ROLEY

Tag: Supreme Court

  • Friday, January 10th, 2025

    • If you accept that Trump was never going to jail under any circumstances, then let’s focus on what happened today. The verdict was upheld, a sentence was passed. I’m not sure if this is appealable to a higher court from here, I think he would have to show something happened to prevent him from getting a fair hearing? If it’s not appealable, then the bottom line is that Donald Trump is now and forever a convicted felon. Make all the jokes you want about ‘getting away with it’, he didn’t. In a (very) small way, there has been accountability. Trust me, he’s livid about this.
    • If you want to know why you’re in a cult, part eleventy: MAGA has jumped to naming all the people who also have convictions, like MLK, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela… You could hear the sound of millions of goalposts moving. Like I said the other day. “STOP PERSECUTING ME!” said the guy in charge.
    • I listened to the Supreme Court arguments for TikTok today. IANAL, but it appears to me that the government is dressing up a free-speech argument as a national security threat. What the government is accusing TikTok of doing is using an algorithm to show you content. It thinks China can manipulate that algorithm to show you what it wants you to see. The trouble with this argument is that an algorithm is an editorial slant. That’s ANY For You/Discover/We Think You’ll Like/Related Page at ANY content company. Facebook does the same thing, lest you forget. There are two questions to answer: Does a threat to national security trump the 1st Amendment? Second, if TikTok poses a national security threat, then show us the threat. I can think of a greater threat to national security than this, and it’s not hypothetical. It’s real, and it’s taking office in 10 days. That opinion has been and will be all over TikTok, and I think that’s the real reason the gov’t wants it gone. Speaking truth to bullshit? Well, we can’t have that, can we?
    • I put together my new desk chair last night, and I realized upon sitting in it that it does not recline. It’s one of these ergonomic chairs that adjust in a few ways, but reclining is not one of them. It’s probably very good for my back if I can keep from slouching forward. This is just one of the ways I don’t human very well I suppose, but we’ll see if this chair helps my posture. I’m practically a hunchback on my best days.
    • With any luck, a super-duper pod this weekend. Stay Tuned.

  • ARTICLE: Maybe We Should Start Learning Swedish

    Today’s Supreme Court decision on immunity doesn’t fill me with confidence. To look at social media today, there’s a lot of spewing on both sides about which side ‘won’.

    No one ‘won’, but I think *we* lost.

    This argument isn’t about Trump. This is about the Presidency. It doesn’t matter who that person is, but everyone you see or read is preoccupied with the short term. They’re also reading for the lowest of hanging fruit. Democrats are saying “Well, that means that Biden can (insert wet dream here)!” Over on the MAGA side they’re dragging out the ‘mug of liberal tears jokes’ again. Neither side is interested in looking beyond November of 2024 out of political convenience.

    As an example, take a look at what happened when Harry Reid nuked the 60 vote cloture rule for all judicial nominations except for the Supreme Court in 2013. In the short term it gave the Senate Democrats the ability to confirm their nominations to the bench with a simple majority. Great news for the Democrat majority, until they lose that majority.

    In 2017, Mitch McConnell—having regained the position of Majority Leader— stepped through the door that Harry Reid opened and nuked the 60 vote threshold for Supreme Court Justices. As a result, Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were confirmed relatively easily without a vote from the Democratic side. We all know the rest of that story.

    The point is that what was politically expedient for one party in the Senate in the short term worked against them in the long term. Presidential immunity will be no different. There’s nothing to stop a President from taking any action they like as long as it can be justified as an official action. That means that they will find a way to argue that everything they do is an official action, and litigating that will take longer than these Trump cases. The President—any President—is now unburdened by the threat of prosecution, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.

    What will change is the group that thinks that it’s not a problem.

  • Wednesday, February 22, 2023

    • First day back to work after the holiday, which is weird.  Since I work for a gubmint-related thing now, I get gubmint-related holidays off.  This is one of the most un-call center-like things about this job.  Most places like that give a minimal amount of holidays, and in some cases, you work them on a volunteer or round-robin kind of thing.  I worked last Christmas, may I have this Christmas off?  No?  Shit.   (This actually happened.)  When I got married, the place I worked wouldn’t approve the actual DAY of my wedding off, but approved the WEEK of my wedding.  That is how the Week of Fun Started.  Looks like for the 3rd time in 29 years we’ll have to put off the Week of Fun again this year.  The way our vacation allotment shakes out is that I get the full amount in September of every year, which makes it a challenge for the following July.  Since Kimmers didn’t start her job until November, she doesn’t have PTO.  For the year.  Which is also weird.  I’d have thought they’d pro-rate, but it doesn’t appear so.  Also strange because she was just in the hospital for a week, so that’s fun.  That’s enough bitching for how, let’s navigate to the meat.
    • In a piece of news I will file under “I want off this ride”, let me pose a question to you:  If the principal of your elementary school leaves his gun in a bathroom stall, and a third-grader finds it and reports it to his teacher, what is the correct thing for that teacher to do?  Clearly, It’s sending another third-grader to the bathroom to check if it’s a real gun. What–and I can’t stress this highly enough–THE FUCK.
    • Britney Griner signed a one-year contract with the Phoenix Mercury, making it her 10th season with the team.  Of course, she missed last year because of her detention in Russia.  Now, I’m not a big basketball fan, (note: watch this space for the day they announce the Sonics are coming back), but before today I had not seen a news story mention why she played in Russia to begin with.  The NPR article I linked here says that WNBA athletes often play overseas in the off-season to supplement their income because of gender pay inequalities with their NBA counterparts.  Now, admittedly, this may be a different situation from the USA Women’s soccer team which has carried the load for US Soccer while the men have done fuck-all, but if the pay difference can be argued as a safety concern?  “Hey, if y’all would pay me I wouldn’t have to go anywhere else.”  I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree, but that would be my argument next time salary arbitration comes up.  Does the WNBA even HAVE a player’s union?  (They do.)
    • In the next town over, Chesapeake, BM Williams Elementary School went into lockdown and was dismissed early because they received a bomb threat email accusing them of ‘devil worship’.  BM Willams is the school you may have heard about in the news because they have the After School Satan Club.  The email accuses a Chesapeake school board member, the Chesapeake schools superintendent and the organizer of the After School Satan Club of ‘promoting devil worship and unIslamic values.’   Without evidence to the contrary, the letter implies the writer of the email is Muslim.  I don’t believe it for a second, but I’ll be willing to admit it if I’m wrong. However, let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with here.  This is a person who saw the word Satan and didn’t look beyond the paint.  I’m not a member of The Satanic Temple, but I know that’s there’s a big difference between them and Anton LeVay’s Church of Satan.  To begin with, The Satanic Temple doesn’t actually believe in Satan.  They don’t worship Satan.  They use the imagery to troll evangelical extremists.  They use satire to get under the skin of people.  They’re activists that preach—if you’ll pardon the expression—equality, social justice, and to point out religious hypocrisy.   They’re all about personal autonomy, curiosity, pragmatic skepticism.   The after school program is an answer to the Good News Club, a Christian after school program.  It doesn’t try to ‘convert’ kids, it teaches “about rationalism and understanding the world around us.”  in other words, how to make sense of the world using critical thinking skills and natural curiosity.  Questioning everything.   That’s a good thing in my opinion.  In fact, the only group of people I can think of that wouldn’t think that’s a good idea are folks more interested in indoctrinating their kids.
    • Lastly, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Gonzalez v Google today, this is the first of two cases regarding the Internet and Section 230.  I’ll have a deeper take on it in the coming days, but here’s the link if you’d like to hear it.