Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

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

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

When we show up, we win.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: April 3, 2024

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On The Road – BigJimSlade – Kauai 2015, Helicopter tour, south side

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BigJimSlade

Ok, I’ve been thinking about posting pictures from our Kauai trip from 2015 for so long that I could swear I’ve done it. I searched the site and couldn’t find anything, so let’s go for it. If I’ve done this already and it was lost in the incredible site kablooie of a while back, we can call it an episode of Best of OTR.

Anyway, this trip was why I bought a decent camera*! I was super excited to see the Na Pali coast, and to take a helicopter trip around the island, and my iPhone 4, or whatever I had at the time (maybe a 6), wasn’t going to cut it.

Let’s get straight to the helicopter (we went with Jack Harter Helicopters – it was great!). We went with an open-door helicopter that seats 4 guests + pilot. I got the perfect seat, back on the right side (you don’t get a choice, they seat you in a way to balance the aircraft). You go clockwise around the island, so I was in hog heaven having the best views (they do make circles and turn around in spots so everyone gets a good view of the best spots). My wife was up in front between the pilot and another passenger, and got nauseous right away for the whole hour. Fortunately, I had no idea about that until we landed, lol.

Today we’ll just cover the south side of the island. You’ll have to tune again tomorrow for the Na Pali coast :-)

*Olympus OM-D E-M1 (catchy name, huh?), the original 2013 version, which I still use, but since then I’ve got a bunch more lenses. For this trip I had only a pancake Panasonic 12-32mm (full frame equivalent of 24-64mm, this being an M43 camera).

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On The Road - BigJimSlade - Kauai 2015, Helicopter tour, south side 9

Taking off, from Lihue. You can see my feet are in the helicopter by about an inch. You rise up fast and you immediately gulp and think, yikes, what am I in for?!! I was kinda terrified, but also absolutely thrilled. View larger.

Late Night Open Thread: RFK Jr Gets Some More of the Attention He So Craves

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The [unpaywalled] MSN / Washington Post, last Friday – “Cesar Chavez’s family tells RFK Jr. to stop using activist’s name, image”:

The family of labor activist Cesar Chavez sent a letter to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday, warning him to stop referencing the late patriarch in election campaigns or face potential legal action.

The letter, signed by Cesar Chavez’s eldest son, Fernando, reiterates the family’s support for President Biden, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of the labor union leader, leads Biden’s reelection campaign.

“We respectfully call upon you and your campaign to cease using images of our father to associate yourself with him and suggest your campaign’s goals are compatible,” Fernando Chavez writes.

The letter comes a day before Kennedy is set to host a campaign event in Los Angeles on Cesar Chavez’s birthday to launch a Latino outreach program. In promoting the event, Kennedy called Chavez a good friend…

Kennedy’s father famously supported the farmworkers’ strike that Chavez led in the 1960s and was present when Chavez broke his fast protesting the conditions.

In the letter, Fernando Chavez says the family remains grateful to the younger Kennedy for helping carry Chavez’s casket after his death in 1993, as did other prominent figures.

“To our knowledge, none of them have featured images carrying the casket in their political campaign materials and promotions,” Fernando Chavez writes. “We take offense at the use of such sacred moments purely for political purposes.” …

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War for Ukraine Day 769: Ukraine Strikes Deep Into Russia!

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A picture of a white cessna flying with a sunset sky behind it. The The caption is in yellow. Above the plane it reads; "CESSNA". Below the plane: "PENETRATING RUSSIAN AIR SPACE SINCE 1987".

Before we get started, just a couple of housekeeping items. First, than you all for the well wishes. However, I just want to make clear that I put the full disclosure in last night so that you all could decide whether my exposure and resulting issues colors my analysis. Also, just a quick note: Defense Base Act (DBA) is not actually workman’s comp for contractors deployed forward even if it is commonly referred to that way. While the person deployed is the person being insured, the actual beneficiary is the company. And the company decides if, should a DBA payout be made, they pocket it or they pass it along to their injured or wounded employee. Don’t even get me started on DBA fraud.

Second, I know a lot of you are trying to make sense of the Israeli strikes – there were three  covering around 2km of distance between the lead and rear vehicles – that hit the World Central Kitchen convoy last night. I highly recommend this republication of this Haaretz English article, which explains the gap between Israel’s official rules of engagement (ROE) and what is actually being done by Israeli forces. I recommend the repub because Haaretz is paywalled. I also recommend these two detailed Thread Reader App unrolls of long detailed threads. The first is by Dmitri Reader, the founder of +972 Magazine that includes extensive quotes from the two Haaretz articles about the strikes. The second is by Jeremy Konyndyk, the former head of disaster relief at USAID. I also recommend this detailed thread on Bibi and his extremist coalition’s attempt to convert Israel into a Hungarian style managed illiberal democracy and how they’re working to ram through a new law that will break the protests so they can use the state of emergency caused by the war to finish the job in the next several weeks. There’s an update post here. I apologize in advance, but there’s no Thread Reader App unroll for this thread. As a result I posted the links to one of the last surviving and working Nitter instances. Finally, as I write this, the humanitarian assistance missions in Gaza are grinding to a halt. The UAE, which was the primary financier of the humanitarian assistance coming by sea from Cyprus has temporarily suspended its support. 240 tons of food aid for the Gazans that was already making steam for the Gazan coast turned back to Cyprus this afternoon. World Central Kitch, as well as a large US based NGO doing humanitarian assistance have suspended their operations. All of this not because of the threat from Hamas or PIJ, but because they’re scared their people will get wounded or killed by the Israelis!

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

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While Trump is running around cosplaying Jesus, I am apparently playing the role of Noahm because it has rained nonstop the past few days and there is enough standing water in my backyard that the willow is gonna grow another two feet. And it’s not gonna stop any time soon, it appears. It’s bad enough that the mayor sent out a mass phone call asking people to just stay in town and not drive the surrounding roads because half of them are flooded.

And it’s not gonna end any time soon with rain predicted all week except for one day when they are predicting morning snow.

It goes without saying that I give all of this the middle finger.

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Repub Venality / Stupidity Open Thread: Trolls Under the Baltimore Bridge

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One of the ugliest features of MAGA politics is the eagerness to seize on large-scale accidents, disasters, and pandemics to spread conspiracy theories, invent new culture-war obsessions, and pit one region of the country against another…

Now, after the disastrous collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, MAGA figures and some GOP politicians are reviving that playbook yet again, in some cases with hateful, conspiratorial gusto. But this time the absurdities are of a next-level sort. That’s because the disaster, by severely hampering Baltimore’s port operations, is impacting regions and industries that rely on the port to export goods. Those include areas sometimes called “MAGA country,” places in the agricultural and industrial heartland throughout the Midwest.

In short, the Baltimore collapse demonstrates with unusual clarity that when it comes to calamities of this sort, we really are all in it together. That, of course, is exactly what the MAGA worldview seeks to deny at all costs—and is once again trying to do here.

This week, Pennsylvania GOP Representative Dan Meuser slammed President Biden for calling on Congress to fully fund the response to the Baltimore collapse. Meuser insisted it’s “outrageous” that Biden wants to fund repairs in their “entirety,” and even demanded that some of this money must be taken from “ridiculous E.V. expenditures.”

Presto: Meuser—who helped run Trump’s 2020 campaign in Pennsylvania and sowed doubts about Trump’s loss—converted the disaster into a zero-sum culture-war standoff between repairing essential transportation infrastructure and combating climate change…

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Why Is This “Hey, Cut Back on the Judge Shopping” Rule Only Advisory?

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Why is this new policy only advisory?  In every situation, it seems like it’s always the ones who need it most who blow things off.

Conference Acts to Promote Random Case Assignment

Published onMarch 12, 2024
The Judicial Conference of the United States has strengthened the policy governing random case assignment, limiting the ability of litigants to effectively choose judges in certain cases by where they file a lawsuit.

The policy addresses all civil actions that seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions, “whether by declaratory judgment and/or any form of injunctive relief.” In such cases, judges would be assigned through a district-wide random selection process.

“Since 1995, the Judicial Conference has strongly supported the random assignment of cases and the notion that all district judges remain generalists,” said Judge Robert J. Conrad, Jr., secretary of the Conference. “The random case-assignment policy deters judge-shopping and the assignment of cases based on the perceived merits or abilities of a particular judge. It promotes the impartiality of proceedings and bolsters public confidence in the federal Judiciary.”

In most of the nation’s 94 federal district courts, local case assignment plans facilitate the random selection of judges. Some plans assign cases to a judge in the division of the court where the case is filed. In divisions where only a single judge sits, these rules have made it possible for a litigant to pre-select that judge by filing in that division.

In a November 2021 letter, Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), and Patrick Leahy, a Vermont senator who since has retired, raised concerns about a concentration of patent cases filed in single-judge divisions.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., referenced this letter in his 2021 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, calling for a study of judicial assignment practices in patent cases.  (rest of the article os below the fold)

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