Midday open thread: A Biden gets booted, a cop ties Frisbee golf to weed, an earthquake anniversary

Daily KOS

10 years ago

Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Voter fraud vigilantes:
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- California Prisons, Newt Gingrich, and broken clocks, by Susan Grigsby
- A fiery prophet for social justice and for why we must vote: Rev. William Barber, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Stand Your Ground: Women and blacks need not apply, by Dante Atkins
- Fox’s Keith Ablow: Obama not protecting us from Ebola because his ‘affinities’ are with Africa, by Hunter
- How Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker shows contempt for the working poor, by Mark E Andersen
- Is it legal for the police to shoot an unarmed, surrendered citizen, by Shaun King
- Will Republicans succeed using Ebola & ISIS to manipulate the American psyche, by Egberto Willies
- Zombie lies: Debunked or not, right-wing talking heads won’t let them die, by Ian Reifowitz
These Daily Kos community posts were the most shared on Facebook October 16:

Ending The Walmart Scam, by Raul Grijalva

Wealth Inequality hurting corporate profits, by gjohnsit

Updated: The real reason behind Rick Scott’s infamous debate tantrum, by SemDem
William Gibson, inventor of the term “cyberspace,” has no idea how the future will view us:

If there were somehow a way for me to get one body of knowledge from the future—one volume of the great shelf of knowledge of a couple of hundred years from now—I would want to get a history. I would want to get a history book. I would want to know what they think of us. From that, I would be able to infer anything else that I might want to know about the future. The one constant, it seems to me, in looking at how we look at the past, how we have looked at the past before, is that we never see the inhabitants of the past as they saw themselves.

We have a very detailed idea of what the Victorians were like. They’re not really very far away, but they were different. Their view of themselves is nothing like our view of them. They probably didn’t think they were puritanical and kinky. They probably didn’t think that conditions of child labor were that problematic. I’m sure they didn’t think that colonialism was a problem—it was a feature, not a bug. Their whole business was based on it. We see them very differently, and I think that the future won’t see us as anything like we see ourselves to be.
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When the vice president learned this, it probably was, to quote him another context, a BFD:

Vice President Joe Biden ’s son Hunter was discharged from the Navy Reserve this year after testing positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hunter Biden, a lawyer by training who is now a managing partner at an investment company, had been commissioned as an ensign in the Navy Reserve, a part-time position. But after failing a drug test last year, his brief military career ended.
Twenty-five years ago, the Bay Area had its largest earthquake since 1906 when San Francisco was devastated.: The Loma Prieta earthquake, 6.9 on the Richter scale, killed 63 people. Forty-two of them were killed when a section of the double-deck Cypress Street Viaduct, a section of the Nimitz Freeway (Interstate 880) collapsed. The Bay Bridge was severely damaged, with a section falling onto the deck below. Liquefaction in the Marina area of San Francisco, built on rubble after the 1906 quake, collapsed or made irreparable more than 75 homes:

Between 40,000 and 50,000 baseball fans calmly evacuated Candlestick Park, about a half-hour before Game 3 of the World Series—even taking with them souvenir chunks of concrete that had fallen from the stadium. The series was delayed indefinitely while officials tried to assess the damage to Candlestick and the Oakland Coliseum.
Judge refuses to delay immigration hearing for lawyer’s maternity leave, then berates her for bringing baby to court: Stacy Ehrisman-Mickle, who was on a six-week maternity leave, got two judges to delay hearings. But immigration Judge J. Dan Pelletier Sr. refused to delay another hearing, responding to her request with a terse “No good cause. Hearing date set prior to counsel accepting representation.” With her husband out of town and no relatives close by, Ehrisman-Mickle strapped her four-week-old infant to her chest and appeared for the hearing. When the baby started crying, the Pelletier chastised the lawyer publicly for inappropriate behavior in court and for exposing her child to its germs. He eventually delayed the hearing and Ehrisman-Mickle filed a complaint.
Check out this what-the-hell interchange between an Iowa cop and a motorist regarding marijuana and Frisbee golf.
Sears recently marketeda ring with a giant swastika on it. According to the description, the ring was “[n]ot for Neo Nazi or any Nazi implication,” but “to make you look beautiful at your next dinner date.” Outrage flowed at Twitter and elsewhere and Sears soon pulled the ring from its website, blaming a third-party vendor for the offering. This goes to show that third-party vendors ought to be constantly evaluated to ensure that it’s a worthwhile partnership; a third-party risk management solution like this might be something to consider – https://www.aravo.com/products/third-party-risk-management/. Team Blackness also discussed right-wing rants on how Obama brought forth Ebola, a racist Toshiba ad, and a terror threat against feminist Anita Sarkeesian.

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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Fantrum, cont’d. Warning: Meteor Blades posts may cause thinking for more than 4 hours. Gardner grilled again on personhood. Hunter on Nikki Haley’s Confederate flag metrics. St. Louis courts provide more evidence we’re regressing.