MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
Indeed, it's a humiliation ritual. Again, I cannot even name one statue of Stalin or Lenin that suffered the same fate.
Neither Stalin nor Lenin betrayed their country. This kind of ritual humiliation was SOP for traitors, which Lee was - or at least an unsuccessful rebel, which counts as a traitor under the traditional rules. You can argue that Lenin was a traitor to the Kerensky government, but he was a successful rebel so it doesn't count.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
This seems so blatantly inbounds ethically that it amazes me that this is what they're going after him for.
As with the lawsuits, the Trump-Raffensberger phone call is improper (both as a matter of ethics and as a matter of criminal law) if and only if the factual claims Trump made were knowingly false. The Georgia indictment indicts the call as "False Statements and Writings" and "Solicitation of Felony Violation of Oath of Office" (in that Raffensberger knew there was no fraud, and would therefore have violated his oath of office by launching the investigation Trump requested). The Federal indictment doesn't charge individual bad acts, but it describes the phonecall as "the defendant lied to the Georgia Secretary of State".
Filing a false police report is not protected speech.
As a separate matter, Trump threatened Raffensberger with criminal liability for aiding and abetting the (non-existent) fraud. That probably should be a crime, but it doesn't appear to be given that it isn't charged in either the Federal or the Georgia indictment.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
There is a big difference between using recount laws for the purpose for which they were intended (even if those recount laws later turn out to be unconstitutional) and filing lies with the court. Neither Bush nor Gore was ever accused of filing briefs containing false factual claims - the key facts of Bush v Gore (that recounting punch card ballots accurately was sufficiently difficult that there wasn't time for an accurate statewide recount before the electoral College deadline, and that the margin of error of the original count exceeded Bush's margin of victory) were never disputed.
Trump's State court challenges to the 2020 election are criminal if and only if they were based on knowingly false factual claims. Both the Federal and Georgia indictments promise to bring evidence that they were.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
The white South didn't accept their defeat and try to live an honourable peace. They launched an insurgency (the 1st Klan), and when that failed they waited out the presence of federal troops in the South and then staged a series of coups against the Reconstruction-era State governments (elected by multi-racial electorates) in order to introduce Jim Crow. The North, to their shame, tolerated this due to exhaustion during the Gilded Age, and enthusiastically embraced it due to political corruption in the New Deal era.
Jim Crow was a dishonourable peace, and the Civil Rights movement was right to seek to overturn it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
No. I am applying the morals of his own time. Lee knew that slavery was evil, and fought to defend it anyway out of a misguided sense of patriotism. Given the many positive aspects of his character, I hope he gets to spend eternity slightly further away from the Fire than, say, Jeffrey Epstein.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
Didn't a bunch of states create mail-in-ballot rules that undermine ballot secrecy just for that election in particular before some of them got taken out by courts due to their irregularity?
Before 2020, nobody thought that mail-in ballots were per se fraudulent. In 2016, three states including one swing state had all-postal elections (Washington, Oregon and Colorado), and most other states had no-excuse postal voting for anyone who applied. 23.7% of all votes were cast by post (see pp 9/10 here). And nobody on either side of the aisle thought that this was a problem that would justify overturning a close election.
Trump made specific allegations of fraud which were not true. He could have made the purely legal argument that slightly easier postal voting introduced in an irregular way was grounds for tossing the election on a technicality (as of 2016, it was a colourable legal argument based on the independent state legislature theory, which wouldn't be rejected by SCOTUS until Moore vs Harper in 2022) and allowing Republican State legislatures to choose electors, but that wasn't the argument he made. He said that he won by a landslide, that there was "massive fraud", that Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines meant that the in person votes were invalid, and that rogue election officials had added large numbers of fake ballots to Biden's tally.
Wasn't the whole Covid psy-ops leading to these rule changes in the first place?
You mean the pandemic with an impact visible at the macro-demographic level? Or are you telling me that governments outside the US faked 6 million deaths (by official count) or 25 million deaths (based on demographic statistics) in order to allow slightly easier postal voting in a US election?
If there was evidence of a massive conspiracy showing all level of governments and media building up the Covid scare with the ultimate goal to undermine the integrity of the elections, wouldn't that be some kind of coup, or at least conspiracy to commit a coup?
Yes, which is why it is good that there is no such evidence. The pre-2020 conventional wisdom was that easier postal voting helps Republicans (because of the military vote), so if there had been a large-scale conspiracy to steal the election for Democrats, the main goal of the conspiracy would not have been slightly easier postal voting.
Well yes, of course the average rich and powerful American is a honest guy.
I didn't say that. I said that by the (low) standards of rich and powerful Americans, Trump is unusually dishonest. Heck, even by the (even lower) standards of greater-NYC real estate operators, Trump was unusually dishonest, this was common knowledge on Wall Street, and was in fact sufficiently common knowledge that a joke about it got into Sex and the City.
and not Epstein's buddies
Epstein's buddies like one Donald Trump, who allowed Ghislaine Maxwell to recruit girls at Mar-a-Lago, who was a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express, and who promoted the corrupt prosecutor who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal the first time he got caught? Even by the (very, very low) ethical standards of Epstein's social circle, Donald Trump went above and beyond.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
At some point more and more individuals will be caught up in interstate lawfare wars. Trump is just the tip of the iceberg.
Trump isn't a victim of this kind of interstate lawfare. All his legal problems relate to behaviour which (if he did it) is illegal everywhere, and the claims of jurisdiction are pretty clear-cut.
Trump's current legal troubles are:
- Federal cases with a clear federal cause of action (the Mar-a-Lago documents, the federal Jan 6 case)
- New York cases where jurisdiction is proper because NY is the Trump Org's principal place of business (the Stormy Daniels payoff, the bank fraud case) or the behaviour alleged took place in New York (the E Jean Carroll rape and defamation lawsuits)
- A Georgia case relating to interference with a Georgia election.
"This kind of lawfare" strictu sensu - i.e. seeking to regulate the worldwide behaviour of businesses outside your jurisdiction on the basis that they did some business inside the jurisdiction - has been SOP in the US for a very long time. From my perspective as someone who has spent most of my career working in non-US multinationals, the biggest issue is random insane civil verdicts in US state courts, but there are a number of federal policies which are also objectionable - especially sanctions on Cuba and the law attempting to punish companies for participating in the Arab boycott of Israel. Countries other than the US do not do this - for example the UK only attempts to regulate British companies and British-based activity of foreign companies. In general, countries other than the US take the view that, as applied to international trade in goods, this kind of behaviour violates the WTO treaty, which says that countries can only discriminate between identical goods based on whether or not they have a trade deal with the country they were made in, not on who made them.
What Texas is doing is something slightly different in that it ties the requirement to doing business with the Texas government, not to operating in Texas. This is less objectionable from a jurisdictional comity perspective, because the Texan government is acting as a market participant, not a sovereign, and has the right to choose who it does business with in the same way as any other entity (FWIW, I have no idea if the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment does or should regulate States as market participants). This kind of behaviour used to be rare except for mission-driven organisations like charities and political parties - normal people care about what they are buying, may care about how it was made, but do not care about the general ethical record of the people making it. The idea that public sector customers should take an interest as customers in the out-of-jurisdiction activities of the companies they do business with is new - AFAIK it dates back to left-wing campaigns about corporate tax compliance in the noughties.
It will be interesting to see how Texas's attempts to enforce this against Wells Fargo pan out. If this was a term in a contract "Wells Fargo will not discriminate against a firearms entity" then at common law it would probably be unenforceable as a restraint of trade and/or a contract to break the law in a (legally) friendly jurisdiction. But making it a pre-contract enquiry means that Wells Fargo are pretty clearly guilty of a fraudulent misrepresentation.
I feel like this kind of interstate lawfare is exactly what the interstate commerce provisions in the US constitution were meant to prevent.
This is the important point - a world in which every jurisdiction tries to regulate activity outside its territory - particularly if that regulation is driven by idiosyncratic local politics rather than being an attempt to enforce widely-shared norms - is very bad from the point of view of making it legal for normal people to do business normally.
Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.
The "randos who said it" included Donald Trump - who became a GOP higher up when he was nominated for President. Both Trump's popularity with the anti-establishment right and his extreme unpopularity with the pro-establishment left (and large parts of the pro-establishment right) start here. When Obama published his birth certificate, Trump claimed the credit for making him do it. Per Wikipedia, Trump didn't publicly acknowledge that was a US citizen until September 2016 - i.e. after fighting the Republican primary as an ambiguously-repentant birther.
Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy. The GOP primary electorate nominated Trump despite (definitely) or because of (probably) his willingness to do it anyway. Trump's base within the GOP is people who think that Democrats always cheat, that they get away with it because the GOP establishment are cucks, and that Republicans should cheat back harder. This is more obvious post-Jan 6 than it was then, but Trump's opponents brought receipts in 2016.
Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it. If American elections really are kayfabe, this makes him someone who breaks kayfabe and gets away with it, which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise. If you think that American elections are not in fact kayfabe, then he is the worst threat to American democracy since elections really were rigged in 1960's Illinois. In either case, he needs to be stopped.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
In a Bayesian sense, following mainstream MAGA Republican accounts on Twitter is very weak circumstantial evidence that someone is a "Nazi" (in the sense that the Very Online left use the term - which encompasses a lot of alt-right politics that has nothing to do with the OG NSDAP) - most MAGA Republicans are not alt-right, but most alt-right Americans are MAGA. Following GOPe accounts on Twitter is circumstantial evidence that someone is not a "Nazi" - the GOPe despise both actual Nazis and the "Nazi" alt-right as much as the left does. Whether DeSantis counts as mainstream or GOPe is left as an exercise to the reader.
But that isn't the context. The question is given that we all know the guy posts 14/88 memes, is he doing so because he actually has "Nazi" political views, or is he posting ironically. And in that context, affiliation with mainstream Republicans is much stronger evidence that the guy is serious - the overlap between "mainstream Republican" and "posts 14/88 memes ironically" is basically zero. People who post 14/88 memes ironically are either nihilistic trolls or lefties, and following mainstream Republicans on social media is good Bayesian evidence that someone is neither of those things.
In any case, I am happy to enforce the Rule of Goats against someone who LARPs as a Nazi absent very strong evidence that their heart is in the right place. As in I actually want to the Nazi character get chased round Europe by an old drunk and a cripple, or at least slip on a banana skin while goose-stepping.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Lee was regarded as a true Southern gentleman
And Rommel was regarded as a true German gentleman. But if a statue of Rommel stood in a place of honour in central Stuttgart as part of the pantheon of military heroes of Baden-Wurttemberg, and it was melted down at the request of the local synagogue, we wouldn't be complaining about "teabagging the outgroup". In fact, part of the "Reconstruction" process in post-WW2 Germany was the removal of Nazi monuments.
Which is irrelevant, because no other US Presidents have committed the crimes Trump is being accused of.
If the facts set out in the Jan 6th committee report are correct, then
- The 2020 election was not, in fact, fraudulent
- Trump and his advisors at the very least knew that the specific allegations of fraud they were making (including the Dominion voting machines conspiracy theory) were false, and probably that there was no significant fraud at all.
- Donald Trump nevertheless conspired to remain in office
- As part of the conspiracy, the Trump campaign filed numerous lawsuits alleging facts they knew to be false, organised slates of fake electors some of whom sent fake electoral votes to Pence, intimidated State and local election officials, asked Mike Pence to violate his oath of office, and sent a riotous mob to the Capitol for the purposes of intimidating Mike Pence into doing what they wanted. (I am happy to admit that there is a legitimate factual dispute over whether or not Trump incited the mob to enter the Capitol).
- Some of this (the fake electors, the perjury, the hacking that Sidney Powell just pleaded to) is uncontroversially criminal. Much of the rest is caught by the vague laws against making false statements in official government proceedings that while a lot of people don't like it for good reasons, has stood up in Court just fine and is frequently prosecuted. There is also a lot of threatening behaviour which is clearly wrongdoing but might not be criminal because the 1st amendment is overprotective of threatening speech (sending goons to Ruby Freedman, Jan 6th itself).
- That Trump was sufficiently involved with the conspiracy to be vicariously liable for the crimes it committed under general principles of conspiracy law
- That Trump met with a retired general in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of staying in power through an honest-to-God military coup. (Not prosecuted because the plans didn't go anywhere, but arguably the biggest outrage of the whole affair).
The last time anything remotely like this happened was the Hayes-Tilden election in 1876, and the fact that nobody was prosecuted for the malarkey then (which included a 3-figure number of murders) was part of a pattern of letting white southerners get away with shit that started with the culpable failure to hang Jefferson Davis and ended up with the north cucking to Jim Crow.
"Unsuccessful coup plotters go down" (whether they get the rope or just a long jail sentence depends on national tradition) is the historical default everywhere - there isn't a directly on-point precedent in the US because nobody in US history has tried to do the kind of things Donald Trump did between the election and Jan 6th.
You can argue that Donald Trump shouldn't be prosecuted because consensus reality is incorrect and he is factually innocent. You can argue that Donald Trump shouldn't be prosecuted because he is so disconnected from reality that he is incapable of forming the mens rea to commit a crime of dishonesty - based on the publicly-available information there is reasonable doubt on this point - although I am not sure you can do so with a straight face while suggesting that he be elected President of the United States. You can argue that he should be let off for the same reason Jefferson Davis was - that prosecuting someone for serious crimes of which they are obviously guilty is nevertheless dangerously divisive if a large percentage of the population still support the perp - but the precedent is that that was a mistake (at least if you reject Jim Crow and the Gone with the Wind/Birth of a Nation school of pop-history).
What you can't do and expect to be taken seriously is to argue that prosecuting a coup plotter is a shocking escalation, or that Trump is being prosecuted (at least as regards the election-related prosecutions) for something that a Democrat or pro-establishment Republican would have skated for, because neither Democrats nor pro-establishment Republicans would allow the kind man who would think of doing what Trump did near the presidency.
Not that it matters very much given that the politics of all this is driven by Jan 6th, but the story with the other prosecutions Trump is facing are similar,
- The Stormy Daniels payoff case in NY is bullshit - although even then the false accounting being charged is unambiguously criminal, and it isn't something that large numbers of people are let off for because it isn't a crime that large numbers of people commit.
- The documents case is clear-cut not bullshit. We can argue about whether Hilary's e-mails are comparable, but most big shots who deliberately mishandle classified information on that scale are prosecuted (Petraeus is the most recent one that comes to mind). The standard plea deal for big shots is a fine and probation, but Trump didn't co-operate so a few months in jail would be consistent with the precedents.
- The NY "civil" fraud case is strange because the punishment (effectively a corporate death penalty) is obviously disproportionate to the crime. But there is no doubt that the behaviour charged is large-scale fraud, of a type that isn't usually allowed to slide because large corporations don't normally commit it in the first place. And on the publicly-available information, the Trump Org sure looks guilty.
There is a lot of evidence, including from before Trump became a partisan political figure, that he is unusually dishonest by the standards of rich and powerful Americans. This means that you would expect him to have worse-than-usual post-presidency legal troubles.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
I don't know enough about the Brazilian situation to confirm if it is the same, but calling his supporters out for a riot was Trump's plan D after his plans to overturn the election before January 6th failed.
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Plan A was the plan announced at Four Seasons Total Landscaping focused on changing the results in the swing states by state-level political action including trying to get lawsuits in front of sympathetic state-court judges, jawboning Republican secretaries of state, and lobbying Republican-controlled state legislatures to intervene in the certification process. I don't know how surprising it should have been that Republican state-court judges and Republican secretaries of state were completely uncooperative with the plan, but they were.
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Plan B was a more conventional military autogolpe - the plan proposed by Gen Flynn to declare the Dominion hack/fraud a foreign attack on US democracy and rerun the election with hand-counting under military supervision. Assuming the Jan 6 committee report is accurate, this plan was being taken seriously until it became clear that there was no way the military would co-operate.
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Plan C was the plan to get Pence to overturn the election based on the legal theories in the Eastman memo. I don't know what the plan was to consolidate power after Pence announces Trump's re-election and Nancy Pelosi orders the House Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest him for couping. Pence refused to co-operate.
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Plan D was to use the mob to carry out Plan C over Pence's objections, either by intimidating him or by causing enough chaos that the Secret Service removed him to an undisclosed location and someone else (probably President pro tem Chuck Grassley) could be convinced to do it.
This is consistent with my theory (which appears to be shared by most Mottizens) of how American conservatives feel about the use of power. Plan A is to do things legally, plan B is organised violence, and plan C (probably) and D (definitely) are disorganised violence. At any point before January 6th, getting his supporters to riot makes plans A-C harder.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
Yes, given that the naming of various high-powered Democrats as Pizzagate child abusers was based on John Podesta's e-mails, not Tony's.
"Tony Podesta is a paedo, so everyone in his e-mail address book has some 'splaining to do or else they go down for aiding and abetting" is a claim of guilt-by-association that doesn't stand up in court, but is a reasonable approach to take when deciding who is allowed access to your kids (or would be, if the evidence that Tony Podesta was a child molester was at least circumstantial rather than just vibes). "John Podesta's brother is a paedo, so everyone in his e-mail address book has some 'splaining to do or else they go down for aiding and abetting" is nonsense. I would have no idea if any of my main professional or social contacts had a brother who is a sex offender, because I don't vet my contacts' siblings, and apart from spouses probably never meet them.
I agree it isn't a meaningful difference to the question "Is Marina Abramovic a fit and proper person to be an honorary ambassador of Ukraine" because she was tight with both Podestas.
How is that wishy washy? You have to contort yourself into a pretzel to come to any other conclusion.
It is wishy washy because Hunter Biden is a liar, and it was a statement he made at a time when he was motivated to lie - the foreign crooks he was dealing with wanted to bribe Joe (although paying Hunter for access would be 2nd best), and would be much more willing to pay off Hunter if they thought the money was reaching Joe.
The "10% for the big guy e-mail" is one crook sending a note to another saying he was going to put aside some money for the big guy, but no money was actually put aside for Joe Biden except, possibly, in Hunter's head (unless there is non-public information about a segregated account, but if the Republicans had that I suspect they would have leaked it by now).
The fundamental problem with making "Joe Biden personally was on the take via Hunter" stick based on a jigsaw of weak evidence is that normally a lifestyle that exceeds known clean income is a key piece of the jigsaw, and Joe's lifestyle between VP and President was entirely consistent with what he has always claimed to be in his financial disclosures, i.e. an old guy with a net worth in the low double figure millions.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
Trump doesn't need to offer red meat to his base. His base already love him so much that they are still supporting him even after he has been indicted twice for serious crimes of which he is obviously guilty (and once for some bullshit process crime in NY). His problem is that his base are not close to a majority of the electorate - they are barely a majority in a Republican primary.
Trump either needs to convince more NeverTrump Republicans to hold their noses and vote for the crook, not the Democrat, or to convince more Reagan Democrat types that trannies are more of a threat to their kids than Russians.
I have been in two fist-fights in my life. One was over cheating at cards in middle school. The other one happened because someone nominated my sister as a candidate to marry, shag, or kill. The game is disrespectful, and it is only safe to play with casual acquaintances if you stick to nominating women who are known not to be respectable, such as actresses.
Playing with close friends, or with people who are equivalent such as team-mates on an all-male team with an appropriate level of team bonding, is part of the way groups can bond by engaging in mildly transgressive behaviour. Even so, there are limits, and a female politician who was not clearly outgroup would be pushing them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
it would eventually have to also make a finding on the free speech issue
Baude's original law review article advocating disqualifying Trump points out the 14th amendment is also part of the Constitution, so the 1st amendment doesn't automatically apply the way it would to a normal criminal law. Under the normal rules for resolving conflicts between two laws of equal authority, the 14th overrules the 1st, both as the more specific provision and as the after-enacted provision.
So it is entirely possible that Trump is disqualified for inciting an insurrection, but is still protected by the 1st amendment from criminal prosecution for inciting a riot.
A quick check of the right wing alt-media site you link to shows that even they are not claiming that there were 150,000 test ballots improperly included in the count. 150,000 was the total number of postal votes in Fulton County - we can reasonably assume that most of these were legitimate, particularly given that the overall percentage of postal votes in Fulton was close to the statewide average. Nor does the article say that the ballots were lost - it says that Fulton County explicitly says they are not lost, but that one specific right-wing citizen-journalist doesn't believe them.
The actual lawsuit filed by Favorito, a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist (the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign didn't run on this point) is based on an affidavit by Susan Voyles, who saw one batch of 107 "pristine" postal ballots in a box of 8 batches. If you assume that Voyles only looked at one box of ballots to find this batch and therefore that roughly 1/8 of the postal ballots were dodgy, then you get the "possibly 10-20,000 fraudulent votes" alleged by Favorito. And the specific box of votes identified by Voyles was reviewed, and there were no irregularities. So the premise of the Favorito lawsuit is that Voyles misremembered the box number, and that a bunch of randos should be able to go through 150,000 votes to find the needle in the haystack. FWIW, the reason why it has come up again is that the standing issue has finally been adjudicated in favour of Favorito after two trips up and down the appeals hierarchy.
But the important point here is how easy it is to create a Gish Gallop of hinkiness. We have one poll worker claiming (under oath, admittedly) to have seen 107 votes that looked a bit wrong (an argument so frivolous that Trump's lawyers wouldn't touch it), being blown up to 150,000 fraudulently counted test ballots alleged on this forum. And apart from Voyles, who (being under oath) was careful not to allege any specific irregularity, all the amplification was done by randos. There are hundreds of more or less frivolous complaints about the election being exaggerated in thousands of places, and because they get vaguer as well as bigger online, it can take hours to find out what the allegation even is, let alone to rebut it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
Legislators have the right to ask questions relevant to potential legislation (and to compel answers if the person being asked is within the jurisdiction) - - in Con Law textbooks this is called the investigative power of the legislature. Since the UK has no written constitution, everything is a potential subject matter for legislation by the Westminster Parliament (and regulation of offensive speech on social media platforms is, in fact, a current subject of active political debate). So she isn't violating any constitutional principle here. She is being a grandstanding idiot, and if I lived in Gosport it would make me significantly less likely to re-elect her. OTOH, in the UK right now everyone hates Russel Brand except the actual fans of his show, so I'm sure she will gain votes on net.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular
They are. Lots of things are broadly popular (in the sense that 60%+ of the population support them) but where a large minority are sufficiently fanatical in opposition that being publically associated with them is a net negative. "Normal-ass employer-provided health insurance includes employer-paid abortions" is a prime example where you should do the popular thing quietly in order to avoid a damaging row with pro-lifers. Anodyne expressions of pro-LGBT sentiment like participating in Pride Month are similar - normies expect you to do it, but shouting about it draws unwelcome attention. The supporters of all these things know that there is a noisy minority of haters.
This applies more to companies which sell to consumers than companies that sell to other businesses. The universe of people who consoom product has a lot more Red Tribers in it than the universe of people who are able and willing to take corporate jobs.
Race-based affirmative action is the rare case where you are probably right - I think supporters genuinely don't grok just how unpopular it is with normies because they have successfully silenced opponents in their own spaces.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
I think someone who claimed a hooker payoff as a business expense on their taxes would be prosecuted for tax fraud if they had powerful enemies, which Trump does. But that would be a federal charge, and Merrick Garland is playing his cards close to his chest.
This particular indictment is driven by Bragg's ego and desire to advance in NY lefty politics, not by a desire to convict Trump. Hence the weak charges - Trump is guilty of a lot more serious crimes than misrecording the Stormy Daniels hush money, but nothing that is both media-friendly and chargeable in New York state court.
I suspect the federal indictments will be less bullshit and will include serious crimes of which Trump is actually guilty.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
We did this with, for example, smog, vacuum tube tvs, leaded petrol, lemon cars
Smog and leaded petrol both required government intervention because the pollution is an externality. Leaded petrol is still better than unleaded from the point of view of the engine, which is why Avgas is still leaded.
The same is true of CO2 - the reason why the worst-case scenarios associated with RCP8.5 (which people like David Friedman correctly point out won't happen, despite the amount of research funding going into working out just how bad they are and the media attention this attracts) will not, in fact, happen, is that governments saw the problem and acted to mitigate it - mostly by subsidising the R&D and early adoption of the technologies (PV cells, efficient wind turbines, electric cars etc.) that will support a lower-carbon society.
Achieving RCP4.5 instead of RCP8.5 is in everybody's interest (except for a few selfish Boomers) because it is the difference between your grandchildren thriving and (with an unacceptably high probability) frying. Fortunately, it doesn't require a Great Reset to achieve. But achieving it has required and will continue to require elites to talk to each other about decarbonisation at places like Davos, and COP meetings, and G20 summits. Going further to achieve RCP3.4 or RCP2.6 isn't in the interests of Red Tribe Americans who have large sunk investments in a high-carbon lifestyle, but it would be in the interest of a lot of people if the technology to do it at a reasonable cost exists. (Tip from a physicist - it does, it's called nuclear power).
In a sane world, working out whether RCP3.4 is a good idea or not requires both elites talking to each other about what can be done and what it might cost, and voters talking to each other about whether it is a good idea or not given the facts that emerge from that conversation. In the world we actually live in, this won't happen, among other reasons because the culture war is making us stupid and US climate policy is going to be decided by whether ragetweets about Hunter Biden's laptop are more or less viral than ragetweets about George Santos' CV. Davos is selling (at an extremely high price) the idea that these conversations are happening and that business executives are valued participants in them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
no, this couldn't be more wrong; Trump wins because he motivates non and low likely voters to show up when they otherwise wouldn't
This presupposes that Trump wins. He lost the popular vote to Dolores Umbridge in 2016 and lost the popular and electoral votes to an empty suit in 2020.
Trump appeals differently to swing voters compared to the Goldman-Aramco Republicans, but it isn't obvious that he appeals more to them. What is clear is that the Republican base prefer Trump to the Goldman-Aramco Republicans that run against him in primaries.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
If you want to burn down the District of Criminals, do it yourselves this time. No need to involve the Canadians. Plus an all-American DC fire would probably have better music.
The most likely candidate I can think of is an amendment regularising the administrative state if it appears to be under serious threat from the conservative majority on SCOTUS. Nobody wants to live in a world where the clownshow that is Congress has to deal with the technical detail of bank capital adequacy or aviation safety, and very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.
Before the McCarthy speakership fiasco, it looked like an Administrative Procedure Amendment would pass easily if needed with votes from Democrats, moderate pro-business Republicans, and conservative Republicans bought by the incumbent banks, airlines etc. I suspect in today's climate a lot of Republicans would be afraid of being primaried if they supported it (a majority of the voters in low-turnout non-Presidential Republican primaries appear to be the kind of anti-establishment conservative who would be happy to watch the world burn if libs were sufficiently owned as a result), so it would be difficult to get the required supermajority.
* IANAL, but my reading of the Constitution is that the administrative state is unconstitutional for the same reasons as the Air Force under any sensible interpretation scheme other than "living constitutionalism". But both the administrative state and the Air Force are good ideas, and should have been regularised by constitutional amendments which would have passed easily at the time.
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