anti_dan
18hr ago
Right but that is kind of question begging, because its the kind of "concern-trolling to attempt to reduce voter participation among Democratic voters" is what partisans in the intelligence community have claimed Russia did, with little evidence, and none convincing, in the past.
anti_dan
1d ago
Well then they have two moral options:
-
Get good.
-
Stop setting up military outposts until you get good.
anti_dan
1d ago
Is Russian just a placeholder for "foreign" or do you have reasons to think the majority of foreign troll farms on social media are Russians? My read is that going back to 2016 Russia has become a bit of a partisan fixation without much evidence its online presence is impactful in any way.
anti_dan
9d ago
I have always been of the opinion that Watergate was just standard dirty tricks of the era that the press got in the mood to actually cover because they hated Nixon and the main reporters given the story were cub reporters who didn't know that FDR had done 10x of Watergate regularly. Nixon is merely a victim of Mark Felt and a press that hated him because he did normal things that happened to be technically illegal. But his opponent Kennedy several years before probably did 10x as much wiretapping and breaking and entering to no coverage.
Was it a setup? I dont think so. It was just a frame up. Something that every other presidential candidate had been doing for decades was done by Nixon, and his team was caught because law enforcement wanted to catch them and then the press wanted to press the issue so it became a big deal instead of becoming the primordial version of the Joe Biden classified documents case.
anti_dan
9d ago
Nixon is the classic unliked by insiders president. He won 49 states while losing 90%+ of the press.
anti_dan
9d ago
I did not know that. I was under the impression his mother's family were mostly Ellis Island era immigrants. But I am interested who is the outlier.
anti_dan
10d ago
The consistent analogies to burglary dont make sense in this context. Because a campaign finance violation is extremely technical. If I am making campaign expenses and regular business expenses, I, by definition, will be making both types of expenses and categorizing them.
Your argument, as far as I can tell, is that the existence of a law that contemplates legal penalties for mischaracterization of the expenses is enough to elevate the misdemeanor to a felony. Because no on has proven the characterization of this expense as a business expense instead of a campaign expense was incorrect, the only thing proven is that part of the expense should have been filed as repayment of a loan and another part should have been legal expenses, but they instead classified it all as legal expenses.
anti_dan
10d ago
Isn't that mainstream thinking among many economists?
Regardless shareholder disputes in the Dutch East Indies company are documented as early as 1605, so the concept of short sellers, insider trading, and shareholder advocates was all mainstream by the time of Washington.
anti_dan
10d ago
Its also true that they feed off each other. Vagrants need their drugs, so drug dealers will migrate to where they are. Then those dealers have existing criminal networks so their coordinated robbery of CVS and Walgreens for all the razors and tide they have every Monday has a resale network. Then the dealers have the money to move to that area permanently, and all of the sudden the local high school has replaced a weed problem with a fentanyl problem.
anti_dan
10d ago
Why should a small station be a money out?
Because its public works in America, in this case in a blue area. All public works of that sort are money pits.
If there were apartments built by it, they would probably be "luxury apartments" with fairly high rents (as is typical for new construction). Why should that attract unsavory characters?
Because high concentrations of people with money creates opportunities for peddlers and beggars. Peddlers and beggars will travel to such real estate so long as their drug supply is close enough. The closer to the city center the more will come. Then once enough peddlers and beggars locate there a few dealers will be attracted to that supply of customers and located there.
There are plenty of unsavory BART stations in SF/Oakland, but there are also perfectly fine stations with no homeless around such as Warm Springs (which is surrounded on one side by million dollar newly built condos) (pay no attention to the industrial zone on some of the most expensive real estate in the country). That suggests that it's in large part due to local policies about what to allow, and if the local constituents are suburban nimbys they are probably going to demand some actual policing.
Indeed, but the argument is you have to get out of SF/Oakland because the residents of those places are huge libs and softies and will never let you do your own thing, and you only can do your own thing by evading the libs and also being far enough away for them to ignore you.
anti_dan
10d ago
The "easing up" looked like thousands of Palestinians being killed in retaliation for a single-digit number of Israelis killed every few years. Going just by raw numbers, in the back-and-forth of action and reaction, it really looks a lot like the Israelis are constantly escalating and the Palestinians are constantly deescalating - there is not a single instance of Palestinians killing Israelis that was not followed by Israelis killing more Palestinians, and no single instance of Israelis killing Palestinians that was not followed by Palestinians killing fewer Israelis. Yet this is somehow being painted into an emotional picture of the Israelis trying to make peace, as the Palestinians escalate and push for war. It is very hard to avoid the temptation to interpret this reframing as stemming from an underlying feeling that in terms of weregeld an Israeli is worth about a thousand Palestinians.
Why would anyone consider "going by raw numbers" if they hadn't already made up their mind to be pro-Palestine? Its a silly measure when one side is incredibly cautious with the lives of its own citizens and the other side treats fatalities to its own citizens a win.
anti_dan
10d ago
Why? Catholics have always been a minority in the US and its not like we just shake the American globe and pick someone. They are also largely new arrivals (comparatively). I think its true that, aside from Obama, every US president has traceable American lineage from before the civil war. You typically need time in America, generations of time, to actually understand the country and its politics.
anti_dan
10d ago
Women, in the US at least, are likely outnumbering men on juries in criminal trials in total. Judges are hesitant to force people to sit on a trial when they don't want to be there and men, in my experience, are more vigorous in their assertion that they are too busy to be there, have too important a job, and that they wont be impartial. This last one may be why the rape trials in Australia skewed male, if women were answering they couldn't be impartial in higher numbers. For example, the last jury I did was 8-4 F-M. One male successfully convinced the judge that America's airline industry would collapse without him. The rest was I suppose mostly randomness. But also the pool skews female because it excludes felons.
anti_dan
13d ago
But a necessary element of the felony is that he falsified business records as a part of a scheme to cover up another crime. In many ways you'd argue in the other direction. The element is even more difficult to satisfy. Trump needed to know how was committing a crime AND known he was covering it up. You'd have to prove both.
The argument you are making makes the misdemeanor/felony distinction moot, which is antithetical to a good reading of laws. What you are saying is that the falsification of the record itself demonstrates the intent to cover up a crime, but that makes no sense. Falsification with intent to defraud is the misdemeanor charge. There is the additional element of the second crime that makes the felony charge a felony. So you cant just waive it away.
anti_dan
14d ago
The only thing related to Cohen's case that is relevant is that Cohen should not have been allowed to testify that he plead guilty, because it is blackletter law that co-defendant's convictions/pleas are inadmissible as evidence that the defendant currently on trial committed a crime, or even that the conduct was criminal. That alone, in a less controversial case, probably would be considered reversible error.
anti_dan
14d ago
I find burglary very non-analogous, it being a malum in se crime. But even then if you think its a good analogy a person who is charged with burglary is allowed a defense along the lines of "it was cold outside, I was going to freeze to death, I broke in to be warm, there was no intent to commit a felony therein." Trump had an expert witness lined up that said there was no crime being covered up, and he was not allowed to testify.
anti_dan
14d ago
The DOJ also was referred this conduct and did not charge it. Saying this was an election law violation requires a tortured interpretation of the statute, and arguably would have put Trump in a catch-22 situation where classifying the expense as a campaign expense would be illegal, but also not classifying it as a campaign expense was illegal.
anti_dan
14d ago
Attempt crimes always have allowed for mistake of fact and are not given the same sentence as the crime itself. Not only is this set of facts enough to prove burglary, it also would prove attempted murder.
This is not akin to the Trump case, because in your case we would know that the alleged felony that the burglar had the mens rea to commit was murder. But in the current case, we do have an exact crime. Instead the prosecution waved at a bunch of statutes and said its possible that Trump committed those crimes (while they and the judge didn't let Trump put on an expert witness who would have said he, in fact, did not violate those laws). This is a novel application of the law in many ways, so its not really serious to compare it to burglary.
Nor even something else like criminal conspiracy, where again you need not succeed in robbing the bank, but it is enough for your gang to buy guns and masks and bags with money signs on them, then drive to the bank, go into the bank, and if you get arrested at the front door, you still are guilty of conspiracy to rob the bank. Again, totally unlike the current situation.
anti_dan
15d ago
Plenty of subpopulations are welfare sucking despite being allowed to work and pay taxes. Statistically, Arab Palestinians would be so in a unified state.
anti_dan
16d ago
Cuba during the Cuba missile crisis lacked 2/3 of your things that define a state. Did Cuba lack statehood?
Indeed, most states at war end up losing those things when they start losing the war. Which is what Gaza is doing. Its a state that is losing a war where it was the initial aggressor.
anti_dan
16d ago
Why would that be so? Israel has no desire to create a class of welfare sucking Arabs.
anti_dan
22d ago
None that I know of other than what I've heard out of the state's attorneys office which is that people from south of Mexico are now making up about 50% of felony DUIs
Not to burst your bubble, but the problem with Civil War actually originates with the source material. One might watch Civil War and ask why Tony Stark, aka Iron Man is on the side of the government despite being a tech entrepreneur who refused to share his suit tech with the government for years and Captain America, an FDR Democrat (aka the closest thing we have had to a dictator since George Washington) is on the side of the libertarians. The answer is the original writer wrote it that way for nonsensical reasons.
As a result, the whole story is nonsensical, and the movie reflects that because it is based on an idiotic comic book that shares its incoherence.
More options
Context Copy link