When word was leaked by the White House that they were vetting Nevada's Republican governor Brian Sandoval for the Supreme Court, I suspect that my initial reaction was similar to many. It was somewhat along the lines of "Say what???!!" Certainly, Mr. Sandoval is not a diehard conservative, indeed almost a centrist, though by GOP standards, and supports issues uncommon for the Far Right, like abortion rights and same-sex marriage (although that's now settled law and not likely to come up for a challenge any time soon) -- but he also has supported far more conservative issues than I think remotely acceptable for an appointment to the Supreme Court by a Democratic president, such as on guns and unions.
But later in the day, the more I thought about it, the more I've come to the conclusion that the news was freaking brilliant. First, one has to keep in mind that this wasn't a nomination. It was just leaking word that Mr. Sandoval was being vetted for consideration. And it's a fair thing to do -- if the president doesn't think he'd get a preferred-nominee past the Republican Senate, maybe he wouldn't want to risk having a possible Republican president make the nomination. So, at least taking a more moderate Republican nominee (by far-right GOP standards...) into consideration is worth the time and effort to check into him. More to the point, though only one name was leaked, I'm sure the White House is vetting a lot of potential candidates, not solely Brian Sandoval. In the end, I think the likelihood of Brian Sandoval being actually nominated is tiny, close to insignificant. But for the reasons just mentioned, it's not unthinkable and therefore worth Senate Republicans taking seriously. Second, by leaking the name, it paints these Senate Republicans into a horrible corner. Just by leaking his name, Republicans in the Senate now have to decide if they're going to stick by their insistence not to even simply meet with any Supreme Court nominees made by the president -- a position which has made their recalcitrance appear unconstitutional. If they do decide to stick with that -- then they will be put in the awful position of taking mere "appearance" of unconstitutionality out of the equation by virtue of not even meeting with a member of their own party. Worse, they will be on the public record of mortally offending Hispanics for not even meeting (!) with a highly-qualified governor and former federal judge who's of Hispanic heritage. It is highly likely that, not even considering this issue, the Hispanic vote will flood to Democrats this year, most especially if Donald Trump is the GOP nominee. But if for some reason Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz win (or get put on the ticket), this refusal to meet with a Hispanic for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court will go a long ways to blunting and off-setting that. But let's say that Senate Republicans decide that this is a way out of their Recalcitrance Conundrum and that they actually could live with Brian Sandoval as the Supreme Court nominee (or understand that they can't afford to avoid him), and so agree to meet with the GOP governor. Well, if so, they are then setting precedent. That's because this therefore puts them in a position of absolutely having to do what they insisted they wouldn't -- they would have to meet with all other candidates who the president vets, including liberals or moderates. After all, they couldn't just meet with the one Republican and not anyone else. I believe that that would be a far-worse PR disaster than just not meeting with anyone. And if they realize that they now have to do what they had said they would not, and therefore meet with the all liberal and moderate nominees, suddenly that shows the president's strength in breaking the GOP's unbreakable battle line, and opens the door to him actually making a nomination -- and once that happens, and a nomination is, in fact, made, it becomes all the harder for Senate Republicans to vote against a highly-qualified nominee who they had met with. To be clear, Senate Republicans could still vote against the nominee -- and likely would. But again, it would be a huge public relations disaster for Republicans to meet with a high-qualified nominee -- with the hearings televised for all the public to see -- and then vote the person down for what will clearly be purely political partisanship. Moreover, there are a number of Republicans running for re-elections in tight races in "purple" states. And if there is a well-qualified nominee to the Supreme that these vulnerable Republican candidates must vote on, suddenly it becomes a big problem for them to vote against such a qualified nominee, and risk showing their partisanship in blocking a constitutionally required act by the president for no reason other than party politics. Of course, there are likely other reasons the vetting of Brian Sandoval is taking place. And other reasons the names were leaked. But I suspect, at the very least, that these reasons above played some part in the decision process. And, just as a guess, I suspect a large part. So...well played, Mr. President.
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As John Oliver is on the way with a new season of Last Week Tonight, I think it's a good time to catch up with some of his most outstanding pieces from last year. This is a devastating piece he did on the tobacco industry that, despite effective laws and regulations in the U.S., is thriving monumentally around the world -- helped in part by strong-armed lawsuits against small countries. The segment is infuriating, yet often quite funny...but around the 15-minute mark it becomes pure-brilliant. I shall say no more. Oh, okay, I'll say one thing -- Jeff...!!! During MSNBC's coverage of the Nevada caucus, they ran a graphic that showed how Donald Trump of all people -- the man who had maligned Mexicans (among others...) -- had won an apparently stunning 50% of the Hispanic vote in the state. Fortunately Lawrence O'Donnell was there to put it in proper perspective.
As O'Donnell pointed out, only about 1,500 voters of Hispanic heritage voted in the caucus, and Trump won around a whopping 800 of them. And to add more perspective, Rachel Maddow followed up on O'Donnell's lead and noted that there are 800,000 Hispanics in the state. To which O'Donnell added for emphasis, not that it was needed, let's not make too much of that statistic that looks so impressive. Also, while watching the coverage, it stood out that we are slowly starting to get to the point I wrote about a while back, where many Republican pundits -- who three months ago were freaking out at the prospect of Donald Trump (!!) leading their party -- now are beginning to accept the reality that Trump might actually win the GOP nomination, and so we're seeing them "explain" the supposedly rational reasons why he is winning, and why it's the "will of the people," and why he's speaking to voter unrest about Washington. And how this is all natural, to be expected, and ultimately good. The usually-responsible Steve Schmidt has been doing this on MSNBC for a few weeks, and Nicole Wallace on joined the fray there tonight in high form. There she was, talking about "voter unrest" and how The People are upset with Washington and that they want change. Now, let's be clear: there isn't "voter unrest." There is anger among Republicans that they don't have a Republican in the White House, and for many Republicans that the man there is black. And after eight years of it, they're really pissed off. If Mitt Romney had won the 2012 election, Republicans would be just fine and wouldn't want to "shake things up." They're just going getting their way, and therefore have found someone who can express their irrational anger in as visceral and crass way as possible. (And try as they might to compare to the two, Democrats are not voting for Bernie Sanders for the same reason, because they're angry at holding the White House for eight years and don't like who's in office there. Democrats are quite happy with having the presidency, very like President Obama, and have long liked Bernie Sanders, who's been repeatedly elected to national office for over a quarter of a century.) But most notably, Ms. Wallance drove her point home by ignoring the issue that Lawrence O'Donnell had raised about how how Donald Trump is basically running a "talk radio" type campaign, where you attack the weakest and smear and don't have anyone disagreeing with you because you're preaching to the converted, and instead she said how it made her "laugh," how it made her "chuckle" every day when she saw liberals defending big boss Superdelegates, while Republicans were happily supporting The Will of the People. And then she went on to ignore O'Donnell's point some more (which he later noted and didn't let her get away with) and she kept talking about The Will of the People on and on (and more about Democrats making her laugh -- I expected her at one point to put her hand over her mouth and say, "tee-hee"), as if having Donald Trump's lying, hate-filled, near-fascistic, misogynistic, un-Constitutional ravings were just what a party wanted as the Will of its party. Who knows, maybe if and when Donald Trump get the Republican nomination as party leader, all these GOP pundits will by then be celebrating the triumph of the Will. And yes, that was a cheap shot. But unfortunately, it has far too many overlaps of valid similarity as at least a starting point to be realistically uncomfortable. And for those who missed the allusion, feel free to look it up... While sitting on the panel for jury selection today, there was a power failure, and they had to evacuate the entire courthouse. The huge delay wasn’t merely a case of getting the power back on, but all the time needed to get the jurors, court employees and lawyers back in and through the metal detectors. All in all, it was probably over an hour.
The “worst” part though was when our prospective jurors would gather in little groups, and everyone was wondering how things were going and who would be lucky enough to be dismiseed, they all would say to me, “Oh, you are definitely getting selected. Absolutely. No question. You’re the only one I’m sure of. You seem so fair. I know you're going to be chosen Oh, yes, I'm certain. Yes, I agree.” All I could say was, what did I do wrong? And alas…yes, I was selected on the jury. The trial is supposed to be two weeks, though the judge said he thought it should be shorter. So, I am now officially Mr. Juror. After the main 12 jurors were selected (and commiserating at having to serve…), the court then had to pick the two alternates. They called five more people, and after a just few question the lawyers dismissed four of them! Four! The jurors who were already selected were sort of humorously grumbling at that. We’d been there for hours and hours and hours, answering tons of questions, and here are four out of five new people tossed off, just like that, within about 10-15 minutes. I decided to throw caution to the wind and add some levity, and shouted out to the judge (who’s a great guy…), “Can I change my answers?!!!” Happily, the courtroom burst into laughter, including (most-especially happily) the judge. There’s a court clerk who, when she first met us in the hallway, said that because of budget cutbacks, she has to do this additional job and added that she’s not very good at it. She’s quite nice and very thoughtful, and – she’s right, she’s not good at all at this other job she’s now got to do. Awkward, lost sometimes and stumbling. But the odd thing is, this new job that she admitted to be lousy at…and I swear I’m not exaggerating… is basically calling roll! Really. But she’s pleasant, we like her, so it’s sort of adorable. But I have no idea what’s so hard about it. The trial starts tomorrow in full. Today, we got the plaintif’s opening statement. And now, by order of the judge, I have to go into silent mode. More later. I came across a very bizarre problem the other day, and although it's probably not something most people will have happen to them, I suspect it's not uncommon, and therefore worth bringing up here. In fact, when I went online to research it, I found that a lot of people were indeed asking about it, so clearly there are others. Since I did track down the way to fix it (and it was easy), I figure it would be a good idea to bring it up here. So, here's the problem and resolution, should you ever come across it. The background is that I noticed that my C: drive was filling up. It has 464 GB capacity, but only had 58 GB left, so that meant it was using up 408 GB. But I had absolutely no idea where that’s all going. When I installed this drive a couple years ago, my storage was around only 150-200 GB. Now, as I said, it was showing that I was using 408 GB. That's a massive increase. And was inexplicable. I did everything I could think of the find possible culprits. I ran Windows "Disk Cleanup" to delete temporary and unnecessary files. I checked through all the folders on my system to see where any huge files might be lurking. The OneDrive cloud serve was using up 38 GB, but this is also where my music files, photographs and Documents reside on my hard drive. The Windows folder was about 14 GB. The two Programs folders were about 7 GB. The Desktop had 4 GB. That’s 63 GB. I cleaned out the Recycle Bin, so it was empty. I emptied my browser cache, as well. There were a few folders in my Users directory that each had 4-5 GB. Let’s say there were 10 of them (there weren’t nearly that many) and let’s say they’re all 5 GB. That’s an additional 50 GB. So, that’s 113 GB. Yet my system was saying that 408 GB were being used up. There are more files and folders on the hard drive, of course, but as far as I can tell, no folders looked like they’d have massive amounts of storage. Just normal, individual files. In fact, I went to the C: drive in Window Explorer, highlighted everything manually and checked Properties, which among other things will calculate disk space. It came out to about 115 GB. So, where on earth was the other 280 GB??? I didn’t have a clue of any other places to look. But clearly, I seemed to be missing something. I went online and did some searching. As I said, it turns out that there were a lot of people with the same problem. Most solutions made no sense, at least for what I was experiencing But one did. And so I tried it. What I read was that System Restore can use up a LOT of space. And that the disk allotment is often set for too much space. (System Restore is a very valuable Windows feature that creates a "restore point" so that you can revert to an earlier setting of Windows if, for example, you install a new program that screws up your system.) So, I went to check it out. (System Restore resides under Control Panel/ System/ System Protection. Highlight the drive you want to protect, and click "Configure.) What I discovered was that, for some inexplicable reason -- nothing I had set -- the allotment my system was configured for was…100% of my hard drive!. This meant that System Restore could use up all the empty space it wanted, as it created new and new and new restore points. And so it was using up 289 gigabytes!!! Which as you'll recall was almost exactly the amount of “missing storage” my random math was unable to figure out. So, I simply turned it off, changed the allotment to 10%, turned it back on and checked my C: drive. It now has 320 GB free on a 461 GB drive!!! Rather than the 58 GB free it was telling me before. (This also means that I have about 140 GB stored, which is near-exactly what I thought it was supposed to be.) Well, that sure made a difference! I knew something didn’t make sense. And I’m pleased at having tracked down the resolution. Why it was set at 100% allotment, I have zero idea. Just a "Why me, Lord?" random glitch. Since this is such a recent issue I would guess it’s something that hiccuped when I upgraded to Windows 10. (I've checked with others who've upgraded, and their System Restore settings are fine. I got into a discussion about this later with my Dalai Lama tech guru, the oft-mentioned here Ed Bott, who writes a great column for ZDNet here, as well as numerous books with Microsoft. What he said was, "Yeah, not sure how you got that allocated to 100%. It’s set by default using an algorithm based on disk size, and in many copies of Windows 10 I have tested [installed on low-capacity systems], it is turned off completely." When Ed Bott tells you he's not sure of something about Windows, it is most definitely a glitch you can stop trying to figure out. Among other things, he just wrote a book with Microsoft about how to use Windows 10. So, when Ed doesn't know, it pretty much can't be known. As I said, I now have System Restore set to allot 10% of the C: drive, which is likely far more than enough. System Restore will now never use up more than 46 GB of the drive, rather the 300 GB from before. And if I ever want to delete that much-smaller amount, it's even easier to do so now. Just use the Disk Cleanup feature I mentioned early (simply type Disk Cleanup in the Search bar...), and select the "Cleanup system files" option, which will remove all the existing restore points but the most recent one. The bottomline is that the problem is resolved, and easily so. It's not a common problem at all, but it is also a problem that others can come across. And so, if you find that your hard drive is unexpectedly filling up for not apparent reason, now you know the resolution.
Three weeks ago, I wrote about doing the publicity on the movie, Jury Duty. Well, now it appears that I might be living the real thing.
I got a summons for jury duty a couple of weeks ago. And today was the first official day. The way it works in California is that if you don't get a trial on the first day, then your service is completed, You don't have to be "on call" for two weeks. Nothing is settled yet, but I have a feeling that I’ll end up on a jury. I did get called to a panel, where they try to trim the 40-50 people called down to 12 and the alternates. And I was also one of those questioned today in the first group of 24. My sense is that a person in the first group has a better chance of being selected for the trial, since once the lawyers settle on the jurors they're fine with, the others waiting are dismissed. They don't question everyone before deciding. Who knows, maybe there will be some things I said when questioned that one of the sides won’t want. But I’m guessing that I’ll be selected and am prepared to be. Alas, it’s supposed to be a two-week trial, which is unfortunate. Without going into any details, from what little we were told about the case, it seems seems surprising that it's schedule for that long. But I will assume that there is more going on under the surface to require a lot of witnesses. But at least I was able to change my venue from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. The drive downtown is hellish, and if I had to do it every day, it would not be a treat. But Santa Monica is an easy drive, so I'm okay with that. And there are plenty of restaurants in the vicinity which helps, too. Almost none of the prospective jurors want to be there for two weeks, of course, though several REALLY don't want to be there. A few were dropped by the judge, but a bunch were kept on, and they're not happy campers. (One woman runs her own one-person business, and also said she's a single mother with two kids at home. When the judge asked how old the children were, she said, "21 and 25." The judge did a double-take like a cartoon character. "How old??" She's still in the jury pool.) Another person worked briefly at the company being sued. It appears that he hated the place and was fired after two weeks. He said he didn't think he could give a fair judgement. I'm going to guess he'll be gone. And another person had a family business similar to the one being sued that went under because of a lawsuit similar to the one here. Though she wasn't involved with the business, and it was a long time ago, it was pretty clear that she was still pretty pissed off. I'm going to guess she won't be on the jury pool long. Me, I said that I had a lawyer friend who had a few instances of cases like this, but added that I could be fair. I was tempted to yell, "Hang 'em, hang 'em all!!!!," but I went for honesty. (As I did when the judge asked if I knew the details of those other cases. "Minutely," I said -- since my friend describes his cases in the most infinitesimal detail, complete with all the legal precedent upholding his arguments, that I'm almost ready to pass the bar. And that's the news from Juror Land. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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