gas cars but it might be, likely will be 20 yrs before they are the majority and it will be better. Now if you can have a bike or an electric bike that will be far better. But not all of us can do that. Just like not all of us can afford an electric car. Should we have started earlier? Absofuckinglutely, but we didn’t. So other than the above I don’t know what to tell you. It is what it is, is making the best of it better than ignoring the entire thing completely? Oh and by the way, do you expect any of the conservative members of our society to at least try, or are they going to still attempt to be the worst possible in this situation like they have in every other situation?

  144. 144.

    JaySinWa

    @Martin:

    Thanks for explaining the 8x derivation.

    @Roger Moore:

    Yes I understand that parking is larger than the area of a car, I was more interested in the 8x claim. So there is a study for that, but I would quibble that this doesn’t address per capita car ownership trends.

    The small city that I live in is reducing the required parking for housing units based on the coming light rail, and actual demographic changes with fewer younger people driving cars. The parking for existing structures rarely change even as occupancy  changes so it may be a push.

    The new construction around me has notably fewer parking spaces per occupant (single family replaced with 7-12 unit townhomes one garage space per unit, more cars but higher density, plus large apartment units with less than 1 space per unit under construction). Second car owners overflow to on street parking to some extent, but the hassles associated with that combined with better transit will drive down car ownership per capita locally long term IMHO.

    Unfortunately it is not yet practical for us to be car free, but we have downsized to one car without too much pain.

  146. 146.

    Jager

    @trollhattan:

    My old man was a Ford Dealer, he sold a rural mail carrier a base Maverick 2 door, the only option was an automatic transmission, The guy delivered mail in it for 390,000 miles. It was started 6 days a week at 7 AM, it ran all day as he delivered the mail (out in the country he drove it from the right side of the bench front seat) until just past 3 in the afternoon. He changed the oil/filters every 3,000 miles, kept it tuned up, etc. When he traded it in, Ford bought it from the old man because they were stunned it lasted so long.

  149. 149.

    Fair Economist

    I will point out it is *absolutely* possible to regear from cars to bikes. That’s what the Dutch did. They were almost as car-dependent as us in the 70’s but they had a social movement to change things because they, correctly, realized accepting the traffic deaths was immoral.

  150. 150.

    JaySinWa

    @JaySinWa: OTOH our bike “safety” is mostly painting bike lanes along with road diets. But it’s one of those chicken and egg things, not enough bike traffic to warrant barriers, not enough safety (and good weather) to make biking safe.

  153. 153.

    Ruckus

    @Roger Moore:

    There are 3 churches within 1/2 mile of my house on one strip of road and all 3 have more than enough parking for the total number of cars that park at all of them on Sunday. Heathens do not go to church, and I see this every week when I walk by the churches.

  154. 154.

    Ruckus

    @danielx:

    I run out of fingers to count all the jacked up full sized 4x4s I see every time I go for a walk here in SoCal. In the first five minutes. I know people who have pickups. The people I know actually use them as intended and 3  actually have small pickups, Chevy S10s. But the vast majority are just late model expensive show off/dick measuring trucks. Personally I’ve owned more 4 cyl economy cars than anything else but they are still money pits, just of different sizes, costs and space.

  156. 156.

    Martin

    @JaySinWa: One car per household would be an excellent target, especially if that one is an EV. That would cut the number of cars in the US by more than half. That would start to be the kind of meaningful impact we need. Unfortunately just switching to EVs doesn’t get the US where we need to be.

    And I’ll repeat again. I still have a car. I just have fewer, but more efficient cars, and I use them less often.

  157. 157.

    Martin

    @Ruckus: No, you’ve nailed the problem. We put it off. Instead of public solutions we shoved the problem on citizens. And we tried to protect people by not taking a more aggressive stance, which actually makes it worse for the public because when it does get dealt with, it’ll be in a crisis fashion.

    Those people who live way out in the weeds. They’re fucked. I wish they weren’t, but they are. They’ll stick with their gas, and the price of gas will soar, be it from carbon taxes or simply the market contracting. 25% of gas stations in the US have already closed. You know who will always have a gas station nearby? People in cities, because of density. You know who is losing their gas stations? Folks who live out in the weeds. And that’s going to be the trend.

    But what I advocate for does help with the problem. Instead of huge subsidies for middle class urban homeowners to buy Teslas, don’t do that. Give them subsidies for bikes. They’re urban. Build them mass transit. They’re urban. Save the subsidies for the F-150 lightning for the guy who needs to move a ton of hay every week. He needs it. See, the cities are in one way or another going to get on top of this, because cities are efficient. And in terms of transportation, they’re really cheap.

    The folks in East Jesus Texas, they’re fucked. They need that truck, but they won’t have a gas station to fill it up at. That’s already started. Or they’ll have to drive 15 miles each way to fill up and burn that first gallon and an hour of each week. And that’s the best case scenario. Alternatively, they’ll address climate change the way that Paradise did – by burning to the ground, and then relocating to a city. Or flooding. Or getting wiped out by a tornado, or simply dying of heat stroke because it hit 120 with 95% humidity, and the power grid buckled under the load.

    There’s a lot of ways this is going to end. It can end in a way where we accept some changes in lifestyle and make some sacrifices or it can end by wiping out the people who won’t or can’t.

    Do I expect conservative members to try? No of course not. I expect they’ll start dying and then complain that nobody did anything, like they did when Texas froze. Not doing anything is a choice, and it’s the choice that leads to disaster. But it’s still a choice. I take no pleasure in this but the parts of the country most vulnerable to climate change is the southeast – Texas to Florida. Storms and flooding (Houston, etc.) will be bad enough, but add a few more degrees to your summer highs and crank the humidity up ever closer to 100% and a power outage will kill thousands.

    Rural communities will shrink and urban ones will grow, one way or another.

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