Rov_Scam
8hr ago
I think you're assuming that intent to commit a crime requires knowledge of the criminal nature of the underlying act, when that's not the case (except in limited circumstances). To go back to the burglary example, suppose a thief breaks into a house with the intention of stealing a watch worth $800. The value of the watch isn't in dispute. The burglary statute requires intent to commit a felony, and the larceny statute makes it a felony to steal goods valued over $500. If the defendant is charged with burglary, he won't get the burglary charge dismissed by demonstrating that he genuinely believed that the statute only made it a felony if the item was worth over $1,000, arguing that because of his mistake of law he only intended to commit a misdemeanor and not a felony. To go back to the paper clip example and tie it into the New York statute at issue, suppose it's illegal to buy paperclips, and a junior executive at a company notices that one of his underlings bought paperclips. He doesn't know that this is illegal, but knows that his boss, the CEO, said that it was against company policy to buy them, so he forges documents making it look like the purchase was for something else. He can't argue that he didn't intend to conceal a crime because he didn't know what he was doing was a crime. He intended to conceal the purchase, which happens to be a crime, and he accordingly intended to conceal evidence of a crime; his knowledge of the legality of the underlying activity isn't relevant here.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Intent can't be proven in any of the three scenarios you put forward because buying paperclips isn't illegal, and legal impossibility is almost always a complete defense. In any event, whether you think something is legal or not is irrelevant, because in most cases, mistake of law isn't a defense. Ignorantia juris non excusat. What's tripping people up here is that the crime Trump was allegedly concealing has very specific intent requirements that does require knowledge of the law, while the crimes he was actually charged with don't. The relevant analogy here is where buying paperclips actually is illegal. In that case, if you falsified records relating to their purchase you'd be guilty of the falsification whether you knew they were illegal or not.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
It's not a crime to try to conceal personal information, obviously. But whether or not that was Trump's intent in falsifying the records is a question for the jury. My point was simply that that the statute he was charged with violating has a lower standard of proof than the underlying act itself, and that the evidence was sufficient for the government to make a prima facia case; doing so doesn't require them to prove the underlying act, or even an attempt to commit the underlying act.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I'm not saying that res ipsa is sufficient on its own, just that there's a certain element involved when it comes to proving intent. If the falsification of the records happened in a vacuum and there was no obvious underlying motive, that would be the misdemeanor. But when you demonstrate that the concealed payments may have covered up a potential campaign finance violation, that's probably enough evidence that a jury can infer that the potential violation was behind the concealment. Like I said in the previous post, if a guy breaks into a store the prosecution doesn't have to demonstrate that the defendant was there specifically to steal a particular item for it to be anything more than trespass; the jury can infer that because there was a very obvious motive for the break-in that the defendant intended to commit a felony. The defendant can certainly argue that that wasn't his intent and present evidence supporting that, but that's a question of fact for the jury. We can argue all day about whether there was sufficient evidence of Trump's intent to commit a campaign finance violation for the purpose of the statute, but my overall point is that arguing about the specific elements of such a violation itself or the mens rea requirement to prove a campaign finance violation is irrelevant here because we're operating on two separate legal principles.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Tagging @zeke5123a since this response also applies to his comment from yesterday that I didn't get a chance to respond to.
You're confusing mistake of fact with impossibility. Mistake of fact is a defense that obviates some element of the crime, the classic example being the theft of property one wrongly believes to be his own. If I take a coat similar to mine from a coat room at a bar because I thought it was mine, I can use mistake of fact as a defense because I haven't formed the sufficient mens rea. Factual impossibility, on the other hand, is generally not a defense but the opportunity to even raise it is so rare that it's not really a huge issue. The hypothetical I gave doesn't involve impossibility, though, because the conduct doesn't amount to attempted murder. There's no generally recognized point at which mere preparation becomes attempt, but it's but it's basically hornbook law that lying in wait or looking for the intended victim don't rise to that level. Cases involving this test usually focus on things like whether the bullet you fired had a realistic chance of hitting the target, which is well beyond what I presented.
The reason I presented that specific fact pattern is that it illustrates a point I'm trying to get — the intent requirements of some crimes don't require you to prove those other crimes. The crime of burglary developed at common law specifically because the act of breaking into someone's home did not in and of itself rise to the level of attempt, but the courts agreed that it was still a crime. So when New York law prohibits anyone from falsifying business records with the intent of concealing another crime, whether or not you can prove that he committed another crime isn't important. Whether or not you can even specifically identify that other crime isn't important. With respect to crimes like this, there's a certain res ipsa loquitur aspect where the mere commission of the act is evidence of intent in and of itself; if a defendant is found having broken into a jewelry store with his face concealed and in possession of burglary tools, the prosecution usually doesn't have to go any further than that to show intent. They don't have to — what some are suggesting would be required in Trump's case — give extrinsic evidence showing that the defendant broke into the building specifically to steal jewelry.
The fact that Trump may not have violated election law is therefore irrelevant. The fact that the prosecution couldn't demonstrate the very specific scienter requirements required to prove an election law violation are also irrelevant. Trump wasn't charged with violating election law. The elements of the crime he was charged with are independent of the elements of the crime he is alleged to have concealed. You may not like this, or think the DA is stretching the law, but that's just The Way It Is, and it's been that way for a very long time. If you're looking for an appellate court to overturn the conviction because you disagree with one or another of the principles involved, that's fine, but even as someone who's broadly liberal I don't know if I'd welcome that, as it would give the Warren Court a run for its money on how defendant-friendly it is.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
That's a perfectly reasonable position to have. Unfortunately, it's not one that makes for an easy defense of Trump. We're talking about a guy with a history of questionable business behavior who surrounds himself with the kind of people who, if not exactly operating within the criminal world, were squatting near the margins of it. He's been sued numerous times, and lost quite a few of those suits. Whether or not he actually did what the New York DA says he did is irrelevant in your world because he's already proven himself to be the exact kind of person who would do something like that. There's debate above on whether the hush money payments were campaign expenses and how was Trump supposed to proceed without getting into hot water but that's irrelevant; whether they were improper campaign contributions or not, I can tell you that what you don't do is have your attorney make the payments out of his own pocket and then create phony invoices and ledger entries as part of a reimbursement scheme. According to your logic, that alone should be enough evidence of suspicious activity regardless of his past. I'm personally not in favor of getting rid of plea bargaining because I don't think it's going to have the effect some people think it will, but if you're going to take the position that people who engage in suspicious activity deserve what's coming to them, I don't see how you can defend Trump in this situation.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
This is the part that bugs me the most. How can a crime be asserted as a predicate fact in court when that crime has never been charged, tried or convicted?
Would you feel any better if you found out that the referenced crime need not even have occurred? And that this has been the case for hundreds of years? Look at common law burglary, for example (modern statutes usually expand the definition, but we'll keep things simple). Unauthorized breaking and entering of a dwelling in the nighttime with the intent to commit a felony therein. Say Bill breaks into Tom's house at night. A neighbor sees him break in and calls the police. The police apprehend him and he's carrying a gun. Tom was not home at the time. A witness testified that Bill told him he was going to kill Tom. There's sufficient intent to prove burglary. The fact that he can't be convicted of murder is irrelevant. The fact that he can't even be convicted of attempted murder is irrelevant. The fact that it would have been impossible for him to even commit the intended murder is irrelevant. He's not getting this reduced to criminal trespass.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Those are avenues for appeal, but they aren't all good avenues for appeal. Keep in mind that I haven't read a full trial transcript and my knowledge of the specific laws involved is limited to what I read in the news. To go one by one:
- This isn't really an issue since Cohen testified. Even if an appellate court were to rule that the specific evidence of the plea bargain was inadmissible, the fact that Cohen outlined his actions in detail for the jury with the defense being given an opportunity to cross-examine likely puts this in the harmless error category. There is the fact that in New York they can't convict on accomplice testimony without corroboration, but the jury was properly instructed.
- I'm not familiar with the specific scientier requirements in this case, but as long as the jury was properly instructed of them, an appellate court is loath to contradict their findings.
- See above. It's another "the evidence wasn't sufficient to prove x" arguments that don't usually go anywhere. Again, I haven't read the full trial transcript, but as long as there was some reasonable basis for which the jury to reach their conclusion, an appellate court isn't going to set aside the verdict.
- This goes back to the first point. Cohen plead guilty to a Federal charge. IIRC, there were state charges involved as well, and if his testimony implicated state law violations, the bootstrapping argument is moot.
- The Appellate Division already ruled on the recusal issue, and I doubt the Court of Appeals will take up the issue. The Wiesselberg thing is moot because the defense didn't protect the record. If they had a problem with the prosecution relying on his statements without calling him they could have called him themselves. The fact that they didn't want him anywhere near that courtroom may be good trial strategy, but there are tradeoffs. I usually load up my witness lists with people I have absolutely no intention of actually calling for the simple reason that if things go sideways and the case goes to trial and some odd reason arises where I need to call them I don't want to get the "He wasn't on the list" argument from Plaintiff's counsel and deal with the subsequent malpractice suit.
For the interest of completeness, I have no idea whether Trump personally cutting a check would have avoided legal scrutiny, but the ambiguity doesn't really bother me, because I don't like the idea that someone trying to be President would blatantly hide information from voters. Hell, at least have the foresight to do it before you're actually running so there's no campaign money to speak of.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Moses consulted on the highway plan over a decade before ground broke, and his original design had the interchange at the Point itself, because that's where the existing bridges were. City officials implemented most of the plan but decided to construct new bridges and moved the highway alignment to its current location. While the pedestrian walkway under the interchange isn't exactly beloved, the Fort Pitt Bridge is, and you can't have one without the other. The way the highway divides the space is testament to the attention to detail I mentioned in the post. Using something functional for that purpose seems more natural than constructing a wall or an arch, which would make things seem a little too intentional. The effect is creating without your noticing. Whether or not it's actually better than any other conceivable possibility of your choice is a matter for debate. Would the Golden Gate be more beautiful without the bridge obstructing the view? Would Downtown Pittsburgh be more beautiful if it were left as old growth bottomland forest? Would Black Canyon be better without Hoover Dam backing up the river? Finally, as the series progresses I'm going to criticize a number of ill-conceived projects; if I praise something it's because I like it, not because I'm trying to advance an argument. The point isn't that urban renewal was always good, just that it wasn't necessarily always bad.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
I initially teased this by saying that I was going to tackle Downtown and its environs, but my efforts since the introduction have shown that such a post would greatly exceed any sense of reasonableness as I kept using various things as jumping off points for broader discussion. This wouldn't be a problem except I had intended to weave a narrative that depended on presenting everything at once, so I spent several weeks waffling over whether I wanted to continue writing or retool, and only when the whole business was at 6000 words with a good deal left to cover did I decide to retool, which itself took longer than I expected. So I apologize for the delay, as I would have had this out several weeks ago if I had just stuck to Downtown. The upside is that the next several installments are practically finished, so I'll be posting them more frequently, probably as filler for whenever things are slow. I've occasionally linked to Google streetview images. I tried to pick representative locations, but you're encouraged to move around a bit to get a feel for the places I'm describing.
Part I. Downtown
For the purposes of this discussion, Downtown includes everything west of I-579 to the Point, except for on the northern part where it extends to 11th St. Map. The city’s official boundary of downtown also includes the area where the Civic Arena used to be, but for historical reasons that will become apparent in a later installment, that area will be discussed along with the Hill District. The city also officially calls this area the more boring Central Business District, while some old maps use the more whimsical Golden Triangle, but nobody uses the former term and only whimsical writers use the latter. It’s Downtown.
The first thing to be said about Pittsburgh’s downtown area is relatively tiny, about 2/3 of a square mile. Despite this, it manages to seem bigger than downtowns in similar rust belt cities that are geographically much larger. Topographical constraints prevent the urban core from expanding much beyond the boundaries outlined above — rivers hem in two sides of the triangle while a hill rises from the third — so everything is much denser than in a place like Cleveland or St. Louis, where the downtown has large lots and wide roads that sprawl out as much as urban planners thought they needed to. Compare this view of a typical street in Downtown Pittsburgh with this one from Cleveland. Traditionally there were several quasi-neighborhoods within downtown; Fourth Street was the financial district, Smithfield St. was the shopping district, Liberty Ave. was the red light district, Forbes Ave. was the seedy bum district, and there was even a small Chinatown. Most of these have changed in character (e.g. there are a few local banks still headquartered on Fourth St. but the big ones have all moved to modern skyscrapers) but a couple still survive. Penn Ave. is officially the Cultural District, containing the homes of The Pittsburgh Symphony, Pittsburgh Opera, Civic Light Opera, and several other similar cultural amenities, and Grant St. was and always will be the home of local government. Every little corner feels unique.
I suspect this is due to a few factors in addition to the aforementioned geographical limitations; the city always had a large number of corporate headquarters, and they never charged a high commuter tax. This kept these headquarters in the city rather than seeing them decamp to the suburbs like in so many other places. There also aren’t many surface lots downtown, and the ones that do exist are small. Finally, city property taxes were based on Georgist principles from 1913 to 2001, when a reassessment effectively forced them back to a single-rate system. I’m not going to go too much into this because city taxes were a relatively small component of total property taxes (county and school taxes used a traditional system), and it’s arguable whether other forces played into the relatively high development rates (it hasn’t abated since the system was abandoned), but it’s worth at least mentioning.
IA: A Past Not So Rosy
If there’s one theme I want to focus on when discussing Downtown, it’s urban renewal. It’s trendy to criticize urban renewal plans as being misguided boondoggles that effected all manner of misfortunes on cities, but to my knowledge no one has ever done a comprehensive examination of these efforts to do a serious evaluation of their success or failure. I say this because the Downtown we know today pretty much exists as a function of urban renewal dating back to the 1940s. Pop urbanists never seem to take a genuinely historical approach when discussing why cities are the way they are today, and they have a tendency to look at the prewar era as some sort of halcyon wonderland of walkability. They blame racism, or the auto industry, or any number of other lazy targets for what they see as a blight upon the landscape. But none of them seem to consider what city life was actually like before the era of highways and strip malls. In 1951, at Pittsburgh’s population zenith, Karl Schriftgiesser of the Atlantic wrote of Pittsburgh:
The decrepitude showed in its worn-out office buildings, its degraded housing, its traffic-choked streets, its sordid alleys, its polluted and uncontrolled rivers, and, above all, in the dense-choking smoke that covered the city and the river valleys…
Renaissance I was a bipartisan effort to change all that. Spearheading it were the Mayor, Democrat David L. Lawrence, and the Governor, Republican Richard King Mellon. The Point at that time was nothing more than unused rail yards and abandoned warehouses. The upper reaches soon became Gateway Center, a contemporary collection of modern high rises in a city that hadn’t seen any new Downtown construction in 20 years. The best was yet to come, though, as the 36 acres closest to the Point became Point State Park, one of the finest spots in the city. It’s so well-integrated into the urban fabric that no one really even thinks of it so much of a park as they do something that just exists. There isn’t much in the way of traditional amenities other than a museum dedicated to Fort Pitt and a lot of green space, but there’s an ineffable joy in taking a stroll around the fountain on a summer night. The most remarkable thing about it is that there’s an interstate highway running right through the middle of it that somehow manages to enhance the park rather than degrade it. There’s enough lawn on the city side to make it usable for events and a quick lunch, but going through the underpass to the river side is like entering an urban oasis, with the towers of Gateway Center looming behind you like a great wall of a city. It’s one of my favorite views, and one that few photographers have captured. Robert Moses was involved.
The whole Point project is an anomaly in American urban planning, the one urban renewal project that never shows up in the various lists of disasters that circulate around the internet. Having been started in the 1940s, it was one of the earliest such projects, and was viewed as an unparalleled success nationally, reinvigorating a downtown that was in imminent danger of collapsing in the face of inevitable suburbanization. While some projects were poorly thought-out from the beginning, I think that urban renewal would be viewed better today if subsequent planners using Gateway Center as a model would have focused on the right things. The reason it works, and is still attractive today, is that, from the shine of the chrome steel facades to the impeccable landscaping, no expense was spared, no detail too minor to be relevant. This is quite literally the ideal of Corbusier’s towers in a park. But that’s not the lesson that was learned; planners instead thought that demolishing old buildings and building towers in a park was enough. For what it’s worth, Jane Jacobs didn’t like it, and the destruction of the old point is now bemoaned by a few armchair urbanists who feel the need to crap on anything that was done between 1945 and 1980. But I don’t think Downtown would be better now if it terminated in an indeterminate mishmash of old industrial buildings.
And then the steel industry crashed. But somehow, in the 1980s, Renaissance II took off. In what should have been the city’s darkest days, there was a commercial building boom that saw construction of 4 of Pittsburgh’s 5 tallest skyscrapers, including icons like the PPG Building. Enter Tom Murphy. Pittsburgh seems to have a tradition of alternating between bold, visionary mayors and caretaker mayors, much like Russia alternates between hairy and bald leaders. Dick Caligiuiri had been Pittsburgh’s mayor from 1977 until his untimely death in 1988 and was definitely the bold visionary sort. He was replaced by Sophie Masloff, a kindly elderly woman referred to as “everyone’s Jewish grandmother”. She’s remembered as a good mayor, but was more focused on maintaining fiscal solvency amid a declining industrial base than on achieving grand proposals. She practically inherited the position (though she later won a full term) and was in her 70s; she wasn’t exactly the kind of person who becomes mayor with an ambitious vision.
IB: Urban Renewal's Last Gasp
Enter Tom Murphy. Murphy became mayor in 1994, at a time when the city was at a crossroads. The air was clean and the new offices were shiny, but the city was hemorrhaging population and in a state of fiscal crisis. Downtown had once been the region’s premiere shopping district, but suburban shopping malls, combined with a transit project in the ‘80s in which the construction of the world’s smallest subway kept some streets closed for years had turned it into a shadow of itself. One area that wasn’t doing bad, though, was the Fifth-Forbes corridor. At the time, 90% of storefronts were occupied, and they did brisk business. The problem was that, in the eyes of the city, they were the wrong kind of businesses. Wig stores, newsstands, liquor stores, pager stores, dive bars, and other places of ill repute lined the district. And they attracted the wrong kinds of people. The Hill District was Pittsburgh’s Harlem. With its own business district decimated in the wake of urban renewal, riots, crack, and gangs, its residents needed to shop somewhere, and merchants on Fifth and Forbes filled the void. This picture is from 2008, which is a decade after the proposal, but it gives you a general idea. Murphy, desperate to revive Downtown, proposed a sweetheart deal to acquire the whole area by eminent domain, raze the buildings, and sell to a Chicago developer who promised to attract high-end tenants like J Crew, build a movie theater and bowling alley, and add other chain shit like a House of Blues. Murphy was a visionary and a policy wonk, but his ideas were straight out of the 1970s. Council was unanimously in favor. The Post-Gazette loved it, and described the area as “downtrodden” and “blighted”. But there were problems brewing. The business owners were unanimously opposed. This was an area with 120 businesses and a 90% occupancy rate. The Institute for Justice got involved, erecting a dozen billboards throughout the city with canny opposition slogans like “Murphy’s Law: Tke from Pittsburgh Families, Give to an Out-of-Town Developer”. Normal people thought that it was some white elephant plan that wasn’t going to do shit. People debated it on talk radio endlessly.
There was also a lot of money involved; the total cost estimates were over half a billion dollars, over 100 million of that public. Part of the cost was a $28 million inducement to bring a Nordstrom’s to town; a spokesman for the mayor described this as a bargain since Cincinnati paid $47 million to get a Nordstrom’s. The business owners proposed an alternative plan in which the city would give them $28 million to renovate upstairs space above the shops into apartments that were currently vacant due to fire code nonconformities, but the city didn’t seem interested. In the face of the mayor’s intransigence, he was inevitably forced to yield, not because of their opposition but because Nordstrom decided to mothball a planned expansion for reasons unrelated to Fifth and Forbes specifically and the developer backed out. Murphy took eminent domain off the table and tried two more out of town developers, but neither was able to accomplish much. When his term ended in 2006, new mayor Bob O’Connor officially killed the plan. That’s not to say that the story has a happy ending, necessarily. The Urban Redevelopment Authority destroyed the opulent marble interior of the original Mellon Bank to make room for a Lord & Taylor that lasted like three years. In 2011, PNC announced that it was building a new 33 story tower to house its corporate headquarters; it had spent the past few years quietly buying out the block that it sits on. Slowly, the dinginess of the area melted away, and now it’s just nondescript urban bleh. The storefronts are mostly vacant. The problem with these kinds of proposals is that they try to do too much. Murphy was constantly questioned about why he wasn’t using local developers, and while he never gave a clear answer, I suspect it was because none of them were willing to take the kind of risk involved with something as big as he proposed. He wasn’t willing to wait for the area to turn around a building at a time, and he was skeptical that it was even possible that anything he found acceptable would move in with all the real-world businesses surrounding it. But we all know how this would have gone — there would have been an initial inrush of new businesses, but it would have taken a long time to fill out. The anchors would have accordingly cut and run after the initial leases were up, and the city would have been left holding the bag. It seems odd that this all happened in 2000 as well, because, a decade later, such an idea would have been unthinkable.
1C: The State of the Triangle
For the next few decades, Downtown remained stable, if not great. The commercial activity was there during the daytime, but at night the whole place emptied out, save for the Cultural District. There was very little residential. If you were in the vicinity of 6th Ave. everything seemed fine, with the theaters and restaurants abuzz and lots of foot traffic, but anywhere else was a ghost town save for the occasional bum asking for change. It wasn’t exactly dangerous, but a bit sketchy. In more recent years, there’s been a movement to build more residential space Downtown, and things are slowly changing. Stymieing this, though, is the increasing vacancy rate of Downtown office space post-pandemic. This isn’t unique to Pittsburgh, but combined with a couple high-profile incidents of violence, it’s created the impression among suburbanites that Downtown is increasingly unsafe. Part of the problem is that the homeless population is more visible than they were before. Contrary to popular belief, the actual homeless population has about halved since they first started counting in 2010, but reduced foot traffic and the proliferation of tents along the bike trails (with the associated drug activity) make the problem look worse than it actually is. I don’t intend to make this an in-depth discussion about the homeless problem in America, as that’s beyond the scope of this post, but it’s something the city has to contend with. Luckily, the actual unsheltered homeless population is under a thousand people, almost all concentrated Downtown or in nearby areas, so the problem isn’t as intractable as it is on the West Coast.
As for the future of downtown, it’s hard to predict. Office space was at a premium before the pandemic, but the new hybrid office environment has led more and more companies to downsize. Commercial real estate companies are acting like it’s the apocalypse, but they do that every time there’s a market downturn. My prediction is that the trend towards more residential continues, but that the office situation stabilizes as natural demand increase fills up the existing vacancies, combined with more companies demanding employees come back to the office. That said, it's never going to be a trendy area. Downtown is ubiquitous in the public psyche, so it will never have the cachet of an undiscovered territory. Pittsburgh isn't New York, and no one will want to raise a family in a Downtown high rise. The inevitable demographic is single professionals and childless couples who presumably make enough to live Downtown because they're workaholics who want to be close to their high-paying jobs. A girl I went to law school with lived Downtown for a while and said that she liked it but that it wears on you after a while and you want to just live in a normal neighborhood.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class as far as residential is concerned, with the caveat that, despite having over 4,000 residents, this isn’t really a residential area. Accordingly, it’s a lot different than most of the other Upper Middle Class areas in the city.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
If only the United States had the foresight to institute such a system a century and a half ago, before the immigrant problem got out of hand. Then they could have just used my great-grandfather's labor in the mines until he decided to retire (coincidentally right around the time Pittsburgh Seam coal started running low), and then deported him back to Galicia just in time for the German invasion. Another great-grandfather would have been shipped back to Calabria some time in the late 40s or early 50s. I don't want to think what the consequences for your family would have been. I'm not sure what the downside was of their being allowed to stay.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
You're giving these people too much credit. When you said "Progressive Art Scene" I thought at first you may be talking about gallery openings or legitimate theater or modern classical music. Instead you were talking about the horrible "scene kids". These are usually punk bands that have only perfunctory instrumental talent and virtually no songwriting talent who latch onto the "scene" because they know that they're too untalented to become professional musicians. They usually put a high value on vague concepts like "authenticity" and "selling out" and look for reasons to create internal drama and ostracize people. You know you're at a "scene show" if, say, you go to a show at a venue in the city one night and then a couple weeks later you go to a show in an exurb 30 miles way and the audience is composed of almost entirely the same people. They mostly play the same circuit, though, because these bars are owned by scene people themselves. If it were a self-contained community of people who just wanted to play locally it would be no problem; less popular styles like jazz and bluegrass are usually like this. The trouble is that these people all have aspirations of playing music full-time, which makes the stakes higher and introduces a lot of stress. It's almost like a combination of Orthodox Judaism and Old Order Amish, where there's a comprehensive Mosaic law you're expected to follow with shunning the consequence of violating it. It's a breeding ground for drama.
Everyone in that thread may have differing politics but they all seem to buy into the scene mentality; their problem is that it's placing emphasis where they don't want it placed. The fact that politics plays a more prominent role isn't surprising but it could honestly just as easily be right-wing politics as left-wing — it just so happens that most of the participants were already lefties so that's the natural direction it took. In the grand scheme of things, though, it's beside the point. These people are rank amateurs involved in a circle jerk, and their bullshit has about as much influence on the broader culture as what's going on in some random subreddit.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I don't understand the focus on skilled immigration. A lot of what we need is unskilled work. Since the pandemic we've seen reduced hours and increased wages for service jobs that they still can't seem to staff. I suspect part of the reason for the price increases everywhere is that they have to pay 15 bucks an hour for someone to push a cash register, not because of change in the law but because they can't find anyone for less than that, and they're still having trouble staffing these places. US Steel is having trouble finding laborers for mills because even at 80k/year no one wants to work rotating shifts doing manual labor in a dusty environment.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
It's irrelevant because no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials. Maybe fail rates are higher at UCLA but UCLA is hard to get into to begin with, so I imagine the coursework is harder than at a place like NEOMED. And there are already schools of osteopathy that seem to attract people who couldn't get into MD programs. I'd be willing to bet that if I were to take a random poll few people would be able to tell me where their doctor even went to med school let alone how highly that school is regarded or what their grades were. Like almost everything else, once you get your first job your education is pretty much irrelevant.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
The evidence against Perry was prejudicial, but that's not the end of the analysis. All evidence is prejudicial to some degree. The question is whether the prejudicial nature is outweighed by the probative value, and it was because it was clearly related to motive. The argument wasn't that it was evidence that Perry was a bad dude but that he specifically contemplated the actions which he was accused of. The evidence of Foster's prior actions wasn't admitted because it would only be relevant if Perry was aware of it at the time of the incident, and there's no evidence that he had seen those posts. Even then I don't know if it would be admissible because simply blocking a street isn't a deadly threat, and intent to intimidate doesn't necessarily mean intent to injure, but since Perry didn't see the posts, we don't need to go that far with the analysis.
Rov_Scam
12d 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
12d ago
I've got more written but this is taking quite a bit of research to do the way I want to do it and I've been unusually busy for the past month so my apologies for not getting the installments out sooner. In the meantime, I owe you answers to your questions.
Does CMU being the best CS university in the world affect the day to day of the average person in Pittsburgh? For example, the JHU's excellence at Medicine or Clemson at Automobile Engg. defintely seems to affect the economic makeup of their respective cities.
Not unless you live near campus, but I doubt that's the kind of influence you're talking about. I have a friend who works at the robotics lab but his place of employment makes no difference in my life. The so-called city fathers hype up our tech prowess all the time, but I'm guessing that all cities with any kind of tech industry do that, and Pittsburgh is still like 18th in number of tech jobs, so I'm inclined to say that any influence is minimal. The one exception may be in East Liberty; it gets a lot of hype for being recently gentrified and having a Google office near there, but for all the housing they're building I've never heard of anyone actually living there, and normal people don't hype the area up like they do other trendy areas. That's more of a discussion for the installment on East Liberty (there's certainly a lot to unpack there), but off the top of my head I'd guess that all the apartments are rented by techbros without social lives, which is why I haven't heard of anyone wanting to move there.
Does Pittsburgh ever feel like a college town? Upitt + CMU makes for 50k students not that far from downtown.
And Duquesne just outside of Downtown, and Point Park in Downtown, and Carlow right next to Pitt, and you get the idea. So yeah; any remotely trendy part of the East End with decent bus service is going to have a relatively high number of student renters, particularly grad students. I've never heard of any of them wanting to live in East Liberty, though. The only part that feels like an actual college town, though is Oakland, where you're right on campus, but being in the city makes it qualitatively different than if you're in a town that revolves around a huge state school in the middle of nowhere. I'll go into greater detail in the section on Oakland.
I've seen Pittsburgh compared to Seattle wrt weather, hilliness, whiteness and having tech. How fair is the comparison ?
I've never been to Seattle so take my response with a grain of salt, but I think it's reasonably fair. The climates are probably comparably dreary, but here we actually have 4 seasons with hot summers and cold winters. Our climate is mild compared to places like the Rockies and interior New England, but we're quite cold and snowy for a major American city. Culturally, though, I don't think that Seattle has the working class industrial history that gives Pittsburgh its sense of grit. I'd also wager that they're a lot less "ethnic" than we are; everybody here is Catholic and has names like Bob Schlydeki and Larry Deldino and you can still smoke in bars here. People I've know who moved here from Seattle are surprised by the amount of industry that still exists and the fact that working class people actually have accents. Most had assumed that the mills had died completely and that accents were an affectation from television that nobody had anymore.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
You're assuming that Trump is actually behind the compilation of these lists. From what I've read, it's all conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that have proven in the past they don't give a shit so much about loyalty to Trump as they do advancing their own agendas. Using these outside lists when he didn't have a clue himself is a big part of what got him in the position he was in during his first term. Asking them to come up with more names isn't going to change that. And competence does matter. At a certain point you're getting less into people whose job consists of making policy decisions and more into the realm of everyday managerial functioning. For instance, say that Trump thinks the ATF's FFL application review process is too strict and wants to make it more liberal, and he fires the guy responsible for this process with a gun nut who's dedicated to making sure practically anyone who applies gets an FFL with minimum hassle. That may be great in theory, but if the guy in question has no clue about how the review process works and ends up bumbling through his job to the point where delay times are so long that applications that would have been a breeze under the old guy are suffering inordinate delays, the exact constituency he's trying to appease isn't going to be very happy. I can just see the article in The Atlantic now: "He thought Trump would make it easier for him to run his gun store; instead it's become a nightmare."
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I hate to do this but you did the math wrong in the earlier post. You said:
Presumably the first 1,000 were selected basically at random and showed a 9.5% voting rate among people that had been deemed mentally incompetent and weren't allowed to vote. If that rate held, that would be over 2,000 votes from ineligible, mentally incompetent voters, just in Dane County.
The article says that there are about 22,000 voters on the incompetent list in Wisconsin. A random sample of 1,000 taken showed that 95 people had cast ballots at some point since 2008. Without numbers specific to 2020 there's no way to estimate how many improper votes were cast. That being said, if they want to implement a system to catch this I'm all for it. If they want to prosecute the people who voted illegally, I'm all for it, though going after incompetent people probably isn't a good look.
The same is true for the indefinitely confined. If you want to go after these people that's fine, but you'd better be prepared to investigate all 250,000+ instances and prosecute each one that doesn't meet whatever strict reading you want to give the law. You can't just go into Milwaukee and find a few black people or bleeding heart liberal activists who violated the law and use them as an example of "Democrat voter fraud"; you have to be willing to go into rural areas and ask MAGA hat guys detailed questions about whether Grandma is really indefinitely confined when she still has an active driver's license and was seen at the grocery store walking around the day before submitting her application. That isn't going to sit well with anybody, which is why nobody is ever going to suggest such a thing.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Project 2025 has approximately zero chance of succeeding:
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The president is already allowed to appoint approximately 4,000 people to high-level agency positions. At any given time in the Trump Administration, approximately 1200, or about a third, were unfilled. If he can't manage to fill these it's unlikely he's going to fill anywhere from 5 to 50 thousand additional posts.
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He's already notoriously bad at picking aides who are loyal to him. He fought with his own cabinet more than any president in recent memory. There's no reason to believe that four years of not having to appoint anyone is somehow going to make him better at this role. This problem is magnified by the fact that most of these positions aren't going to be under his direct supervision, and he'll only know that they don't have the requisite loyalty when a scandal erupts. Not a good look.
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If you remove a career bureaucrat and replace him with a political hack, the new guy isn't likely to have an in-depth understanding on how things actually work. Bureaucrat A doesn't do what you want so you replace him with Bureaucrat B. Bureaucrat B is dedicated to doing what you ask, except he isn't well-versed in the Administrative Procedure Act or the various other laws governing the office, and he's essentially starting from scratch. Except there's no time to get up to speed because the president wants this done now, so he ends up doing something that violates the law and the action ends up getting tied up in court for the next six months while the new guy in charge bungles various other duties of the office that were an afterthought under the first guy. Now the president's in the position where he has to fire Bureaucrat B and replace him with another guy who didn't make the cut the last time and is now even more likely to screw things up. Meanwhile guys appointed to non-contentious positions are making their own little messes that just become fodder for your opponents without any political gain. This obviously isn't going to happen every time, but when you're talking about thousands of positions the Venn diagram isn't always going to match up and there's a good chance you find you've appointed a moron.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Prosecuting the Tides foundation isn't going to do much. As a "dark money" organization most people haven't heard of them the way they've heard of the NRA, so the chance that anyone will actually care is low. Furthermore, as a foundation, they don't actually do anything themselves but simply distribute money to other groups. It takes a long time for an advocacy organization like the NRA to build up the donor network and social capital to have the kind of influence they've had. If you're just distributing money, there's plenty of other advocacy organizations that can easily take up that slack.
The biggest problem, though, is that most of the alleged malfeasance on the part of Tides is directed towards liberal advocacy groups who claim they mismanaged money intended for their benefit. For example, they're currently being sued in California by BLM, who claims the group misdirected 33 million in funds that were raised as part of a joint campaign and were supposed to be earmarked. Any other prosecutions are going to be in a similar vein. It's hardly an own of the libs if most libs haven't heard of the group you're prosecuting and the ones who have are likely to be your star witnesses. If BLM ends up siding with the administration it's hardly a good look.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
The problem there is that going after voter fraud in a non-grandstanding way means he actually needs to name names and have evidence. You can't just say there was MASSIVE FRAUD in Detroit or wherever; you have to actually say here is a corrupt election official and here's exactly what he did and here's the evidence to prove it. Most of the voter fraud stuff in 2020 was more along the lines of "I don't like the looks of this", which doesn't exactly help you out too much when it comes to a prosecution.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Studying and interacting is much different than expending considerable resources on something, which in turn is much different than waging war or making large economic investments in something. Sure, we spend money on researching things out of curiosity already, but it's not a lot. Numbers are hard to come by, but one figure I saw says we spent about $7.2 billion on botanical research in 2013. However, the context of this figure was talking about money spent on crop science research, and I'd be willing to bet that the money spent on projects like some professor studying rare ferns of Appalachia is much less than what we're spending on more practical applications. If an alien civilization were to visit earth from the distances described, it would be an incredibly costly mission with no guarantee of success. My guess is that if they wanted to study us they'd send unmanned vehicles first, then maybe a small research party like at the beginning of E.T. I highly doubt they'd come here with cargo ships ready to exchange resources for technology, let alone bring an army to mount a full-scale invasion. After all, we've been sending stuff into space for 60 years and we still haven't got past the curiosity stage yet, with the exception of satellites that are within driving distance. We certainly haven't gotten to the point where it makes sense to start mining the moon or something similar, and that's practically right on top of us in astronomical terms.
I didn't read the entire transcript, but I scanned Cohen's testimony, and I couldn't find any instances where he's asked to draw legal conclusions. The only thing approaching that that I could see, as you said in your initial comment, was that he admitted to having plead guilty to certain Federal crimes. The defense never challenged the admissibility of this testimony in general. They filed a motion in limine to prohibit the prosecution from using those pleas as evidence that the underlying crimes were committed, and they won that motion. The evidence of the pleas was admitted so that the jury could evaluate Cohen's credibility, and the judge gave a limiting instruction as soon as they came up. The defense's motion conceded that the plea evidence was admissible for that purpose. They never tried to get the evidence out entirely, and it wasn't in their interest to, either, because without the evidence of the pleas, it would seriously hinder their attempts to discredit Cohen. Given the limited nature of what Cohen actually testified to on direct, the prosecution probably wouldn't have even opposed a defense motion to keep the plea evidence out entirely, since the defense would have had much less to work with.
Beyond that, I don't want to get into too many details, but inadequate jury instructions and insufficiency of evidence are usually long shots when it comes to getting an appeals court to overturn a jury verdict. I argue in another post somewhere that intent (most of the time) doesn't require knowledge that the action is illegal. As for that last bit, it wasn't so much about hiding information from voters as it is hiding expenditures from voters. Laws requiring disclosures were created with the express intent of creating a certain transparency in election-related spending. I was reacting to the commenters here who were saying that Trump was in a kind of Catch-22 because there was no way he could have made the payment without drawing the scrutiny of the FEC. This clearly isn't true; if I were Trump's attorney I would have told him that if he wants to be completely safe he should pay it out of his personal funds and report it as a campaign expense. Alternatively, he could pay it out of his personal funds and not report it because unless it's obvious that sort of thing is rarely punished. Paying it out of campaign funds and reporting it isn't recommended but at least it makes it look like he's on the up and up. What I wouldn't tell him to do is to have a third party make the payments so they can't be traced to him, and then create phony documents to obfuscate the reimbursement.
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