No job is perfect. There have been some difficult times. But this work is a privilege, and I’m damned lucky to have found the closest thing to a perfect career for me.

Over the years, I’ve helped people in every appellate & reviewing court in Ohio—the Ohio Supreme Court, all 12 courts of appeals, both federal district courts, and the Sixth Circuit. Heck, I’ve even appeared in the Ohio Court of Claims. Who else gets to do stuff like that?

I still remember which realtor had the anti-LGBTQ sign up in their yard in, I think, 2008, when an anti–marriage-equality measure was on the ballot here. I will never use that realtor unless I hear some serious and (IMO) sincere apologies.

I used to be her Tertiary Human, but then we got a second cat, a COVID kitten, who bonded closely with my partner, and the long-hair cat in this photo decided the newcomer was Public Enemy Number One Most Evil Of All Interlopers, so I moved up to Auxiliary Human status.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the evacuation advice comes from professional diplomats. Making this kind of decision is what they’re trained to do.

*to make an even bigger and even more destructive invasion, I mean.

My point is that that the State Department can be institutionally small-c conservative about stuff like this. Who knows, they may be trying to make it harder for Trump to invade.

My experience is dated, but in 1991, the government evacuated Peace Corp Volunteers from every predominantly Muslim country in the days leading up to the start of US bombing. Tunis then may have been the safest big city I’d ever been to, but I was still evacuated.

Trump and his minions are capable of pretty much any evil thing, and you may be right about the response, but I can’t imagine that any American without a ton of private security could be safe there now.

They could yeet it out of the tower, but they don’t recognize that word, either.

It reminds me of being an American in Tunisia from 89-91. I couldn’t go anywhere else by land because Tunisia is wedged between Algeria and Libya. But now, more and more of the world hates us, and with good reason.

If you were a Minneapolis prosecutor w/ access to grand jury subpoena power, would you use it, & if so what would you try to get.

I know it's super-hard to get convictions, & premature or unprovable charges can make things worse, but grand jury subpoenas are a power that it seems a shame to waste.

We currently use a MEVO, but we don't need live-streaming capability, and the MEVO is hard to learn how to use and is temperamental when connecting to the phone it can't function well without, and at least one meeting has gone unrecorded because of that (and of course, it was a doozy of a meeting).

One word we have to watch for is “civilian.” We’ve let it drift to allow cops to use it to describe non-cops. But cops aren’t (supposed to be) military. Cops are themselves “civilians.”

“They’d been an empire for less than a month. How long would they be tallying the cost.”

“Who knew what Palpatine wanted, besides loyalty and control, when he had given his beasts free rein.”

Not the diversion I hoped for—I started this Star Wars story, but it’s about the immediate aftermath of a dictator’s takeover & how underling “boys with keys to the store” are running amok & how people “were denied water & medicine because one of Palapatine’s rivals publicly mocked the new regime.”