I don't know why, Jim, but I always thought a Billiken was a goat. Seeing the pictures of the mascot, I now see that a Billiken is a nuclear powered icebreaker.
There are other articles that indicate that CoreCivic is in the loop. They transport immigrants just to keep the lawyers from having access to courts or clients. The CEO makes $7m per year - many in Congress are invested as are the richest - BlackRock and Vanguard made it happen. Geo Group also does the same thing. Like other Trump ideas - these companies will go bankrupt and the taxpayers will pay legal expenses for years to come - unless the king reins. There is no constituent support for ICE or detention - or Mars - so we will vote out the GOP Trump loyalists. Hopefully the sooner the better. We need to start with Graham and Jordan - the leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees that do nothing to control this corrupt administration.
With 140 Insurrectionists in Congress, Musk's money, and an untruthful media, the battle of right vs wrong will continue to provide only small victories for awhile. Thomas and Alito are on Leonard Leo's payroll and the Federalist Society lawyers continue to be a large part of the problem. All lawyers took an oath to the constitution - and if they want to change it - they are breaking the law and their oath.
Ms. O'Hara absolutely stole the show in Best In Show. BULGE??
Now that football season is fading (much sadness for this mammal), shouldn't Jim and Andrew make a #ShameBet over who finishes 3rd in the NL Central? That's Redlegs v. el Birdos (Cardinals, aka #BFIB) for the non-baseball enthusiast.
I cling to a belief that Jim still holds some boyhood luv for a certain AL team, by whatever name he calls em. I was birthed, reared, and matured (ok, debatable) in the 216, "one of the original North American Numbering Plan codes". I've experimented with both years & distance, still pretty sure you can't take the CLE out of the boy 😉
I appreciate the efforts of our shared city's snow removal process and their tireless drivers. They have more trucks this year, and for those us in the city's hinterlands (that is, your neighborhood and mine), it was a real improvement.
The challenge is with that other important form of citywide transportation: sidewalks. Wish I could share the composite picture I included of the corner of two important streets running through my neighborhood, which I sent to city council with a few suggestions for improvement. It included a hapless bus rider at a corner that includes two bus stops on the adjoining roads, both running alongside a prominent local bank.
I intended to try and shovel that stretch of road on Thursday, when the public schools resumed classes. There was no way this old lady with a shovel could manage the mounds of snow dumped by private contractors while clearing parking lots for businesses, or the hardpacked, icy snow remaining on sidewalks. Sorry, kids who walk to school.
I hear the city is planning to meet to discuss these and other issues related to snow removal. Now's the time to use the 311 app to register any businesses that haven't shoveled or other issues you've noticed as a result of poor removal maintenance.
I think about this a lot. In my municipality you are responsible for your stretch of sidewalk, but at this point it's a job for a machine, not a 130 lb very caffeinated woman :(
I follow some of the urban planning/walk ability channels on YouTube, and it's amazing to see some of the footage of people biking around Scandinavia is this weather, but they can because the sidewalks/bike lanes are treated with the degree of priority we treat our roads. I don't know how you break the loop here of people not walking/biking because it's dangerous, but the conditions are dangerous because "no one bikes or walks".
In college I biked all through the subzero weather and lake effect snow because our campus was immaculately maintained. Cutting through town though...was an entirely different matter.
Me, too! I'm deeply involved with my neighborhood traffic safety committee, which advocates for improved pedestrian/cycling infrastructure. We also sponsor twice-monthly community bike rides.
As a dedicated walker and occasional cyclist trying to be more intentional about cycling, it's frustrating when the infrastructure supporting these basic activities doesn't get the same priority as those dedicated to cars.
“With a hearing on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship now on the calendar, I want to return to a basic point we’ve discussed several times over the last year. Given our experience living mostly in “normal” times, many of us are used to the idea that the law evolves over time. When judges create new case law, the law evolves and changes. And we accept that it has “changed” — in a certain meaning of the word — even when we may not agree with the change. But with so many other things that have changed slowly since 2016 and then rapidly from early 2025, these are outdated ideas, outdated understandings of how the world and the law works.
Birthright citizenship is a key example of this.
Birthright citizenship is clearly, explicitly and incontestably written into the U.S. Constitution. It’s the country’s fundamental law and more than 150 years of American history have been lived on that basis. There’s a reason why no one has doubted this over all those years even if many have opposed it.
A huge amount of the conservative legal movement, especially but not solely in its post-2012 and increasingly Trumpy variant, has been based on changing legal analysis and interpretation, turning it into a choose-your-own-adventure exercise in which you say, What could this law or constitutional passage require if we start from the premise that words and phrases have no established meaning? If the Supreme Court decides that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t exist or doesn’t count, that won’t change its established meaning. It will have vast real-world implications in the short term — and what counts as the short term isn’t entirely clear. But the actual law and Constitution will not have changed; what it says will not have changed.
This may be a subtle point and more importantly the relevance of this point may not be immediately clear. But it’s actually quite important. Constitutional government in the United States is largely in abeyance and has been for roughly a year. Whether it returns is not yet clear. In the old times, we accepted Supreme Court decisions because there was a broadly held view that the Court was operating on good-faith jurisprudence even if it was a jurisprudence we ourselves didn’t agree with. That’s no longer the case. What we have is a corrupt Court making war on the constitutional order. Its decisions have no legitimacy. We may choose, as a pragmatic decision, to operate within them. But that doesn’t mean they’re legitimate or have any claim on us. It’s the same as the role of the states and state sovereignty in a time of constitutional crisis. Small-d democratic legitimacy now exists in the free states. And it’s the responsibility of the free states to resist the power of a renegade presidency making war on the Constitution as well as they can while the forces of civic democracy regroup and prepare to reassert their power.
Along these lines, I’ve been I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how states — now only with small steps — are moving forward into this role. TPM alum Brian Beutler published his conversation today with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has set up a portal for citizens, state officials and law enforcement to report and save evidence of ICE crimes. Later I learned that New Jersey Governor Sherrill is doing the same thing.
We’re not in normal times. The national citadel has been captured and free states have to fill the void until it can be reclaimed. Here is an analogy that clarifies my meaning as it relates to the Court.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump got the FBI to seize voting machines in Georgia in his continuing quest to deny he lost the 2020 or claim for whatever it’s worth in his degenerate mind that he won the 2020 election. If Donald Trump gets someone at DOJ to say that Donald Trump won the 2020 election that won’t change what happened. Even if he got Nicolas Maduro to “admit” he rigged the election, still nothing will have changed. If he convicts those two election workers in Georgia based on Maduro’s testinomy … nope, what happened will still be what happened. It will just be more criminal conduct by a corrupt executive.
The Supreme Court is no different, an equally corrupt institution operating outside the constitutional order. We have to grapple with its decisions just as we have to grapple Trump’s actions. But that doesn’t make them real. They can’t make two plus two equal five anymore than anyone else can.”
Jim, thank you for the shout out to ODOT. One of our family's businesses - 4 of us in 2 generations. Brother drove snow plow some, more so headed out into bitter & snowy nights with his tools and got them back up & running, where ever they'd broken down... if you wanna talk heroes, now there's a man 💪😇
It was "the highway department" when dad started surveying in 1930s.
Can't tell a trucker-to-the-rescue without Red Sovine's masterpiece of storytelling, taken up a level 50 years ago by Tom Waits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qu3ECNR9UM
A parallel can be drawn between Winston Churchill's famous 1946 warning about Stalin's iron curtain descending across Europe and Donald Trump's cloak of oppression that he is spreading across our country to suffocate, as Emma Lazarus put it, our "yearning to breathe free."
March Madness bracket? YES, PLEASE!!!
I don't know why, Jim, but I always thought a Billiken was a goat. Seeing the pictures of the mascot, I now see that a Billiken is a nuclear powered icebreaker.
"The Best of Moira Rose" video was hysterical. O'Hara was so freakin' talented. She might have been the best comedic actress of her generation.
There are other articles that indicate that CoreCivic is in the loop. They transport immigrants just to keep the lawyers from having access to courts or clients. The CEO makes $7m per year - many in Congress are invested as are the richest - BlackRock and Vanguard made it happen. Geo Group also does the same thing. Like other Trump ideas - these companies will go bankrupt and the taxpayers will pay legal expenses for years to come - unless the king reins. There is no constituent support for ICE or detention - or Mars - so we will vote out the GOP Trump loyalists. Hopefully the sooner the better. We need to start with Graham and Jordan - the leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees that do nothing to control this corrupt administration.
With 140 Insurrectionists in Congress, Musk's money, and an untruthful media, the battle of right vs wrong will continue to provide only small victories for awhile. Thomas and Alito are on Leonard Leo's payroll and the Federalist Society lawyers continue to be a large part of the problem. All lawyers took an oath to the constitution - and if they want to change it - they are breaking the law and their oath.
Ms. O'Hara absolutely stole the show in Best In Show. BULGE??
Now that football season is fading (much sadness for this mammal), shouldn't Jim and Andrew make a #ShameBet over who finishes 3rd in the NL Central? That's Redlegs v. el Birdos (Cardinals, aka #BFIB) for the non-baseball enthusiast.
I cling to a belief that Jim still holds some boyhood luv for a certain AL team, by whatever name he calls em. I was birthed, reared, and matured (ok, debatable) in the 216, "one of the original North American Numbering Plan codes". I've experimented with both years & distance, still pretty sure you can't take the CLE out of the boy 😉
I'll take the Bucs and Paul Skenes for third place, maybe more.
That really is very plausible. I'm just glad el Birdos are finally admitting they need a rebuilding period.
I remember the supreme court’s decision on 1989 Exxon Valdez. SCOTUS is scum.
They overturned the will of the jury for the first time in history.
All to keep Exxon profits to fund Haliburton and terrorism in Iraq.
Maybe my perspective is very different for the Intentional corporate disregard for the public and environment.
They unleashed a most powerful force of evil to kill an entire ecosystem; our way of life, and get away with it.
You can just accept it and move on and figure out a different place to live so Exxon shareholders don’t have to shoulder the burden of responsibility.
I appreciate the efforts of our shared city's snow removal process and their tireless drivers. They have more trucks this year, and for those us in the city's hinterlands (that is, your neighborhood and mine), it was a real improvement.
The challenge is with that other important form of citywide transportation: sidewalks. Wish I could share the composite picture I included of the corner of two important streets running through my neighborhood, which I sent to city council with a few suggestions for improvement. It included a hapless bus rider at a corner that includes two bus stops on the adjoining roads, both running alongside a prominent local bank.
I intended to try and shovel that stretch of road on Thursday, when the public schools resumed classes. There was no way this old lady with a shovel could manage the mounds of snow dumped by private contractors while clearing parking lots for businesses, or the hardpacked, icy snow remaining on sidewalks. Sorry, kids who walk to school.
I hear the city is planning to meet to discuss these and other issues related to snow removal. Now's the time to use the 311 app to register any businesses that haven't shoveled or other issues you've noticed as a result of poor removal maintenance.
I think about this a lot. In my municipality you are responsible for your stretch of sidewalk, but at this point it's a job for a machine, not a 130 lb very caffeinated woman :(
I follow some of the urban planning/walk ability channels on YouTube, and it's amazing to see some of the footage of people biking around Scandinavia is this weather, but they can because the sidewalks/bike lanes are treated with the degree of priority we treat our roads. I don't know how you break the loop here of people not walking/biking because it's dangerous, but the conditions are dangerous because "no one bikes or walks".
In college I biked all through the subzero weather and lake effect snow because our campus was immaculately maintained. Cutting through town though...was an entirely different matter.
Me, too! I'm deeply involved with my neighborhood traffic safety committee, which advocates for improved pedestrian/cycling infrastructure. We also sponsor twice-monthly community bike rides.
As a dedicated walker and occasional cyclist trying to be more intentional about cycling, it's frustrating when the infrastructure supporting these basic activities doesn't get the same priority as those dedicated to cars.
From Josh Marshall at TPM:
“With a hearing on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship now on the calendar, I want to return to a basic point we’ve discussed several times over the last year. Given our experience living mostly in “normal” times, many of us are used to the idea that the law evolves over time. When judges create new case law, the law evolves and changes. And we accept that it has “changed” — in a certain meaning of the word — even when we may not agree with the change. But with so many other things that have changed slowly since 2016 and then rapidly from early 2025, these are outdated ideas, outdated understandings of how the world and the law works.
Birthright citizenship is a key example of this.
Birthright citizenship is clearly, explicitly and incontestably written into the U.S. Constitution. It’s the country’s fundamental law and more than 150 years of American history have been lived on that basis. There’s a reason why no one has doubted this over all those years even if many have opposed it.
A huge amount of the conservative legal movement, especially but not solely in its post-2012 and increasingly Trumpy variant, has been based on changing legal analysis and interpretation, turning it into a choose-your-own-adventure exercise in which you say, What could this law or constitutional passage require if we start from the premise that words and phrases have no established meaning? If the Supreme Court decides that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t exist or doesn’t count, that won’t change its established meaning. It will have vast real-world implications in the short term — and what counts as the short term isn’t entirely clear. But the actual law and Constitution will not have changed; what it says will not have changed.
This may be a subtle point and more importantly the relevance of this point may not be immediately clear. But it’s actually quite important. Constitutional government in the United States is largely in abeyance and has been for roughly a year. Whether it returns is not yet clear. In the old times, we accepted Supreme Court decisions because there was a broadly held view that the Court was operating on good-faith jurisprudence even if it was a jurisprudence we ourselves didn’t agree with. That’s no longer the case. What we have is a corrupt Court making war on the constitutional order. Its decisions have no legitimacy. We may choose, as a pragmatic decision, to operate within them. But that doesn’t mean they’re legitimate or have any claim on us. It’s the same as the role of the states and state sovereignty in a time of constitutional crisis. Small-d democratic legitimacy now exists in the free states. And it’s the responsibility of the free states to resist the power of a renegade presidency making war on the Constitution as well as they can while the forces of civic democracy regroup and prepare to reassert their power.
Along these lines, I’ve been I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how states — now only with small steps — are moving forward into this role. TPM alum Brian Beutler published his conversation today with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has set up a portal for citizens, state officials and law enforcement to report and save evidence of ICE crimes. Later I learned that New Jersey Governor Sherrill is doing the same thing.
We’re not in normal times. The national citadel has been captured and free states have to fill the void until it can be reclaimed. Here is an analogy that clarifies my meaning as it relates to the Court.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump got the FBI to seize voting machines in Georgia in his continuing quest to deny he lost the 2020 or claim for whatever it’s worth in his degenerate mind that he won the 2020 election. If Donald Trump gets someone at DOJ to say that Donald Trump won the 2020 election that won’t change what happened. Even if he got Nicolas Maduro to “admit” he rigged the election, still nothing will have changed. If he convicts those two election workers in Georgia based on Maduro’s testinomy … nope, what happened will still be what happened. It will just be more criminal conduct by a corrupt executive.
The Supreme Court is no different, an equally corrupt institution operating outside the constitutional order. We have to grapple with its decisions just as we have to grapple Trump’s actions. But that doesn’t make them real. They can’t make two plus two equal five anymore than anyone else can.”
Let's see how the Billybobs do at UD Arena ! Go Flyers and see u at bracket time. !!
Why would you even have to ask that question?
PS...free steak at the Pine Club based on the Feb .24 rematch ?? Soaring with the Flyers !
You two are on a roll!!! Love it!!!
What a year this week's been!
Jim, thank you for the shout out to ODOT. One of our family's businesses - 4 of us in 2 generations. Brother drove snow plow some, more so headed out into bitter & snowy nights with his tools and got them back up & running, where ever they'd broken down... if you wanna talk heroes, now there's a man 💪😇
It was "the highway department" when dad started surveying in 1930s.
Can't tell a trucker-to-the-rescue without Red Sovine's masterpiece of storytelling, taken up a level 50 years ago by Tom Waits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qu3ECNR9UM
Yes to a March madness OT bracket contest.
A parallel can be drawn between Winston Churchill's famous 1946 warning about Stalin's iron curtain descending across Europe and Donald Trump's cloak of oppression that he is spreading across our country to suffocate, as Emma Lazarus put it, our "yearning to breathe free."