That’s a pretty slimy technicality.

Cue the James Joyce letters in 3… 2… 1… ({}).

Trump on immigrants in late 2023: “They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Kobach just last month on the Coldwater case: “It still effectively takes the vote away or cancels the vote of a U.S. citizen.”

Most town residents voted for these men. Whether they realize it or not, they’re getting what they wanted. On Election Day, they chose cruelty.

The worst part of this is that the actual guy getting deported should be the reason these yahoos see the light, but instead they just want to be special and not have their preferred “illegals” suffer the consequences they have brought down on so many others. Consequences are for the big city where the brown people are all evil and lazy drug-selling job-stealers, not Coldwater where the one brown guy is a sweetheart who makes sure to vote how his friends do. He seems like a genuinely decent, if utterly dim, person who’s simply never known anything except this shitkicker town actually being fairly nice to him, and indeed if you “know your place” and don’t present an economic threat or make them feel insecure about either of those first two things, many MAGAs will be perfectly pleasant to you.

She was his special education teacher in school [apparently he was very far behind and had poor English skills in a school that had no proper ESL program, and he was not a uniquely talented intellect who could overcome that]. This mess actually started, she said, when she took Ceballos and her other special education students to the Comanche County clerk’s office on a field trip. And there, she said, she actually played a role — which she now regrets — to get him mistakenly registered as a Kansas voter…

“That’s right,” Dennis Swayze said. “I was the one who drove him to Wichita when he was still a kid, to get him that first green card. He saw those words, ‘permanent resident,’ and thought that made him a citizen, and that was not true. So I partly blame myself. We should have brought this up and said it wasn’t enough. But there’s others who also should have been more on the ball. Where was the county clerk when he raised his hand about registering? The clerk should have asked too.”

[from the other article] After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.

Then the guy’s lawyer is giving everyone false hope, talking about how he didn’t have intent to break the law. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter. There are two cliches you’ll hear from Lawyer TV: “You have to have intent,” and “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” They are not in contradiction, though it turns on lawyer hairsplitting. If you push a button that says “free candy” and it instead shoots an investment banker in the face, you haven’t committed a crime, assuming the “button” wasn’t suspiciously trigger-shaped or anything. If someone tells you that it’s not murder to shoot an investment banker in the face, you still go to jail for murder if you shoot an investment banker in the face, because regardless of what you know about the law, you intended to shoot an investment banker in the face. You have other defenses, like entrapment, but that isn’t nearly as easy to claim as people like to think, and getting back to this story, it has to go way beyond somebody else being stupid and herp-derping your illegal voter registration because a white guy was with you.

I think the Kansas Reflector writer actually summed it up very well:

As sure as if every Republican voter of Coldwater lined up to cast a stone at Ceballos, their choices at the ballot box in 2024 and 2022 had the same traumatic effect. They did this to their friend. They did this to their mayor. They did this to their beloved town fixture. And until they figure this out, our country and our state is not going to get better.

I have it on good authority that the Starbucks protein coffee gives you the double-shits.

Duval taking care of business. It would be generous to say that Tennessee is in the early stages of their rebuild. Woof.

STD will make you all warm and fuzzy.

And everyone else in the room clapped, I presume?

On the other hand, if they do depart from a joyless slog from one plot point to the next, people scream “filler” like it’s a crime against humanity. I do have some sympathy for people writing shows, but I agree that too many of these shows began life as single-movie pitches that were padded (or at least never edited down) rather than a traditional mini-series, which is what they are, or a season of TV slimmed down to the high-points.

A lot of things are possible when you have a population that is deeply socialized to believe completely in the cause, and/or has few viable economic options, and/or is literally compelled to do the work. We also have a lot of survivorship bias as the we only see the stuff that was done so well as to stand the test of time. In the early days of Egyptology for example, they would sometimes realize (or learn from the locals because the locals knew best) that the big heap of rubble over there in the desert was actually a pyramid where somebody half-assed it with mud bricks instead of the giant limestone slabs from Giza.

Or, you think you lost one and get the second, but the original was tucked into some zippered sub-pouch all along.

Got a lot of sticktuitiveness.

I don’t think I should go against the grain here.

leave things more open or unresolved or ambiguous, which is simultaneously dissatisfying and refreshing

Agreed, and it absolutely depends on the episode. Also agree that they sometimes (often?) bit off more than they could chew, but in general they weren’t so disastrous that I didn’t appreciate the effort. I imagine there was a lot of compromise and horse trading on those scripts, and people were probably relieved to get out something as good as they got. I like to imagine the Ferengi episodes were generally the penance exacted from writers who insisted on too much self-respect.

I’ve never had a BC, but I have had a sheltie, and Aussi, and a couple of Heelers. The Heelers in particular just treat you like a cow and boop and nip as necessary to make you do what they want. They are brilliant too, but not subtle and don’t seem to view challenges as amusing for their own sake.

If a BC is the master thief carefully working the treasure chest with a lock-pick, the Heeler is the tank who just bashes the thing open, traps be damned, but they’re smart enough to remember to chug a bunch of potions first.

I enjoyed B5 and would consider it one of the shows that did things well. The production values haven’t held up quite as well (except for the prosthetics and hair, which are easily Star Trek quality I think), and I never fully warmed to either station commander, but for what it was trying to be and within the constraints of its budget, it is a really good show.

I did stop watching after the “original” finale though. I didn’t see where it was likely to get any better and I wasn’t quite invested enough to tolerate a significant downturn.

Those are actually becoming an artform of their own. The best ones subtly hint at the areas of focus in the upcoming episode and get your mind tee’d up.

Herding dogs assume they’re smarter than humans. Border Collies are probably right.

I think DS9 and some other shows of the era really hit the sweet spot here. They were mostly contained episodes, but there were overarching narratives lurking in the background, sometimes occupying an episode or two, or a subplot here and there, blowing up around season finales and premiers, although once war broke out the ones that didn’t do much to acknowledge it admittedly felt a bit out of place. That method of storytelling also forced the writers to at least consider character developments that had occurred in prior episodes and not simply ignore them in the name of the quest for syndication.

The modern format can make for some truly great TV (Andor, e.g.) and freeing up the run time without reducing the budget can mean beautiful looking shows, but they don’t work well when you’re basically filming an overlong first draft of a movie script, rather than writing a story (or two or three) that’s meant to occupy 8-12 hours. I also agree with the others who say that a gap of more than a year (and even that much, really… it used to be three or four months) puts all but the most anticipated shows at a huge disadvantage, and god help you if you cast kids in S1.

Only if they get James Gunn to do it, and only if they can find something eye-shaped to graphically pierce.

belaboring every little plot point to connect up to four

That would be one of the “new ones” I was thinking of, and they didn’t even do it well. Leia remembers her real mother, explicitly in the script, so Lucas just says, “nah… it’d feel cooler if she died in childbirth.” Make the nerds hand-wave something about the Force until I can rewrite and re-film Ep6.