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
6mo 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
8mo 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.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
The standard is only concerned with what is reasonably likely to happen, not with worst case scenarios. The likelihood of an attack with fists or tackling isn't reasonably likely to result in death or serious injury, absent some aggravating factor that isn't present here. That's pretty much black letter law in any jurisdiction.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith.
Only if you selectively define "bedrock elements" to include only what's politically convenient. Is JD Vance actually Catholic? He repeated rumors about Haitian immigrants he knew to be untrue for the specific purpose of demonizing them for political gain. He has, to my knowledge, never once apologized for this or walked back his statements, instead doubling down on them and insisting on calling them "illegals" not because they arrived here illegally, but because he disagreed with the political mechanism by which they were allowed to come. Again, he didn't do this because he was mistaken but because either he personally doesn't like them due to his own racism or because he cynically believes that other people are racist enough that he can exploit them for his own political ends. While the church's position on immigration doesn't contain any bright lines, you'd have to squint really hard to claim that productive, law-abiding people are causing such a burden to the United States that we are justified in deporting them to a country steeped in as much violence, poverty, and political instability as Haiti.
Or if you'd prefer bright lines, let's just point to capital punishment, an issue on which the church has taken an unequivocal stance for 50 years. This isn't merely something where Republicans want to maintain the status quo; they actually advocate expanding the death penalty. At least when Democrats want to expand abortion access it isn't based on the idea that more abortions is a good thing.
I say this as a Catholic who went to a small, Catholic, liberal arts college largely populated by serious Catholics. Some of my friends were liberals, some conservatives, and I don't believe for a second that abortion or anything else is the defining thing that's keeping them from voting Democrat. I'm still in contact with a lot of these people, and the ones that didn't switch to Democrat in the wake of Trump are all aboard the Trump Train, defending every policy of his without question. They spent college defending the Iraq War as totally justified, and I can't tell you how many times I heard the traditional conservative caricature about how poor people just didn't work hard enough and taxes should be lower to avoid penalizing the most talented people in society. I don't think that these people "aren't true Catholics", I just wish conservative Catholics would stop blowing smoke up my ass because of the abortion issue, or gay marriage, or whatever. The Democratic Party could reverse course on these issues tomorrow and I'd still have to hear the same bullshit about immigrants, poor people, urban blacks, and anyone else they think is ruining America.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
And if you can tell me where exactly in the Pennsylvania Vehicle Code it says that the posted limits are only suggestions and motorists are free to drive whatever speed they want provided it lies within the engineering design speed then I'd say you have a point. But you seem to have missed mine. I'm not arguing that we should ticket everyone who takes five or ten miles per hour, just that those people can't turn around and complain when a cyclist does something that's technically illegal but otherwise makes sense and isn't particularly unsafe.
Rov_Scam
4mo ago
I don't see what's so bad about it, and it's certainly less annoying than your making accusations and using them to paint half of the entire population with a broad brush. I'm not a huge fan of people announcing their exit, but this is certainly preferable to past users who have decided to end their time here with a long whinge about why they're leaving, complete with accusations about the mods not acting fairly since most of them were skirting perma-bans anyway.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
Each of those actions probably took about five minutes, maybe a few hours tops. And they could have been having a slow night. When you put someone under surveillance you don't get to watch them at your convenience.
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.
Well, I wasn't planning on getting involved in politics, but if that's what you're concerned about, I have a plan that all but guarantees to get the cost of that hamburger down: First, we'll raise interest rates up to Volcker-era levels. If this managed to get inflation down by double digits, with inflation currently sitting at 2.5%, it should be enough to get double-digit deflation. Next, I'm going to raise taxes on practically everyone. Current middle class brackets are in the 21%–24% bracket, let's get them into the 25%-30% range they were at before the Reagan tax cuts. Next, we'll get rid of all tariffs. There's no reason for Five Guys to be forced to pay extra if they can get cheaper beef from Brazil. Finally, end all immigration restrictions. Farmers, food processing plants, and restaurants shouldn't have to pay anyone $15/hr when there are plenty of people who would work for the minimum wage and be glad to get it. Now, there's a decent chance that you might not have a job after my plan takes effect, rendering the cost of restaurant food a moot point, but that would do it.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
One example: A guy and two women attempted to enter a bar but were denied admission because the guy had an expired ID. As they were walking away the man was approached by a man who had been in a relationship with one of the women several years earlier. The other man started yelling at the first man and cornered him in a doorway. The first man claims that the other man threatened to kill him and it looked like he was carrying a concealed weapon in his sweatshirt. So the first man shot him with a licensed gun that he was carrying legally. It seems like a fairly anodyne story when told that way, but when the news starts out with a story like "23-year-old Javonte Diggs was arrested outside the Pause nightclub after an apparent dispute with 22-year-old Martavius Allen", the online right doesn't start making the guy a martyr of self-defense and concealed carry.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
Go ahead and make that point at trial... and prepare to get destroyed on closing. Seriously, if I'm the prosecutor in this case, I can pretty much ignore whatever other arguments you've made (or just hit on them briefly) and run that point to the end of its tether. "Is someone acting crazy? Who knows what they're crazy enough to do; better shoot them before anything bad happens. The defendant wants to convince you that this is a reasonable course of action." I'd then go on to describe a series of examples of "crazy" behavior and suggest that your argument would require them to view any shooting or the perpetrator as justifiable self-defense, and the examples would get progressively more absurd. I'd characterize the entire defense as "people should be able to shoot anyone who looks suspicious", and by the end there's the possibility that the jury would forget that the defendant had even been attacked. If this is "the point", then it's not a very good one.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
One of the things I find most irritating about gish gallop election fraud claims is the way they breathlessley move between theories that assume the theft of the 2020 election was something that Democrats had been planning for months and that it was something that was done at the last minute after they realized Trump was going to win. Somehow, your post seems to capture both of these sentiments simultaneously — the PA Department of State is planning on rigging the election, but it's apparently impossible for them to do so without a couple extra days on the back end. How this is supposed to work is beyond me.
Rov_Scam
29d ago
It's a 2-step analysis. First, you have to determine whether or not the law itself makes a distinction based on sex. This is a legal question, not a biological one. If you determine that it does, only then do you get to consider biology, since step two then asks if the distinction is "substantially related to an important government interest". The Tennessee law doesn't even pretend that this isn't a sex-based distinction. Hell, the law finds it necessary to define "sex" to eliminate all ambiguity. Yet the majority puzzlingly finds that it doesn't to avoid having to get to step 2.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
It's not that bad. People just like to be dramatic and use questionable statistics to explain away their crappy profiles.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
It's only "indoctrination" when you don't agree with the outcome. When I was in elementary school in the '90s. There was plenty of material in reading class that would have been considered indoctrination in a prior era among those of a certain persuasion. A biography of Dr. King comes to mind; why is this being discussed in reading class and not social studies? What about all the other stuff we read that subtly or not so subtly tried to convey the message that it wasn't okay to judge people based on race? What about the story about the girl whose parents met while her father was stationed in Japan? Is this nothing more than indoctrination about interracial relationships and multiculturalism (the story itself was about dating where the dad learned to use chopsticks and the mother learned to eat with a fork, and why they switch between both at home)? For that matter, we also read other stuff about American history in reading class; is the story about a Revolutionary soldier not indoctrination? Shouldn't this be part of social studies class?
The crux of the matter is that the normalization of same-sex relationships is a culture war battle that the right fought and lost, and some of the losers are clinging to the last viable paths of opposition in a desperate attempt to reverse the tide. The problem with these books isn't that they're age-inappropriate due to sexual content, it's that they're presenting same-sex relationships in a manner that isn't sufficiently condemnatory. That the plaintiffs have to resort to bad faith references to leather is proof of this—it's presented in a way to make one think that the book is referring to bondage or gay leather boy culture, when in reality it's a picture of a woman in a leather jacket, which picture would be unobjectionable in a book about anything else.
Rov_Scam
3mo ago
I have neither the time nor the inclination to write a legal opinion outlining any proposed limits of judicial interference with executive action. What I will say is that from a practical perspective, it doesn't matter. You can propose all sorts of scary scenarios you want where the president is required to wage nuclear war based on a court order for something seemingly trivial, but I'm not moved by them for the simple reason that such a system is vastly less scary than the one we're currently presumably operating under. Per the government's arguments, the president—one man—could achieve any of these insane and evil ends on a whim, with no check whatsoever other than the courage of subordinates to defy orders. The argument in favor of this position is that the president is at least elected, and thus reflects the will of the people. But leaving it to the courts is the safer option. If the courts did order the president to overthrow a foreign government it would only be after several levels of review that requires at least some consensus among multiple people. I'm not arguing that the court should necessarily have this much power, or that the president shouldn't have a large amount of discretion, but even if we take the slippery slope all the way to the bottom, I still don't see what the huge concern is relative to the existing structure.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
respecting a 200-mile zone around the abortion law's actual strictures would and did force the hospitals and doctors into non-compliance with other laws and regulations. Unless discharging patients with life-threatening conditions like sepsis is somehow black-letter legal?
I mean, I'm not sure what you're talking about. First, none of the Texas cases at issue involved patients who were discharged, but lets forget that for a minute because it doesn't mean that future cases won't. What is it about exercising extreme caution that requires the hospital to discharge a septic patient? In one of the cases the septic woman was being monitored in the hospital the entire time, so this is obviously the preferred course of action. Third, even if the hospital did discharge a septic patient, well, I'm unaware of any laws that prohibit that, black letter or otherwise. the closest laws I'm aware of are those that prohibit hospitals with EDs from turning away patients with emergency medical conditions due to inability to pay.
So doctors and hospitals realistically have two options:
-
Perform the abortion, which creates a potential criminal liability, the consequences of which are up to 99 years in prison, substantial fines, loss of license, and various other administrative penalties. If this liability is pursued I have a good defense.
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Don't perform the abortion and treat the patient using other means. This MAY create a civil liability IF the patient actually suffers adverse consequences, which they may not. In the event that happens, the civil liability is limited to money damages the doctor and hospital are insured against it. The doctor and hospital have a good defense here as well, as they can argue that they reasonably assumed that the abortion would have been illegal under Texas law.
the defenses cancel each other out. So what you have here is a fully mature criminal liability with severe consequences that can't be indemnified, vs. a potential civil liability with mild to moderate consequences that already are indemnified. What doctor in his right mind would select option 1?
The other interesting thing I would point out about this is that, for all the guarantees I've seen here and elsewhere that the doctor's actions in any of these deaths would have totally been covered by the exception, they've been curiously absent coming from anyone who actually matters. I haven't heard Ken Paxton or anyone else from the AG's office saying that performing an abortion in those circumstances would not be criminal, nor have I heard it from the governor. I haven't heard any state legislator suggest that those circumstances were of the type the exception was intended to cover. The Supreme Court declared that the law wasn't vague and declined to offer any further guidance. The only Texas politician who has done so was Ted Cruz, but he's in no position to actually make determinations about these things. It's easy to say what we think would have happened because we know that the woman ended up dying. But if she lives, it's a different story. We now have a perfectly healthy woman and a dead baby and the Terri Schaivo crowd who is behind limiting these exceptions would claim that there's no way we can know that the baby wouldn't have been perfectly healthy had it not been killed in the womb. There have been no prosecutions thus far, and as such we have no idea what to expect. Any doctor who decides to perform an abortion he can't absolutely, 100% say is necessary to prevent death or permanent impairment, not simply a reasonable precaution against an increased risk, is taking a 99 year gamble. You'd better believe he's not getting within 200 miles of that law.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
This comes up every year around clock change time and perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic. The mere existence of this debate is proof that time changes are needed. Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience, then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life. Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in. Or do anything else that results in any mild disruption to your precious sleep schedule.
Losing an hour of sleep on a weekend is something I can deal with once a year. But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark. I currently have to deal with this maybe a few weeks out of the year. Permanent DST would have me deal with it from the end of October until mid-March, and I really don't want to fucking deal with that. Conversely, if we eliminated DST altogether it would mean I'd forfeit the glorious hour between 8 and 9 in the summertime when it's warm and still light enough to do things outside in exchange for... it getting light a 4 am. To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations. The average person isn't getting up at 3:30 am to sneak a round of golf in before heading to the office. For those of us who don't get out of work until 5 pm or later, that extra hour in the evening is a godsend.
So can we stop this perpetual bitching? Time changes were implemented for a reason, and people who think we'd be better off without them have never actually lived in a world without them. The benefits are all theoretical. When permanent DST was implemented during the 1970s, the program was cancelled within a year because people couldn't abide the first winter. And very few people want to end summer evenings early. This has to be the stupidest debate in American political discourse; just leave things where they are.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
No, Biden was unfit, physically and mentally. The reason the debate settled the matter is that it was undeniable proof of what people were told wasn't happening (and they had to keep being told because they didn't believe it). Biden hid the extent of this for months upon months not only from the public but from some of his colleagues and the media.
The question is how many months. Remember, we're not talking about whether or not Biden should have dropped out earlier, but whether he should have run in the first place. He announced he was seeking a second term on April 25, at which point there were only two groups of people arguing that any kind of age or cognitive issues should keep him from running. The first was Republicans, but they had been arguing that Biden had dementia since at least 2019 and thus had no credibility on the issue. The second was people like Dean Phillips and James Carville, along with a bunch of rank and file Democrats, but their arguments were just that he was too old generally and not that he was experiencing any kind of specific decline. If he had instead announced that he wasn't seeking a second term then he would have been a lame duck immediately and all the problems I mentioned above would have come into play. Hell, his cognitive decline wouldn't have even been noticed, for precisely the same reason that no one is looking over his appearances from the past four months to find signs of further decline.
And he did so for explicitly racial reasons.
I don't know what the big deal is about this. It's not exactly a secret that running mates are chosen more due to political considerations than anything else. Hell, Trump's choice of Mike Pence over the more well-known Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie was pretty much a naked ploy to shore up his unsteady support among the Christian Right, yet I never hear criticism that he was chosen for religious reasons. By your criteria, he's an even worse choice than Harris, as his chances of winning a national election as second in line are roughly on par with Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee. Harris, for her part, chose a white guy after only considering white guys and after pretty much every commentator said she should pick a white guy, yet I never heard any criticism of her for choosing Tim Walz for racial reasons.
I also reject the self-serving notion that Bernie is what did in Hillary. She's always been unpopular and Bernie being relevant at all was the public desperately begging Democrats to take their money. Democrats didn't lose in 2008 because someone actually challenged at a primary instead of letting the party grandee be anointed.
I agree with you there; Hillary was a bad candidate, and the Democrats should have seen that in 2008, but you go on to conclude
The party could also have leaned on Kamala to allow an open primary.
First, it wasn't Kamala's decision but that's not my main point. For all the talk I've heard about about having some kind of contested primary, I don't see any scenario in which it wouldn't have made the situation worse. Suppose Biden drops out immediately after that debate; what then? The convention is in less than two months and the election in just over four. The mechanics of scheduling new primaries in all 50 states less than a month after the last ones were completed is a tall order in and of itself, but even assuming the problem could be overcome it only distracts from the real issue. Who is going to jump of the couch to contend for a presidential nomination with that kind of lead time? Remember, nobody other than Biden has any fundraising apparatus or campaign staff at this point. You're asking candidates to start from scratch on short notice. And for the winner, what are the spoils, exactly? The opportunity to run an abbreviated campaign as part of a reclamation project.
Even if they were to dispense with actual elections and simply have a contested primary where candidates would lobby delegates, I doubt the party's best and brightest would be the ones signing up. Do you really think that an up and comer like Josh Sapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is going to waste political capital to take over the presidential bid of an unpopular incumbent? Why not wait a few more years to become more seasoned and make a normal bid where, if nominated, you have the time to run the campaign you want and you're going against a GOP running someone other than Trump for the first time in a dozen years? A contested primary or convention that only attracts b-listers and also-rans only makes the party look even more incompetent, in addition to exposing the internal divisions I spoke of above. Is Deval Patrick or Marianne Williamson a stronger general election candidate than Kamala Harris? Is Kamala a stronger candidate after beating one of those two? Easier to just endorse her and lobby for support rather than open up the clown car.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
So, in other words, if Trump wins by a wide margin, and Kamala Harris says that her own internal polling shows her winning by a landslide in all 50 states, this should be enough to conduct whatever and as many investigations as she wants, and that we should delay certification until all of them are complete and/or she should refuse to conduct the electoral vote count until she's satisfied?
Rov_Scam
9mo ago
Because there is a massive, massive discrepancy in the application of the law between these two groups of people, as well as the scope of what happened.
Is there? This is usually taken as an article of faith by conservatives, but no one seems to put any actual numbers out there. Based on the way Trump talks, you'd think nobody was arrested. In Minneapolis, for instance, there were about 100 people charged with felonies in the wake of the riots and another 500 or so charged with misdemeanors. That may not sound like a lot considering that those numbers represent two days of rioting during which over 100 structures burned, but the contexts of the arrests are rather similar. I'm hesitant to offer advice on how to get away with committing crimes, but I'd recommend against livestreaming your criminal activities or posting them to social media. the BLM riots took place at night and were distributed across a large area where there was minimal media presence. Jan 6 took place in the daytime, had a lot of people in a concentrated area, practically none of whom were trying to conceal their identity, and the area itself was swarming with media. The people who got arrested in Minnesota were largely those who decided to livestream looting or post their hauls on social media, and the same was true of virtually everyone who was arrested in connection to Jan 6. In an emergency situation, the police have higher priorities than arresting individuals. Practically nobody was actually arrested on Jan 6, but identifying he perpetrators was like shooting fish in a barrel. Not as many BLM protestors were quite this stupid, but the police didn't ignore those who were.
The other thing that makes this line of arguing particularly vacuous is that, even if the number of BLM protestors convicted is proportionally lower, I have yet to hear any Democratic politician suggest pardoning any of them.
Because the alternative is "we looked at this and decided you lose. No we won't tell you our logic." Does that seem like it's helping? If it's going to fail on the merits, show me the merits; allow the debate to happen.
I think you're confused about how the legal system actually works. First, I'm not sure if your complaint is that the cases should be heard on the merits or that the courts aren't issuing written opinions. If it's the latter, be aware that being told "you lose" without explanation has nothing to do with standing and is the norm in litigation; written opinions are very rare. Some motions are filed strictly to protect the record and won't be challenged if the opposing party indicates that they're going to contest them. In these cases the court won't even formally deny them. If we decide to argue a motion, we'll get some sense of the judge's reasoning based on how he responds during oral argument, but most judges don't say anything during argument and don't rule from the bench. A week or so later you'll get an order granting or denying the motion and that's it; you move on with the case. And yes, this includes motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgment where the judge is practically ending the Plaintiff's case, at lease against one defendant. And, not that it applies to the election cases, but jury verdicts don't offer any more insight. You either get a defense verdict or a bill, with no further commentary except in unusual situations.
Now, in some cases trial courts do issue written opinions, particularly in cases where there are novel issues and the court expects an appeal. In those cases, the court will occasionally write a brief opinion that isn't published and has no precedential value, but is in the records for the appellate court to look at if they want to. I agree that some of the trial courts could have done so here. There are two problems with this, though. First, these cases were all asking for emergency relief. You can't expect the court to act fast but nonetheless have time to issue opinions detailing their reasoning. The second problem is that this wouldn't do anything. The standing objections were obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the law, and there was plenty of commentary available. The court issuing an 86 page opinion that acts more or less as a primer on standing and why this Plaintiff doesn't have it would have done nothing to shift public opinion.
Now, if it's the former, and you really want the cases to be heard on their merits, then it gets even worse. First, I don't know what you mean by wanting full discovery power. Most of these lawsuits didn't involve any factual disputes. For instance, Texas v. Pennsylvania (which is what I assumed you had in mind when talking about dismissals based on standing) didn't involve any disputed facts. The question was whether actions taken by various state election officials violated the Constitution; no one was arguing that these actions weren't taken. An "on the merits" ruling by in trial court in this case would have likely been "there were no constitutional violations, you lose". Would that be a better outcome? Would a 120-page opinion explaining why state legislatures are allowed to delegate ministerial responsibilities really satisfy the people alleging MASSIVE FRAUD?
And what do you expect to accomplish with this discovery, anyway? None of the lawsuits, save Sidney Powell's, made any actual allegations of fraud. "Full discovery" is essentially asking the court to let you go on a fishing expedition. Where are you even going to start? If you file the day the election is called for Biden, you're looking at a few days for the defendants to respond, and for the judge to hear motions to dismiss. If he denies these motions and sets the case for trial, you're normally looking at a discovery deadline around May 1, over three months after Biden has been sworn in. Of course, there's no way you're even making that deadline, because you're going on a fishing expedition, which means you need to conduct discovery just to get to the point when you can begin conducting discovery. What are you looking for? Do you want emails? Are you going to request emails involving official election accounts in all the affected jurisdictions? You better plan on giving them ample time to sort through these emails to get rid of irrelevant information. Or since you don't trust them to do that you can sort through them yourself. How many emails do you think this is? How many of them do you think you'll actually want to use as evidence in court? How much time and money do you expect it to take for you to sort through all of these yourself? How many depositions do you plan on taking? Who do you plan on deposing? How much do you think this is going to cost? Given the breadth of the allegations, two years seems like an optimistic timetable for discovery completion, and that's before you get into all the other stuff. With any luck you might uncover the fraud and get your verdict before the next election. Assuming there are no appeals, Trump might actually be able to serve a few days of his term before being constitutionally ineligible.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
If you had statistics suggesting that tackling onto concrete presented a risk of serious bodily injury or death comparable to being shot or stabbed, then you could call someone like an epidemiologist at trial to testify to that effect. And it would be a fairly strong defense, if tempered by the fact that the prosecution would call their own expert reaching the opposite conclusion. That's not relevant here, though, because Hayes shot the guy after he was tackled. You're only privileged to defend yourself out of apprehension of an imminent threat, not out of a response to a past threat. Once Hayes was on the ground he wasn't getting tackled again, and any argument about the supposed dangers of being tackled on concrete is moot.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
There's a plaintiff's counsel I deal with frequently who will occasionally send out exhibits ahead of a deposition, and all the points she wants to emphasize will be highlighted, and I very quickly learned two things: 1. It's really easy for your eyes to go straight to the highlighted portions, and 2. It's just as important that you read what isn't highlighted. If you're trying to create right-wing ragebait for a targeted audience, it helps if you can not only direct readers to the most inflammatory sounding parts of a document but also omit 3 of the 5 pages included in that document, lest some smartass actually reads the whole thing and comes to the incorrect conclusion. It also helps that the document wasn't intended for the public but for a specific audience and thus omits crucial context that the target audience would be familiar with, though I can forgive Ms. Collin for that because I doubt that she took the time to familiarize herself with that context either.
Getting down to the nitty gritty, as Ms. Collin so helpfully highlighted, the policy provides that:
Hiring supervisors must provide a hiring justification when seeking to hire a non-underrepresented candidate when hiring for a vacancy in a job category with underrepresentation. Hiring justifications must be submitted to and approved by DHS Equal Opportunity and Access Division (EOAD) prior to an offer of employment being made.
She did not, however, highlight the following definition:
Underrepresented: when the FTE (full-time equivalent) representation of one or more protected groups is less than that group’s estimated availability in the relevant geographic area and labor force.
In other words, this isn't a wide-ranging justification requirement for hiring white men; it only applies to job categories in which there is underrepresentation. And underrepresentation isn't based on the minority population as a whole, but on the estimated number of qualified minority applicants in a particular geographic region. To see what this actually means, though, you would have to look to the DHS Affirmative Action Plan, which the document's intended audience would almost certainly be familiar with. There, you'll find that there are seven job categories, that protected groups are divided into three broad categories: Women, disabled people, and minorities. This gives us 21 data points for determining whether there is underrepresentation, of which four actually show it as such; Minorities are underrepresented in three categories (supervisors/administrators, skilled crafts, and service maintenance) and women in one (paraprofessionals). There are no categories that underrepresent disabled people. There is no underrepresentation in the technician, professional, or administrative support categories. When you look at the statistical breakdowns, it is clear that these targets are dispassionate and completely unidealistic. There are approximately zero women currently employed in the skilled craft category (plumbers, electricians, etc.), but since the estimated number of qualified women in this category is zero, there is no target, and you thus don't need to justify hiring a man. For the service maintenance, on the other hand, there is a minority hiring target, even though these are the kind of low-level service jobs that minorities were historically relegated to in the past. The upshot is that you need justification for hiring a white janitor over a black one but not for hiring a white attorney over a black one.
And this says nothing of the fact that the justification involved doesn't even have to be that persuasive. If you look at page three of the document (which Ms. Collin didn't provide), it provides a laudry list of acceptable justifications, with the caveat that the list isn't exhaustive. The point of the process isn't to force the issue of hiring more minorities in jobs where they can't cut it, it's to to make hiring managers take a second thought about why they're hiring one candidate over another. The canonical conservative argument against AA is that it substitutes racial preferences for merit, but such arguments are always made without any understanding of how AA works in practice. All this policy does is say that if you think the white guy is the best man for the job, in the limited cases where AA even applies, you should be able to explain why he's the best man for the job. If you're incapable of doing that, then one wonders why you picked the guy in the first place.
You can feel free to disagree with the merits of the policy; I was merely pointing out that it's much different than the Tweet you posted implies. But that's all collateral to the real point, which is whether such a policy is evidence of a wokeness epidemic. The key here is page five, which Ms. Collins did not provide for us, though even if she did it's unlikely that anyone would recognize its significance. It well within the references and statutory authority and all the other housekeeping stuff that appears at the end of these kinds of directives, and contains but one item before the signature line:
Supersession:
DHS administrative policy 4100.005, “Affirmative Action Implementation,” effective 05/06/14 and all policies, memos, or other communications whether verbal, written, or transmitted by electronic means regarding this topic.
If one actually examines the referenced document, they will discover an Affirmative Action Implementation Policy implemented in 2014 that contains the following provision:
Following the completion of interviews with all candidates, if a candidate from the protected group for which there is an underrepresentation is not selected, the supervisor must submit a Justification Form to the Equal Opportunity and Access Division, explaining the reason for the decision to offer the position to someone who is not a protected group candidate.
In other words, this NEW policy that goes into effect next month is actually just an elaboration of a policy that's actually been around for over a decade. It gets even better, though; the 2014 Affirmative Action Implementation Policy is the third revision of a policy that initially went into effect in 2002. I couldn't find a copy of the 2002 policy so I don't know if it contained the above language in it, but I suspect it contained something substantially similar, as I was able to find an Affirmative Action Plan from 2004 from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic development that contains a documentation packet with a form asking substantially the same questions as are required in this "new" plan, i.e. asking the hiring manager to justify hiring a non-affirmative candidate. And those requirements appear to have been stricter, as they indicate that the non-affirmative hire must be substantially (emphasis in original) more qualified than the minority candidate, while the new guidance contains no such provision.
To this effect, it's hard to see how you've given any evidence that "wokeness" has increased in any meaningful way in recent years. And yeah, I know the Biden's EEOC filed a bunch of diparate impact suits. But that doesn't say much; the EEOC has been doing that for decades. And before that they were filing pattern discrimination suits whose effects were much more severe than making a police department use a different test. In 1974 nine steel companies entered a consent decree by which they would grant minority candidates practically automatic seniority when it came to bidding into skilled positions as compensation for past discriminatory hiring practices. What this meant in effect was that if you were a white guy working in the labor pool for years with the hope that you'd eventually be able to bid into an apprenticeship to be a pipefitter or something, you'd get stepped over by a black guy who had been there for a year and got first priority. I don't hear many people talking about the wokeness of the Nixon Administration, though.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
this conditions the availability of a constitutional right on knowing exactly how to frame a matter for the tastes of whatever judge or judges he was unlucky enough to pick months or years before seeing the court room, having the funds to hire lawyers (and since the guy isn't pro se, instead being represented by this guy, having the funds and knowledge to hire 'competent' lawyers), having the capabilities to act well as an effective witness at trial, and come off nicely-enough presented while sitting in court for a New Jersey judge to like him, (and don't know about a community services organization offering low-cost outpatient services). Few of these matters could be verified without a time machine; none are in the public record to even make sure that the judges are properly summarizing it.
I hate to break it to you, but the same applies to any other area of the law, including whether the state can revoke your own liberty for a period of years. Yes, there's the added protection in that case that you will be entitled to an attorney if you can't afford to pay for one, which attorney will probably do an adequate job but might not, but in any event, all the other concerns you raise still apply. If you have suggestions on how we can idiot proof the legal system so that any moron can act pro se and get similar results to those that lawyers get now, I'm all ears, but a more realistic approach is to do more to ensure access to legal services for those who can't afford them.
As a side note, while that attorney was on record for the appeal, it isn't clear that the guy was represented at the initial hearing. Based on the available record, I'm inclined to believe that he wasn't. It's clear from the appellate record that the guy wasn't prepped to testify, probably hadn't looked at the records he was using to make his case, and relied on the report of a regular treating psychiatrist rather than a forensic psychiatrist who would have testified in court. There are attorneys in Pennsylvania who specialize in this sort of thing and no, it isn't cheap, but it's what you have to do.
The main point I want to make, though, is that you're treating this as though these hearings are prerequisite to exercising one's Second Amendment rights. But they're not; this is the case of someone who was already adjudicated ineligible to purchase firearms based on a separate proceeding, at which the right to own firearms was collateral to the determination. To the extent that he has any right to the expungement of that record, the burden of proof is on him, as the state already met theirs. The procedural posture here is no different than that of a convicted felon petitioning the court for an expungement so he can buy a gun legally. The judge denying that petition isn't revoking any right, she's merely declining to reinstate a right that was already revoked in a prior proceeding.
There is no right to an expungement; it's entirely a creature of statute. New Jersey could just as easily make expungement unavailable in any circumstances, or have a process to restore some disabilities involuntary commitment results in but retain the prohibition on owning a gun, or only allow expungement in circumstances that don't apply here, and the guy would have been SOL from the start, and this case wouldn't exist, and no one would be bitching about how his rights are being violated.
This whole matter is complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with expungement and not an alternative process for restoration of gun rights. Most other states have some process for this, but an expungement is much easier to get in New Jersey than in other states, the standards are similar to those the Feds use, and it's ultimately a stronger system since an expungement's ability to remove the disability isn't reliant on whether the process is compliant with the Federal guidelines. Whether or not there's a constitutional right for there to be some mechanism to restore gun rights to those with a history of involuntary commitment is an open question. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the Second Amendment prohibited the permanent revocation of rights just because someone was committed at one point in his life, but it didn't elaborate with regard to what was necessary to restore those rights.
In any event, it's hard to see what the court did wrong here. The guy has the burden of proof to show he should get an expungement, and he provided very little evidence beyond "I'm not nuts and you should take my work for it". He lied to the court about the circumstances surrounding the commitment. He admitted to intentionally misrepresenting his mental health to the doctor whose opinion he was relying on. How is the court supposed to base a determination on a bare-bones statement made by a doctor whom the applicant admits didn't get an accurate assessment? The applicant's testimony lacked credibility, the doctor's report lacked credibility, so what's left? Even if you can pick your way through the weeds and offer some basis upon which she could have granted the expungement, that's a long way from saying that she made the kind of error that the appellate court would reverse, and the two Republican judges who wrote the opinion seemed to understand that.
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.
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