If not, don't worry--there's still time! The Commenteriat Commune has been designated an official Voting Center and will be open November 3rd, from 6pm to 7pm PST for voting and ballot drop-off.
As head Poll Worker, I will be verifying signatures and administering the literacy tests.
Also, to ensure your ballot doesnt get rejected, I will also be checking random ballot cards to ensure blue/black ink was used and no incumbents or tax increases "accidentally" received any votes.
And Eustace Tilley sheds a single tear as his monocle shatters upon the marble floor.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epdgm4/new-yorker-suspends-jeffrey-toobin-for-zoom-dick-incident
We've been doing this work from home thing for eight months now. Anyone have any horror stories like Mr. Toobin's yet?
https://images.app.goo.gl/PPBj468NLB8DXoSz8
Well known Harvard legal scholar Elie Mystal has a piece in Nation online in which he compares the confirmation of ACB to, wait for it, The Princess Bride.
There’s a moment in The Princess Bride when the evil and conniving Prince Humperdinck, eager to finish a sham wedding to his unwilling bride, Buttercup, demands that the priest cut to the chase. As the bride’s rescuers prepare to charge the castle, Humperdinck insists, “‘Man and wife.’ Say ‘man and wife’!”
That’s basically where we are with the confirmation process for Amy Coney Barrett.
Any guess what Disney movie Mystal tied up for the kiddies while his wife was out making a living?
Our favorite walrus goes on from there to conclude pack the court yes.
The way to free ourselves from the random wheel of death is to have more justices on the court. Ginsburg’s passing would have had significantly less impact on the fate of women’s rights if she had been but one of 19 people instead of nine.
19 justices? Can you imagine digesting a Supreme Court decision with 18 concurring opinions? The mind boggles. Like Mystal's. Utterly unchecked by any need for scholarship.
But wait. having established the 'need' for 19, Mystal jumps to 29!
The benefits of court expansion are so manifest that I’d be willing, as a Democrat, to put additional Republican nominees on the court, too. If you had a bill to add 20 people to the Supreme Court, I’d be willing to split the new seats between, say, 11 Democratic appointees and nine Republican ones. I’m serious. The Garland debt must be paid...
That Elie is a legal giant! Go big or go home.
Yeah, yeah, I know I switched firms less than two years ago, but I've made another move. I'm purposefully withholding some details so that I don't dox myself, but you'll hopefully get the gist of what's going on.
To give you a brief refresher, I left my job as a partner at a mid sized regional law firm to become a partner at a national "BigLaw" firm. When I realized that I really hated being a BigLaw partner, I came back to my mid sized firm. I was relatively happy to be back and things were going pretty well. Then the COVID lockdown came. We were all working from home and everyone I knew was still pretty busy.
Things seemed to be going pretty well. Then, about a month into the lockdown, firm management started talking about cutting pay for associates and non-equity partners. This struck me as odd since I kept up with the deposit reports and we were seemingly having an outstanding year. It struck me that one of two things was going on, either (1) the firm's financial position was in worse shape than I thought due to information the equity partners weren't sharing or (2) the equity partners were going to use COVID as an excuse to screw the non-equity partners. They claimed that the equity partners had taken very large hits to their draws already, but of course I had no way of knowing if that was true. I immediately changed my LinkedIn profile to say that I was open to opportunities. Firm management decided not to cut our pay, but I still had a bad feeling in my gut, so I continued to take calls from recruiters.
Over the months of working from home, I had begun to really enjoy not spending 1-3 hours in the car every day fighting traffic. I was more productive working from home and I got to spend the time that I would have been commuting on home improvement projects or on my garden. I also started wondering why my firm was paying so much in overhead for office space that wasn't being used and pretty clearly (at least to me) wasn't necessary. I think I mentioned here several times that I'd really be interested in a law firm that had a remote model. The problem is that most of the "virtual" firms that recruiters called me about were pretty clearly scams, or at the very least provided minimal benefit.
I also got tons of calls for traditional firms. The lateral market, at least in Dallas, is pretty hot. However, most of the calls were pretty much the same.
I'm working with [NATIONAL FIRM] and they've made expanding their Dallas office one of their top priorities. They're looking for IP partners with portable business. They offer a national platform/rate flexibility/a collegial work environment/a no assholes policy/a puppy. Their partners would love to talk to you about moving over so that they can jump all over your current clients.
I'm always polite when when I talk to recruiters, but I didn't see anything that sounded interesting. Then one recruiter kept trying to get me to talk to an IP boutique firm. I was leery since I've always mentally equated "boutique" with low pay. I finally agreed to get on a call with one of the name partners. He told me that his firm had so much potential work that they didn't have enough experienced attorneys to work it all. THAT got my attention.
They use a virtual model where the firm maintains small offices in flyover states for administrative functions, but the attorneys for the most part work from home. This results in overhead per lawyer that's about 1/3 of where I was.
So anyways, yada yada yada, they made me a really good offer and I decided to make a move. I cleaned out my office and moved everything home. They actually lowered my billing rate, so now I can be hired for less than a paralegal at a coastal BigLaw firm.
As a final note, it's amazing how much I spent per month on everything that commuting to a downtown office entails. Between tolls, gas, dry cleaning and lunches, I'm probably saving $500 per month. I think that we're going to see a lot more firms moving to this model.
Since I totally prayed for Lat I'm now required by God (look it up) to pray for Trump and --not to brag-- but as of 11PM PST he's alive and tweeting. Yes, Mari Dupont gets results!
Which brings me to my next topic: the horrifying photos of the Presidential Suite (link at end of post) in that hospital that all US presidents get thrown in when they catch a cold, Walter Reed. Ugh where is the HG Channel when you need them, this is so gross! Who could get well in this grim, Mary Todd Lincoln-designed hell hole? Trump must be freaking out, nothing is gold plated.
Finally I made a few drunken well-thought out political donations to candidates whose ads have appeared on the Youtube channels that I watch after 11pm. A few Black GOP newbies and some guy in Minnesota who seemed nice.
So who are you guys giving money to??
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8800181/Inside-Walter-Reed-Trump-treated-coronavirus-secure-Presidential-Suite.html
If ever you find yourself unlucky enough to be stuck among the hostages in one of these situations, here is how it breaks down.
In most U.S. jurisdictions, modern police practice gives command and control to the hostage negotiator while the hostage taker(s) negotiate.
However, once any hostage taker is stupid enough to cap any hostage, the hostage negotiator is done, and command and control immediately passes to the senior officer commanding the storm team, and the storm team goes in, guns a-blazing.
If you are among a group of hostages when this happens, the key consideration is to stay low and find whatever cover there is, and try to survive through the seconds of intense gunfire to the point where the law enforcement storm team will have killed the hostage taker(s) and taken control of the scene. When it happens, it is typically a terrible mess. I expect that when the details of this incident are released, it will turn out that someone unwisely shot a hostage, not realizing what would follow.
To the surprise of very few who understand the law, the cops who killed Breonna Taylor were not arrested. One was criminally charged for stormtrooper aim. Protests began, metastasized, and now there's a body count. All of this sparked by months of social media and celebrity-lead rallying behind the slogan of "arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor" suddenly crashing against what I think everyone knew would be the eventual reality - no charges would be brought.
Do I think that Louisville law enforcement shat the bed in applying for and executing the warrants? Damn right I do. Do I think that people are right to be pissed off about it? Damn right I do. Do I think that this would have happened had Ms. Taylor been white? That one's tougher. The warrant was drug-related and it seems that drug charges are disproportionately pursued against minorities. It's also hard to look at the deaths of Philando Castile and Elijah McClain and not take away the impression that some law enforcement officers intrinsically view Black people as more threatening. On the other hand, Ms. Taylor was tragic collateral damage. The reason for the warrant was her past involvement with Jamarcus Glover, who is Black. On the whole, I say it's more likely than not that a no-knock warrant wouldn't have issued against a white female EMT with no criminal history who had dated a drug dealer two years prior. However, from the facts I know, I don't see anything suggesting that the cops executing the warrant pulled the trigger based on Ms. Taylor's race.
Getting back to the point of this post, I think we (and by "we," I mean the small group of individuals who frequent this page, not the county at large) all knew the real cause of Ms. Taylor's death was the no-knock warrant. If strangers enter your house at night, at least in Kentucky, you can defend yourself with a gun. If someone fires at police, police can fire back. Assuming an armed resident, this is a likely result of a no-knock warrant executed at night. If the trigger-happy asshole who murdered Philando Castile didn't go to prison (I know, different jurisdiction), there was never a chance of these cops being convicted.
I understand Louisville eliminated no-knock warrants in the wake of Ms. Taylor's death, which should go a long way toward preventing any similar deaths in the future. The city's also agreed to a very large settlement which can't replace a human life, but it seems like it was reached very quickly without putting the family through protracted litigation. This was positive change.
The internet, however, wanted more. Even though arresting the officers involved was unlikely to prevent another fruitless no-knock warrant from turning into a shootout, the internet wanted vengeance, not change. Celebrities who likely did not understand what a no-knock warrant is or the role it played in this tragedy, joined in with the cry of "Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor!" It became a meme with life of its own, giving people hope (though a very dubious hope if one understands the law) that the officers who had a legal right to be in Ms. Taylor's apartment (I think the warrant was bullshit and shouldn't have issued, but it did) who returned fire would be arrested. Impliedly included in this rallying cry was the goal that the officers be charged with murder, [which was never going to happen. When the probabilities played out and the seriously unlikely failed to occur, the protests started. The protests turned violent, and now we have more casualties than we did the night Breonna Taylor was killed. In my mind, the unrealistic and ill-advised slogan of "Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor" and those who pushed it are largely at fault.
I'm sympathetic to the BLM movement. I think George Floyd, Philando Castille, Eric Garner, Elijah McClain, and far too many other Black men were killed by police for unjustifiable reasons. I get the frustration and the need for change. I get kneeling for the national anthem. I get the NBA strikes. I support all of it, but this one was mishandled from the get go and now more people are dead because social media and celebrities built up unjustified hope in a group of people still reeling from a parade of injustices.
What do you all think? Are people who pushed to "Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor" partly to blame? Overall, do the recent protests/riots tied to this hurt the message of the BLM movement?
Disqus.
Much as the famous 2018 Brooklyn Wicca hex ritual led, I can only assume, to Justice Kavanaugh's spontaneous regurgitation of gallons of grape juice while attending church, a lawyer by the name of Jamie Smith has announced that Justice Ginsburg's death has prompted her to turn to a *ahem* lower power to ensure that the Supreme Court continues to walk the lefthand path.
When Justice Ginsburg died, I knew immediately that action was needed on a scale we have not seen before. Our democracy has become so fragile that the loss of one of the last guardians of common sense and decency in government less than two months before a pivotal election has put our civil and reproductive rights in danger like never before. And, so, I have turned to Satanism.
But Smith -- whose bio and c.v. the Huffington Post seems to have misplaced -- is not your stereotypical goat-slitting Satanist. There is a method to her madness.
The Satanic Temple hopes to appear before the Supreme Court in a case challenging a Missouri abortion law that requires those seeking to terminate their pregnancy to first receive materials asserting that their abortion would end the life of a separate, unique person. The temple argues that these materials violate the deeply held religious beliefs of one of its members regarding bodily autonomy and scientifically reasonable personal choice. The argument the Satanic Temple is using is the same one the Supreme Court effectively endorsed in the Hobby Lobby birth control case, for which Justice Ginsburg wrote the dissent ― that no one should have to follow a law that violates their deeply held religious beliefs. If a Christian should not have to do so based on their religion, a Satanist should not have to either. This is what equality under the law means on a fundamental level.
Smith (seen below at her swearing-in ceremony upon admission to the bar) has a point. Though I thought for sure the argument would have been that any law curbing the availability of dismembered fetuses for the ritual blood sacrifice would have run afoul of the "effect" prong of the Lemon test.
Per the Wall Street Journal, here are all the lady contestants for SCOTUS.
Plus everything you need to know to place your bets:
-Amy Coney Barrett Has a psycho Wikipedia picture and a million kids. Clerked for Scalia
-Barbara Logoa Her parents fled Castro. Seems cool. Lat Trigger warning: WAS NOT A SCOTUS CLERK
-Kate Todd super pro business, has most private sector experience. Clerked for Thomas
-Joan Larsen Boring-ass Wikipedia page, clerked for Scalia
-Allison Rushing Super religious-y. Clerked for Thomas
