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softlynow

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by softlynow

  1. Juries are wild animals in and of themselves. I had a sexual assault case hang up because 1 juror misheard testimony regarding yoga pants. 11 to convict. The other 11 looked totally beaten down that they couldn't convince her that she'd misheard the testimony. A jury a colleague had for his trial somehow had an 18 year old on the panel who fell asleep constantly during the trial. He was the only one who didn't vote to convict. My partner had a jury hang up on a bank robbery solely because the prosecutor inavertently insulted a woman during jury selection, and felt it was the only way to "have her voice heard." I had one jury write on the jury form that they thought the charges were totally unjust, and the case should've been dismissed . . . directly below the signature of the presiding juror finding my client guilty. And a corporate attorney was the presiding jury. The judge was pissed. This jury can easily fuck this up, and it could be for a bizarre reason Stephen King couldn't dream up.
  2. "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress;" Before we entered the Darkest Timeline on November 2, 2016, 11:47 CDT (Cubs win WS), we had an accepted interpretation of the language above. But, as we now know, once a political party give fuckall about the accpted interpretation and how we put that into practice, there is more than enough wiggle room in that constitutional clause to convince anyone with a vested interest to just about anything they can conceivably do bring about the desired result. Those governors and legislator are more than willing to Mitch McConnell this election. To deny that is to deny that we are in crisis.
  3. I do. The 24-hour news networks' ratings will be incredible. Just another reason to think it might happen. With AI, today's would be Hearst (Lachlan Murdoch's coming out party?) wouldn't even need a Frederick Remington.
  4. The Republican governors in states Joe won are Joe Lombardo in Nevada, Kemp in Georgia, Chris Sununu in NH and Phil Scott in Vermont. Flip those from last time, and it's 274 Biden, 264 Trump, after reapportionment.
  5. Tricky, for sure. You'll just have to tailor the message to the listener. We know the media won't, beyond pimping themselves out for clicks.
  6. Even if you think Biden wins, you should be amplifying the Trump could/will win message. The easiest way for Trump to win is a lack of a sense of urgency. Clinton made a bunch of mistakes in 2016. But Trump looking unelectable, IMHO, had to affect turnout and allow for some folks to feel OK about "sending a message" and voting for Stein or even Johnson. Over 4.5% of voters chose someone other than Trump or Clinton. In 2020 that dropped to about 1.8%. 2012 saw about the same percentage vote for neither Obama nor Romney. Trump could win should be all you say to anyone you know who understands the stakes of this election or otherwise will not for for Trump. They need to be scared to stay home or vote for RFK or some other joke candidate.
  7. She wants to continue it when possible. It's really the only move she has left given her ambitions.
  8. Yeah. It's really that simple. 40% of the electorate suffers from the Black Sleep of Kali Ma, and literally nothing matters to them. They control the GQP.
  9. Nikki Haley says she’s voting for Trump in November https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/22/politics/nikki-haley-donald-trump/index.html
  10. Not immediately acknowledging the hotness of Hayley Atwell is an affront to God. Just sayin'.
  11. That’s a judge who needs his/her shit put on blast.
  12. We get out of it by winning. This isn't a PG-13 movie where the good guys prevail by sticking to their virtues, like Batman not killing or Jack Ryan refusing to dance the Potomac Two-Step. This shit is NC-17 if we need it to be. They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of them to the morgue. America was never that pure anyway. Stop pissing yourself about the good ole days. Leave that delusional shit to morons like Harrison Butker.
  13. I did leave out the part about your off-label uses of Liquid Smoke and gold-plated HDMI cables.
  14. Red county DAs will likely ramp up the plea offers again, just like they did in MoCo after Ogg announced her look the other way policy in Harris Co. As I recall the MCDA made a public statement about the evils of reefer (his word choice) and offers of dismissal with a clean test disappeared overnight.
  15. I'm more interested in I'm more interested in following up on my client's revelation this morning that they have, among their $10k in sex toys, an anal shower head. Unfortunately, I had to spend 5+ minutes hearing about it, and the trauma that my client will suffer if it is not awarded to them (leaving gender out for reasons). I've met my daily quota of hearing about people's fucked up lives.
  16. Greed was the “belief.” Pure self-interest. Laissez-faire is the con. Those who believe(d) are/were the marks. The kleptocratic class doesn’t believe in anything but themselves.
  17. It was sold as an overreaction with an assist by appeals to our tribal nature and the ignorance of fundamentalists. There may have been a few nonsensically overbroad or overbearing policies here and there, but the most important policy, that taxation should fall much more heavily on those who benefit more from government allowing for the steady and predictable accumulation of wealth. That Cletus came to believe he greatly benefited from tax cuts is the biggest of big lies and the one they cared most about.
  18. While the House is a problem, the Senate is the bigger one.
  19. You're better than this. So I don't like your idea, so what? Now I'm the problem? Calm your tits. Ok, now about self-censorship. At least the 1A isn't implicated. But let me know when you think the Boads of Directors of Fox Corp., News Corp., Comcast, National Amusements, Disney, the NYT Co., Nash Holdings, Naspers, Thompson Reuters, Warner Bros., Nexstar IACI, Sinclair, etc. etc., are going to see an increase in their bottom lines by agreeing to stop feeding their consumers the shit content that keeps the quarterly profits coming in. The key difference between self-regulated industries like Hollywood and the news media is that Hollywood knows that steady and predictable profits are more certain with regulation than without it. They also know that D.C. would get involved if they didn't label the films that run afoul of puritanical sensibilities (there's enough gray area under the Miller test for the feds to act). The news media would almost certainly NOT profit by what you propose, and know that politicians are constitutionally unable to intervene. Any variation of what you're talking about would likely be considered prior restriant or impermissible viewpoint discrimination. Find a way to make the truth profitable, and misinformation unprofitable, and to do it either without government intervention or with it in a way that clears 1A scrutiny and you're on to something. I won't hold my breath. Again, you need to focus on what is harder, but also more vital. Changing our culture. We once valued truth-tellers. We could do so again, with work. Sorry that's not a blueprint, or a 5-step plan or 1 simple trick, but that's the answer. Keep insisting on the truth, even from your allies and friends. Do it with your voice and your pocketbook. Get others to do the same. Convince leaders to carry that torch. Try to build a movement. This is an aside, and not really that important: As far as I know, the Texas Board of Architectural Examiners is a state agency. Is there some other agency you're talking about that governs standards in addition to those that the state regulates? I'm not really all that familiar with that industry.
  20. I read it. "EVERYTHING else is media and is given all the appropriate disclaimers and such as you would say, South Park." Maybe it sounded more substantial in your head.
  21. You want the government to be the arbiter of truth? Sounds great when the government believes the truth you believe. How about the next GOP administration. You want them labeling all the critical nightly shows as subversive? Censoring NPR? Announcing that what CNN just aired was a lie and go tune in to OANN for the real truth? What you want to do runs afoul of the 1sr Amendment. Community notes are a fine way for the people to add and point out a possible lie. Compulsory Government notes would be an expansion of the state’s propaganda power. I never said do nothing. I said don’t do counterproductive things. Pee color charts in the locker room, kicking guys off the team just to show off you mean it with no regard for your core mission, runny eggs to instill toughness. At its tamest, that’s the effect your “unverified facts ahead:” warning. At it’s worst, and with a friendly Nine, you’re just adding to the fascists’s took kit. Culture change is slow and difficult. For even small changes it’s often a multi-generational effort, and it happens in public fora. The same ones you’d invite the government to comment on. I’d rather government not put their thumb on that scale, and instead give the coming reaction to Boomer excess room to breathe. Stamon is typo. Typo is stamon.
  22. What you're talking about is reputation. Reputation is like culture, in the sense that it is organic and resistant to the stifling hand of regulation or inartful leadership. Many of our journalists have spent the last 2-3 decades chasing soundbytes, headlines and clicks. They're not interested in reputation, because they answer, more and more, to the MBAs looking at the next quarter's earnings. As with so many things these days, the problem is the primacy of capitalism in every aspect of our culture. Disclaimers would only amplify the appeal of the bad actors in media. A stamon media as "bad for you" would work the same way a warning label on cigarettes or the parental advisory on an album, game or tv show. Hell, water in a can called Liquid Death sells for precisely because it has a dangerous sounding name.
  23. You didn’t need to clarify anything. You are in favor of violence if it sates your lust for it. We get it. You might want to figure out why you have that desire. It’s not healthy. Put another way, your position tells us much about you and fails to convey a coherent policy regime w/r/t criminal justice. We aren’t where we are because the system is designed to rape and otherwise brutalize inmates. We are here because it’s cheaper to look the other way when it happens. If we really thought pound-me-in-the-ass was the right policy, victims and victim groups would be allowed to do the brutalizing. Rationalizing the existence of a policy out of the mere by-product of a penny-wise/pound foolish scheme is telling on yourself.
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