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Some thoughts about Matt’s client, Leroy Bradford. I did appellate indigent criminal defense work for 20 years and had quite a few clients like Leroy (except that most of them were long-term guests of the state, unlike Leroy, who is facing a misdemeanor theft charge).

Matt gets an early morning phone call from Kirsten, asking him to cover an appearance in Leroy's case. So Matt puts on his suit and heads downtown. If anyone was wondering what a lawyer's life is like, this is it. Having to scramble to cover an appearance or a deposition or a meeting for a partner or associate at the last minute is part of the job. Very realistic if you're a criminal defense lawyer or a civil litigator.

Leroy has a shitty life and has had a shitty life since day one: absent/addicted/incarcerated parent or parents, bad neighborhood, bad housing, bad schools, bad diet, bad or no healthcare, no job, no money. Maybe it was even worse, and he grew up in foster care. The system that is supposed to help him is difficult or impossible for him to navigate and sometimes makes things worse instead of helping him. You want to empathize with him, you do empathize with him. But he’s not a likeable guy (and not only because of his ableist comments about Matt’s blindness), and you have to admit he’s brought a lot of his troubles on himself. Matt’s comment about not thinking about the consequences of his actions is right on the mark.

So what do you do as his lawyer? You can’t fix his shitty life. You’re his lawyer, not a social worker. So you put aside his unlikeability and, in Matt’s case, his ableist comments, and you do your best for him. In this case that means getting the best possible deal for your client. Which Matt did.

It’s a little unrealistic that Leroy would be pissed off at Matt when he comes back to tell Leroy about the offer. He’s been through the legal system enough times to know that it’s a very good deal. Finally he shrugs and says it doesn't matter.

On a happier note, Matt’s negotiation with the ADA is a delight. In real life, there probably would be a line of attorneys waiting to talk to Sofija, and little or no time for flirting, but who cares about real life when you can get a scene like this?

The scene takes place in the misdemeanor arraignment courtroom. Sofija has a whole stack of cases she’s handling. The goal is to “dispo” (get a disposition in) as many cases as possible so they can be removed from the court’s docket. So she’s negotiating with Matt to try to dispo Leroy’s case. As has been suggested elsewhere, maybe she didn’t get the DA’s memo (after the Ayala trial) instructing her not to cooperate with Matt. Or maybe she's just doing her job. Or maybe flirting with him is too much fun to pass up. Whatever the case, she and Matt negotiate at the same time as they are flirting and eventually strike a deal. Priceless.

One final thought about Leroy. Sadly, our society considers people like him disposable and begrudges every penny spent on them. Yet as Leroy correctly observes, feeding him would be cheaper (and more cost-effective) than incarcerating him.

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Did anyone else notice the very cool watch Matt is wearing in the toasting scene at the end of episode 3 (screenshot above)? It's called the Eone Bradley watch. (Click on the link for the full story about the watch.)

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And now it's today!

Daredevil: Born Again - teaser

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The full video is hilarious! (CIick on "Source" in original post.)

Dad Jokes with Charlie Cox & Vincent D'Onofrio - Tongue-Twister

(Source)

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There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

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1976 The Who Tour Concert Program

Pete Townshend 🎶

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25 Days of Daredevil Countdown to Born Again [24/25]

Nelson, Murdock, and Page

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The JJ book is the first in a series. A Daredevil book, coming in September, is the second.

Well I went to B&N and they didn't have the Jessica Jones book so that's been ordered! However, it wasn't a total loss, cause I walked out with this! I've been slowly working my way through various DD comic runs in the Marvel Database but I hadn't gotten to Born Again's arc yet, so I'm super excited, plus it's got a foreword by Charlie!

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i hope every single one of you outlives these hateful fucks on the news right now. i hope each and every one of you is able to find joy and support throughout these tumultuous times and i hope you get to live so fiercely as yourself. i hope you wake up one day to news that you’ve outlived those pieces of absolute shit and whether that brings you joy or relief or hope or what have you, i hope you live to see that day

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Hey tumblr.

I want to share a post from The Guardian that was published today.

“Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.

“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”

People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.

“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.””

Everyone should read this article about “DOGE” tearing apart USAID (and then read more reporting about how they are being allowed to do the same to other US federal entities). Elon Musk and his minions are violating our highest laws and destroying lives and livelihoods in the US and abroad. USAID is less than 1% of the federal budget— this isn’t about cost-cutting or “investigating fraud”. It’s about cruelty and seeing how much unlawful devastation and psychological warfare they can get away with, with the intention to repeat this process at one federal agency after another. They already have access to IT systems at the Treasury, NOAA, and other agencies, and have taken over OPM (essentially HR for the federal government), using the latter to send demeaning and threatening e-mail blasts to civil servants.

I’m urging everyone who reads this to recognize what’s happening here and how abhorrent and frightening it is. I wager that even most people who wanted Trump back didn’t want a centibillionaire technocrat making unilateral decisions on which parts of the federal government to “feed into the wood chipper” (as he has described his team’s actions at USAID in a recent post on X, The Everything App).

Please call your elected representatives and urge them to act against Musk now— before his actions make our legislative branch totally irrelevant.

I’ve been seeing posts about Musk’s coup-in-progress going around on here, but I feel like a lot of people still aren’t aware of the extent of it, and I really want to help get the word out. I’m heartsick for all the civil servants at USAID and beyond. Some of them, their unions, and some Democratic congresspeople and others are speaking out, but these workers need us everyday Americans to speak out for them, too.

Thank you for reading. And anyone who isn’t American, please keep us in your thoughts.

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Daredevil: Born Again trailer

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Insurance companies are parasites. Remove the parasite and health care will flourish.

Medicare for all. Just like Congress receives.

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Happy New Year, I guess.

The Cincinnati Enquirer, Ohio, February 21, 1947

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So close! American voters, you had one job, and you put the Orange Felon back in power. Epic fail. Will our democracy survive the next four years?

P.S. The price of eggs isn't going down.

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I would watch this.

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GUILTY, UR HONOR