Rov_Scam
9hr ago
This is the part that bugs me the most. How can a crime be asserted as a predicate fact in court when that crime has never been charged, tried or convicted?
Would you feel any better if you found out that the referenced crime need not even have occurred? And that this has been the case for hundreds of years? Look at common law burglary, for example (modern statutes usually expand the definition, but we'll keep things simple). Unauthorized breaking and entering of a dwelling in the nighttime with the intent to commit a felony therein. Say Bill breaks into Tom's house at night. A neighbor sees him break in and calls the police. The police apprehend him and he's carrying a gun. Tom was not home at the time. A witness testified that Bill told him he was going to kill Tom. There's sufficient intent to prove burglary. The fact that he can't be convicted of murder is irrelevant. The fact that he can't even be convicted of attempted murder is irrelevant. The fact that it would have been impossible for him to even commit the intended murder is irrelevant. He's not getting this reduced to criminal trespass.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Those are avenues for appeal, but they aren't all good avenues for appeal. Keep in mind that I haven't read a full trial transcript and my knowledge of the specific laws involved is limited to what I read in the news. To go one by one:
- This isn't really an issue since Cohen testified. Even if an appellate court were to rule that the specific evidence of the plea bargain was inadmissible, the fact that Cohen outlined his actions in detail for the jury with the defense being given an opportunity to cross-examine likely puts this in the harmless error category. There is the fact that in New York they can't convict on accomplice testimony without corroboration, but the jury was properly instructed.
- I'm not familiar with the specific scientier requirements in this case, but as long as the jury was properly instructed of them, an appellate court is loath to contradict their findings.
- See above. It's another "the evidence wasn't sufficient to prove x" arguments that don't usually go anywhere. Again, I haven't read the full trial transcript, but as long as there was some reasonable basis for which the jury to reach their conclusion, an appellate court isn't going to set aside the verdict.
- This goes back to the first point. Cohen plead guilty to a Federal charge. IIRC, there were state charges involved as well, and if his testimony implicated state law violations, the bootstrapping argument is moot.
- The Appellate Division already ruled on the recusal issue, and I doubt the Court of Appeals will take up the issue. The Wiesselberg thing is moot because the defense didn't protect the record. If they had a problem with the prosecution relying on his statements without calling him they could have called him themselves. The fact that they didn't want him anywhere near that courtroom may be good trial strategy, but there are tradeoffs. I usually load up my witness lists with people I have absolutely no intention of actually calling for the simple reason that if things go sideways and the case goes to trial and some odd reason arises where I need to call them I don't want to get the "He wasn't on the list" argument from Plaintiff's counsel and deal with the subsequent malpractice suit.
For the interest of completeness, I have no idea whether Trump personally cutting a check would have avoided legal scrutiny, but the ambiguity doesn't really bother me, because I don't like the idea that someone trying to be President would blatantly hide information from voters. Hell, at least have the foresight to do it before you're actually running so there's no campaign money to speak of.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Moses consulted on the highway plan over a decade before ground broke, and his original design had the interchange at the Point itself, because that's where the existing bridges were. City officials implemented most of the plan but decided to construct new bridges and moved the highway alignment to its current location. While the pedestrian walkway under the interchange isn't exactly beloved, the Fort Pitt Bridge is, and you can't have one without the other. The way the highway divides the space is testament to the attention to detail I mentioned in the post. Using something functional for that purpose seems more natural than constructing a wall or an arch, which would make things seem a little too intentional. The effect is creating without your noticing. Whether or not it's actually better than any other conceivable possibility of your choice is a matter for debate. Would the Golden Gate be more beautiful without the bridge obstructing the view? Would Downtown Pittsburgh be more beautiful if it were left as old growth bottomland forest? Would Black Canyon be better without Hoover Dam backing up the river? Finally, as the series progresses I'm going to criticize a number of ill-conceived projects; if I praise something it's because I like it, not because I'm trying to advance an argument. The point isn't that urban renewal was always good, just that it wasn't necessarily always bad.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
I initially teased this by saying that I was going to tackle Downtown and its environs, but my efforts since the introduction have shown that such a post would greatly exceed any sense of reasonableness as I kept using various things as jumping off points for broader discussion. This wouldn't be a problem except I had intended to weave a narrative that depended on presenting everything at once, so I spent several weeks waffling over whether I wanted to continue writing or retool, and only when the whole business was at 6000 words with a good deal left to cover did I decide to retool, which itself took longer than I expected. So I apologize for the delay, as I would have had this out several weeks ago if I had just stuck to Downtown. The upside is that the next several installments are practically finished, so I'll be posting them more frequently, probably as filler for whenever things are slow. I've occasionally linked to Google streetview images. I tried to pick representative locations, but you're encouraged to move around a bit to get a feel for the places I'm describing.
Part I. Downtown
For the purposes of this discussion, Downtown includes everything west of I-579 to the Point, except for on the northern part where it extends to 11th St. Map. The city’s official boundary of downtown also includes the area where the Civic Arena used to be, but for historical reasons that will become apparent in a later installment, that area will be discussed along with the Hill District. The city also officially calls this area the more boring Central Business District, while some old maps use the more whimsical Golden Triangle, but nobody uses the former term and only whimsical writers use the latter. It’s Downtown.
The first thing to be said about Pittsburgh’s downtown area is relatively tiny, about 2/3 of a square mile. Despite this, it manages to seem bigger than downtowns in similar rust belt cities that are geographically much larger. Topographical constraints prevent the urban core from expanding much beyond the boundaries outlined above — rivers hem in two sides of the triangle while a hill rises from the third — so everything is much denser than in a place like Cleveland or St. Louis, where the downtown has large lots and wide roads that sprawl out as much as urban planners thought they needed to. Compare this view of a typical street in Downtown Pittsburgh with this one from Cleveland. Traditionally there were several quasi-neighborhoods within downtown; Fourth Street was the financial district, Smithfield St. was the shopping district, Liberty Ave. was the red light district, Forbes Ave. was the seedy bum district, and there was even a small Chinatown. Most of these have changed in character (e.g. there are a few local banks still headquartered on Fourth St. but the big ones have all moved to modern skyscrapers) but a couple still survive. Penn Ave. is officially the Cultural District, containing the homes of The Pittsburgh Symphony, Pittsburgh Opera, Civic Light Opera, and several other similar cultural amenities, and Grant St. was and always will be the home of local government. Every little corner feels unique.
I suspect this is due to a few factors in addition to the aforementioned geographical limitations; the city always had a large number of corporate headquarters, and they never charged a high commuter tax. This kept these headquarters in the city rather than seeing them decamp to the suburbs like in so many other places. There also aren’t many surface lots downtown, and the ones that do exist are small. Finally, city property taxes were based on Georgist principles from 1913 to 2001, when a reassessment effectively forced them back to a single-rate system. I’m not going to go too much into this because city taxes were a relatively small component of total property taxes (county and school taxes used a traditional system), and it’s arguable whether other forces played into the relatively high development rates (it hasn’t abated since the system was abandoned), but it’s worth at least mentioning.
IA: A Past Not So Rosy
If there’s one theme I want to focus on when discussing Downtown, it’s urban renewal. It’s trendy to criticize urban renewal plans as being misguided boondoggles that effected all manner of misfortunes on cities, but to my knowledge no one has ever done a comprehensive examination of these efforts to do a serious evaluation of their success or failure. I say this because the Downtown we know today pretty much exists as a function of urban renewal dating back to the 1940s. Pop urbanists never seem to take a genuinely historical approach when discussing why cities are the way they are today, and they have a tendency to look at the prewar era as some sort of halcyon wonderland of walkability. They blame racism, or the auto industry, or any number of other lazy targets for what they see as a blight upon the landscape. But none of them seem to consider what city life was actually like before the era of highways and strip malls. In 1951, at Pittsburgh’s population zenith, Karl Schriftgiesser of the Atlantic wrote of Pittsburgh:
The decrepitude showed in its worn-out office buildings, its degraded housing, its traffic-choked streets, its sordid alleys, its polluted and uncontrolled rivers, and, above all, in the dense-choking smoke that covered the city and the river valleys…
Renaissance I was a bipartisan effort to change all that. Spearheading it were the Mayor, Democrat David L. Lawrence, and the Governor, Republican Richard King Mellon. The Point at that time was nothing more than unused rail yards and abandoned warehouses. The upper reaches soon became Gateway Center, a contemporary collection of modern high rises in a city that hadn’t seen any new Downtown construction in 20 years. The best was yet to come, though, as the 36 acres closest to the Point became Point State Park, one of the finest spots in the city. It’s so well-integrated into the urban fabric that no one really even thinks of it so much of a park as they do something that just exists. There isn’t much in the way of traditional amenities other than a museum dedicated to Fort Pitt and a lot of green space, but there’s an ineffable joy in taking a stroll around the fountain on a summer night. The most remarkable thing about it is that there’s an interstate highway running right through the middle of it that somehow manages to enhance the park rather than degrade it. There’s enough lawn on the city side to make it usable for events and a quick lunch, but going through the underpass to the river side is like entering an urban oasis, with the towers of Gateway Center looming behind you like a great wall of a city. It’s one of my favorite views, and one that few photographers have captured. Robert Moses was involved.
The whole Point project is an anomaly in American urban planning, the one urban renewal project that never shows up in the various lists of disasters that circulate around the internet. Having been started in the 1940s, it was one of the earliest such projects, and was viewed as an unparalleled success nationally, reinvigorating a downtown that was in imminent danger of collapsing in the face of inevitable suburbanization. While some projects were poorly thought-out from the beginning, I think that urban renewal would be viewed better today if subsequent planners using Gateway Center as a model would have focused on the right things. The reason it works, and is still attractive today, is that, from the shine of the chrome steel facades to the impeccable landscaping, no expense was spared, no detail too minor to be relevant. This is quite literally the ideal of Corbusier’s towers in a park. But that’s not the lesson that was learned; planners instead thought that demolishing old buildings and building towers in a park was enough. For what it’s worth, Jane Jacobs didn’t like it, and the destruction of the old point is now bemoaned by a few armchair urbanists who feel the need to crap on anything that was done between 1945 and 1980. But I don’t think Downtown would be better now if it terminated in an indeterminate mishmash of old industrial buildings.
And then the steel industry crashed. But somehow, in the 1980s, Renaissance II took off. In what should have been the city’s darkest days, there was a commercial building boom that saw construction of 4 of Pittsburgh’s 5 tallest skyscrapers, including icons like the PPG Building. Enter Tom Murphy. Pittsburgh seems to have a tradition of alternating between bold, visionary mayors and caretaker mayors, much like Russia alternates between hairy and bald leaders. Dick Caligiuiri had been Pittsburgh’s mayor from 1977 until his untimely death in 1988 and was definitely the bold visionary sort. He was replaced by Sophie Masloff, a kindly elderly woman referred to as “everyone’s Jewish grandmother”. She’s remembered as a good mayor, but was more focused on maintaining fiscal solvency amid a declining industrial base than on achieving grand proposals. She practically inherited the position (though she later won a full term) and was in her 70s; she wasn’t exactly the kind of person who becomes mayor with an ambitious vision.
IB: Urban Renewal's Last Gasp
Enter Tom Murphy. Murphy became mayor in 1994, at a time when the city was at a crossroads. The air was clean and the new offices were shiny, but the city was hemorrhaging population and in a state of fiscal crisis. Downtown had once been the region’s premiere shopping district, but suburban shopping malls, combined with a transit project in the ‘80s in which the construction of the world’s smallest subway kept some streets closed for years had turned it into a shadow of itself. One area that wasn’t doing bad, though, was the Fifth-Forbes corridor. At the time, 90% of storefronts were occupied, and they did brisk business. The problem was that, in the eyes of the city, they were the wrong kind of businesses. Wig stores, newsstands, liquor stores, pager stores, dive bars, and other places of ill repute lined the district. And they attracted the wrong kinds of people. The Hill District was Pittsburgh’s Harlem. With its own business district decimated in the wake of urban renewal, riots, crack, and gangs, its residents needed to shop somewhere, and merchants on Fifth and Forbes filled the void. This picture is from 2008, which is a decade after the proposal, but it gives you a general idea. Murphy, desperate to revive Downtown, proposed a sweetheart deal to acquire the whole area by eminent domain, raze the buildings, and sell to a Chicago developer who promised to attract high-end tenants like J Crew, build a movie theater and bowling alley, and add other chain shit like a House of Blues. Murphy was a visionary and a policy wonk, but his ideas were straight out of the 1970s. Council was unanimously in favor. The Post-Gazette loved it, and described the area as “downtrodden” and “blighted”. But there were problems brewing. The business owners were unanimously opposed. This was an area with 120 businesses and a 90% occupancy rate. The Institute for Justice got involved, erecting a dozen billboards throughout the city with canny opposition slogans like “Murphy’s Law: Tke from Pittsburgh Families, Give to an Out-of-Town Developer”. Normal people thought that it was some white elephant plan that wasn’t going to do shit. People debated it on talk radio endlessly.
There was also a lot of money involved; the total cost estimates were over half a billion dollars, over 100 million of that public. Part of the cost was a $28 million inducement to bring a Nordstrom’s to town; a spokesman for the mayor described this as a bargain since Cincinnati paid $47 million to get a Nordstrom’s. The business owners proposed an alternative plan in which the city would give them $28 million to renovate upstairs space above the shops into apartments that were currently vacant due to fire code nonconformities, but the city didn’t seem interested. In the face of the mayor’s intransigence, he was inevitably forced to yield, not because of their opposition but because Nordstrom decided to mothball a planned expansion for reasons unrelated to Fifth and Forbes specifically and the developer backed out. Murphy took eminent domain off the table and tried two more out of town developers, but neither was able to accomplish much. When his term ended in 2006, new mayor Bob O’Connor officially killed the plan. That’s not to say that the story has a happy ending, necessarily. The Urban Redevelopment Authority destroyed the opulent marble interior of the original Mellon Bank to make room for a Lord & Taylor that lasted like three years. In 2011, PNC announced that it was building a new 33 story tower to house its corporate headquarters; it had spent the past few years quietly buying out the block that it sits on. Slowly, the dinginess of the area melted away, and now it’s just nondescript urban bleh. The storefronts are mostly vacant. The problem with these kinds of proposals is that they try to do too much. Murphy was constantly questioned about why he wasn’t using local developers, and while he never gave a clear answer, I suspect it was because none of them were willing to take the kind of risk involved with something as big as he proposed. He wasn’t willing to wait for the area to turn around a building at a time, and he was skeptical that it was even possible that anything he found acceptable would move in with all the real-world businesses surrounding it. But we all know how this would have gone — there would have been an initial inrush of new businesses, but it would have taken a long time to fill out. The anchors would have accordingly cut and run after the initial leases were up, and the city would have been left holding the bag. It seems odd that this all happened in 2000 as well, because, a decade later, such an idea would have been unthinkable.
1C: The State of the Triangle
For the next few decades, Downtown remained stable, if not great. The commercial activity was there during the daytime, but at night the whole place emptied out, save for the Cultural District. There was very little residential. If you were in the vicinity of 6th Ave. everything seemed fine, with the theaters and restaurants abuzz and lots of foot traffic, but anywhere else was a ghost town save for the occasional bum asking for change. It wasn’t exactly dangerous, but a bit sketchy. In more recent years, there’s been a movement to build more residential space Downtown, and things are slowly changing. Stymieing this, though, is the increasing vacancy rate of Downtown office space post-pandemic. This isn’t unique to Pittsburgh, but combined with a couple high-profile incidents of violence, it’s created the impression among suburbanites that Downtown is increasingly unsafe. Part of the problem is that the homeless population is more visible than they were before. Contrary to popular belief, the actual homeless population has about halved since they first started counting in 2010, but reduced foot traffic and the proliferation of tents along the bike trails (with the associated drug activity) make the problem look worse than it actually is. I don’t intend to make this an in-depth discussion about the homeless problem in America, as that’s beyond the scope of this post, but it’s something the city has to contend with. Luckily, the actual unsheltered homeless population is under a thousand people, almost all concentrated Downtown or in nearby areas, so the problem isn’t as intractable as it is on the West Coast.
As for the future of downtown, it’s hard to predict. Office space was at a premium before the pandemic, but the new hybrid office environment has led more and more companies to downsize. Commercial real estate companies are acting like it’s the apocalypse, but they do that every time there’s a market downturn. My prediction is that the trend towards more residential continues, but that the office situation stabilizes as natural demand increase fills up the existing vacancies, combined with more companies demanding employees come back to the office. That said, it's never going to be a trendy area. Downtown is ubiquitous in the public psyche, so it will never have the cachet of an undiscovered territory. Pittsburgh isn't New York, and no one will want to raise a family in a Downtown high rise. The inevitable demographic is single professionals and childless couples who presumably make enough to live Downtown because they're workaholics who want to be close to their high-paying jobs. A girl I went to law school with lived Downtown for a while and said that she liked it but that it wears on you after a while and you want to just live in a normal neighborhood.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class as far as residential is concerned, with the caveat that, despite having over 4,000 residents, this isn’t really a residential area. Accordingly, it’s a lot different than most of the other Upper Middle Class areas in the city.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
If only the United States had the foresight to institute such a system a century and a half ago, before the immigrant problem got out of hand. Then they could have just used my great-grandfather's labor in the mines until he decided to retire (coincidentally right around the time Pittsburgh Seam coal started running low), and then deported him back to Galicia just in time for the German invasion. Another great-grandfather would have been shipped back to Calabria some time in the late 40s or early 50s. I don't want to think what the consequences for your family would have been. I'm not sure what the downside was of their being allowed to stay.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
You're giving these people too much credit. When you said "Progressive Art Scene" I thought at first you may be talking about gallery openings or legitimate theater or modern classical music. Instead you were talking about the horrible "scene kids". These are usually punk bands that have only perfunctory instrumental talent and virtually no songwriting talent who latch onto the "scene" because they know that they're too untalented to become professional musicians. They usually put a high value on vague concepts like "authenticity" and "selling out" and look for reasons to create internal drama and ostracize people. You know you're at a "scene show" if, say, you go to a show at a venue in the city one night and then a couple weeks later you go to a show in an exurb 30 miles way and the audience is composed of almost entirely the same people. They mostly play the same circuit, though, because these bars are owned by scene people themselves. If it were a self-contained community of people who just wanted to play locally it would be no problem; less popular styles like jazz and bluegrass are usually like this. The trouble is that these people all have aspirations of playing music full-time, which makes the stakes higher and introduces a lot of stress. It's almost like a combination of Orthodox Judaism and Old Order Amish, where there's a comprehensive Mosaic law you're expected to follow with shunning the consequence of violating it. It's a breeding ground for drama.
Everyone in that thread may have differing politics but they all seem to buy into the scene mentality; their problem is that it's placing emphasis where they don't want it placed. The fact that politics plays a more prominent role isn't surprising but it could honestly just as easily be right-wing politics as left-wing — it just so happens that most of the participants were already lefties so that's the natural direction it took. In the grand scheme of things, though, it's beside the point. These people are rank amateurs involved in a circle jerk, and their bullshit has about as much influence on the broader culture as what's going on in some random subreddit.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I don't understand the focus on skilled immigration. A lot of what we need is unskilled work. Since the pandemic we've seen reduced hours and increased wages for service jobs that they still can't seem to staff. I suspect part of the reason for the price increases everywhere is that they have to pay 15 bucks an hour for someone to push a cash register, not because of change in the law but because they can't find anyone for less than that, and they're still having trouble staffing these places. US Steel is having trouble finding laborers for mills because even at 80k/year no one wants to work rotating shifts doing manual labor in a dusty environment.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
It's irrelevant because no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials. Maybe fail rates are higher at UCLA but UCLA is hard to get into to begin with, so I imagine the coursework is harder than at a place like NEOMED. And there are already schools of osteopathy that seem to attract people who couldn't get into MD programs. I'd be willing to bet that if I were to take a random poll few people would be able to tell me where their doctor even went to med school let alone how highly that school is regarded or what their grades were. Like almost everything else, once you get your first job your education is pretty much irrelevant.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
The evidence against Perry was prejudicial, but that's not the end of the analysis. All evidence is prejudicial to some degree. The question is whether the prejudicial nature is outweighed by the probative value, and it was because it was clearly related to motive. The argument wasn't that it was evidence that Perry was a bad dude but that he specifically contemplated the actions which he was accused of. The evidence of Foster's prior actions wasn't admitted because it would only be relevant if Perry was aware of it at the time of the incident, and there's no evidence that he had seen those posts. Even then I don't know if it would be admissible because simply blocking a street isn't a deadly threat, and intent to intimidate doesn't necessarily mean intent to injure, but since Perry didn't see the posts, we don't need to go that far with the analysis.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
The prior incidents of protesters shooting at cars is all well and good, but they're only relevant if the defendant knew about them and they influenced his decision, and the only way to admit that evidence is if he testifies to it himself. While that evidence may have helped his case, that help almost certainly would have been outweighed by the fact that he'd have to testify and open himself up to cross examination, which almost never ends well.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I've got more written but this is taking quite a bit of research to do the way I want to do it and I've been unusually busy for the past month so my apologies for not getting the installments out sooner. In the meantime, I owe you answers to your questions.
Does CMU being the best CS university in the world affect the day to day of the average person in Pittsburgh? For example, the JHU's excellence at Medicine or Clemson at Automobile Engg. defintely seems to affect the economic makeup of their respective cities.
Not unless you live near campus, but I doubt that's the kind of influence you're talking about. I have a friend who works at the robotics lab but his place of employment makes no difference in my life. The so-called city fathers hype up our tech prowess all the time, but I'm guessing that all cities with any kind of tech industry do that, and Pittsburgh is still like 18th in number of tech jobs, so I'm inclined to say that any influence is minimal. The one exception may be in East Liberty; it gets a lot of hype for being recently gentrified and having a Google office near there, but for all the housing they're building I've never heard of anyone actually living there, and normal people don't hype the area up like they do other trendy areas. That's more of a discussion for the installment on East Liberty (there's certainly a lot to unpack there), but off the top of my head I'd guess that all the apartments are rented by techbros without social lives, which is why I haven't heard of anyone wanting to move there.
Does Pittsburgh ever feel like a college town? Upitt + CMU makes for 50k students not that far from downtown.
And Duquesne just outside of Downtown, and Point Park in Downtown, and Carlow right next to Pitt, and you get the idea. So yeah; any remotely trendy part of the East End with decent bus service is going to have a relatively high number of student renters, particularly grad students. I've never heard of any of them wanting to live in East Liberty, though. The only part that feels like an actual college town, though is Oakland, where you're right on campus, but being in the city makes it qualitatively different than if you're in a town that revolves around a huge state school in the middle of nowhere. I'll go into greater detail in the section on Oakland.
I've seen Pittsburgh compared to Seattle wrt weather, hilliness, whiteness and having tech. How fair is the comparison ?
I've never been to Seattle so take my response with a grain of salt, but I think it's reasonably fair. The climates are probably comparably dreary, but here we actually have 4 seasons with hot summers and cold winters. Our climate is mild compared to places like the Rockies and interior New England, but we're quite cold and snowy for a major American city. Culturally, though, I don't think that Seattle has the working class industrial history that gives Pittsburgh its sense of grit. I'd also wager that they're a lot less "ethnic" than we are; everybody here is Catholic and has names like Bob Schlydeki and Larry Deldino and you can still smoke in bars here. People I've know who moved here from Seattle are surprised by the amount of industry that still exists and the fact that working class people actually have accents. Most had assumed that the mills had died completely and that accents were an affectation from television that nobody had anymore.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
You're assuming that Trump is actually behind the compilation of these lists. From what I've read, it's all conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that have proven in the past they don't give a shit so much about loyalty to Trump as they do advancing their own agendas. Using these outside lists when he didn't have a clue himself is a big part of what got him in the position he was in during his first term. Asking them to come up with more names isn't going to change that. And competence does matter. At a certain point you're getting less into people whose job consists of making policy decisions and more into the realm of everyday managerial functioning. For instance, say that Trump thinks the ATF's FFL application review process is too strict and wants to make it more liberal, and he fires the guy responsible for this process with a gun nut who's dedicated to making sure practically anyone who applies gets an FFL with minimum hassle. That may be great in theory, but if the guy in question has no clue about how the review process works and ends up bumbling through his job to the point where delay times are so long that applications that would have been a breeze under the old guy are suffering inordinate delays, the exact constituency he's trying to appease isn't going to be very happy. I can just see the article in The Atlantic now: "He thought Trump would make it easier for him to run his gun store; instead it's become a nightmare."
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I hate to do this but you did the math wrong in the earlier post. You said:
Presumably the first 1,000 were selected basically at random and showed a 9.5% voting rate among people that had been deemed mentally incompetent and weren't allowed to vote. If that rate held, that would be over 2,000 votes from ineligible, mentally incompetent voters, just in Dane County.
The article says that there are about 22,000 voters on the incompetent list in Wisconsin. A random sample of 1,000 taken showed that 95 people had cast ballots at some point since 2008. Without numbers specific to 2020 there's no way to estimate how many improper votes were cast. That being said, if they want to implement a system to catch this I'm all for it. If they want to prosecute the people who voted illegally, I'm all for it, though going after incompetent people probably isn't a good look.
The same is true for the indefinitely confined. If you want to go after these people that's fine, but you'd better be prepared to investigate all 250,000+ instances and prosecute each one that doesn't meet whatever strict reading you want to give the law. You can't just go into Milwaukee and find a few black people or bleeding heart liberal activists who violated the law and use them as an example of "Democrat voter fraud"; you have to be willing to go into rural areas and ask MAGA hat guys detailed questions about whether Grandma is really indefinitely confined when she still has an active driver's license and was seen at the grocery store walking around the day before submitting her application. That isn't going to sit well with anybody, which is why nobody is ever going to suggest such a thing.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Project 2025 has approximately zero chance of succeeding:
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The president is already allowed to appoint approximately 4,000 people to high-level agency positions. At any given time in the Trump Administration, approximately 1200, or about a third, were unfilled. If he can't manage to fill these it's unlikely he's going to fill anywhere from 5 to 50 thousand additional posts.
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He's already notoriously bad at picking aides who are loyal to him. He fought with his own cabinet more than any president in recent memory. There's no reason to believe that four years of not having to appoint anyone is somehow going to make him better at this role. This problem is magnified by the fact that most of these positions aren't going to be under his direct supervision, and he'll only know that they don't have the requisite loyalty when a scandal erupts. Not a good look.
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If you remove a career bureaucrat and replace him with a political hack, the new guy isn't likely to have an in-depth understanding on how things actually work. Bureaucrat A doesn't do what you want so you replace him with Bureaucrat B. Bureaucrat B is dedicated to doing what you ask, except he isn't well-versed in the Administrative Procedure Act or the various other laws governing the office, and he's essentially starting from scratch. Except there's no time to get up to speed because the president wants this done now, so he ends up doing something that violates the law and the action ends up getting tied up in court for the next six months while the new guy in charge bungles various other duties of the office that were an afterthought under the first guy. Now the president's in the position where he has to fire Bureaucrat B and replace him with another guy who didn't make the cut the last time and is now even more likely to screw things up. Meanwhile guys appointed to non-contentious positions are making their own little messes that just become fodder for your opponents without any political gain. This obviously isn't going to happen every time, but when you're talking about thousands of positions the Venn diagram isn't always going to match up and there's a good chance you find you've appointed a moron.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Prosecuting the Tides foundation isn't going to do much. As a "dark money" organization most people haven't heard of them the way they've heard of the NRA, so the chance that anyone will actually care is low. Furthermore, as a foundation, they don't actually do anything themselves but simply distribute money to other groups. It takes a long time for an advocacy organization like the NRA to build up the donor network and social capital to have the kind of influence they've had. If you're just distributing money, there's plenty of other advocacy organizations that can easily take up that slack.
The biggest problem, though, is that most of the alleged malfeasance on the part of Tides is directed towards liberal advocacy groups who claim they mismanaged money intended for their benefit. For example, they're currently being sued in California by BLM, who claims the group misdirected 33 million in funds that were raised as part of a joint campaign and were supposed to be earmarked. Any other prosecutions are going to be in a similar vein. It's hardly an own of the libs if most libs haven't heard of the group you're prosecuting and the ones who have are likely to be your star witnesses. If BLM ends up siding with the administration it's hardly a good look.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
The problem there is that going after voter fraud in a non-grandstanding way means he actually needs to name names and have evidence. You can't just say there was MASSIVE FRAUD in Detroit or wherever; you have to actually say here is a corrupt election official and here's exactly what he did and here's the evidence to prove it. Most of the voter fraud stuff in 2020 was more along the lines of "I don't like the looks of this", which doesn't exactly help you out too much when it comes to a prosecution.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
Studying and interacting is much different than expending considerable resources on something, which in turn is much different than waging war or making large economic investments in something. Sure, we spend money on researching things out of curiosity already, but it's not a lot. Numbers are hard to come by, but one figure I saw says we spent about $7.2 billion on botanical research in 2013. However, the context of this figure was talking about money spent on crop science research, and I'd be willing to bet that the money spent on projects like some professor studying rare ferns of Appalachia is much less than what we're spending on more practical applications. If an alien civilization were to visit earth from the distances described, it would be an incredibly costly mission with no guarantee of success. My guess is that if they wanted to study us they'd send unmanned vehicles first, then maybe a small research party like at the beginning of E.T. I highly doubt they'd come here with cargo ships ready to exchange resources for technology, let alone bring an army to mount a full-scale invasion. After all, we've been sending stuff into space for 60 years and we still haven't got past the curiosity stage yet, with the exception of satellites that are within driving distance. We certainly haven't gotten to the point where it makes sense to start mining the moon or something similar, and that's practically right on top of us in astronomical terms.
Rov_Scam
20d ago
I'd preface this by saying that since these "powers" were so poorly defined by the OP, speculating about who they'd find acceptable seems kind of pointless, since any discussion can elicit a response of "no, the powers aren't like that". Anyway, I'm going to proceed on the assumption that these mysterious overlords are left-leaning but not too far left, avatars for the man they're actually trying to keep in the White House. Which I guess makes me one of them, though I'm opposed to assassination and, in any event wouldn't know where to start, but I'll nonetheless use this as license to consider myself somewhat of an expert, especially since most of the people in my social circle are of roughly the same opinion.
Desantis was a credible Bogeyman two years ago but his absolute inability to outmaneuver Trump has rendered him impotent in the eyes of the Powers. And in the eyes of Trump supporters he's totally disloyal and probably a cuck, too for taking abuse from Trump and not bothering to fight back. Desantis's main advantages over Trump were that he was supposedly more competent and that he was actually willing to fight rather than get involved in messy political disputes. His campaign showed that he was totally uncharismatic and couldn't run a national campaign to save his own life, allowing also-rans like Nikki Haley to run circles around him. And he his profound unwillingness to attack Trump, even in the face of his abuse, didn't exactly project the image of a fighter. He's a guy most lefty Democrats would reflexively dislike and bitch about for his policy positions, but he isn't the kind of guy whom anyone would be concerned about the country over. If Trump, as charismatic as he is, was unable to cow the governmental apparatus into bending to his will, then Desantis sure as hell isn't a threat. He's also too much of a traditional Republican at heart to make any serious changes. He'll talk about ending woke but when he realizes that there isn't much he can do about it he'll just shift to enacting more tax cuts. PLus, the guy does have actual executive experience running a large state.
As for Youngkin, I've never met a Democrat who has strong feelings about the guy. I don't live in Virginia, but outside of there the man comes across to most Democrats as as somewhat moderate, the kind of Republican who can actually win a statewide election in Virginia. While he wouldn't be as acceptable as a guy like Phil Scott, he's not exactly the MAGA menace Republicans would need to nominate to really scare the lefties. For Trump to be assassination-proof his putative successor would have to be someone like MTG or Boebert, and there's no way in hell that's happening. And if it somehow did happen, there's no way someone like that is defeating an incumbent. And even if someone like that did beat Biden in the general, it would pose no real threat to any powers that be because these people are totally incompetent and more interested in soundbites than government.
This is totally anecdotal but it proves my point. A friend of mine has a winter house in Boebert's district in Colorado. Being in the West, there's some local water authority, basically a citizens group, that relies on the local rep to get Federal funding for their operating budget. This isn't exactly controversial politically, but they have to meet with the rep every year to go over the budget and whatnot so the rep knows how much to ask for and can justify the number if pressed. First, instead of attending the board meeting, Boebert wanted to do it over the phone for no plausible reason other than that she was too lazy to attend. Okay, whatever, but when she's on the phone it's clear to everyone involved that she wasn't actually listening. When she asks for clarification of something that she should have understood had she been paying attention, it's clear to them that she's either a complete moron or has such a short attention span that she can't even listen to the answers to questions she asked (Which weren't pointed clarifications of someone involved but simply asking them to repeat what they just said). Then she terminated the meeting early by actually telling them it was boring. These aren't the kind of people who are going to make any significant change if in the White House.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
If these mysterious powers that be really don't want Trump to be president to the point that they're willing to assassinate him, and we presume they have the ability to pull it off, why wait until he gets elected? Anyone even more odious than Trump is probably someone who has even less chance of getting elected — and none of the personality cult — than he does, so why not do it now? Especially since the security of a sitting president is almost certainly much tighter than whatever he's getting now. We've never had a major party candidate drop dead during an election season before, so it's uncharted territory how much of a shit show it could turn into trying to find another nominee on short notice. The veep is the obvious choice, but I'd be willing to bet that the actual primary candidates will feel like they deserve a shot since they actually got votes at the convention and Trump's pick was only for vice. Or hell, do it now while there are still primaries to go and Haley is still on the ballot. She may have a better shot of beating Biden in the general but four years of her are certainly better than four years of Trump. Why even give the guy a chance if you don't have to?
Rov_Scam
22d ago
I agree with most of what you said, but aren't you an American expat living in London? There seems something a bit off about someone in your position saying that immigration restrictions are the only thing that matters.
Rov_Scam
22d ago
Calling Cliff Asness a "lifelong Democrat" is disingenuous at the very least. I used to keep CNBC on as background noise when I was in law school and his name rings a bell as the guy who was complaining that one or another of Obama's bailouts was too friendly to workers and not friendly enough to hedge fund billionaires such as himself. Some further internet research shows he was a Rubio supporter in 2016 and a Haley supporter more recently. I don't know what the details of his voter registration are, but he definitely comes across more as one of those never Trump conservatives who Republicans spent the last 8 years assuring us were electorally irrelevant.
Rov_Scam
23d ago
I just spent all day defending large companies in products liability actions, and I'll do the same thing tomorrow, etc. I don't have the time or the inclination right now to give a crash course on how personal injury litigation actually works, but suffice it to say that the jury is irrelevant. We often bring it up but it's more of a theoretical construct than a real thing, because there's no way in hell a case actually goes to trial unless things go significantly off the rails. Damages in a case aren't related in any way to coverage limits or how deep the defendant's pockets are. The damages usually aren't even alleged and when we're evaluating cases are projected awards are just estimates. But no one wants to go to trial; these things settle. Plaintiffs' lawyers, as I said earlier, have to work for free until the case is resolved. The plaintiffs themselves don't want to wait, either, and their engagement agreements require them to accept any reasonable offer. Most of the work involved in a case is less legal razzle-dazzle and more going through the evidence systematically to determine an appropriate amount for settlement negotiations. The idea of a rainmaker gunning for a huge verdict is something more out of a John Grisham novel than the reality of day to day lawyering. There are some Plaintiffs' attorneys who are like that, but they tend to get shitty cases that it quickly becomes apparent aren't even worth trying for a big score; they usually end up just taking whatever we offer them. Some are more aggressive than others, but they're all pragmatic. They have businesses to operate, and they can't afford to throw 200 grand into a holein the hope that it turns into a big score. Any Plaintiff's lawyer working on contingency needs a war chest, and it's much easier and better for their clients to make sure they get a fair settlement then to burn through all their operating capital in search of a huge payday. There's also the added wrinkle that most jurisdictions now have mandatory settlement conferences with the judge; judges in general aren't necessarily averse to trials, but they don't like it when the parties can't settle straightforward cases with no major issues. If one party is intransigent, they aren't getting any help there. As for the insurance companies, they're durable. They survived asbestos, where they're still paying millions of dollars a year on decades-old general liability policies that had low premiums to begin with. They survived countless natural disasters where everyone in a large metro suddenly needs a new car or house at once. They'll survive self-driving cars just fine.
One caveat I'd add is that this is, of course, dependent on self0driving cars being as good as if not better than human drivers are overall. If they're not that good then they'll never be able to market them in such a way that will absolve the driver from any responsibility. Despite recent gains, I'm skeptical that they'll ever get that good in our lifetimes, in which case this exchange is pure navel gazing. But if they do, I don't think liability is going to be a huge issue.
Rov_Scam
23d ago
The part you're forgetting is that if Ford has to insure against all those accidents then the driver doesn't. The up front cost to the consumer may be more, but it's effectively prepaying an insurance policy that lasts the life of the vehicle. Whether or not you're actually coming out ahead depends on specific numbers, but as long as they're somewhere in the ballpark of what you'd spend on insurance then it's a question of how much you value self-driving capability, which is already enough of an advantage that people would be willing to pay a steep premium.
That's a perfectly reasonable position to have. Unfortunately, it's not one that makes for an easy defense of Trump. We're talking about a guy with a history of questionable business behavior who surrounds himself with the kind of people who, if not exactly operating within the criminal world, were squatting near the margins of it. He's been sued numerous times, and lost quite a few of those suits. Whether or not he actually did what the New York DA says he did is irrelevant in your world because he's already proven himself to be the exact kind of person who would do something like that. There's debate above on whether the hush money payments were campaign expenses and how was Trump supposed to proceed without getting into hot water but that's irrelevant; whether they were improper campaign contributions or not, I can tell you that what you don't do is have your attorney make the payments out of his own pocket and then create phony invoices and ledger entries as part of a reimbursement scheme. According to your logic, that alone should be enough evidence of suspicious activity regardless of his past. I'm personally not in favor of getting rid of plea bargaining because I don't think it's going to have the effect some people think it will, but if you're going to take the position that people who engage in suspicious activity deserve what's coming to them, I don't see how you can defend Trump in this situation.
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