[barmar]

johnu, on 2019-March-15, 12:24, said:

I am strongly against any pay for admission schemes, whether in the open or not.

That's certainly a reasonable opinion to hold, as well as arguing against legacy preference.

But I still think there's a qualitative difference between preferential treatment for donors/legacies and bribery/fraud. There's also a quantitative difference: you have to donate millions of dollars to get your name on a building, the people involved in this scandal did it with just thousands.

[johnu]

More of the Christopher Steele Dossier on the Manchurian President has been confirmed as true:

Unsealed documents shed new light on efforts to verify Trump-Russia dossier

Quote

The controversial dossier had accused Russian hackers of using those companies, Webzilla and its parent company XBT, as part of their scheme to meddle in the presidential election. The memos, written by a retired British spy, Christopher Steele, also claimed that Russian entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev assisted the cyberattacks "under duress" from Russian intelligence.

Quote

The most salacious allegations in the dossier remain unverified to this day. But the claims that form the bulk of the memos have held up over time, or at least proved to be partially true.
This notably includes Steele's claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw an effort to interfere in the 2016 election. It also includes allegations of secret contacts between Trump's team and the Russians during the campaign. Steele gathered this stunning information months before the Russian meddling campaign was publicly confirmed by US intelligence agencies and in court filings from special counsel Robert Mueller.

Das Vedanya Comrade Puppet Dennsison...

[johnu]

barmar, on 2019-March-16, 10:42, said:

rential treatment for donors/legacies and bribery/fraud. There's also a quantitative difference: you have to donate millions of dollars to get your name on a building, the people involved in this scandal did it with just thousands.

In the latest scandal, parents paid bribes of $100,000 to $6.5 million to guarantee their children got into top schools, including Yale, Stanford, the University of Southern California and Georgetown.

It would seem that getting your name on a building might have been cheaper than what some of those parents illegally paid.

[barmar]

johnu, on 2019-March-16, 21:06, said:

In the latest scandal, parents paid bribes of $100,000 to $6.5 million to guarantee their children got into top schools, including Yale, Stanford, the University of Southern California and Georgetown.

It would seem that getting your name on a building might have been cheaper than what some of those parents illegally paid.

When I heard the report earlier in the week, I thought they said the bribes were mostly 5 figures, not 6-7.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Quote

David Leonhardt has an excellent column up about how, to put it bluntly, President Donald Trump incites violence by bigots:

Quote

It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.

As Leonhardt points out, it’s impossible to draw a straight causal line between Trump and any specific episode of violence. But it’s also not necessary. And, at any rate, it’s not unusual that we can’t make those kinds of specific causal connections. We can’t know, for example, if the government shutdown or the vacancy at the top of the Federal Aviation Administration directly caused the 737 Max disaster. Nor can we say with any certainty, to pick a positive example, that President Bill Clinton’s aggressive management of the bureaucracy in 1999 prevented the millennium plot from succeeding. In many cases, all we can do is tell if a president or a public policy made an outcome more likely or less likely. In this particular case, it’s not hard to determine which direction Trump is pushing things.

I’d add one more thing: Harmful rhetoric of this kind is, by itself, not really a justification for a legitimate impeachment and removal of a president. But it’s absolutely reasonable — indeed, necessary — for Congress to take it into account when assessing whether to move forward with an otherwise legitimate impeachment.

The president has sworn an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Giving comfort — and, even worse, encouragement — to political violence is a direct violation of that oath. After all, one of the core principles of the Constitution of the United States is that of the republican rule of law; one of the reasons a republic exists is to banish violence from domestic politics.

And this is true of another of Trump’s frequent themes: his attacks on the media. Some criticism of the press is perfectly normal, of course. But Trump’s rhetoric, from calling the media an “enemy of the people” to questioning whether government agencies should “look into” TV comedians attacking him, is not. It’s not necessarily an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment if Trump restricts himself to talk. It can, nevertheless, be an abuse of power and a violation of his oath to defend the Constitution.

Impeachment is always going to be a political decision, and even more so when the evidence of presidential misconduct is in the gray area where removal would be legitimate but the evidence doesn’t absolutely demand it. Indeed, many criminal indictments are, in a sense, the political choices of prosecutors faced with that same gray area, and it’s only going to be more political when the prosecutors and the grand jury are the House of Representatives, and the jury is the Senate. We don’t know where the facts will come out on (other) abuses of power and of obstruction of justice. But it sure seems to me that Trump’s repeated and ongoing attacks on democratic norms and constitutional principles should, if it’s a close call at all, push Congress toward impeachment and removal.

[y66]

Good story here about problems with the 737 Max by the aerospace reporter at The Seattle Times.

[Winstonm]

Quote

Russian President Donald Putin Vladimir Trump and Individual-1's favorite guy signed a law Monday that imposes strict fines for publishing “fake news” and online comments that show “blatant disrespect” for the state, Reuters reports. Individuals who disseminate information that officials determine to be false will be forced to pay up to $6,100 if the information sparks a “mass violation of public order.” If the information shows “blatant disrespect“ for Russia, the Kremlin, the public, or the flag, individuals can be fined up to $1,525—and can be jailed on repeat offenses. The law also allows officials to block websites that refuse to remove allegedly false information. Opponents of the law fear that it opens the door for state censorship; advocates say that it’s necessary to stem misinformation and online abuse.

What a grand idea - no doubt in the near future we will hear from Individual-1 playing to his religious base while singing Vlad's praise with How Great Thou Art.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2019-March-18, 15:59, said:

Good story here about problems with the 737 Max by the aerospace reporter at The Seattle Times.

Then there is this:

Quote

Federal authorities launched a criminal probe into how the Boeing 737 Max was “certified to fly passengers” before the plane's latest crash occurred in Ethiopia, Bloomberg reports, citing sources. The probe by the Transportation Department’s Inspector General’s office was reportedly prompted by a 737 Max crash in Indonesia in late 2017, but has since taken on a “new urgency” after the Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after take off earlier this month and killed 157 people. The Transportation Department's audits and criminal probe are reportedly working in conjunction with the Justice Department—which is also reportedly collecting information about the “development of the 737 Max” through a “grand jury subpoena.” The Transportation Dept., DOJ, and Boeing reportedly declined to comment to Bloomberg. On Sunday, the Federal Aviation Administration stated that the plane's certification “followed the FAA’s standard certification process” and the agency's process “consistently produced safe aircraft designs.”

[y66]

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic candidate, called for ending the Electoral College.

Birch Bayh, the one-man constitutional reform machine, almost succeeded in doing this 50 years ago:

Quote

But the amendment that would have had the biggest impact of all was the one he could not get passed.

Between 1966 and 1970, Senator Bayh led a vigorous national campaign to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by a direct popular vote.

He was far from the first to try. Our system of presidential electors — an antidemocratic relic of the late 18th century — has been targeted for reform or abolition roughly 700 times, more than any other part of the Constitution. No one has ever come as close to eliminating it as Mr. Bayh.

Abolition wasn’t even part of his original plan. He thought, as many people did at the time, that the Electoral College needed only a few tweaks. As chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on constitutional amendments, Mr. Bayh arranged for hearings on various reform proposals. On the first day of hearings, he rejected the idea of a national popular vote out of hand. The smaller states, which believed they benefited from their disproportionate number of electoral votes, would never go for it. “Putting it optimistically,” he said, the chances of Congress passing a popular-vote amendment were “extremely slim, if not hopeless.”

A few months later, he did a complete about-face.

In a remarkable speech on May 18, 1966, Mr. Bayh said the hearings had convinced him that the Electoral College was no longer compatible with the values of American democracy, if it had ever been. The founders who created it excluded everyone other than landowning white men from voting. But virtually every development in the two centuries since — giving the vote to African-Americans and women, switching to popular elections of senators and the establishment of the one-person-one-vote principle, to name a few — had moved the country in the opposite direction.

Adopting a direct vote for president was the “logical, realistic and proper continuation of this nation’s tradition and history — a tradition of continuous expansion of the franchise and equality in voting,” he said.

He then explained how the Electoral College was continuing to harm the country. The winner-take-all method of allocating electors — used by every state at the time, and by all but two today — doesn’t simply risk putting the popular-vote loser in the White House. It also encourages candidates to concentrate their campaigns in a small number of battleground states and ignore a vast majority of Americans. It was no way to run a modern democracy.

In short, Senator Bayh said, the president “should be elected directly by the people, for it is the people of the United States to whom he is responsible.”

The speech was galvanizing, and by 1968, his popular-vote campaign had won the support of 80 percent of the country, according to a Gallup poll — Republicans and Democrats, as well as organizations as varied as the Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters and the American Bar Association.

Then came the chaotic election of 1968, when George Wallace, the former Alabama governor and arch-segregationist, nearly managed to deadlock the vote and force Congress to pick the winner. Most people were just beginning to understand how bizarre and dangerous the Electoral College was. The prospect of an unreconstructed racist determining the presidency rightly horrified them. As the best-selling author James Michener wrote in a book advocating a switch to the popular vote, the Electoral College was a “time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation.”

In September 1969, the House voted overwhelmingly to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a direct popular vote. President Richard Nixon got onboard, and polls of state legislatures suggested strong support throughout the country. All signs pointed to another successful amendment for Mr. Bayh and a radical change in the way Americans chose their presidents. All signs but one.

As soon as the amendment reached the Senate, it was blocked by Southern segregationists, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who were well aware that the Electoral College had been created to appease the slaveholding states. They were also aware that it continued to warp the nation’s politics in their favor, since millions of black voters throughout the South were effectively disenfranchised by restrictive registration and voting laws. Even those who were able to vote rarely saw their preferences reflected by a single elector. A popular vote would make their voices equal and their votes matter — and would encourage them to turn out at higher rates.

The Southerners delayed and filibustered the amendment until it died, finally, on Sept. 29, 1970. The last attempt to end the filibuster failed by five votes.

It was a devastating loss, but Mr. Bayh didn’t give up. He continued to push his popular-vote amendment throughout the 1970s, bringing it back every couple of years, not stopping until he was swept out of office in the Reagan revolution of 1980, when he lost his seat to a young Indiana congressman named Dan Quayle.

With Mr. Bayh’s departure, the Senate lost its most devoted advocate for a national popular vote. “No one was a better legislator than he was, and he couldn’t get it done,” Jay Berman, the senator’s former chief of staff, told me. “It’s just such an empty feeling because it was so right to do. And we couldn’t do it.”

Last fall I visited Mr. Bayh at his home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, to interview him for a book I’m writing about the Electoral College and the push for a popular vote. Mr. Bayh shuffled to the door to greet me, keeping one hand on his wife, Kitty, for balance. Even stooped over, he was tall, with a full head of white hair. His handshake was frail, but I could feel the memory of a lifelong politician’s confident grip. We sat around the kitchen table, drank iced tea and talked for hours.

The oldest memories were intact. “Nobody in my family background had ever been involved in politics,” he said, recalling a childhood spent working on his grandparents’ farm in Terre Haute. “When my father found out what I was doing, I think he wondered what he’d done wrong as a parent.”

On the topic of the popular vote, he struggled to reconstruct scenes from half a century ago. But the pain of the loss was still there. If anything, it was keener, now that the Electoral College has awarded the White House to two popular-vote losers in the past two decades.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Bayh said, shaking his head. “I like to think as a country, as we grow older, we learn. It just makes such good sense.”

When I asked about the familiar charge that eliminating the Electoral College would lead to “mob rule,” Mr. Bayh brushed it off. “That, to me, is the positive end of it. Why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they be able to determine their own destiny?”

[y66]

From Supreme Court and appellate advocate Deepak Gupta:

Quote

Emoluments Clause litigation update: Last fall, I argued before the 2nd Circuit in NY on behalf of competitors of Trump's businesses. That appeal is still pending. This morning, we go before the 4th Circuit in Richmond as co-counsel to D.C. & Maryland AGs: All Eyes on Fourth Circuit Hearing in Emoluments Case

[y66]

From Vanity Fair's behind the scenes take on Annie Leibovitz's photo shoot of Beto:

Quote

I met him at the rally the next day, and was pretty much with their group through all of that. And we met again the next morning and did the cover. He was by himself. He didn’t have anyone there. I always admire that too. I was in a quandary about whether he should wear a blue shirt or something more relaxed. So when we went out there, I said, “Listen, if you’re going to run, wear the blue shirt. If you’re not going to run, let’s wear something else.” And he said, “Let’s put on the blue shirt.”

[barmar]

y66, on 2019-March-19, 06:52, said:

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic candidate, called for ending the Electoral College.

Birch Bayh, the one-man constitutional reform machine, almost succeeded in doing this 50 years ago:

There's been a movement for a few years to get around the need to amend the US Constitution for this, called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The Constitution leaves it up to each state to decide how to award their electors, it doesn't require them to do it based just on the vote in their state. The states that join this compact agree to award their electors based on the national majority, not the state majority. If states that total 270 electoral votes join, the Electoral College has effectively been abolished; it's currently up to 181 (Colorado joined last week).

But Nate Silver doesn't think it has any real prospects. Until Colorado, all the states that have joined have been blue, and there aren't enough electoral votes in all the blue states to achieve the goal. Amending the US Constitution would certainly face an even tougher challenge -- that requires a 2/3 vote of each house of Congress and ratification by 3/4 of the states.

[cherdano]

Going back to reparations, I wonder whether those in this thread who oppose it know what redlining is, and the role the federal government played in it. Or about the systemic racial bias in the GI bill.

[y66]

cherdano, on 2019-March-19, 15:02, said:

Going back to reparations, I wonder whether those in this thread who oppose it know what redlining is, and the role the federal government played in it. Or about the systemic racial bias in the GI bill.

Please stop trolling this thread. It's easy to make a compelling moral case for reparations based on what was taken from millions of black people before and after slavery was outlawed, including takings of life, liberty and opportunities to acquire wealth by acquiring and financing property. It's also easy to make a compelling case that this country was built on taking life, liberty and land from others and that reparations will never be supported by a majority of voters even if they are supported by David Brooks, to his credit as a moral person if not as a pragmatist. F**k pragmatists? No. F**k all of us if we let doomed discussions about reparations distract us from focusing on getting rid of Trump and his ilk ASAP and to whom these doomed discussions are tailor made for dividing Dems and motivating takers and haters to take and hate more.

[barmar]

If someone wants to have a serious discussion about reparations, let me know and I'll try to find all the messages here and extract them into a new thread. But it doesn't really seem to be very Trump-related (I know I was guilty of perpetuating the hijack).

I'm not sure it's worth it, it seems like the kind of topic that can be like a religious war.

[Winstonm]

I freely admit I don't know where to place the reparations discussion. It seems similar to combining this thread with the Brexit thread - there is a connection but how much, where, and with whom?

[kenberg]

I doubt I would contribute all that much to a reparations thread since I believe that I have already said my piece. At the risk of being seriously repetitious: I think it's a bad idea. It's also true that I think that it's political suicide for the Dems to back it, but part of the reason I think it is suicide is because I think it is a bad idea. We have a choice. We can see the country as one country, in which case it is easy to see that providing education and opportunity for everyone will benefit everyone, or we can see it as a collection of us versus them battles. I favor the former. In one of my first posts on this I said that I see a cash settlement as something you do when you are getting a divorce. Or breaking up a business. Paying reparations would go hand in hand with saying "That's that, don't bother us anymore, you go your way we will go ours." There are many good things that we could and should do for the future of the country, reparations isn't one of them.

I was a little torn because I didn't want to ignore Cherdano's post, but I thought that I had already said everything I had to say.

On a thread devoted to national politics, it seems like a reasonable topic for discussion, I am just out of things to say.

[johnu]

More Three-Card Monte from the Manchurian President,

Trump: Mueller report 'ridiculous' but should be released

Quote

"Let it come out, let people see it," Trump told reporters as he left the White House on Wednesday for a trip to Ohio. "Let's see whether or not it's legit."

Dennison is virtually guaranteed to have told AG Barr to not release any details of the upcoming Mueller report, and to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid having to release any of the damaging details that are sure to be in the report.

Dennison is setting up to blame Barr for not releasing any details about the Mueller report while trying to make himself look good for publicly advocating for its release. We've seen this hundreds of times from Dennison before. Do the opposite of what you are advocating no matter how obvious the lies are. Dennison is a master gaslighter for at least the 35-40% who support him no matter what. For the other 60-65% of the people, he is just a pathological liar.

[Winstonm]

I think reparations germane to the discussion as some of the democratic contenders have supported the idea - Kamala Harris comes immediately to mind.

However, the dire consequences of European expansionism were felt most severely by the American Indian tribes - and any reparation idea has to start there to get my support. Affirmative action is a type of reparation and IMO a valid attempt to correct to some degree the hideous effects of the racism that the U.S.A. has shown over the decades.

[cherdano]

y66, on 2019-March-20, 07:22, said:

Please stop trolling this thread. It's easy to make a compelling moral case for reparations based on what was taken from millions of black people before and after slavery was outlawed, including takings of life, liberty and opportunities to acquire wealth by acquiring and financing property. It's also easy to make a compelling case that this country was built on taking life, liberty and land from others and that reparations will never be supported by a majority of voters even if they are supported by David Brooks, to his credit as a moral person if not as a pragmatist. F**k pragmatists? No. F**k all of us if we let doomed discussions about reparations distract us from focusing on getting rid of Trump and his ilk ASAP and to whom these doomed discussions are tailor made for dividing Dems and motivating takers and haters to take and hate more.

Believe it or not, I wasn't trolling, I was genuinely curious.

I don't think we actually disagree on anything. I think reparations would be the right thing to do in an ideal world, but probably counter-productive in the actual world we live in, and a dangerous topic for Democratic presidential candidates.

I was just a bit surprised that no one arguing against reparations took redlining on. If the federal government for decades, and not too long ago, spent money supporting wealth-building for group A but not group B, then it would seem adequate to now spend a bit of money supporting wealth-building for group B. And (mostly - I lived in the US for 6 years and am just visiting there for a few months) from the outside, it just seems like such a no-brainer.