Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

“But what about the lurkers?”

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

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

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Bark louder, little dog.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

The revolution will be supervised.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

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Saturday Afternoon Open Thread: Crystal Flute Flaunt, Doubling Down On the ‘Disrespect’

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Somewhere, a Very Serious Cultural Guardian started bleeding from every orifice, and they didn’t know why.

As a proud Irish-American, I have been accused of not knowing when to let go, but there are levels here.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Major Impacts

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Congratulations, Sir Elton John

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We Already Have the Attorney General This Country Needs

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Sorry, John, but I feel the need to rebut this line from your (otherwise) most excellent post.

Letitia James, the Attorney General this country needs…

No, this guy is the Attorney General this country needs.  But Tish James is doing a damn fine job as the AG for New York.

Open Thread: Merrick Garland

And I hope she nails the bastard.  And his grown-ass “children” – will no one think of the children?

Open thread.

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A Programming Note on the Dept. of Justice.

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I am not a Lawyer. I am, however, a Programmer — also known as a Coder — by education, and trade.

And it occurs to me that the debate over Garland’s DoJ (in)action, is a lot like the debates on writing code.

Balloon Juice readers have years of experience with applications built on code that means well, but has real flaws. Watergirl (among many) has done amazing work to keep the ship here, upright, in the face of some real “oops” in the areas of technology this blog requires.

Yet the level of coding you need to keep a blog up, is not the same level you need to keep an airplane up. The risks for the former coming down are, well, very obviously different.

So, too, the risks around the work centered on Former President Trump and his acolytes. I can only imagine — again, as a non-lawyer — how much work it takes to ensure these cases don’t fall out of the air.

And yet: that’s Justice.

Justice — real Justice, not the stuff we get on TV, or in my fave comic books — isn’t Vengeance. It isn’t swift. It sure as hell isn’t satisfactory from an emotional POV. I’ve not met a lot of Public Defenders, but they don’t strike me as a happy go-lucky bunch of people. Delivering people from poor decisions — including jailing them over those decisions — is work.

Justice takes time. And that means toxic people have chances to disrupt it. To derail it. To shutter it. We saw that with both how the Muller Investigation didn’t have the best start, and certainly was torpedoed in the ending, assisted by a GOP-addled Fourth Estate unable to process nuance and deflection.

I’ve seen something like rushed Justice, in the code that built wobbly Applications. So much of what we’ve built this Internet on is rushed, for a host of reasons. That rush makes it easy to exploit — again, as so many here will recall, just recently.

Garland cannot afford exploits. The code — the legal arguments — this DoJ writes, must be solid. Not solely, as some many has said, because of Democracy being on the line — rather, the reputation for impartial Justice in America, is on the line.

That is the reputation that these Authoritarian Asswipes should fear! Good laws, and wise enforcement, are critical to protecting Democracy. Bad laws? Well, from Dred Scott to Dobbs, we’ve seen how they rip up the landscape of Democracy.

And that is why it pains me to also say this: far too much of what happens in courtrooms in America, is Not Justice. And that’s relevant, as well.

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Domestic Terrorism Open Thread: Congratulations, ‘Libs of TikTok’!

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For the past month and more, Chaya Raichik and her far-right running buddies have been ginning up a campaign of terrorism against Boston Children’s Hospital. Today, the FBI arrested one of the bigots Raichik convinced that a world-renowned facility treating kids with cancer, heart problems, and other life-threatening illnesses deserved to be targeted ‘because they want to cut little girls’ breasts off’. (Which is, of course, a lie, but guaranteed to scare the transphobes.)

This is great news for Raichik — tons of earned media advertising her site for any confused haters who need a ‘safe space’ to plan attacks on the people and institutions they fear! It would be less great if there was any chance that the social media platforms which she uses to monetize her bigotry might shut her down, but CLICKS FREE SPEECH, everybody…

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Joint Filing Has Been Submitted, No Response Yet to DOJ Filing on Thursday from Corrupt Judge

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No big surprises, as far as I can tell.

The only surprise for me is that neither side appears to have directly responded to the request made by the judge after the DOJ filed on Thursday.

Question for the attorneys:  Don’t both sides have to respond TODAY to the Thursday request from the judge?

From the New York Times

The Justice Department and lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump failed to agree on Friday on who could serve as an independent arbiter to sift through documents the F.B.I. seized from Mr. Trump’s Florida club and residence last month.

In a eight-page joint filing that listed far more points of disagreement than of consensus, the two sides exhibited sharply divergent visions for what the arbiter, known as a special master, would do.

The Justice Department proposed two former Federal District Court judges for the position: Barbara S. Jones, a retired jurist from New York who was tapped to perform a similar role in evaluating documents seized from two personal lawyers of Mr. Trump, Michael S. Cohen in 2017 and Rudolph W. Giuliani in 2021; and Thomas B. Griffith, who retired from the bench in the District of Columbia in 2020.

Mr. Trump’s legal team countered with two alternatives, retired Federal District Court judge, Raymond J. Dearie, who sat in the Eastern District of New York and once served as the top federal prosecutor there. They also suggested Paul Huck Jr., a former deputy attorney general in Florida who also served as general counsel to Gov. Charlie Crist, who was a Republican at the time.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who ordered the parties to produce a list of qualified candidates by midnight Friday, will decide who will be tapped for the job. She will also set the parameters of the review.

The two sides also clashed substantially over the duties of the special master. Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the arbiter should look at all the documents seized in the search and filter out anything potentially subject to attorney-client or executive privilege.

By contrast, the government argued that the master should look only at unclassified documents and should not adjudicate whether anything was subject to executive privilege.

The dispute over the special master’s purview was reflected in an appeal the Justice Department filed on Thursday asking that the judge lift part of her order temporarily barring it from using the documents in its investigation until the arbiter’s work was done.

The department asked an appeals court to overturn that part of that order that applied to about 100 documents marked as classified, and asked Judge Cannon to hold off on enforcing that same part while the appeal unfolded. The upshot would be that the investigation could resume using only the documents with classification markings.

Judge Cannon has not yet decided whether to comply with the government’s request, which the Justice Department argued was necessary in part because separate national-security assessments were inextricably bound to that effort.

Open thread.

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