Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Joe Biden had been out of office for months at the time that email was sent. You can't bribe a private citizen.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
There was no indication in any of the laptop data that Joe Biden took bribes from anyone. There was evidence that he was once briefly in the same room as one of the Burisma guys (and witnesses to that exchange confirmed that the conversation was limited to pleasantries), and there's some China stuff that took place when Biden was out of office. Any suggestion that Joe Biden was influenced by any of his son's business dealings is nothing more than conjecture at this point.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
Riley Gaines's problem wasn't that she criticized the eligibility requirements but that she went full-bore conservative culture warrior. She appeared at Donald Trump rally and in a Rand Paul campaign ad. The event she was confronted at was sponsored by Turning Point USA, not exactly an uncontroversial group.
Cancelled from the left, certainly, but as these things go, it's only the people who are willing to become the mascot for the right that are willing to risk cancellation from the left. Which is then used against their credibility and to question their motives.
Martina Navratilova's been saying the same basic thing as Gaines but she still has her commentating job at The Tennis Channel and gets interviewed in mainstream news and sports outlets about other things without any throat clearing or even mention of her opinions on trans athletes.
Rov_Scam
28d ago
I don't believe anyone from Jan 6 was charged with obstructing an ICE agent performing his official duties, or any corollary that would apply to the National Park Police or DC Police.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
As one of those moderates, I don't see the problem here. The rule of law imposes no requirement on the Supreme Court to hear appeals, and doesn't require any justification for a decision to hear or not to hear a case.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Maybe the judge thought that was better than ICE personally aiding and abetting the escape of a wife beater.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Citing something that was implemented between 2009 and 2014 is hardly evidence of the woke explosion having influenced anything.
And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.
This is based on the assumption that "defund the police" and other movements led to a conscious effort to decrease policing that resulted in a higher murder rate. But the increase in murder rate happened everywhere, and to much the same degree. I haven't seen any study that's attempted to grade cities based on how enthusiastic they were about implementing police reform and looking at how the murder rates responded. Hell, Dallas and Miami had Republican mayors and still couldn't avoid the crime increase, so I doubt that this phenomenon was solely driven by policy decisions. Until someone actually takes a look at this, it's nothing more than conjecture.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
Being eventually right isn't the same as being right. My grandmother had dementia in 2014. If I had continually said she had it beginning in 1995, I would've eventually been right, but only after nearly 20 years of being wrong. Additionally, the claims were always beyond anything that's been demonstrated thus far. While he clearly isn't as sharp as he used to be, nothing he's done publicly has shown any indication he has dementia. His debate performance was bad, but the actual answers he gave weren't anything one wouldn't expect from a garden-variety bad debate performance. The criticism was more on his energy and demeanor than anything substantive. From my experience with the disease, this is not what one would expect from someone with that kind of cognitive decline.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
She’s abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career. What about any of this is “likeable” to you?
You may not like her personally, but some politicians (Hillary Clinton, Liz Warren, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, etc.) have articles written about whether they're likeable enough to be president. People weren't writing articles about Harris's likeability problems.
Willie Brown
How was this exactly a skeleton. She dated the guy 30 years ago. He may have been technically married, but he'd been separated from his wife for a dozen years by that point; the relationship wasn't exactly a secret affair. Her "sleeping her way to the top" consisted of a couple appointments to state commissions nobody's heard of a decade before she ever ran for public office. In any event, it wasn't a big enough deal for the Trump campaign to make an issue of.
When asked on The View - the most friendly and favorable environment imaginable - whether there was anything she would do differently from (massively unpopular incumbent) Joe Biden, she said that “Nothing comes to mind.” How is this not a catastrophic gaffe? It was the easiest softball question in the world and she couldn’t handle it.
This is one of those things that could have gone either way. She could have distanced herself from her boss and repudiated his policies, saying that if she had been in charge she'd have done things differently. However, for her to suggest that Biden was a bad president would have been incredibly disloyal to the man who was more responsible than anyone for putting her in the position she's in. It would make the current administration look more dysfunctional than it already does. That's not a good look when you're running as an incumbent member of that administration. Furthermore, Biden isn't exactly Jimmy Carter. Inflation is down from where it was. The market is up. Unemployment is low. Illegal border crossings are comparable to Trump-era levels. To the outside observer it should look like the Biden administration faced significant challenges and met all of them. If there was any gaffe here, it was the failure to compare this to the Trump administration, which spent three years on easy mode and fell flat on its face as soon as it hit a major crisis (his response to which was largely to deny that a crisis even existed).
The argument here isn't that the Biden administration didn't make mistakes; it most certainly made several big ones. But while honesty may be the best policy when it comes to personal relationships, it's lethal in politics. If you want an example of an actual campaign gaffe, Mondale in 1984 said "Both of us are going to raise your taxes. The difference is that I'll admit it, he won't." Regan didn't end up raising taxes, but four years later Bush famously promised not to raise taxes, but raised them anyway. Bush won his election; Mondale didn't. I'm unaware of any politician in American history who has won reelection after owning the mistakes of his first term. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but if it did it's extraordinarily rare. I have seen plenty of politicians justify obvious mistakes and get rewarded for it.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
A big problem here is there simply wasn’t enough time to actually conduct a serious investigation. In order to actually investigate the election fraud claim that voting machines changed votes, you’d have to forensically audit dozens of machines in every state. To do so properly would take several weeks. The people claiming no fraud were saying so within days.
The same can be said for the people alleging fraud. Absent some specific evidence, of which none was provided, there was no basis for which Trump to even suggest that the election was fraudulent. Yet he was making these allegations before they had even finished counting the votes. This throws the whole call for forensic audits of voting machines into question as well. There was concerted effort to "audit" the election results in several states, but the auditors never explained exactly what they were looking for, or what they were doing, or how they expected what they were doing to demonstrate what they were looking for. Instead, they poked around with constantly changing procedures before concluding that the vote total wasn't substantially different from the official numbers. Not that this satisfied the election truthers, who merely backtracked and said that the methods the auditors used wouldn't have uncovered any of the other 199 types of fraud they alleged without evidence.
The lawsuits were never heard. And when they were dismissed, they were dismissed on standing. To say we know for certain he was lying is pretty uncharitable. He couldn’t have known whether there was fraud as no evidence was ever investigated properly.
Dismissal on standing grounds did not prevent the lawsuits from uncovering fraud; that would have required fraud to have been alleged in the first place. What the lawsuits did was allege improprieties in election procedure and ask that the court throw out the results for an entire state as a remedy, or at least throw out some tranche of ballots, the goal being that if certification could be prevented in enough states it would throw the election into the House. IIRC, these suits never alleged any facts that were in dispute, and thus would not have resulted in any kind of discovery or investigation. These cases being heard on the merits would have simply meant that the parties would have gone into court and argued different issues than they actually argued. Some of these cases were heard on the merits and were found lacking; I doubt the ones dismissed for standing, or laches, or any other affirmative defense would have fared differently had they been allowed to proceed.
You want to file a lawsuit that will actually result in a thorough investigation? File one that makes specific allegations of fraud: Tell a story in the complaint about how specific people took specific actions at specific times. Have actual witnesses on hand whom you can depose under oath, subject to cross-examination. Be prepared to do some of your own cross-examination as the other side puts up their witnesses contradicting yours. Don't be afraid to get subpoenas. Even if you have forensic evidence that your expert says is ironclad, it's worthless unless you have lay witnesses who can substantiate your claims. Saying there's proof that votes were switched is meaningless if you don't know who switched them. In other words, you have to have an actual case. It's not hard. Attorneys manage to file real cases every day, even attorneys who suck.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
They might think that the agency was correct? The recent assault on the Chevron doctrine has to be one of the oddest crusades in recent judicial history. I understand that a lot of conservatives are critical of the administrative state, but it's not like overturning Chevron really changes anything. I understand the justices had their own reasons for overturning it, but let's face it, they're all just a bunch of eggheads that make rulings based on principle. The reason Chevron became a doctrine in the first place was because it involved highly technical questions that courts were reluctant to wade into. The original case involved whether Chevron had to apply for a permit or not. While people are generally concerned about environmental issues, they're concerned about the kind of issues that actually affect the environment, not about the details of EPA permitting requirements. The present case involved whether certain fishing vessels were required to pay for observers while in international waters. Again, a purely technical question that the Supreme Court kicked back to the lower courts to answer. The end result of this isn't necessarily that the lower courts strike down the regulation at issue; they can always find that it was consistent with the intent of congress. In any event, whether vessels in restricted fisheries have to pay for observers required under the Magnuson-Stevens Act or whether the North Atlantic Fisheries Service has to pay for them isn't likely to be a topic of discussion here when the lower courts make their determination. If the courts rule that the NAFS has to pay then I doubt many will consider it a crushing blow to the administrative state.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
He didn't run on prosecuting Trump in the sense (as I have seen implied in some conservative outlets) that he made it a campaign promise. He ran on prosecuting Trump in the sense that he cited his participation in the AG investigation. In other words, he ran on his record, which is something every AG candidate does, especially when they were involved in a high profile case.
Rov_Scam
1yr 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
1yr ago
To take your arguments one by one:
So like Barack Obama in 2008? Or 2012? (when Democrats worried absentee voting would drive old-people votes which harmed them).
I don't remember this. I do remember some kerfuffle where the Obama campaign sued Ohio because they passed a law giving the military three extra early voting days, and the conservative media tried to spin it as him trying to restrict military votes when the lawsuit sought to give the rest of the population the same early voting window as the military. Obama's been pretty consistent about "more voting, not less".
Or Trump whining about it for months before the election as the scheme was being ramped up by executive fiat in explicit contravention to election laws across dozens of states?
I clearly limited my argument to before 2020. And the states that ramped up mail-in voting by executive fiat weren't ones that were at issue in the 2020 election. Only 5 states changed absentee voting requirements through executive action—less than half a dozen, not dozens—and among them, three are clearly red states controlled by Republicans (Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia), one (Kentucky) is a red state with a Democratic governor, and one (New Hampshire) is left-leaning with a Republican governor. There was no clear liberal pattern here.
There are dozens of high profile examples over the last 2 decades...
I don't know about dozens, but I'll admit there are a few. But I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove. Everything involves tradeoffs. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it were conclusively proven that voter fraud could be eliminated entirely if we limited voting to polling places in major cities. The ultimate effect of this, of course, would be that the rural vote would be rendered entirely irrelevant and elections would have a decidedly partisan lean, probably to the point that our politics would realign entirely. If these now disenfranchised voters complained, I'd respond that people who find it too inconvenient to drive a couple hours to vote obviously aren't motivated enough to deserve any say in government, and people who can't afford the trip obviously don't have enough "skin in the game" to deserve a say in government. If the primary goal is the elimination of fraud, why wouldn't this be an ideal solution? We both know the answer to this question. The question isn't whether fraud exists, it's whether it has enough of a practical effect to make additional restrictions worthwhile.
Each time mail-in or absentee voting legislation has been passed, this was discussed repeatedly with additional security requirements and conditions because of those concerns.
No, it wasn't. I live in Pennsylvania. When mail-in voting passed in 2019 the biggest issue about the bill was that it also eliminated the straight ticket option, which led to some Democrats voting against it in protest. It otherwise passed unanimously, and was quickly signed by the governor. Every single Republican voted for it, including arch-election truthers like Doug Mastriano. I'm sure you can find some concerns if you look hard enough, but as someone who lived in the state, I don't recall it coming up once, and this is a politically diverse state with the largest legislature in the country. Similarly, in Michigan, the biggest criticism of Prop 3 wasn't that it expanded mail-in voting but that it was making something that should have been a legislative item into a constitutional one.
No one is arguing mail-in voting is inherently "unconstitutional."
I was writing this on my phone at work so I apologize. The OP said that it "violates every principle of Democracy", which I misinterpreted. Feel free to substitute the correct language.
We're not talking about millions of votes needing to swap, but ~40,000 in any of 5 different states
Well, no. Flipping one state wouldn't have been enough to turn the election in favor of Trump. At best he would have needed to flip two, provided they were Michigan and Pennsylvania. Realistically he needs to flip three. And if he goes the flip 2 route then he needs about 80,000 votes in PA and over 100,000 in MI, at least double the 40,000 you mentioned. What's the largest mail vote fraud scheme you can find? How about the average? Remember what I said about tradeoffs?
if a single one did something as simple as requiring canvassing hundreds of thousands of votes which had no signed chain of custody receipts (and no election officials have yet been charged despite this being a crime in multiple states like AZ).
Ah, yes, the old "the previous five audits we requested didn't find anything, but if we do a sixth one we're pretty sure the whole edifice will come crashing down because a televangelist saw something in a viral video that PROVES that Biden and the Democrats committed MASSIVE FRAUD by forging hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots under the cover of night but being too dumb to think of forging chain of custody receipts along with them". I'm sure the Kraken will finally be unleashed.
If two people raced bikes all over France and then the loser tested positive for PEDs, do you think they should both get a do-over race or otherwise we're not talking about "principles"?
Are the PEDs supposed to be a stand-in for fraud, or for mail-in ballots generally? If they're a stand-in for mail-ins generally, then they aren't a banned substance and there's no problem; you can't claim a race was unfair just because you don't like the rules. If they're a stand-in for fraud, then you do get to win the race, but I don't see what this has to do with the election—in one case you found actual evidence of cheating, and in the other you didn't, you just argued that the rules made it easier to cheat. What you're suggesting is more analogous to a race where PEDs are banned and your opponent never tested positive, but you want to rerun the race because you're pretty sure he cheated but can't actually prove it.
The Federal Government is currently abusing laws made 150 years ago in response to the Civil War as well as stretching interpretation of other laws way past their breaking point...
Well, what do you think a more appropriate charge would have been. If organizing a plot to take over the Capitol building in order to prevent the lawful transfer of power of a democratically elected president so that it will remain in the hands of the guy who lost isn't seditious conspiracy, what is exactly? What line do you think he needs to cross? And how is the jury biased? Unless you're arguing that he didn't actually do what the government said he did, there's no room for bias here. Jury nullification isn't something you can expect from any jury, and isn't something you should expect in this case unless you seriously think attempts to overthrow the government should be legal.
Do you follow election disputes/protests over "local judges and clerks," closely?
lol, I'm a lawyer. I deal with these people all the time, and yes, it makes a difference. I not only follow them closely, I follow them closely in counties and even states where I don't live and can't vote. If you want I can fill you in on the drama in West Virginia's First Circuit judicial retention election, or tell you about the recurring pissing match between the current and former Recorders of Deeds in Westmoreland County, PA.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Again, this is all stuff that happened in 2017 and 2018 during the brief period in Joe Biden's life when he was neither in public office nor running for public office. To be clear, I have no problem with this stuff being investigated, I just haven't seen anything come out of the investigation that would suggest there's any ethical concerns let alone criminal liability. It's a political question, and while people are certainly free to come to the conclusion that Biden's relationship to these deals was too close for comfort, we need some perspective here. The evidence presented so far suggests that Joe Biden may have had peripheral involvement in a couple of his son's business ventures that ultimately went nowhere. Then you have his likely opponent, who had extensive business dealings with Russians for a period that lasted nearly 30 years and continued well into his presidential campaign, which campaign was staffed by a few people who had their own questionable dealings with Russians. And yet Trump supporters were furious at the mere idea that anyone would even think this worthy of investigation. So unless you're only voting Republican if someone like Tim Scott wins the nomination, I don't see how this factors into the equation much given what we know now.
Rov_Scam
2yr ago
As @rae alludes to below, the culture war implications of trans women in sports overshadow any actual concern for female athletes. The attitude of conservatives towards women's sports in my lifetime has been blase at best and condemnatory at worst. The most popular women's sport by far is tennis, but even there, a quick perusal of the world rankings reveals no household names. The biggest women's college event of the year is the NCAA tournament, and that isn't exactly a hot ticket. When Pitt basketball student tickets were hard to come by, the lottery system in place gave you credit for the number of women's games you went to just to boost attendance. The discussion about Title IX below had an air of incredulity about it, suggesting that if it were costing OCR this much to enforce equality among men's and women's sports, perhaps we were better off without it. I doubt many conservatives would care too much either way; they might not exactly rail against the idea of a school being forced to spend ungodly sums on unprofitable women's sports because they spend millions on the football team, but if the law changed tomorrow and colleges started shutting down women's teams or at least restricting them (playing locally as independents rather than flying them all across the ACC footprint or whatever) I imagine the arguments would mirror those they make when one someone suggests WNBA salaries should be on par with the men.
And then when a trans person goes from being ranked 400th nationally to 38th in a sport no one cares about regardless of what gender is playing it because they won some tournament that most people haven't heard of but is supposedly kind of prestigious, women's sports become a sacred thing that must be protected at all costs. I understood that there was real concern in the early days of the trans saga when advocates were arguing that personal identity trumps all and it raised the specter of failed male athletes ticking a box differently just to get a chance to compete, or for scholarship money, or whatever. But the relevant governing bodies imposed testosterone limits, and while we can argue that those limits are too high or too low, we can't argue that no man is meeting the most lenient ones without taking supplemental estrogen. The effects of taking supplemental estrogen are such that it's doubtful that any man would undergo this treatment just for a shot at playing organized sports in a discipline that offers no hope of making any money as a professional. Do they have a competitive advantage? Maybe, but I don't really care. The trans population is small enough that it's probably not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, and you never hear about the trans athletes who don't win anything. One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this. Governing bodies don't seem to be too concerned, and polls have repeatedly shown that the competitors aren't either. And if those most at stake don't care, then why should we? After all, when it comes to the priority of things, sports are pretty far down the list.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
I guess that explains why straight white males have such low incomes and high unemployment compared to minority populations.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
Did you read the dissent? Heightened scrutiny applies when the state makes legal distinctions based on sex. Any reasonable reading of the Tennessee law does this. If a 13-year-old girl starts developing unwanted facial hair, a doctor can prescribe certain medications that he would be prohibited from prescribing if a 13-year-old boy had the same complaint. You can argue semantics and say that this technically wouldn't be a prescription to treat gender dysphoria, but I don't think the legislature's goal was to make sure doctors coded such prescriptions differently. You don't have to agree with this interpretation, but saying that it's so completely devoid of reasoning so as to question the intelligence of the person who expressed it doesn't make sense.
Rov_Scam
18d ago
Forbidding one thing necessarily means requiring something else. One can just say that parents should have the ability to forbid their children from having their own children.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I think the concern is that if they rule on this case while the others are still pending (assuming they strike it down) they get one state law struck down and several others where the courts carefully craft their decision to avoid running afoul of whatever logic the Supreme Court uses to justify their decision, in which case they have to keep hearing the same kinds of cases over and over again. And even when they do rule on it, they're just going to get new legislation that tests the limits of the decision. This is what happens when you have a constitutional right that a sufficient number of states simply choose not to recognize as such; look at how many southern states kept passing more and more onerous abortion restrictions to get around Roe. The court simply doesn't have any interest in turning into the Gun Control Review Board or whatever, so they're just going to keep denying cert. Some people may wonder why they say they're too busy when they still hear tax cases and bankruptcy cases and approximately 16,000 cases per term involving the Uniform Arbitration Act, but it's because those cases involve questions that need answers, and they don't worry about state legislatures and lower courts trying to dodge their rulings.
This may seem like an unfortunate situation to gun rights advocates such as yourself, but it's better than the alternative. The entire reason the court is in this mess is because they want to preserve restrictions that almost everyone agrees are necessary, and while you personally may not care if fully automatic weapons or sawed-off shotguns are legal, as soon as there's a high profile incident with a lot of casualties, the anti-gun protests would make everything we've seen thus far look like a dress rehearsal. There's a reason that most gun-friendly NRA A+ congressmen aren't introducing bills to repeal the FFA, or the Gun Control Act of 1968, or whatever law makes post-1986 guns illegal. This doesn't even get into sales restrictions, or background checks, or any of that. At that point the argument about cosmetic features, or DFUs, or whatever go completely out the window, and whatever rights you think Heller isn't protecting are going to vanish along with Heller itself, and in the ensuing backlash states aren't going to be shy about clamping down the screws.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
To be fair about the Anthony case, at least the initial wave of support wasn't for his defense per se. Anthony was initially given a 1 million bond, which was reduced to $250,000 after a hearing, and his family was able to post the bond. Some fringe right-wing websites decided this was unacceptable and protestors started showing up outside the family's home and sending death threats. The fundraiser was initially to pay for alternative lodging for the kid, since being forced into hiding isn't easy for people of modest means.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
I would consider that both objectionable to teach to children and derived from a critical race theory framework. That's irrelevant, though, because what you linked to wasn't intended to be taught to children. Your screenshot was part of an explanatory note at the very beginning of the first module explaining that certain terms in the materials would be italicized in reference to concepts put forth in another publication. It wasn't even explained in detail, and it certainly wasn't intended as a handout or something to be taught to middle school kids as part of the curriculum.
You're really stuck on how the media reports on things. The media is dishonest all the time.
Because this is how most people hear about this stuff. Very little of what is reported to me on this comes from an actual student, parent, or teacher. It comes from people with no connection to the education system responding to media reports and to a lesser extent, rumors based on media reports. Hence the inability to produce any classroom materials as evidence supporting their assertions. If there weren't any media coverage about CRT in schools it's unlikely that very many complaints would arise from people who discovered it organically, given how unobjectionable most of these proposals are once you strip away all the woke bullshit.
I bet in 1990 the "give everyone extra attention" doctrine wouldn't be couched in such language or concepts. Thus, this is one piece of evidence, for one state, that teaching became more 'woke' in some (at least) marginal respect, no? Saying it's not as bad as it looks is not the same as saying it's not a real thing. We should limit the number of indoctrinations into, what I consider, goop.
The entire point of my post is that, for all the discussion of various woke concepts, precious little of it has made it into actual policy. The fact that people are citing to documents that are long on bullshit and short on actual substance is only further evidence of that. If I really had to I could probably justify the entire Trump policy platform using woke CRT language, but it wouldn't really say anything about the underlying policies. All the use of this excess verbiage does is provide evidence of the thought-process of the people writing the documents, but I'm not arguing that there aren't important people who think this way; I'm arguing that this kind of thought hasn't been pervasive enough to result in objectionable policies.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
What gives you the impression that Willie Brown was responsible for starting her political career? She dated him for about a year in 1994/1995, and she wasn't running for anything until 2003. She got a couple of apointments, but I don't think the Medical Assistance Commission and Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board are exactly known as incubators for top political talent. In any event, she hadn't served on either within five years of beginning her political career. It's also worth keeping in mind the actual dynamics of California politics at the time. By 2003 Willie Brown was viewed as corrupt, and any association with him was toxic. Her prior association with him was seen more as a liability than an asset. Take Willie Brown out of the equation, and there's nothing unusual about someone who's worked as a prosecutor for 13 years winning an election for District Attorney. There's nothing unusual about a District Attorney getting elected Attorney General.
Deploying troops is a serious matter and a last resort to only be used in the most serious riots that are absolutely beyond the control of the police and state National Guard. Once a riot becomes an insurrection the insurance policies aren't required to pay due to the exclusion for acts of war. If Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act he would have drawn the ire of the people he was supposedly trying to help, which is why he didn't do it.
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