So I said - bits and pieces

Another gathering of random comments on various things posted by others, arranged chronologically. 

2026-01-08
Everything you need to know about today’s GOPpers in one headline: “House fails to override Trump’s vetoes of 2 bills that passed unanimously.”

Not every GOPper voted against overriding the veto, but quite enough to generalize. Craven weaklings unworthy of public office.

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2026-01-09
ICE has become little more than an armed, masked, secret police, increasingly populated with Tonton Macoute wannabes.

If we’re not going to have open borders (which I do think is an arguable position*) we have to have some kind of border control and some way to enforce it, roles for which both ICE in particular and DHS in general have proven incapable of fulfilling in a humane or even Constitutional manner.

Thus my new slogan, deliberately intended to tweak the MAGAs:

“ICE: Repeal and Replace!”

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2026-01-09
[Background: An attorney was fined $400,000, upheld on appeal, for informing a school that one of their staff was previously involved in sex with a minor on the grounds that it violated a confidentiality agreement regarding a bankruptcy case. The judge said the fine was based on the cost of the investigation.

The question was are the courts at in any way at fault for what seems to be an injustice or were they just constrained by the law.]

Of course both the district and appeals courts at least potentially bear some of the blame.

Is there a law saying that the fine must be based on the “cost of the investigation?” If so, the courts should have required a proof of that cost - meaning receipts, detailed accounts, and not vague items like “hours billed.” If there is not such a law, the court should have ignored that cost as a basis for the fine. In either event, the district court could have withheld judgment for the moment while encouraging the sides to negotiate a lesser amount.

So unless there is both a law specifically stating that the fine is to be based on the cost of the investigation and a detailed proof of those costs, then either court could have at the least found the fine excessive and even included in their rulings (even if it didn’t affect the judgment) some reference to the potential harm avoided by [attorney Richard] Trahant’s actions.

I’m reminded yet again of Joni Mitchell’s lyric (in “Sex Kills”): “Is justice just ice/Driven by greed and lust?/Just the strong doing what they can/And the weak suffering what they must?”

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2026-01-12
I will not forward, “like,” or discuss memes or vids or whatever that do not source the claim made.

I’ve had more than enough experiences of asking for a source (which you’d think the poster had) only to be told some version of “find it yourself” to have confidence in the conclusion that they don’t have one, they either just made it up or, more likely, are just reposting something that itself had no source.

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2026-01-12
[Background: Responding to Congressional Democrats failing to oppose an anti-trans law, someone asked “Do they still expect trans people to vote for them despite this harm they’re causing us?”]

The answer to your question is yes.

This, bluntly, is SOP, par for the course, choose your cliché, but in any case long-standing policy for the institutional Democratic Party. It’s not just trans rights, it’s a range of issues where they figure that as long as they can be or at least present themselves as any degree to the left of the GOPpers, it’s “Hey, whadda you gonna do? Vote for that crowd? It’s us or nuthin’.” They see no downside to taking the left flank of voters for granted.

And if you dare to mutter phrases like “won’t vote” or worse yet “third party,” you’ll be treated as a child to be scolded and shamed rather than an adult to be engaged.

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2026-01-14
In discussing oral arguments before SCOTUS on two suits relating to bans on transgender students in sports, Chris Geidner (Law Dork) suggested they revealed a shift in tone toward avoiding a wide-ranging decision with Constitutional implications, so that while the bans in question would be upheld, it would be done in a manner that it only applied to those particular cases and would leave open the option for other jurisdictions to allow students to participate according to their gender. That is, states could have such a ban but allowing participation based on gender would not violate Title IX, despite the plaintiff's claims.

Now, this of course was oral arguments so is no guarantee of the shape of the ultimate ruling, but according to Geidner the Justices seemed interested in avoiding basic questions about trans rights under the Title.

Which leaves me feeling if there is such a word quasi-optimistic, which is about as good as it gets on this topic these days. There are undoubtedly hard - make that even harder - times ahead but I still believe in the line about the arc of the moral universe.

So I take hope in the shift in tone represented by Kavanaugh’s remark that “one of the themes of your argument has been the more people learn, the more they’ll agree with you.“ I do it both because that is true and because perhaps that, again, shift in tone is the result of some members of the Court starting to think “um this whole business is more complicated than I originally thought.”

Consider that in the period 1998-2008, 26 states added to their state Constitutions provisions banning same-sex marriage at tine when opposition to those rights ran at about 60%. They did it because support was slowly rising and the reactionaries, aware of that fact, pushed these amendments to lock in their bigotry at a time when they could still get people worked up over it.

Despite that, it continued to be an issue, support continued to rise, in 2015 SCOTUS struck all of them down, and polls over the past two years show 67-69% of the public supporting same-sex marriage.

It’s unclear who originated the saying “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” (no, it wasn’t Mark Twain). No matter; with some recent polls saying that a clear majority of Republican voters think their party is way too concerned with trans rights issues, I don’t feel it remiss to listen for the perhaps faint but still perceptible sound of rhyming chimes.

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2025-01-14
The Democratic-controlled New Jersey legislature has broken a promise to enact a trans shield law in the post-election session, generating a sense of betrayal.

It's a well-justified reaction, yet we should for the moment recall that NJ has an Executive Order in place that functions as a shield and that stays in force until it's overturned or superseded by law.

I have urged [out-going] Gov. [Phil] Murphy to call on the legislature to turn his EO into law without success, so now we have to push [Governor-elect Mikie] Sherrill to do it.

I rather suspect the lack of post-election action arises from a feeling of “We’ve got the shield EO, why raise what might be a contentious issue?” More specifically, I suspect the reason for the idea of a post-election vote was intended as a backstop against the possibility of a win in the governor’s race by Trump-lover Jack Ciattarelli, who certainly would have revoked Murphy’s EO. Since the moderate Mikie Sherrill, who has a pretty good record on LGBTQ+ (including transgender) issues, won, the members of the legislature felt no urgency to deal with it.

None of which changes the fact that there should be a law, not just an EO, and we should be pressing for that.

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2026-01-16
[Background: In response to a 2015 TikTok from John Cena about what makes an "average American, someone asked "WTF happened?"]

WTF happened is that we got lazy, we thought those issues were pretty much settled, that the bastards, bigots, and buffoons had shrunk far enough away that we could coast to the finish line, ignoring or ignorant enough to the fact that the diverse America we saw emerging that was so pleasing to us - one with a “non-majority majority” in which no racial/ethnic group is a majority of the population - was instead terrifying to many of the existing majority whose internal conception of what it means to be “American” is being undermined by that reality.

 *See, for example, https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-erickson-report-page-4-longer-look.html