Great years! Good screen name, too.

And another 30 seconds gone. . .

Good parents!

Welp, there's another 17+ minutes I'm never getting back. I'm not sure Billy Crystal's bit - which is just kind of dumb and clueless, if perhaps well-meaningl - rises to the kind of institutional malice one traditionally associates with racism, but I guess Tom Scharpling showed him.

I think that was (the late) Michael Jackson. He wrote about mostly whisky, not whiskey.

Good analogy! Made me chuckle, at least.

Magnificent bastards.

I remember when he got an Israeli gunship crew to fire into a hillside so he could file a combat story, which, if I recall, was the cause of his noisy departure from ABC.

You do know the ICD is only a set of billing codes, not a diagnostic tool, right?

Unfortunately, I don't think there's really a cure-all. Judges are really the gatekeeper, but even the best judges are only human. Balancing the rights of the accused with the safety of the community isn't necessarily easy, and even the best judges sometimes just get things wrong. In general, I think that fully…

I know! If collecting Nazi memorabilia can't be an all-inclusive big tent, what can?

Usually flight risk.

Against it, for it.

Who'd have thought that a collector of Nazi memorabilia would do something like this?

No shit. Took them long enough.

Both, really. Just because someone is accused of murder doesn't make them a muderer: that's the presumption of innocence. Now, traditionally, it's been up to the judge to determine when bail is warranted, and if so, the amount and conditions. This requires a showing by both parties. Theoretically, if there is a…

It's a difficult problem, and there probably isn't a great solution. I tend to favor de-politicizing (as much as possible, which is increasingly little) the process by removing contested partisan elections. Retention elections are fine, but it should be up or down, not sitting judge versus candidate. That takes the…

Sorry, I see that you didn't. This kind of thing really pisses me off, what can I say?

As I said above, uniformity and fairness are not the same thing. There is no mechanistic way to approach sentencing that doesn't lead to unfair results. The system is by, for and about people, which means every case is different.

I also don't think uniformity of result and fairness are the same thing: there is a lot of information that doesn't get captured that can inform sentencing. It's not a perfect, system or even very good much of the time, but it's almost always better than a one-size-fits-all, top-down solution like the guidelines,…