domain:felipec.substack.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
cover sheets
Hot damn. If the FBI managed to screw up the investigation of what should be obvious misconduct, I’m going to be so disappointed. Let’s see what exactly they did…
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/03/mar-a-lago-trump-classified-documents-00156124
Looks like they added placeholders and cover sheets when they initially sorted the fifteen boxes. And then possibly failed to remove them? Assuming every cover sheet was left in the count, and there are really only half as many documents as stated in the warrant, that could mean Trump’s 15 boxes held fewer than 100! Witch hunt!
This is stupid. It’s also not the cause of the delay, which stems from the complaint that those searched boxes are now out of order. How much did they change? No idea. How did they notice the change? Because the contents were exhaustively documented after the seizure.
It’s not a great look for the prosecution. But it also has no bearing on the facts of the case. If Trump’s team could point to any version of the boxes as favorable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I don’t mind a delay of the trial, but I’m not going to treat this as exculpatory.
Skibboleth
3d ago
the powers-that-be
There should be a requirement that if you're going to use vague and allusive terms that you define those terms so people can know who you're talking about. Don't just say 'elites' or 'the powers-that-be'. What specific people/organizations/institutions do you mean?
Recursive_Enlightenment
4d ago
Conservative Mike Cernovich (1.2M followers) Tweeted "Trump needs a VP that will make him assassination proof. Anyone saying otherwise has no understanding of the time we are in. Tim Scott as VP? Trump's survivability will drop to zero. It's incredible to me that more don't understand this."
How seriously should Trump take such a threat, and how seriously does Trump take such a threat? Yes, the powers-that-be truly hate Trump and if he became president and had Scott as VP many would rejoice at Trump's death. But by what mechanism might they kill him? Obviously, it creates horrible incentives if Trump believes the threat and it causes him to consider someone such as Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Sarah Palin for his VP nominee. In sort-of support of Cernovich, part of the reason that Biden might be sticking with Harris as VP is to reduce the chances he gets removed from office for senility.
Great post. The simple truth is that unless…
- Trump wins
- The GOP get a trifecta with a very comfortable senate majority
- They abolish the filibuster
- Trump is suddenly hugely more competent at wrangling Congress
…there will be no better deal than this one. That is to say that even if Trump wins, the chance of a better border control bill is minimal at best. If this hill had passed under Trump, he would have signed it. Of course it wouldn’t, because there’s no way Democrats would vote for it in that case.
There is no way this isn’t a mega black pill. But the ultimate black pill is that it’s really all about Trump. There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago. The fact that Trump was personally able to kill this bill is testament to the extent to which service to his personal whims and (perceived) self-interest are now the sole metric by which congressional Republicans are and wish to be judged.
There is no plan, and if there is, Trump doesn’t even seem committed to following it. Sure, I’ll still vote for him, that’s the reality of a two-party system. But no Trump voter should be under any illusions that his second term won’t be him attempting some (likely unsuccessful) crusade against those he believes have wronged him (personally) while behind the scenes very little changes.
“Buh buh buh this doesn’t deport 10/12/15 million illegals”. Yeah, and neither will anything that Donald Trump can, let alone will, accomplish in office. Moreover, if by some stroke of luck this bill had passed and Trump won and decided to become competent, it would afford him MORE power to reduce inflows and impose ZERO meaningful restrictions on additional actions by the president or congress to increase deportations.
Moreover, 50,000 additional immigration visas a year is nothing compared to the current numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, so focusing on this was especially retarded.
Few things make me seethe more than what happened with this bill. As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters. It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends. Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time. Every single measure that reduces total inflows must pass. Unless, apparently, it might make it a little harder for Donald Trump to win the presidency and accomplish nothing, again.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
The government insists that it wasn’t wrong about what they were. Or even which box they were in. Only that it was an error to say they were “in the original, intact form as seized,” because the order is not the same. Page 8.
Nor do you have a good reason to believe the documents were planted. Only that Trump was informed of some (other?) boxes left in Virginia. His administration has never denied that the boxes belonged to him, has it?
And what’s all this bullshit about mislabeling? A banker’s box in your house is inappropriate for any level of classification.
yellowgreenred
10hr ago
I just got around to reading last month's post about Noticing the increase in interracial relationships we're seeing on screen. @George_E_Hale was mercilessly piled on for supposedly feigning ignorance, innocently asking "what's the big deal?", and claiming that the white woman and black man pairing is not a new phenomenon. Given that I'm also in the camp of "what's the big deal" and "yes, there has obviously been an increase in such representation, but I'm not sure it's as dramatic as painted by most users", I thought I'd investigate all this is a bit more.
First, I looked at the most popular romance/romantic comedy flicks from last year. Disclaimer: I have only seen one of these (Past Lives), the list was compiled from various "best romance movies of 2023" articles, these are only films produced by Hollywood, and I determined the races of the on-screen couples by consulting the movie poster and/or a written summary. Therefore, it's very possible I missed a subplot in a movie that contained further interracial or interracial relationships, and because the list may be not a representative sample, I may be over-or under-counting the number of interracial relationships. Anyway, the list:
- Shotgun Wedding - Jennifer Lopez and white guy.
- One True Loves - Mixed race Asian-American (Chinese father & white mother) was married to a white guy who was presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Some years later, she becomes enagaged to Asian-American hunk Simu Liu only to find out that her husband is still alive. She ends picking the hunky Asian.
- Love Again - Indian woman who happens to be Nick Jonas' wife and white guy.
- Past Lives - Asian woman and white guy, but there is another Asian man in the picture who she might be in love with. Ends up staying with the white guy in the end. I'm not doing justice to a really great movie.
- The Perfect Find - Black woman and black man.
- Happiness for Beginners - White woman and white man.
- Red, White & Royal Blue - Ethnically ambiguous gay man and white gay man.
- Love in Taipei - Asian woman and Asian man.
- Bottoms - Diverse group of lesbians and Marshawn Lynch.
- Love at First Sight - White woman and white man.
- What Happens Later - White woman and white man.
- Anyone But You - White woman and white man.
- Shortcomings - Asian woman and Asian man.
- Rye Lane - Black woman and black man.
- Your Place or Mine - White woman and white man, might contain a subplot featuring black man.
- Prom Pact - Mixed Asian-American and white man.
- Beautiful Disaster - White woman and white man.
- Ghosted - Ana de Armas and Chris Evans.
- A Tourist's Guide to Love - White woman and Asian man.
- You Hurt My Feelings - White woman and white man.
- The List - White woman and Hispanic man wherein the Hispanic dude sleeps with someone on a "free pass list" and then the white woman cucks him by sleeping with a white guy, I think? Having trouble figuring out the plot for this one.
- After Everything - White woman and white man.
- The Other Zoey - White woman and white man.
- Somebody I Used to Know - Alison Brie and black man.
- No Hard Feelings - Jennifer Lawrence with white man (kid).
- Challengers - Zendaya has sex with two white guys.
TV shows would take too long to go through, but just eye-balling the posters on Rotten Tomatoes, I don't see any immediately obvious black man and white woman pairings, though I do see a several white man/non-white woman.
I am aware that most of the complaints are about an increased in interracial relationships in advertising. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any research that quantifies this increase. There is one story from 2021 that quotes a professor who says "70% of interracial commercials from the past four years show a white man with a Black woman", which is the inverse of this pairing in real life. If true, this wouldn't be surprising: WM/BW is less controversial than BM/WM. As I was looking into this, I was reminded of that rather infamous Cheerios commercial featuring a white mom and a black dad. Turns out the original intent was not to make the family multiracial:
This wasn’t storyboarded as a multiracial family,” said Doug Martin, chief brand officer for General Mills and in 2013 associate director of Cheerios brand marketing. “With kids, the most important thing is getting the right actor, and this girl (Colbert) just blew everyone away, so we chose the kid first. With kids, sometimes you get a kid that’s one way off camera and on camera you get something totally different, so getting the right kid is key. And Gracie, she’s biracial, so then we went about casting adult actors that would be a match for her."
Also turns out that her parents mirror the races for the mom and dad in the commercial.
Finally, a note on the left's "desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities". It seems to me that if anyone should be concerned about their racial group "disappearing", it should be black Americans given their numerical disadvantage. If the black-white interracial marriage rate were to significantly increase, we would see a corresponding decrease in people who look "black", even by American standards. The best recent example I can think of Isaiah Hartenstein. No one would ever mistake him as anything other than white, just like no one would would ever mistake his father as anything other than black. Black Americans already have an average of 20% European admixture, so generationally, it wouldn't even take that long. Is this the answer to all our racial woes?
All this makes me wonder if the conversation we're having here is being played out on other forums except it's black women discussing how they're often cast alongside a white man love interest.
Recursive_Enlightenment
3d ago
Putting a 77-year-old in prison unjustly (if that is indeed what is being attempted) is on par with assassinating him.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
I think that’s plausible, but not because of the revelations here.
Check out page 8. The government concedes that they were inconsistent because the order within boxes changed. Nothing else. They insist that the only other change to contents is the placeholder cards.
But nothing in the indictment, the sealing, the warrant depended on order! It was all about number of documents suspected to remain. Nothing I’ve seen in here casts doubt on that unless we assume that the boxes were made up wholesale. I’m not willing to bite that bullet.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
5d ago
The great thing about printing money here in America is that we are the USA USA USA baby! Everyone takes our dollar, they take it for oil, for oranges, for tungsten, for cars, for iphones. We print it up out of thin air and they give us real goods for it every day.
The higher the trade deficit the more they are getting ripped off by exchanging real goods for dollars. Even with all the printing we are still experiencing a strong dollar and less inflation compared to other countries that don't have the backing of the US economy and 11 carrier strike groups.
Look at any currency vs the US dollar over the last 4 years. The dollar is as strong as it has ever been. MMT is a brilliant scheme for extracting real material and goods from the rest of the world in exchange for protection and promises. It is crazy that we get away with it! USA USA USA!
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.
This is a tendentious presentation imo. Politico presents this as:
Smith’s team revealed in the filing that FBI agents carried printed “classified cover sheets” during the Aug. 8, 2022, search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and used them to replace any classified documents they discovered in cardboard Bankers Boxes that littered the former president’s residence.
“The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” the prosecutors wrote.
“Any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents — they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added,” Smith’s team wrote. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
I think it's reasonable to put cover sheets on the classified documents, given they are classified. The documents would have already had classification markings, so I don't see how this is "willfully misleading" the public "into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security".
It turns out that when the government alleged that Trump had classified documents he was not supposed to have, the government itself did not accurately know which documents Trump had, or which documents Trump was even supposed to have. Actually, worse than that, it turns out they fabricated some or all of the accusations
"Some or all", here, seems unjustified - I don't think anyone (other than perhaps Trump on Twitter) is claiming the accusations are all fake - that's a much stronger claim than "the documents aren't in the same order that they were when we scanned them". Your sources imply this is like "tampering" with evidence, and it may (not sure) be a procedural issue, but things like "adding cover sheets" and "reordering documents" don't undermine the claim that Trump committed a crime.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Could American social progressivism be (in part) an intelligence operation to create “defense-in-depth” against America’s weak points, akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy?
In cybersecurity, valuable assets are hyper-protected with multiple layers of security, so that if any layer fails the others may still hold. The idea being that the assets are so important to defend and attacks could come at any time (and with novel stratagem), so it is reasonable to over-defend it in many different ways. In the military usage, layers of physical defense are established so that one may retreat into another defense upon an assault, ensuring reduced losses and longer periods of defending. Another somewhat ancillary idea is “fencing the Torah” in Judaism. It is so important not to violate a Torah prohibition that “fences” are established to make even the chance violation impossible. Eg, the the rule to not even pick up a tool lest you accidentally use it which would violate the sabbath prohibition.
America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines. In order to hyper-defend from that risk, you implement a social operation involving defense-in-depth where the majority constituents must necessarily deny their own identity and engage in ritual ”sacrifices” upon the altar of plurality (from Trayvon to George Floyd). This explains even the whitification of Asians: once they become significant enough to possibly lead to Balkan problems, you enforce the same depotentiation. Notably, it is not enough of a social defense to merely pledge allegiance to plurality, as that hardly changes someone’s psychology. You must actually make it a social ideal so that it is promoted and normalized especially among the young potential rebels, and that is in fact what we see — those most at risk for any potential rebellion are coerced into a Kaczynskian “system’s neatest trick” procedure where their very rebellion helps to solidify state security. Why allow “Antifa” their own zone in Portland? Because when they are doing that they are doing nothing serious. Along the same lines, see how valuable transgenders have been as a layer of defense: millions of conservatives hours are spent arguing against something that has a surprising level of state support, and millions of progressive hours are spent defending something that is historically and intuitively off-putting. Those are hours that are not spent on something actually valuable; transgender stuff is simply the most outer layer of defense against a possible Balkan threat, and if conservatives win there’s nothing valuable lost from a state security perspective.
As outlandish as it seems, I think this is possible. It would be par for the course for how intel agencies behaved historically — well before they had enormous databases of information and AI to help them decide state hyper-protection. We could imagine the team of hundreds of some thousands employed toward this objective at some intel agency: “how do we protect against the most cataclysmic threat for America?” They look at the cost and benefit with history in mind, with WWII’s staggering death toll and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in mind.
Well it is make believe to start. How would you react to being asked why the 3 little pigs were a not solution to societal ills?
Also the countries that have tried that are all total shitholes. Been to a theocracy lately? Not great.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2d ago
I don't want left leaning posts. I want rational posts!!!! I want hot takes on current events from a reasonable and objective body of smart people. Not this partisan shit. It just makes me upset and mad at what it could have been, and what it has been when in full form. I occasionally have been able to come on here and the former sub for some of the smartest and most informative information available anywhere on the planet.
Maybe the news is too slow now and it is impacting the quality of the posts, maybe it is ideological drift or capture, all I know is I'm not getting the discourse I would expect from a forum that perhaps I saw as a more august body than it was.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
I agree that the reordering reflects badly on both the FBI and the prosecution. I agree that it should reduce their credibility, and that we should be skeptical of anything they say, checking it against actual evidence. Fortunately, we have actual evidence reviewed by a third party—the scans which revealed this inconsistency.
The change between those scans (taken in late ‘22) and today does not affect the substance of the case. A change before those scans could, but I haven’t seen anyone with actual skin in the game make that allegation.
Who have you seen propose this “chronological order” defense? Perhaps Trump’s counsel? Because I don’t think they’re disputing the authenticity of the special master scans.
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
Remember how many times progressives on social media were wrong about Russia, and about Trump's legal woes in general? I think you're doing the same thing in reverse here. What the government's alleged to have done is very minor, but a lot of the words look like the words you'd use in a major situation, so it's blown up into a big deal.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
You are not being honest when you say Trump tanked the bill.
If you're going to accuse me of lying, please don't strawman me. I never claimed there was no opposition to the bill before Trump came out against it. But whatever prospects the bill had, died when he did.
It’s far better to expose the immigration issue and pass a clean bill after the election.
This is just the double-or-nothing idea I mentioned in my post. Throwing away the biggest win on immigration in a generation, and instead banking on winning the Presidency AND the Senate AND the House AND hoping Trump actually cares about the issue enough to pass actual legislation instead of just trying EOs. Surely the last time he had a trifecta and passed no major legislation on immigration was just a fluke, right? Surely he won't be distracted by settling scores and getting revenge on his perceived enemies, right? And even if all that happens, hoping that Trump is tactful enough to actually do a (supposedly) extreme immigration bill without the Democrats freaking out and repealing it the minute they come into power.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
5d ago
The provisions that Republicans want are temporary. The provisions that Democrats want are forever.
All of the provisions that the Democrats received were minor, and they were (as far as I can tell) all temporary, either because they directly expired like the 50K more legal immigrants for 5 years, or because they were minor carveouts in the things Republicans wanted which would expire themselves.
The bill hands Democrats exactly what they want, and enshrines a permanent increase in "legal" unrestricted immigration forever.
Blatantly false. The increase in legal immigration had an expiration date of 5 years. Check the bill summary or even the full text if you think I'm wrong.
Democrats have been calling for years to have an asylum "express lane" where even if the conditions are stricter on paper, anyone coached to tell the right lies will breeze right through the process to a "legal" path to permanent residency and citizenship.
This is what's basically happened in the status quo with Catch and Release, something that the bill would have ended.
yellowgreenred
7hr ago
Watch an NFL game this fall.
I'll pass.
I don't think most people dispute that there is probably a higher proportion of interracial couples in commercials than there are IRL, but that doesn't mean interracial relationships are an oddity. They're normal, in both a biological sense and as a reflection of what you'd see in cities and towns across the US, so why not portray them and tick your diversity box?
Also, part of the point I was trying to make, and as @Steferri says below, is that the black man-white woman pairing tends to stick out but that doesn't mean it's nearly as prevalent as people assumed in last month's post. Of the two dozen movies in my post, Somebody I Used to Know is the clearest example of BM/WM, but it'll probably stay in your mind over other movies because Alison Brie stars as the white woman.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
“Have you stopped beating your wife?”
I’d say the Stormy Daniels prosecution is probably unjust in that it wouldn’t be happening but for Trump’s political status. Low confidence.
The classified documents, on the other hand? Nothing I’ve seen suggests that Trump was innocent, or that a random citizen could get away with doing the same thing. While I was surprised that it escalated to a trial, I don’t think it’s unjust.
Recursive_Enlightenment
3d ago
What they are openly trying to do to Trump is as bad as an assassination attempt, is my point.
2rafa
3d ago
One, illegally allow in tens of millions of people into the United States; two, trick the (hopefully) absolute morons in the GOP to pass a "compromise bill" which allows a hostile administration to staff a army of bureaucrats which can more quickly adjudicate asylum claims under a "more strict" standard (it's really not) than one which could be adopted by executive fiat and then quickly stamp "approved" on large percentages of the illegally released people who now get automatic work permits. And it would have worked if it wasn't for that stupid Trump who is just so bad, doesn't care about immigration or the country, and opposes it because he just doesn't want Biden to get a win. And thank God for that
Literally none of this matters.
-
Almost all illegals are eventually released or make it into the interior. That was true even with Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy because there is no wall and Trump is no closer to getting Congress to build one than he was this time in 2016. That is to say even migrants turned back eventually make it into the interior, where they’re never deported unless they commit serious violent crime and ICE arrests and deports them which of course only happens to a tiny minority of illegals migrants, and even in those cases most return illegally.
-
Because of 1 (a fundamental issue which, again, Trump has zero realistic plan to fix), the only difference between handing every migrant a green card (or, hell a passport) and not doing so is one generation. Every child of every single illegal migrant in the US born on US soil is a full citizen of the United States. That’s the trick with ‘amnesty’; it means nothing, because the demographic impact is guaranteed in any case. Birthright citizenship is the ultimate incentive for illegal immigration. Talk about “work permits” is hilarious; their sons and daughters have the same rights and privileges as you.
So, yeah. The only two things that would do “more” than this bill would be a meaningful end to most illegal inflows (impossible without transnational coast to coast impenetrable wall, and even then asylum seekers could just come legally and overstay visas if they could get them) and an end to birthright citizenship (almost certainly impossible without constitutional amendment). So this magic alternative to this bill (which again, would allow a GOP administration to take minor incremental steps to somewhat reduce inflows) does not exist. There is no plan, there never was, and Trump killed it because he didn’t want to give Biden what he felt was some kind of ‘win’, whatever the cost.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
4d ago
I think the Trump strategy is to gamble everything on a big win in the upcoming elections.
I addressed this in my paragraph before the last section. Not only does Trump need to win, he'd almost certainly need a trifecta. The odds of this are somewhere between 20-50% based on prediction markets, and any bill they'd be able to clinch would likely only be 10-20% more conservative in the best plausible outcomes. Then, it'd have to pass the final hurdle of Trump actually caring enough to do it. He didn't accomplish any major legislation on the issue even when he had a trifecta and instead focused on other priorities and only did EO's on immigration.
In terms of getting an enduring compromise, it'd almost certainly be easier if they started with this bill, and then just extended it, possibly adding to it slightly if possible. "Hey, remember that bipartisan immigration bill that fixed the border crisis? Let's just extend that" is a pretty easy sell. Even if Trump gets his trifecta and wanted to pass immigration reform, if history is any guide then Trump would screw it up in the long term by doing something like calling it the Subhuman Infestation Removal Act, Democrats would freak out, and they'd revoke it the next time they're in power.
You call his decision self-serving, but from a game theory perspective that's the whole point.
Sure, I understand why Trump is doing it. What I don't like is that the Republican base is just going along with it. They're so enamored with Trump's vibes that they're willing to sacrifice easy, concrete policy wins.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I don't know that any of these are great examples. Let's approach them individually:
Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act
It's a bit academic, but it should be noted that the EEOC doesn't actually have Title VII rulemaking authority. The "rules" they promulgate are merely interpretive documents that inform businesses on how to comply and inform courts on the agency's interpretation. The courts themselves are only bound to follow EEOC guidance if it's "reasonable". Now, there are decisions out there that say that courts can't just wave these away and should give the agency deference, so there's a pretty big hurdle to overcome if you want to go against this guidance, and it gets pretty complicated here, but suffice it to say that courts aren't bound by these rules the same as they would if they were promulgated by an agency that actually had rulemaking authority. It should also be noted that the EEOC still has to follow the APA when it comes to procedural matters in promulgation (like notice and comment), so this lack of authority doesn't exactly make it easy for them to run wild.
As far as the actual rule is concerned, it's hard to say from a Republican perspective what the EEOC should have actually done. Saying outright that the law didn't apply to abortion would have created a situation where the EEOC guidance was directly at-odds with any reasonable canon of legislative interpretation; I don't think any textualist could argue with a straight face that abortions aren't pregnancy-related. Saying nothing about the matter isn't an option either. Since they're still bound by the APA, they have to address the comments they received, and they received plenty of comments about abortion. And even if they could have just omitted the abortion section, all that really does is kick the can down the road for when a court actually has to decide the matter, and it's unlikely that any but the staunchest anti-abortion judge would rule that abortions aren't related to pregnancy.
But that's all irrelevant because it's unlikely that this rule (or lack thereof) would ever result in litigation. The rules pretty clearly state that the effect of this guidance is that an employer is required to give a woman leave (paid or unpaid) to receive an abortion. While this seems like raw culture war bait, the reality is that, excepting for circumstances where someone is trying to rub it in an employer's face, no one is specifically asking for time off to get an abortion. I've personally never had an employer ask about the nature of any medical procedure I've taken time off to get, or had them ask me which doctor I was going to, and if a doctor's excuse is required, I doubt many employers are going to do internet research to determine if this is a doctor who exclusively performs abortions. Employers generally aren't allowed to ask employees about medical conditions that aren't work-related, except to verify leave, although as long as a doctor confirms that the absence is for a medical reason they can't really inquire further. And I doubt they would, since hunting for people who are getting abortions means, practically speaking, that they'd have to investigate every employee's medical leave, which I doubt any really want to do. There may be some unlikely confluence of factors where this could become a real issue, but I doubt it. Most women seeking abortions aren't going to tell their employers that they need time off specifically to get one.
If Republicans felt that strongly of this, they would have sought to get specific language into the bill. They didn't, and complaining about this is just them getting hoisted by their own petard given the electoral consequences involved.
FFLs When the entire point of specific statutory language is to expand a definition, you can't complain too loudly when that definition gets expanded. If you had sole rulemaking authority with regards to this, how would you expand the definition to conform with the new law without simply restating the old definition? I'm sure you can think of a dozen ways that this could be done, but that's beside the point. The point is that someone has to come up with these definitions and they have to conform with the statutory language without being overbroad. But that's tricky. The problem here is that there are two basic categories that are uncontroversial. One is the people who are actually running gun stores who need FFLs for legitimate business purposes. The other is people who simply have a gun they don't want anymore and want to sell it. But there's a third category of people we've talked about before who the government really doesn't like — people who want to sell guns part-time or as a hobby. You mentioned in a previous post how the ATF no longer will issue FFLs for hobbyists. You can disagree with that stance all you want, but it seems to me that Congress agrees with that and that was the specific intent behind the change in language. Now it's up to the ATF to flesh out that definition to cover the myriad circumstances in which someone might be selling guns "for profit". And that's hard! The problem as I see it doesn't stem so much from the law itself or ATF's interpretation of it but that there is a group of people for whom any further restrictions on gun sales is bad and needs to be stopped. They simply aren't arguing that the law was a good idea but ATF bungled the implementation; they're arguing that the law was a bad idea to begin with and using the ATF's interpretation as proof. But those are two separate arguments.
FACE Act It's telling that this law has only become controversial in recent years, after the Biden Administration used it aggressively in the wake of Dobbs. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the fact that it was never used in cases of church vandalism was never an issue. At least not enough of an issue for 2 Republican presidents to invoke it in 12 years, one of whom was devoutly religious and the other of whom was devoutly into culture warring. It's also telling that the act also allows for private enforcement via a civil cause of action that few parties seem bothered to sue under. That being said, anti-abortion protestors necessarily do most of their work when the place is open and in full view of the public. Most of the church vandalism was done at night by people who actually disguised themselves. One type of crime is much easier to investigate than the other.
Of course, that doesn't really apply to the Nota case, because the perpetrator was caught in the act. But it doesn't compare to the Houck case, at least if you actually look at the procedural posture. The information in the Nota case was filed the day before the plea was entered. This itself was several months after the incident. What this suggests was that this was already a done deal by the time it was even on the court's docket; for all we know, the prosecutor could have threatened to throw the book at Nota before offering a misdemeanor charge and a sentencing recommendation as a lifeline. Houck, on the other hand, was found not guilty by a jury. For all we know he could have been offered the same deal as Nota but turned it down; I'd be surprised to say the least, if there was no deal offered at all.
Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things. I'm to the right of most of my social circle but I'm to the left of whatever this place is turning into. People just get sick of getting downvoted and unable to post in real time, eventually they say something rude and get banned or they say "fuck it" and leave.
When the conversation turns to being worried about trump picking his VP based on possible assassination, putting guns in holes as a generational family gun stash in your back yard, "powers that be" conspiring to eliminate people like you, heavily downvoting someone pointing out having sex with blackout drunk people is probably wrong, being afraid to leave your red state for fear of being locked up for defending yourself, practicing religion harder being the only answer to societal ills, women only being truly happy barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen....I mean the parody starts to write itself at some point.
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