Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

I really should read my own blog.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Consistently wrong since 2002

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

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Hail To the Chief

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I don’t know where TaMara found this awesome photo, but I’m gonna use it every chance I get.

Auto Draft 97
So Bright They Had To Wear Shades

Timely guest post, thank you ema!

I have a story I think BJ readers might like:

I live within walking distance of Radio City Music Hall so, yesterday, I thought I should go there and take some pictures of the three Tenors Presidents for BJ. Unfortunately, it was impossible to make it even into the vicinity of the vicinity of the area because of security, the dump trucks were blocking the entire building, and I don’t have a telephoto lens or a fancy camera, so off back home I went, pictureless.

This morning, I step out of my building on my way to work and I see double barricades, a bunch of dump trucks, and a police officer guarding every nook and cranny on the street. This only happens when Bibi is in town for the UN General Assembly and he stays at a hotel up my street. I thought something similar might be happening, the NYPD officer guarding my building confirmed that President Biden was on my street, and off I went to work.

A quick aside: Why do these people insist on staying at that hotel is a bit of a mystery. I mean, it’s a nice place, don’t get me wrong, but it’s definitely not The Mark or The Carlyle. Maybe it has something to do with security arrangements?

Back to the story. I thought by the time I returned home all will be back to normal. Not even close! Just as I reached one end of my street , not only was everything still there, but an officer informed me that there’s a freeze order in place (meaning, nothing moves, you cannot go in/out even if you live on the street because they’re expecting the President to be on the move soon). This freeze can last anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour so I wasn’t too keen on it. Just as I was planning my next move – dig a tunnel, sneak into an adjacent building and rappel down to my apartment? – the motorcade starts moving, the presidential limousine passes by, people are clapping and cheering, and I’m waving with one hand and filming (askew) with the other.

And, since we more or less ran into each other, I took the opportunity to tell the President a few things (using my inner voice, of course, because what am I, a peasant who yells at passing cars and famous people?). This is what I “told” him:

1) Great job.
2) Good luck in November. BJ is working hard to reelect you, keep the Senate and flip the House.
3) Give Ukraine whatever it needs and then some.
4) Help the Gaza refugees.
5) In your second term, enough with appointing Republican AGs and SCs, they’re unprofessional.
6) Go for 15! (h/t Another Scott) Between Thomas’ corruption and Alito’s “Burn the Witches” legal arguments, the public is losing trust in the legal system.
7) Give extra scritches to Major, Commander, and Willow.

What would you tell President Biden if you had a chance encounter with him?

I hope you like it.

ema

I simply can not hear Hail to the Chief without thinking of this scene and hearing Dave’s lyrics.

Open thread!

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Open Thread: This and That

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Auto Draft 97
So Bright They Had To Wear Shades

This is from Thursday night’s fundraiser that sounded like it was Oscar/Grammy/WHCD level star quality in attendance.

 

 

I have my issues with Kyle Clark  – mostly having to do with some ill-advised remarks after the 2016 election (and no, not quite over that yet) – but for the most part, between his reporting, charity work and love of sharing good news stories, I do respect his work.  This was right on the mark.

Cleaning out some bookmarks:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UNqkfdsED44?feature=share

A life-sized killer whale was crafted using snow and sand at Jericho Beach. On Friday afternoon, the rain was no match for the beached whale, and it still stood.

Onlookers and beach walkers stopped to take in the work of art with some questioning if it was real from a distance.

More on the Vancouver snow sculptures here.

This guy made me laugh – and yes, when you read my obituary it will probably say, “cause of death, she tried to pet… (something large and unpettable for sure).”

This is an open thread

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We Live In Interesting Times

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If you were asked to paint a picture of Trump in a single sentence, it seems like this would be a pretty good one.

Is this too many words for a tombstone (when the time comes)?  I think the only change we’d need to make would be to change “he’s selling” to “he sold”.

He’s selling Bibles during Holy Week to cover his bills while manipulating the stock market with a pump and dump IPO and attacking the daughter of a judge with a story he fabricated.

Feel free to submit your own one-sentence summary in the comments.

How long can community notes last on twitter if they are going to disrupt things by pointing out the truth?

This is the only line I’ve seen from Biden’s Big Event last night, but I already know it’s my favorite.

.

CNN interview with Judge Reggie Walton.

(Media-ite) interview excerpts

Collins asked senior United States district Judge Reggie Walton why he decided to speak out.

“I think it’s important that, as judges, we speak out and say things in reference to things that conceivably are going to impact on the process, because if we don’t have a viable court system that’s able to function efficiently, then we have tyranny,” Walton said. “And I don’t think that would be good for the future of our country or the future of democracy in our country.”

COLLINS: What do you make of how the judge here, Judge Juan Merchan, didn’t include himself or his family in the gag order?

JUDGE WALTON: Yeah, I understand why he wouldn’t do that. I mean, again, I think we cannot make ourselves a part of the case. I mean, obviously, we are a part of the case because we’re presiding over the proceeding, but we can’t make the case and the issue about us. And that can be very difficult, but it comes with the territory.

COLLINS: You’re someone who has always been really straightforward in your assessment of the former president. If you read your comments when you’re sentencing people, when you’re in these cases, you once referred to him as a “charlatan” at the sentencing of a January 6 defendant. I know you’ve gotten a lot of those cases before you. You’ve said that you don’t think he cares about democracy, only power. That you once seemed to suggest you didn’t, you weren’t sure he’d accept defeat if he lost in this election. Do you still feel that way tonight?

JUDGE WALTON: I’d rather not comment on that. I mean, I’ve made those, you know, the comments I made in the context of the sentences I imposed because I’m hoping that what I say to the individuals who I’m sentencing will resonate with them and cause them to rethink the activity that they engaged in that brought them before the court, and hopefully deter them from engaging in further conduct of that nature in the future.

COLLINS: Have you been on the receiving end of more threats since you’ve had the January 6 defendants in your court?

JUDGE WALTON: Yes, I’ve had more threats than what used to be the case. Yes, I have received a greater number of threats as a result of that incident and the fact that cases arising out of that incident have appeared before me. I mean, it was rare. I’ve been a judge for over 40 years, and this is a new phenomenon. I’m not saying that it didn’t happen before, but it was very rare that I would ever receive any type of a threat, regardless of what type of cases I was handling. And unfortunately, that is no longer the case. I know the marshals service has seen a significant increase in the number of threats against judges, and I think, obviously, that’s very, very, very concerning.

Open thread.

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A Couple of Good Stories

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Elizabeth Lopatto rounds out her coverage of the SBF trial with a great final piece on that asshole:

At his sentencing, I sat several rows behind Bankman-Fried, clad in prison khaki and clanking faintly when he walked from the shackles on his feet, while he gave his statement to the court. “I’m sorry about what happened at every stage,” Bankman-Fried said. “I failed everyone I cared about.”

What Bankman-Fried did not say was that he had, in fact, committed crimes and he wouldn’t do it again. Instead, he talked about the “mistakes” he’d made, how he’d assisted the FTX customers in dealing with the bankruptcy estate, that he hadn’t actually engaged in witness tampering, and that, in fact, the FTX estate had “billions” more than necessary to repay the customers, and that has been true the whole time. He didn’t say a word about his lenders, two of which went bankrupt, or the investors, whose money is gone.

It struck me that Bankman-Fried was going with the strategy he’d outlined in a document, submitted as evidence by the prosecution. He was simply going to blame the bankruptcy lawyers, as outlined in points 4, 5, 6, and 9 in his little Google Doc.

SBF reminds me of the great line from Kathleen Edwards’ song In State:  “You wouldn’t be yourself if you weren’t telling a lie.”  (Another lyric:  “Maybe 20 years in state will change your mind” is also apropos, though this particular leopard probably isn’t going to change his spots.)

Another good piece: Mo Tkacik on Boeing’s quest to fire all their good quality inspectors and replace them with rubber stamps:

Few quality managers were as stubborn as Swampy [the Boeing whistleblower who recently “committed suicide]. A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the “bullying environment” in which defects had systematically “stopped being documented” by inspectors. They weren’t fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”

Boeing’s big customers like Emirates are demanding an engineer for the next CEO, but the next guy in line, Larry Culp, is a Harvard MBA.  The new head of Boeing commercial, Stephanie Pope, began her career there as a cost accountant and also has an MBA.  As the X-rays clearly show, this bone was broken long ago.  The MBAs came in and fucked Boeing.  The unfuck is going to be long and ugly, and it may not work.

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The Many Tragedies of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse

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I gritted my teeth and bought a Bulwark subscription. Andrew Eggers, “What Went Wrong on Dali?”:

What do you do if a man-made disaster turns out to be nobody’s fault?…

Eight workmen were on the bridge at the time; two were rescued, and six are now presumed dead. That the attempts to recover their bodies have so far been fruitless is a grim illustration of just how nasty a logistical problem the collapsed bridge presents—a tangle of twisted metal and concrete rubble submerged in murky water 50 feet deep. They don’t even have the Dali out yet. Pinned under huge trusses from the bridge, with crew unsure whether the ship is safe to navigate even if it were free, the massive vessel could take weeks to move.

Until the channel is cleared—to say nothing of the bridge being reconstructed—the economic damage will be significant. The vast majority of the Port of Baltimore’s shipping facilities are now cut off behind the wreckage of the bridge. Much Baltimore-bound commerce can be routed through other east-coast ports, but that means extra load on already stressed supply chains; meanwhile, according to White House estimates, 8,000 Baltimore longshoremen will be sitting on their hands…

Should the ship’s mechanical failure have been foreseeable? It’s too early to say, although you can bet investigators will find out. “It’s likely that virtually every pilot in the country has experienced a power loss of some kind [but] it generally is momentary,” Clay Diamond, executive director of the American Pilots’ Association, told USA Today this week. “This was a complete blackout of all the power on the ship, so that’s unusual. Of course this happened at the worst possible location.”

That’s the bottom line here: How flatly unlucky the Dali was at every turn. The worst possible location to lose power—after the tugs that turned it out to sea had detached, but before it was safely out of the harbor. The worst possible drift once it lost power—whether due to the position of the rudder, or wind, or current—apparently compounded by the ship’s response to the crew throwing it hard astern in a desperate attempt to slow it right before the crash.

Maybe they’ll find a culprit—some human error to pinpoint, some regulatory deficiency to address. But maybe the collapse of the Key Bridge will just prove one tragic and hugely costly demonstration that shipping has risks, and keeping those risks at acceptable levels isn’t the same as getting them to zero.

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Biden Threw A Party & *Everyone* Came…

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From USAToday, “‘A positive story to tell’: Obama and Clinton rip Trump, boost Biden at $26M NYC campaign fundraiser”:

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton joined President Joe Biden Thursday night in New York at the most lucrative fundraiser of the 2024 campaign, warning fellow Democrats that Donald Trump must be defeated while making forceful cases for Biden’s reelection.

“Joe is absolutely right that we’ve got not just a nominee, but frankly a party and an entire infrastructure that increasingly seems unconcerned with the essence of America,” Obama said of Trump and Republicans. “The idea of self-governance and the possibilities of us all fully operating and bridging our differences and moving forward.

“But we also have a positive story to tell about the future,” Obama added.

The three presidents took turns taking questions during an “armchair conversation” moderated by Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”…

“I think our democracy is at stake, not a joke. I think democracy is literally at stake,” Biden said. “Think about the things [Trump] has said, think about the things he wants to do.”

Biden added: “We’re at a real inflection point in history, things are changing. This guy denies there is global warming. This guy wants to get rid of not only Roe v. Wade − by the way which he brags about having done − he wants to get rid of the ability of anyone anywhere in America to have the right to choose. All the things he’s doing are so old.”…

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