The law he was going to use to fuck Hillary is the one he's about to be indicted and put on trial for.
Jun 8, 2023
A Reminder
In 2018, Trump signed a bill into law that changed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, increasing the penalties for mishandling secret documents to 5 years, and making it a felony.
It was a change he and the GOP clowns in congress intended to use to spank Hillary.
Ukraine
Some good analysis from an Estonian veteran, Artur Rehi.
- Russians closed all the release valves weeks before the Kakhova dam was blown up - so the water pressure would be very high, and the damage would be greater - and then ordered their forces to pull back their artillery and vehicles just before the blast.
- Without the water (delivered by canals) from the reservoir, 3 oblasts will be unable to produce the agricultural goods that the Ukrainian economy depends on.
- Eco-cide
- Shaping the battle space
- Politics of Energy
- Politics of Hunger
- Scorched earth
"Unless Russia can mobilize least another 4 or 5 hundred thousand people, and have a third party supplier of weapons, they will not be able to do any major offensive operations in the future"
As The World Burns
 |
| NYC |
 |
| Wash DC |
Meanwhile, the "Freedom Caucus" decided their priority is to enact a law that protects gas stoves, and to fuck over Kevin McCarthy because they're pouting about the Debt Ceiling deal he made.
Today's Passing
"Pat Robertson passed away..."
American Christian conservative Pat Robertson died at age 93 at his Virginia home, the Christian Broadcasting Network said in a statement on Thursday.
Robertson founded the network in 1960 and used the flagship program "The 700 Club" for prayer offerings and political commentary. In 1980, the show helped to galvanize support among Christian conservatives for Ronald Reagan's successful campaign for president.
Nicknamed "Pat" by his older brother, he was born Marion Gordon Robertson in Lexington, Virginia, in 1930.
Fuck the euphemisms - that fucker is fuckin' dead.
Robertson founded the network in 1960 and used the flagship program "The 700 Club" for prayer offerings and political commentary. In 1980, the show helped to galvanize support among Christian conservatives for Ronald Reagan's successful campaign for president.
Nicknamed "Pat" by his older brother, he was born Marion Gordon Robertson in Lexington, Virginia, in 1930.
Pat Robertson was a hateful bigot, a full blown hypocrite, and a loud voice of the toxic notion of Christian nationalism.
He blamed 9/11 on gay people - because Pat's God was so angry with them He felt the need to murder thousands of Americans - and he scolded his followers about gambling even though he owned racehorses.
I'm not particularly glad he's dead, but I'm not all broke up about it either. He will not be missed around here.
Today's Quote
We are like books. Most will never see more than our cover. Many will believe the critics. Some will read only the foreword. Very few will ever know our true content.
_-_Emile_Zola,_13-556535.jpg)
Today's Keith
- Indictment(s) today or tomorrow - but soon
- There is no 'middle' in Cable TV News
- How to solve the Both Sides problem
- DumFux News may be set to sue Tucker Carlson to keep him off the air - and off social media too
Jun 7, 2023
Today's Great New Thing
The promise of great things is real, and the hype is really real, but the reality &/or the time it takes the Great New Thing to deliver on the promise always falls short, or it causes problems that can be quite a bit bigger than the one it was intended to solve.
We Have Arrived
I grew up with the understanding that no matter how "important" we thought Denver was becoming, it was still just a cow town out on the plains of Colorado - bigger - but still a cow town.
So it seems a little weird that Denver would attract the kind of attention that gets The New York Times to do a feature on an old defunct landmark joint out on West Colfax that's been more or less derelict for 30 years, and is now being redone and re-opened - weird until you throw in the part about local-boys-make-good.
The South Park guys
With “infinity dollars” poured in by the creators of “South Park,” a fabled Colorado restaurant reopens with the same 1970s vibe and drastically improved food.
Colorado’s defining features include glorious mountain peaks, vivid seasonal colors, skiing and a widespread compulsion to exercise and eat well. But for generations of Colorado children, arguably the most commonly shared experience involved Casa Bonita, a vast, filthy, poorly-lit, underground restaurant with food that many diners deemed barely edible.
Casa Bonita — then sprawling over 52,000 square feet in Lakewood, a Denver suburb — served steamed refried beans, tacos and enchiladas to thousands of people a day, buffet-style. The dinner entertainment was a child’s fever dream: waterfalls, cliff divers, Black Bart’s Cave, faux gold and silver mines, puppet shows and a person in a gorilla costume chased by a sheriff, who sometimes joined in the cliff diving. Casa Bonita’s curious childhood grip was chronicled in an episode of “South Park.”
After that episode ran, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the show’s creators, were regularly asked whether such a place actually existed. “Oh, that’s a place,” Mr. Parker would respond, he said recently. “It’s crazy. It’s weird.” Like so many Colorado children, Mr. Parker had held his birthday parties there.
Then, in 2020, Casa Bonita went bankrupt, hit by the pandemic slump. The place was already in disrepair, crumbling from deferred maintenance, rife with electrical hazards, the ventilation systems coated with grease and the carpet encrusted into something like concrete. The jokes about the food had earned it the nickname Casa NoEata. Still, its passing was mourned.
But in the coming weeks, the enormous casita will reopen with new owners: Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone, both native Coloradans, who have spent upward of $40 million to tear it down, rebuild it and, they joke, to keep everything the same, except now sanitary.
“It doesn’t stink like chlorine anymore,” Mr. Stone said in an interview in late May, during the final, frantic stretch to reopen. “We could have rebuilt this twice as big, for half as much money, but we spent so much restoring it, like a piece of art.”
Mr. Parker added: “And the food is excellent.”
Indeed, Casa Bonita returns as one of the biggest Mexican restaurants in the world, and the new executive chef, Dana Rodriguez, is a six-time James Beard Award nominee. Local fans of Casa Bonita speak of the reopening as if the beloved “Orange Crush” Denver Broncos of 1977 had been revived from a cryogenic state. More than 100,000 potential customers have signed up on the restaurant’s website to make a reservation, Mr. Stone said.
“It’s its own Colorado thing,” said Rick Johnson last Friday night, when some 400 guests were invited for a test run, in the company of Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker. Mr. Johnson, 44, had come to the restaurant as a child and had now brought his own sons. “There are these certain places that bring you back — that bring the nostalgia,” he said.
His son Isaac, 10, was struck by his father’s enthusiasm. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him more excited,” he said.
Isaac had just joined a dozen other children watching a puppet show, during which a friendly taco puppet introduced a somber burrito puppet that sang an Italian aria. The puppet stage was tucked next to Black Bart’s Cave, a windy maze minded by two skeletons. Steps away, the mercado sold Casa Bonita T-shirts, mugs and other trinkets. Every 20 minutes, divers splashed from faux cliffs into a blue pool.
“This is heaven on Earth,” Isaac said.
Mr. Stone, smiling, took in a mariachi band near the bar. The original cost of renovations was projected at $10 million. When the figure reached $20 million, business advisers encouraged Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker to pack it in. These days, Mr. Stone said, the investment was closer to “infinity dollars.”
As Mr. Parker put it, “It would be way cheaper if we just went hang gliding over volcanoes.”
Replicating the proper shade of pink was one of the more benign refurbishing challenges. “Twenty seven different tries to get the right color,” said Scott Shoemaker, who has overseen the renovations.
Casa Bonita occupies a building colored a signature pink that looms like a flamingo’s neck over an outdoor shopping complex; other tenants include a Dollar Store, a Ross Dress for Less, an H&R Block and a coin-operated laundry. The restaurant first opened to the public at the same spot in 1974, patterned after another with the same name, and the same owner, that had opened in Oklahoma City a few years earlier.
Finding the right shade of pink was one of the more benign refurbishing challenges, but still demanding. “Twenty seven different tries,” said Scott Shoemaker, who has overseen the renovations. Finding the right shade of gold for the lettering took nine. Some features, like the four fake deciduous trees and the 62 fake palm trees inside the restaurant, could simply be touched up: fake leaves removed, cleaned, trees repainted, leaves reattached.
“There aren’t many construction projects where you have to re-frond the palms,” Mr. Shoemaker said. “Which is the name of my new band.”
Other features, like the old cliff-diving pool, were actual physical hazards. It turned out that divers, once they leaped into the pool, could only exit through a 30-inch-wide underwater tunnel brimming with pipes, Mr. Shoemaker said. Then they emerged from the water into an electrical room.
“There were 200 amps of power directly to the left,” Mr. Shoemaker said. “When I saw it, I called Matt and told him, ‘This is the most dangerous room I’ve ever seen.’” (They have heard no reports of injuries.) The renovated pool, 14 feet deep, resembles the old one but provides the divers with a wider, relocated exit, among other changes.
Other changes will be more evident to customers. There are four new bars. A new indoor ticketing plaza, meant to recall a street in Oaxaca, adds 4,000 square feet and is intended to reduce waiting times before sitting down and eating. Some attractions, like Black Bart’s Cave, have received some narrative polish to help them make actual sense.
The original Black Bart character “was a cross between a weird pirate and a bank robber,” said Chris Brion, the creative director of both “South Park” and Casa Bonita, and who goes by the nickname Crispy. “He was an amalgam of 16 different comical bad guys.” The new Black Bart, he said, was based on “the actual character who robbed stage coaches.”
But part of Casa Bonita’s appeal was the thematic smorgasbord, and much of the original weirdness has been left untouched. “We sat down and talked a lot about it: We know how to clean this up, narratively,” Mr. Parker said. But they opted against, he said, and instead embraced a unifying theme of exploration.
“It’s about discovery,” he said. “Little kids like to say, ‘What’s in that hole?’ There’s a lot of that.”
Mole by Loca
The whimsy of the original Casa Bonita was matched by culinary mystery: Why was the food so-so at best? “There’s got to be a place in hell for people who serve food like that,” said Victoria Gagnon, 57; she said she and her family got food poisoning after a visit to Casa Bonita in 2013.
Nonetheless, she said, she was eager to go back to her favorite childhood destination. Years ago, when her father, a construction worker, received his pay, the family voted on where to dine. “Hands down, Casa Bonita,” Ms. Gagnon said. “I know it sounds corny.”
During the demolition phase, one cause of Casa Bonita’s subpar cuisine became clear. “There were no ovens, no range tops,” Mr. Stone said. “It was all steamers. They steamed everything.”
There were other surprises. The old gas lines leaked, and the gas service to the building had to be redone. All the drains had been plumbed improperly, allowing cooking grease to “get into the city wastewater,” Mr. Shoemaker said. The list went on.
The quality of the food, at least, is being addressed by Ms. Rodriguez, who is known by the nickname Loca, owing to her relentless enthusiasm and her sailor’s vocabulary.
Ms. Rodriguez immigrated from Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1998, and applied for her first job at Casa Bonita; she was turned down as being underqualified. She went on to establish and own several celebrated restaurants, including Work & Class, in Denver, and has her own Tequila brand Doña Loca. In 2021, when she heard that Casa Bonita might reopen under new ownership, she applied for the top job. “Now am I qualified?” she said she had asked.
Her kitchen staff, numbering 110, will cook everything from scratch, in a modern, stainless-steel kitchen built to produce huge quantities. One hundred and ninety-eight gallons of mole sauce will be made for the chicken, every night. Also: enchiladas with red and green sauce; green chile-braised brisket; chile relleno, with vegan and vegetarian options, served with refried beans (not from a can, thank you very much) and rice; and of course, sopaipillas with honey.
The Casa Bonita team said they were still working out the pricing, an area of uncertainty that reflected their inexperience in running a restaurant. “What we’ve come to realize over the last couple of months is, now we have a lot of work to do to make it a sustainable business,” Mr. Parker said.
Not to mention balancing the weight of tradition and nostalgia, and their own high expectations.
“It’s such a visceral place,” Mr. Parker said. “That’s what I hope makes it so cool.”
Mr. Stone said: “That’s worth infinity dollars.”
Quit Hoggin' It
Wealthy people are so fat with Power Coupons (ie: dollars - thanks, Beau), they've become accustomed not just to getting their way on issues like tax policy, but using their out-sized influence on government to control large pieces of public property so the rest of us are left standing there with our dicks in our hands.
I'll say it again:
Rich people are not required in order to form a more perfect union. In fact, when left unsupervised, they become the very thing that prevents it.
Colorado corner-crossing property legislation poised for comeback following Wyoming ruling
Colorado Rep. Brandi Bradley wonders if she should revive corner-crossing legislation after Wyoming judge dismisses civil trespass complaint against hunters
A Wyoming federal judge has ruled four hunters did not trespass when they stepped over fencing that met at the corner of public and private property.
The seemingly obscure case involving the hunters and a wealthy landowner in Carbon County, Wyoming, has been closely watched by public land advocates hoping for clarification of the murky corner-crossing issue. Corner crossing is when a person steps from one parcel of public land to another at a four-corner point where private and public land meet. Private property advocates — and the owner of Wyoming’s 22,045-acre Elk Mountain Ranch east of Rawlins — argue corner crossers are trespassing in private air space above their land.
The question of trespassing in that air above private land is the crux of the debate over corner crossing. It’s an important issue. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership has identified 9.5 million acres of federal public land in the West that are “corner locked” and inaccessible to the public.
“Landowners have 5,000 acres next to 5,000 public acres that aren’t accessible and they want the whole 10,000 acres and that’s not fair to the people paying taxes for that public land,” said state Rep. Brandi Bradley, a Republican from Littleton, who said her “phone has been blowing up” since Wyoming’s U.S District Judge Scott Skavdahl issued his decision last week.
Bradley in February offered legislation that would allow public land users to freely walk between corners of public land by eliminating the possibility of trespassing charges and prohibiting landowners from fencing corners of their land that meet public property. Lawmakers in Wyoming, Montana and Nevada have attempted similar legislation to no avail. Bradley’s House Bill 1066 eventually ended up as a bill creating a task force to study the corner-crossing conundrum in Colorado.
Now she’s wondering if she should stick with the task force plan or return next session with the same bill and try again.
“We need to come up with some sort of position on corner crossing in this state,” she said.
The corner-crossing Wyoming hunters were acquitted of criminal trespass charges in an April 2022 trial and the ranch owner sought more than $7 million in damages in the civil trial.
Judge Skavdahl, in his decision, ruled there was no evidence that the hunters’ “airspace intrusion caused actual damage to or interfered with the plaintiff’s use of its property.” He ruled that while owners possess the air space above their land and can exclude people from that air space, “that right is not boundless.”
The judge ruled that when a person crosses from public corner to public corner on land owned in a checkerboard pattern without touching the private land and without damaging the private property “there is no liability for trespass.”
“In this way, the private landowner is entitled to protect private-owned land from intrusion … and privately-owned property from damage while the public is entitled its reasonable way of passage to access public land,” Skavdahl wrote in his ruling. “The private landowner must suffer the temporary incursion into a minimal portion of its airspace while the corner crosser must take pains to avoid touching private land.”
Backcountry Hunters and Anglers has collected more than 4,000 signatures from its members in support of legal corner crossing. Tim Brass, the state policy and stewardship director for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers said Colorado’s public land users of all political persuasions are eager for “a meaningful public access legislative solution” to corner-crossing challenges.
“I know Rep. Bradley remains committed to leading this charge on this effort and I think the people of Colorado deserve a solution that reflects the judge’s ruling, which was based on existing federal law.”
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)