[pilowsky]

The term "chaos tourist" was used by someone.

[kenberg]

A simple point: When I was 17 there were things to cope with. Everyone else can say the same. I did not think that bringing my shotgun with me to my trigonometry class was the solution.
We need to look for reasonable solutions to the problems that we have in society.

[Winstonm]

awm, on 2021-November-20, 02:01, said:

The disturbing thing is that the US has seen many incidents where someone shows up to a large gathering of people with a military-style weapon and starts shooting, killing multiple people. The NRA (and Republican Party) answer to this is that the way to stop it is "a good guy with a gun" and that people should be more proactive (and more armed) and physically stop the shooter.

Okay, you're in a large group of people (say at a protest), and someone shows up with a military-style weapon that he's waving around, pointing at people, while he's arguing loudly with members of the crowd. Are you feeling threatened? Like you might be a mass-shooting casualty? Maybe you want to try to disarm this person, or even pull your own gun on him?

Even if you initially show restraint, suppose this person now actually shoots and kills the person he was arguing with. You could be next! Do you want to disarm this person now? Pull your own gun on this person now? Isn't it time to be "a good guy with a gun" (or perhaps "a good guy with a skateboard") and try to prevent the next mass-casualty event?

Well, according to this ruling (and apparently Wisconsin law), the bozo with the military-style weapon is actually within his rights to shoot anyone that's trying to stop him -- if he shoots you when you're trying to disarm him (or shoot him, or skateboard-ize him, or otherwise stop him from killing dozens of people) then it's self defense.

And if you want to go on a violent killing spree, all you have to do is show up somewhere, wave your gun around, scream and act angry, and then wait for someone to try to confront you before you start firing.

As Winston would say, Yippee-Ki-yay.

The way the law is enforced is that after the first shots were fired anyone in the crowd could have shot and killed the kid and claimed self defense. There's the Yippee ki-yay. Fastest gun , fair fight. https://getyarn.io/y...78-0769dc234a5d

[awm]

Winstonm, on 2021-November-20, 09:07, said:

The way the law is enforced is that after the first shots were fired anyone in the crowd could have shot and killed the kid and claimed self defense. There's the Yippee ki-yay. Fastest gun , fair fight. https://getyarn.io/y...78-0769dc234a5d

Surely you mean any WHITE person in the crowd, but otherwise I agree with your point. Vigilante law here we come!

[Winstonm]

awm, on 2021-November-20, 09:54, said:

Surely you mean any WHITE person in the crowd, but otherwise I agree with your point. Vigilante law here we come!

Who knew that Moses broke the stone tablet that contained all the footnotes, like the footnote to “Thou shalt not kill” that said “unless thou fear for thy own life, then fire away.”

[Chas_P]

Winstonm, on 2021-November-20, 13:42, said:

Who knew that Moses broke the stone tablet that contained all the footnotes, like the footnote to “Thou shalt not kill” that said “unless thou fear for thy own life, then fire away.”

Yes. Rosenbaum and Huber definitely were heroes and martyrs. Hopefully statues of them will soon be erected.

[y66]

Dave Itzkoff at NYT said:

In its opening segment, “S.N.L.” returned to the familiar format of a “Justice with Judge Jeanine” parody, with Cecily Strong playing the program’s vociferous host, Jeanine Pirro.

Reflecting on the highly charged Rittenhouse proceedings, Strong said, “That lovable scamp was put through a nightmare of a trial just for doing the bravest thing any American can do: protecting an empty used car lot in someone else’s town.”

She then introduced Mikey Day as Judge Bruce Schroeder, who oversaw the trial, saying that he had been “as impartial as a dance mom clapping harder than anyone.”

Day said that the rules he followed during the trial were “all standard procedure.”

“That’s why I ordered that the prosecution not use the word ‘victims,’” he said. “They were rioters. And they weren’t shot. They were ‘gadoinked.’ But that did not give my client an unfair advantage in any way.”

Strong asked him, “Do you mean the defendant?”

“Oh yeah, sure, I keep doing that,” Day replied.

Strong brought out two liberal commentators, played by Chloe Fineman and Chris Redd, who saw the verdict from very different perspectives.

“I was shocked,” Fineman said. (“You were?” Redd responded. “‘Cause I wasn’t.”)

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” she said. (“I have,” he answered. “Many, many times.”)

“This is not who we are,” Fineman declared. (“I feel like it kind of is,” Redd answered.)

The sketch also featured Alex Moffat as Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, in a brief sendup of the eight-hour speech he gave from Thursday night into Friday morning. Strong said of him, “And that brave man stopped the Build Back Better bill from being passed. Until the next day, when it passed in two minutes.”

As in its previous iteration, the segment concluded with an appearance from James Austin Johnson as former President Donald J. Trump. He delivered a couple of free-association riffs on Chris Christie, Bill Maher, Dua Lipa and “Gossip Girl,” and boasted that he had “built it back even better.”

“I did wall,” Johnson said. “Big, beautiful wall. But it’s not just wall, because when you put wall down through a grass field, frankly, that’s road. And if you take wall and lay it across the river, frankly, Jeanine, you are doing bridge.”

[y66]

Carl Hulse at NYT said:

https://www.nytimes....den-agenda.html

WASHINGTON — On a Wednesday night in September, while President Biden backslapped in the Republican dugout during the annual congressional baseball game, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat nearby, sober-faced and wagging her finger while speaking into her cellphone, toiling to salvage her party’s top legislative priority as it teetered on the brink of collapse.

Credit: C-SPAN

On the other end of the line was Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a crucial swing vote on Mr. Biden’s sweeping social policy bill, and Ms. Pelosi, seated in the V.I.P. section behind the dugout at Nationals Park, was trying to persuade him to embrace $2.1 trillion in spending and climate change provisions she considered essential for the legislation.

In a moment captured by C-SPAN cameras that went viral, Ms. Pelosi appeared to grow agitated as Mr. Manchin, according to sources apprised of the call, told her that he could not accept more than $1.5 trillion — and was prepared to provide a document clearly laying out his parameters for the package, benchmarks that House Democrats had been clamoring to see.

The call reflected how Ms. Pelosi’s pivotal role in shepherding Mr. Biden’s agenda on Capitol Hill has reached far beyond the House that is her primary responsibility and into the Senate, where she has engaged in quiet and little-noticed talks with key lawmakers who have the power to kill the package or propel it into law.

Her efforts — fraught with challenges and littered with near-death experiences for the bill — finally paid off on Friday with House passage of the $2.2 trillion social policy and climate change package.

Along the way, Ms. Pelosi, who is known for delivering legislative victories in tough circumstances, was forced repeatedly to pull back from a floor showdown on the bill as she labored to unite the feuding liberal and moderate factions in her caucus. A crucial but less-seen part of her task was sounding out and cajoling a pair of Democratic holdouts in the Senate, Mr. Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who were opposed to major elements of Mr. Biden’s plan and had the power to upend whatever delicate deal Ms. Pelosi was able to strike.

It was only after her call with Mr. Manchin at the baseball game that Ms. Pelosi discovered that the West Virginian’s demands were contained in a sort of makeshift contract he had delivered to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, in late July. The document, which was signed by both men, had been kept secret — including from her — for months.

“I would have liked to have known that,” Ms. Pelosi, said in an interview on Friday, recounting how she felt blindsided. “However, it was what it was.”

Mr. Manchin’s insistence on holding down the cost of the package threw a wrench into Ms. Pelosi’s plan to quickly advance the monumental social policy bill, sending it instead through a series of tortuous twists and turns until Friday morning, when she finally managed to pass it.

She is still not done, with the Senate now getting a chance to reshape the measure in the hope of eventually sending it back for final House approval and Mr. Biden’s signature. Mr. Manchin is still demanding major changes, such as the jettisoning of a new four-week paid family and medical leave program that Ms. Pelosi has made a top priority.

But in the weeks since their call, Mr. Manchin has privately expressed an openness to embracing a costlier plan than the one he initially insisted upon, and the speaker now says she is confident that the measure approved by the House will re-emerge from the Senate mostly intact.

“They may want to hone or sharpen this or that, and that’s a negotiation,” Ms. Pelosi said of the Senate. “But 90-some percent of that bill is what it is.”

Initial approval of the legislation in the House was a considerable achievement in itself, considering unanimous Republican opposition and the deep Democratic divisions over the package. And it came in spite of whispers in the corridors of the Capitol that lawmakers no longer feared Ms. Pelosi as much as they had in the past, since she is believed to be nearing the end of her tenure.

In the end, as she did with the financial bailout in 2008, the Obama-era stimulus plan in 2009 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010, among others, Ms. Pelosi found a way to win when it appeared she could lose. This time, she did so with a bill that contains history-making initiatives for the environment and substantial health care, child care, family leave and educational programs that she and her Democratic colleagues have sought for decades.

Ms. Pelosi, 81, acknowledged in an interview on Friday that it was a legacy piece of legislation, even if she was not willing to entertain questions about her own future.

“We must pass it, and then we have to see it for me to have an almost religious experience of appreciating what it is,” Ms. Pelosi said in her Capitol office, not long after the vote to approve the bill, which was delayed until Friday morning by an angry eight-hour stemwinder from Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader. “But it’s a big deal.”

While her main responsibility was wrangling the House, Ms. Pelosi devoted considerable time to Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, both of whom hold the power to scuttle the deal in the evenly divided Senate if they balk.

Ms. Pelosi has ties to both. She has bonded with Mr. Manchin, who like Ms. Pelosi grew up in a political family, over their shared Italian heritage and Catholicism and her work on health and pension benefits for coal miners, represented in her office by a statue of a miner gifted to her by Mr. Manchin.

When Ms. Pelosi wanted to send a message to Mr. Manchin about voting rights this year, she had it delivered on a literal silver platter given to her by Robert C. Byrd, the former Senate leader from West Virginia whom Mr. Manchin often cites as a guiding star. The tray, which is warmly inscribed in appreciation for Ms. Pelosi’s fund-raising work on delivering a Democratic Senate majority in 1987, was a reminder for Mr. Manchin of the speaker’s past relationship with his predecessor.

“I thought he should see it,” Ms. Pelosi said with a chuckle.

Ms. Pelosi knew Ms. Sinema as an activist in Arizona even before she was elected to the House, where they developed a mutual respect and rapport. It was warning signs from Ms. Sinema in late September that led Ms. Pelosi to begin the delicate task of separating the social policy bill from a bipartisan infrastructure measure that had already passed the Senate with Ms. Sinema as a main author.

Progressives were adamant that they would only back the public works bill after they were assured that Senate Democrats, notably Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, were committed to voting for the social policy bill — an assurance that did not, and still does not, exist.

With the deadline for a vote approaching, Ms. Pelosi opened a back channel to Ms. Sinema through former Representative Joe Kennedy III, a friend of Ms. Sinema’s who entered the House with her in 2013.

He reported back that Ms. Sinema was ready to abandon the social spending bill entirely if she did not quickly see the House developing a path forward on the public works measure. In response, Ms. Pelosi sent a letter to her colleagues on Sept. 26 saying the House would take up the infrastructure bill the next day, a plan that drew vehement opposition from progressives and led to a stalemate for weeks.

As for Mr. Manchin, Ms. Pelosi intensified her outreach to him following a Sept. 16 video conference call she had with Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer. The three Democrats, who have been friends and colleagues for decades, deepened their bond during the talks, ribbing and encouraging each other in their vastly varying styles.

During that particular call, according to people with direct knowledge of it, Mr. Biden told the two congressional leaders that he had been encouraged by his discussions with Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, though they agreed it might be to their benefit to have Ms. Pelosi talk to Mr. Manchin as well.

“I’m with ya,” Mr. Biden told Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer of their plans.

“Put an F-word in front of that,” Mr. Schumer said enthusiastically.

“Now that you’ve resorted to that language, I’m going to thank you, Mr. President,” retorted the speaker, who frowns on profanity.

“Nancy does not allow me to curse,” Mr. Schumer responded. “I try to curb my foul mouth in front of her, with some degree of success.”

“Every time I look at Nancy, I think of myself as some altar boy,” said the president.

When she went back to Mr. Manchin, he had a reassuring message.

“There is a place we can come together,” he told Ms. Pelosi, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. “I feel quite certain. I always want to make a deal.”

[kenberg]

It's ok, I suppose, for SNL to do a comedy routine about the trial, comedy is what they do, but two people are dead so it's not really all that funny. During the actual trial, the judge was widely criticized for expressing hope that the transportation bottlenecks wouldn't slow down the delivery of their Asian food lunch. I did not see his remark to be in any way a slur on Asians but I did think that maybe he should go easy on the humor during a murder trial.

There will be a discussion about changing the law on self-defense. The following occurred to me. Sometimes (often?) in a traffic accident both parties share some blame. I believe that this is often resolved by asking who had the last chance to avoid disaster. A guy stops his car in the middle of an intersection. He shouldn't do that. A guy coming into the intersection crashes into him. Could he reasonably have been expected to stop? I think that is often the crucial question in assessing primary responsibility for the crash. One could argue about which driver was the bigger idiot, but I think who had the lat opportunity to avoid disaster is often the paramount legal question. I suspect that this was a good part of the thinking of the jury. Coming to an out-of-control demonstration was stupid. Chasing a guy with a gun was stupid. As it reached the closing stage, who had the last chance to bring a safe end to their confrontation?
Any law about self-defense will be applied, or be hoped to apply, in a wide variety of situations. You can't list them all in advance. So there must be some basic overview of when it applies. This "who had the last chance to prevent disaster?" criterion would get a lot of votes I think.

[y66]

I'm constantly amazed at how hard some of our politicians work, especially some of the old vets like Pelosi, Biden and Sanders. It's not just the oldsters however. Here's my favorite member of Congress (D-VA, age 42), fielding a constituent's question about inflation at a town hall meeting last Wednesday: https://youtu.be/6oRBjYANyLI?t=888.

[y66]

kenberg, on 2021-November-21, 10:08, said:

It's ok, I suppose, for SNL to do a comedy routine about the trial, comedy is what they do, but two people are dead so it's not really all that funny.

A lot of the stuff SNL spoofs isn't funny. "Tragedy and comedy - same damn thing Jack" -- Chesterton to Langrishe in "Deadwood"

[kenberg]

y66, on 2021-November-21, 12:00, said:

A lot of the stuff SNL spoofs isn't funny. "Tragedy and comedy - same damn thing Jack" -- Chesterton to Langrishe in "Deadwood"

There is probably something to that. But I watched one episode, or maybe three-fourths of one episode, of Deadwood and that was enough. I've heard it was good. Anyway, I can enjoy SNL in short bits and pieces.
Nonetheless, I hope we can find a good way forward.

[pilowsky]

The funny thing about SNL is that it isn't.

[Chas_P]

pilowsky, on 2021-November-21, 14:30, said:

The funny thing about SNL is that it isn't.

At one time it was. https://www.youtube....h?v=9hYGtXIqDa0

[Gilithin]

Chas_P, on 2021-November-21, 18:22, said:

At one time it was. https://www.youtube....h?v=9hYGtXIqDa0

Good grief, that was less funny than most of the Trump sketches. The canned laughter doesn't exactly help its cause.

[pilowsky]

The electoral system in Australia is different from the USA system in some ways but not others.

We have six states and two Territories. The Australian Electoral Commission runs the Federal election and determines the boundaries of the seats.
The AEC is so non-partisan that nobody in Australia would be able to tell you how to get on to it or who runs it.

Today, Zali Stegall - the independent conservative who unseated Tony Abbott (unrelated to but similar in outlook to the Texan) - proposed a "truth in political advertising bill" (to be administered by the AEC).
The idea is to prevent misleading advertising by politicians.

My question is: is it possible to be misled by a politician?
Wouldn't you have to assume they always told the truth first?

I think the Tucker (obviously I'm lying) Carlson defence would apply.
Our current Prime Minister has such a reputation for mendaciousness that journalists - and the public in general - would be suspicious if something fell out of his mouth that appeared on its face to be truthful.

[Chas_P]

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

[kenberg]

Well, we are having a gathering tomorrow. Not huge, 14 including us, but that's the largest in the last couple of years or so. Three of them are 6 and under. The six-year-old gets her shot next Monday, the other two are not yet eligible. All the rest of us have our shots, we older ones have had our booster. We won't be masking but I think we are ok.
Political and social views probably vary among us but we are all sane. It's nice to have simple issues to think about. Eg Becky bought me an early Xmas present, the 1951 Duke Ellington Masterpiece album, but I am far from sure that the 20 somethings would think of Mood Indigo as proper background music. And maybe it isn't. It is very good to have such things be the biggest problem to deal with.
Come Friday, or maybe Saturday since some might be staying overnight, I'll get back to explaining why Joe Biden should do what I tell him to do. But for the moment he is on his own.
Best wishes to all.

[y66]

No Mood Indigo but lots of fun at local parks, in the kitchen and at the table. Everyone in our extended family has made it through the pandemic so far so a lot to be grateful for. Someone put on Keith Jarrett Tokyo '96 while the adults did the dishes.

[kenberg]

y66, on 2021-November-26, 08:01, said:

No Mood Indigo but lots of fun at local parks, in the kitchen and at the table. Everyone in our extended family has made it through the pandemic so far so a lot to be grateful for. Someone put on Keith Jarrett Tokyo '96 while the adults did the dishes.

I just tried to get Keith Jarrett's Mona Lissa but apparently, I have to sign up for something, perhaps even pay some money. I might do that, it has always seemed a bit like ripping off the artists to just click YouTube. Still, I do it.
My daughter and her husband enjoyed Mood Indigo, so did their two kids, the twenty-somethings.
The six-year-old, the oldest of Becky's som's kids, wanted some kid's music that I didn't have so I went to YouTube for Cow Cow Boogie
She danced to it and admired the woman's dress. The younger siblings followed her lead as best they could.
It's easy to think of pop music from the 1950s as being either Doris Day (and Perry Como and so on) or Elvis Presley (and Bill Haley and so on) but that oversimplifies it. I keep meaning to make a list of some of my favorites. Mood Indigo (yes, composed in 1930, I know, but played in the 50s and forever) would be high on the list.