Rov_Scam
2mo ago
If the Trump–Russia allegations were limited to Manafort and only Manafort, then you might have an argument. But there were several more people in Trump's circle who were indicted in connection with the Mueller investigation, and several more who were implicated due to having ties with Russia but committed no actual crimes. There ended up not being any fire, but there sure was a lot of smoke; it's certainly unusual for so many people in a presidential campaign to have connections to a country the US isn't exactly on great terms with. Combine that with Trump making statements about Russia that weren't exactly in line with what anyone on either side of the political aisle was saying at the time, and suspicion is understandable. If there were evidence that the conduct in question went beyond Sun and deeper into the Governor's office, I would expect there to be an investigation.
otherwise, frankly, I would have to chalk such a position up to pure partisanship.
I don't think Democrats have any qualms about hanging even more shit on Andrew Cuomo.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
They don't need to be spread out over the city, necessarily. The number of homeless in Allegheny County has halved in the past 15 years, but the problem is much more salient now than it was then. In 2009 there were certainly bums on the streets but most of the actual encampments were in the interstitial places that nobody sees or even thinks about. You had to go out of your way to find them, and into places that nobody had any reason to go. In the past few years they have taken up residence along our riverfront bike trails, including the GAP, which is a major attraction. People complain about being harassed and having to dodge needles and stray dogs. If the city would simply dismantle two encampments (which are tiny compared to what I read about in other cities) and keep the trails clear, the bums will eventually go back to the places that draw the least attention. The local news isn't going to do a story involving citizen complaints about a homeless encampment on an abandoned triangle of land between a rail yard and a highway embankment.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I would add that a disturbing number of the so-called "solutions" suggested in that thread involved imposing additional burdens on women that they would never tolerate themselves. These people would never tolerate a society where men were the ones required to make all the sacrifices. Suppose the tradeoff was that the woman bears all the physical risk of bearing the child, and in exchange the man gives up his career, financial independence, and political rights to become a full-time caregiver? And they should also be more willing to date low status women as well. You don't want to support five kids in the salary of an obese trailer trash hairdresser? Well, your only other option is to live with your parents and push a cash register until they're old enough that you need to stay home and change their diapers. If that were the necessary tradeoff for solving the "fertility crisis", I imagine that fertility rates would suddenly seem unimportant.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
The meal schedule would probably make things worse, though,. especially given Trump's known predilection for fast food. When your diet consists solely of restaurant meals and catered events, it generally isn't as healthy as if you were eating at home, even for wealthy people like Trump.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Traditional welfare benefits are already unavailable for people without children,nat least in the United States.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Chinese dumping of steel isn't a problem in the slightest. In 2017, the last full year before the Trump tariffs, the volume of Chinese steel importiwas so low I can't even find statistics for it; it was outside the top ten, lower than countries like Turkey and Taiwan that no one seems too concerned about. I imagine that the number is even lower now. We currently only import about a quarter of our steel the number one supplier being Canada by far, and number two being Mexico, neither of whom are subject to tariffs.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
The reason the hammer and sickle doesn't draw the same level of opprobrium as the swastika is the same reason anything associated with the Ottomans, or the Mongols,.or the Huns, or the Sudanese, or any other murderous regime doesn't either. There's a tacit understanding that this kind of behavior is historically common and continues to be common until a civilization reaches a certain level of development. Russia had always been a backwater so it was easy to dismiss Stalin as a thug, and most other Communist countries were even further behind economically, culturally, scientifically, and socially. Germany, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced countries in Europe, and had been viewed as such for a long time. The Holocaust wasn't the same kind of mass butchery that had always existed; it was a high-tech process optimized for efficiency with every detail down to the amount of gold extracted from dental fillings meticulously recorded, perpetrated by an army of bureaucrats in business suits and a leader who had been popularly elected. The idea that "progress" could lead to something like that was terrifying.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Before when go any further, what do you mean by "inability to audit"? The last I checked all but 6 states had audit provisions. If you want to make that argument, fine, but you have to apply it to all states equally, so unless you can tell me what it is in particular about Texas's audit procedures that make it better than Pennsylvania, I'll have to assume that Trump only won Texas due to fraud, no? I'd like to respond to your other points as well but I need this cleared up first.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
only the most elite cyclists ever have any business going on the highway.
Honestly, highways are much safer for cycling than a lot of main roads. They tend to have wide shoulders and long sightlines, making it easier to stay out of traffic and maintain visibility. Main roads often have limited room on the side and blind curves that can send motorists a little over the edge; add in traffic and it can be pretty nerve wracking. Even country roads can be bad, because people fly on them without regard for other traffic, let alone bicycles.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Forester's intransigence was, in my opinion, largely an effect of his own political experience. He had been riding for 25+ years at the time the '70s bike boom started, and prior to that period there were so few cyclists on the streets that no one really gave them a second thought. He'd been doing it for so long that he was comfortable and developed his own set of best practices. When the bike boom cause the number of cyclists to swell, motorists started getting irritated, and their superior numbers led to local governments installing bike lanes and forcing cyclists to use them when available. Forester didn't view this as an accommodation but as a statement by government that he was a second-class citizen. I don't know what these '70s bike lanes were like, but I'll give Forester the benefit of the doubt here and assume there were safety problems with them that don't apply to contemporary designs. He fought back against this and got enough grassroots political power to convince local governments that vehicular cycling was better than dedicated infrastructure.
His advice is generally good for when it come to how to behave when riding on urban streets. But it really only works for the kind of person who isn't intimidated by riding on urban streets, i.e., an experienced rider who has both the equipment and fitness to maintain 20 mph and isn't intimidated by aggressive drivers. But it isn't going to convince casual riders to bike rather than drive. Luckily no one pays attention to him anymore because most cyclists weren't around for the California Bike Wars, don't know or care about the politics behind them, and instinctively feel safer when protected from traffic.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
That left, who speaks and acts with capricious concern for constitution and law, have spent most of the last decade giving every indication they would steal an election if necessary, and you are calling them a unique kind of liar.
Really? I've been among mainstream lefties my entire life and I've never once heard anyone say that elections should be stolen if necessary, whether from personal acquaintances or any mainstream media or political figures. Of course, you never claimed that they said as much, only that they gave indications that they believe it, which is whatever you subjectively interpret that to mean. Anyway the sum total of your case is as follows: 1. Leftists gave "indications" that they were willing to steal an election. 2. Democratic politicians had fraud machines in major cities 60+ years ago. 3. They couldn't overshoot their fraud or they'd get caught, 4. Big coordinated secret campaigns have happened before.
What you haven't presented is any real allegation, let alone real evidence. Give me a name or names and describe something specific that they did and how it affected the vote totals. Then provide some kind of evidence, whether documentary or testimonial. If Trump were to have won the 2020 election I'm sure I could have come up with just as many broad, vague, unprovable allegations as to why the Republicans rigged the election, were I so inclined. Give me something like "The Bubb County Judge of Elections commandeered 1500 mail-in ballots that the postal service returned to his office as undeliverable and marked them for Biden. As evidence of this we have copies of the ballots themselves, which all have signatures which an expert concludes are from the same pen, and email from the judge to his secretary telling her to hold onto any returned ballots, the testimony of the secretary stating that the judge instructed her to put the ballots into the office safe, and testimony from the assistant judge saying that he wanted to consult with the county solicitor on the matter of what to do with the ballots but the judge told him not to worry about it. This would create a strong, though not dispositive, case of fraud.
As for arguments from complexity, I wrote on this about a month ago. American history has immediate examples of conspiracies involving very large numbers of actors who never came forward.
One thing all those have in common is thousands upon thousands of pages of documentary evidence. There's no way you're running a complex fraud operation across five states involving hundreds of local boards of election and doing it all with in-person meetings that wouldn't arouse anyone's suspicion. What makes you think the people counting the ballots are all ideologically motivated to the point where they'd be willing to commit felonies? Seriously, if your employer asked you to commit a felony for ideological reasons and promised that you'd totally get away with it, would you do it? I know people who actually counted ballots in Allegheny County. They're county employees who don't make a lot of money. They also hate doing it and look for any excuse to do their regular jobs on election day (one supervisor described the tedium of testing thousands of voting machines as they moved them out of storage). Even if you assume they were all paid off, that amount pales in comparison with how much money they'd make if they were able to present a credible case of electoral fraud. It wouldn't even be that hard to prove either since you'd have to hold huge training sessions with handouts and Power Point slides. I know you're going to come back at me with some supposition on how they destroyed the evidence and how every employee in Allegheny County is a Democrat and whatever but unless you can actually prove any of this, I don't want to hear it. Just show some real evidence or quit making the allegation.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
It didn't. The transatlantic accent was based on British RP, which doesn't have an aspirated "wh".
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
His advantage in the 2016 debates stemmed from his approach being so unconventional that the audience found it exhilarating, and the other participants were so flummoxed by anyone not being appalled by it that they didn't know how to effectively respond. By 2020 his schtick had worn thin, and Biden knew what he was up against.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I hate to be pedantic but Bryson DeChambeau is not a PGA star. He's a former PGA Tour star, and possibly a LIV Golf star, if you're of the opinion that LIV Golf actually has stars.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Santorum's political career is an interesting case study. Everyone forgets this, but when he was in the House he represented a district that was heavily Democratic and waged his first Senate campaign as the prototypical "compassionate conservative" who would look critically at the budget but still try to accommodate social services spending. At the very least, he always shied away from the "up by your bootstraps" mentality that characterized a lot of the Reagan right in those days. As such, he was a rising young star who had bipartisan support. His first term was relatively uneventful, and he cruised to victory in a totally unmemorable campaign that was nonetheless closer than it probably should have been. He was popular enough in PA but had no national profile. He decided to rectify this during the Bush administration by going hard in the direction of the religious right. This decision absolutely boggles the mind. Maybe things looked different in 2001 or 2002, but those guys generally don't win presidential primaries, let alone general elections. He couldn't even keep his Senate seat, losing to Bob Casey, who even back then always looked like he was about to fall asleep.
As far as him being unlikable in person is concerned — I'm from the same neck of the woods as him and I never heard that. That being said, most of his interactions around here are from the '90s, when he was "your local elected official" as opposed to after 2000, when he was "national political celebrity". Part of the reason people may view him as unlikable may be that he turned into a caricature of himself at some point and couldn't turn it off. Maybe the lone attendee of his 2016 rally during the Iowa Caucuses can shed some light on this.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
One of the things I find most irritating about these "Voter integrity" narratives is that they operate on the assumption that states have crappy systems while the people making the arguments have no idea what the systems actually are. I can't speak for what Virginia's laws were like before Youngkin, but the fact that only "tens of thousands" of voter's were purged after his directive suggests that things were actually running like they were supposed to. I live in Pennsylvania, a state that's often accused of shenanigans and was in fact so accused earlier in this very thread, and they purged nearly 300,000 voters from the rolls in 2020. There was nothing unusual about this because they "purge" a similar number every year because that's how many people die or move away every year. While I wouldn't expect some rando on the internet to know that, I would expect a gubernatorial candidate to know that before he says the state of the PA voter rolls is so messed up we need to do a total purge and require everyone to re-register. OF course, it's easy to keep track of people who move out of state if you're part of a multi-state system that keeps track of these things. Youngkin, however, decided to remove Virginia from the ERIC system, following the lead of other Republican-led states who were convinced by conspiracy theories about it being some evil Democrat vote rigging scheme. How these states plan on eliminating those who move elsewhere from the voter roles is currently anyone's guess, but election deniers would prefer to ignore that.
To further prevent fraud, they will only allow paper ballots, and the machines that count the ballots will be tested and not connected to the internet.
Again, Pennsylvania was doing this before 2020. Voting machines were never connected to the internet. I'm unaware of any jurisdiction that hasn't tested voting machines before an election, at least in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
And all dropboxes will be monitored 24/7.
I highly doubt this is the case. The most obvious concern about dropboxes is that someone could break into them and destroy the votes. This is not something I've heard the election deniers express any concern over. Instead, they express vague fears that the dropboxes will enable ballot harvesting that is somehow a vector for MASSIVE FRAUD. They might have an argument if the only place to cast these ballots were the dropboxes, but these are mail ballots. Every mailbox in the state is a potential ballot dropbox. If someone is going to ballot harvest they can just put them in a mailbox on the street, or mail them from their house for that matter. I doubt Youngkin is posting monitors at all public mailboxes, let alone monitoring households and businesses.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
One of the things I find most irritating about gish gallop election fraud claims is the way they breathlessley move between theories that assume the theft of the 2020 election was something that Democrats had been planning for months and that it was something that was done at the last minute after they realized Trump was going to win. Somehow, your post seems to capture both of these sentiments simultaneously — the PA Department of State is planning on rigging the election, but it's apparently impossible for them to do so without a couple extra days on the back end. How this is supposed to work is beyond me.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
"Food grade" means it has to be manufactured in a food grade facility, which means stricter production standards have to be followed. If people aren't eating it you don't have to put as many protocols in place to prevent contamination.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I addressed the mirage of this decision only applying to Allegheny and Philadelphia counties below. As to the severability question, any severability or non-severability clause in a statute is going to be ignored by courts. This has been true for a long time, in every jurisdiction. Courts in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have all but completely invalidated these clauses. If this seems sophistic to you, there are legitimate public policy reasons for the courts' stance. Consider the following: Congress passes a law with several provisions that are clearly, unequivocally, unconstitutional. The law also includes a provision saying that if any part of the law is ruled unconstitutional than every law passed by congress since 1890 is unconstitutional as well; the ultimate non-severability provision. I don't think we disagree that it would be ridiculous for a court to uphold such a provision. Now lets consider a less dramatic and perhaps more on-point example. Suppose the PA election law that was at issue here was part of a comprehensive electoral reform bill that completely replaced all prior election law, which was repealed in a separate bill. The new law includes a non-severability provision. Should any successful challenge result in the complete scrapping of an entire state's election laws? If there are clearly unconstitutional provisions in that law, should the courts be forced to either let them stand or concede total electoral chaos? There's obviously a line here somewhere, and the courts have repeatedly ruled that the only way to determine where it is is on a case-by-case basis. They strike down entire laws only when it's clear that the problematic provisions are essential to the law itself. They aren't going to let legislatures poison pill their way into keeping unconstitutional laws on their books.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
Short answer: They didn't. The declaratory judgment invalidating the strict dating provisions as unconstitutional applies to all 67 counties.
Long answer: The plaintiffs only sued Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties. Since those counties declined to defend the suit, the Republicans (the RNC and the PA equivalent) intervened as defendants. They then filed a motion to dismiss on the basis that the plaintiffs failed to join all necessary parties. Civil procedure requires that certain "indispensable" parties be joined in a lawsuit. Typically this is for stuff like contracts involving multiple parties or property with multiple owners, where the court needs to sort out what everyone's rights and obligations are. The defendant intervenors argues that since any declaratory relief would apply to all 67 counties, the plaintiffs should have joined the other 65. The court didn't buy this argument; the plaintiffs said that the reason they only sued 2 counties is because those were the only counties where they had knowledge that voters were being harmed by the dating provisions. If the court had dismissed the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs hadn't joined all necessary parties, the plaintiffs would have refiled the next day naming all 67 counties as defendants. At that point, the 65 counties who weren't sued the first time would have moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, and the court would have been forced to grant those motions. The court didn't say this in so many words, but suffice it to say that if a court knows that an action against a party won't survive a motion to dismiss, they're loathe to find that party "indispensable" to the proceeding, especially if there are 65 such parties. The court can't issue injunctions against non-parties, so injunctive relief was only granted against Philadelphia and Allegheny counties by virtue of them being the only named defendants. The technical distinction is that they've been specifically ordered to stop something they were already doing. We officially don't know if the other counties were doing anything offensive to the state constitution or not, but the declaratory judgment clearly delineates what they aren't allowed to do in the future. Pinging @urquan since his comment touches on these issues.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
If I'm picturing the streets he's describing correctly they're the kind of one way parking on both sides narrow ass streets that a car would struggle to keep up with a cyclist on because going faster than 10 puts you at serious risk of clipping a mirror.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
This only really has a chance of working if sidewalks are set up like roads, where you have dedicated directional lanes of traffic and no arbitrary stopping. Sidewalks aren't like this; people walk where they want to, stop to chat with friends, loiter, look at restaurant menus, etc. Plus they can be filled with lots of other obstacles like garbage cans, mailboxes, outdoor seating, benches, grocer's displays, etc. There's also the problem that the traffic imbalance is reversed. On roads there's a lot of high speed traffic (cars) and a small amount of low speed traffic (bicycles). High speed operators may have to occasionally accommodate bikes, but it's a relatively small amount of time. On sidewalks you have little high speed traffic (bikes) but a lot of low speed traffic (pedestrians). Every cyclist would be constantly swerving or slowing to accommodate pedestrians. Riding on the sidewalk isn't bad in areas with low pedestrian traffic, but in business districts it's a nightmare.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
It's hard for me to see how the Trump assassination attempt could have stayed in the news longer than it did. Two things that keep stories in the news are mystery, and continuing developments. There was no mystery as to the identity of the shooter, and the continuing developments were naturally limited. With a murder, there's an announcement, a police investigation, a suspect identified, an arrest, hearings, a trial, appeals, etc. With a missing persons case, like Natalee Holloway or the plane that disappeared, there's endless speculation on what may have happened, as well as updates from the continuing investigation. With this, there was nothing. The shooter was dead, and we didn't learn anything interesting about him other than that he lived a few blocks from where my grandparents lived (which was only of interest to people from the area). After a couple days we learned nothing interesting about the shooter, and nothing of note happened other than the announcement of the House investigation and some remarks by the various law enforcement agencies blaming each other (I probably heard more of this than most because local police talked to the news in Pittsburgh after the Secret Service threw them under the bus).
Now, it might still stay in the news if there's nothing more interesting to talk about, but two days later the GOP Convention started, kicked off by Trump's VP announcement, and that was inherently more interesting than an crime with no further developments. Then a week later Biden dropped out, and the Olympics started, and by that point it was hard to see what coverage they could have even run about the assassination without it being the kind of pointless drivel that causes people to reach for the remote.
Rov_Scam
2mo ago
I'll do @JulianRota one better — I practiced title law for about a decade and I've never seen it. In theory someone could forge the owner's signature on a deed and have it acknowledged by a rogue notary and record the deed, but this doesn't really get you anything. If the property is occupied they'd have to commence an ejectment action to get the owner out, and at this point they'd be found out. If they wanted to mortgage it or sell to a third party they'd run into guardrails the mortgage companies have in place as part of due diligence. For instance, an appraisal requires an in person inspection and the appraiser needs access to the property. The biggest guardrail, though, is that it requires the perpetrator to use his real name and commit a series of felonies that create a massive paper trail.
That being said, I was at a seminar a number of years back and heard that this was a thing in Philadelphia. The caveat, though, is that the forged deeds involved distressed properties in areas that were seeing renewed development interest. And the guy got caught anyway, because when you're selling for enough that it's worth doing, you're creating a massive paper trail. Also, these were properties where the ownership was in question (usually due to an unresolved estate) so the actual owners probably didn't even know they owned the property, or shared it with other heirs. For a normal owner-occupied residence, this kind of thing is near impossible to pull off.
If you read the entire indictment, it looks like there was a sort of quid pro quo going on. Sun's husband met with Chinese government officials who facilitated his business exporting seafood from the United States to China. They earned millions of dollars from this business, which they didn't report on tax forms and laundered into the United States through purchases of real estate and luxury cars. There were also a series of lower-level gifts like covering travel to China and giving them event tickets. In return, she was basically doing the Chinese government's bidding to the extent that her position allowed. She was regularly meeting with Chinese officials and keeping them abreast of her actions.
That's certainly a defense. But, "My actions were totally in the interest of New York State and had nothing to do with the millions of dollars my husband's business earned after meeting with Chinese government officials or the thousands of dollars of gifts and travel compensation I got and didn't include on my ethics report" may not play particularly well with a jury.
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