Rov_Scam
20hr ago
That's basically the same argument that a certain type of degrowth leftist makes. If relative wealth is all that matters, then economic development in and of itself doesn't make sense because it just increases the treadmill. The only way to improve society as a whole is through fundamentals, which would include redistributing wealth to blunt the pain of being at the low end of the economic totem pole.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
It probably wouldn't have even been that, though. French food didn't become popular in the United States until Julia Child made it so, and even then a lot of her recipes are modified based on what was available to the typical American (good luck finding pancetta in 1962). If you want an idea of what fine dining looked like during the postwar era, here's a menu from The Brown Derby in Los Angeles from 1948. You can see that it's mostly basic meat and seafood dishes. Few Americans in 2025 would be willing to pay the equivalent of $30 for what amounts to a country-fried chicken breast with gravy and consider it fine dining.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
By that logic, being the chieftain of a hunter-gatherer tribe, or an ancient Assyrian king, would be preferable to living in the modern age; in other words, any era has technological improvements that seem impressive at the time. If people in 2125 have it better than we do now, then it's preferable to live in the future. But we don't know what things will be like then. We do know what things were like in the 1950s, and just because they seemed amazing at the time, they were objectively worse on almost every metric. In 1900 it would have been a big deal to have electricity, the telephone, and the phonograph record. In 1850 it would have been a big deal to have access to cheap textiles and mass-produced farming implements. But go back to then and you get a worse standard of living than people in the poorest parts of the world have today. If you think that the standard of living for a rich man is preferably, that can be achieved for a relatively modest sum of money in today's terms.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
In the 1950s most people were making coffee with percolators, and there was no market for high-end coffee beans. Pourover Folgers is still Folgers.
Camping gear, miuntain bikes, etc, might not be as light or as good as today, but many natural areas were potentially much better in the 50s.
Mountain biking didn't start until the 1970s, and that was people racing old beach cruisers they called "clunkers" down fire roads in Marin County. There weren't any purpose-built mountain bikes until the 1980s, and these were rigid. You wouldn't get any kind of suspension until the very end of the decade, and it wasn't common until the 1990s.
Natural areas were decidedly not better in the 1950s. Especially in the East, most of what is now forest had been clear-cut prior to 1930 and there was still a lot of farmland. There was more forested area in the 1950s, but a lot of this was still in early successional stages. There was also a lot of unremediated contamination from mining and other activities. There were 44 state parks in Pennsylvania in 1956, compared to 124 today. I collect old outdoor books, and the equipment available was of a decidedly rudimentary nature. Pretty much everything aside from hunting and fishing was a specialized activity that wouldn't gain much traction until the 1970s. Whitewater, for instance, didn't really exist outside the Grand Canyon until 1964. Most first descents of whitewater streams in Pennsylvania and West Virginia were done in the late 1960s (I know some of the participants personally, although they all insist that these weren't first descents but very early descents). Back then, they found where to paddle based on looking at USGS topo maps for steams with sufficient gradient and didn't know what to expect when they got there; som traveled long distances to find streams that were unrunnable. Now anyone can go on American Whitewater and find stream information, including runnable levels.
The point of all of this is that even if some of this stuff was theoretically possible, the conceptual knowledge that allows us to enjoy it now simply didn't exist back then.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
To be clear, that wasn't an executive order. The administration announced that DOE would be pausing issuance of new permits while they reviewed the process, but there wasn't anything official that was signed by the president, unless you include an official announcement on the White House website. I have no idea whether this is something that DOE would have had to consult with the president about before doing, or how much involvement Biden had, or whether it's something his communications team decided the administration would take credit for.
I'd also mention that there's a fundamental disconnect between what oil companies want and what consumers want, and the GOP seems to regularly conflate these interests. I spent a decade in the oil and gas industry, and we are happier the higher prices are. This isn't any different from most industries. But there's political pressure to keep prices as low as possible. The policy would have the natural consequence of putting downward pressure on natural gas prices by limiting the industry's ability to export. This may have been bad for the industry but good for consumers. If increased feasibility of exports were to cause prices to quadruple, I don't think most Americans would be saying "Thank God that the oil and gas industry is doing well!"; no, they'd be bitching about high costs, as they should be. I don't even think most Americans would agree that gas prices should have some kind of floor to ensure that the industry maintains a minimum degree of profitability. I don't know whether the policy in question was any good on a fundamental level, but you can sell it either way.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Let me try to restate my argument, because I think we're talking past each other. What kind of test are you going to have and what is it going to entail? What I'm getting at is: What percentage of 11-year-olds crossing over is it going to exclude? 80%? 90% 50%? It honestly doesn't matter what number you pick, because unless you're only selecting for the top 1% you're using a test that any 14-year-old is going to be able to pass easily unless he's fat, special needs, etc. IF you're talking about a troop, where you do the full complement of scout activities and advance towards Eagle, you need a steady pipeline from Cubs, or the troop withers and dies. I've seen power struggles before where the Cubmaster loses faith in the local troop and sends the kids elsewhere, and it takes a long time for the troop to recover, if it can at all. So any troop that decides to exclude is at a disadvantage initially, even if their reputation enables them to draw from a wider geographic area.
But all you've really done is exclude for an 11-year-old with the fitness of a below average 14-year-old. And any 14-year-old who is that out of shape doesn't want to do the more difficult activities anyway. The goal of Venturing is to move away from advancement and focus on high-adventure group activities. Selecting for motivated 14-year-olds does a better job than selecting for fit 11-year-olds, and since advancement is an afterthought the group can focus on activities. I haven't seen any Venture crews who participated in my programs that included people who shouldn't have been there. I saw more 14-year-olds who could pass a fitness test but were some combination of lazy, unskilled, or petulant, while these kids never seemed to show up in Venturing. In any organization that relies on people acting locally (rather than the council-level program), some groups are going to be more active than others. I don't think creating a new kind of class is going to do anything, and in the years I spent heavily involved in Scouting and Venturing, nothing led me to believe that something like this would have any benefit.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
What you're talking about already exists. They're just called Venture Crews, and they don't have any fitness tests and are variable in how active they are. Realistically, 11 is too young for them to make that kind of choice. Even if the kid can pass some kind of test, they aren't going to keep up. My program was geared toward Venture crews and older scouts and while there were a few 12 and 13 year olds who slipped through for various reasons and invariably did fine, there's generally a pretty clear skill progression with age, and when I worked with younger kids on the side there's no way I'd want them anywhere near my program as a matter of course. If you were to try to separate these kids out right after crossing over all but a few would go to normal troops and the pipeline would dry up pretty quickly because no one wants to join a troop without their friends. Aside from the fitness test, nothing is preventing anyone from starting a troop like this as it is, but saying you want to be more active runs up against the reality that it requires active adult leaders and kids who are also willing to put in the work as far as planning is concerned. Last year I had to tag along with my old troop because a few kids wanted to get the cycling merit badge and needed a second adult to go on the 50-miler. The first adult was a 22-year-old who hung around after aging out. I hadn't been involved with the troop in 20 years. None of the dads were willing to ride 50 miles, even if the scouts were. And by the end of the ride, the kids, who were all fit and reasonably active, looked like they never wanted to sit on a bike again. I think it's easy to sit here as adults and think of what we would have like d in retrospect, forgetting that we weren't always stronger than we are now and didn't have as much tolerance for pain as we do now.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I'm an Eagle Scout, I worked for the Boy Scouts for a period of time as High Adventure Director for my local council, and I've regularly volunteered since at the council level, though my involvement over the past decade has waned and been more at the direction of others rather than of my own initiative, though I did agree to attend a meeting this Saturday evening to discuss certain things. Complaining about a program compared to what it used to be is only valid if you actually knew what it used to be like. So when you say something like:
It felt like most of the fun, exciting, interesting, vigorous or masculine things we did were things I brought to the table. Like I had to fight the program to do anything cool. The official program doesn't even call for a single one mile hike until Bear - third grade. I had those boys out and loose on every park and wild area in a 45 minute radius every month. That was the part they enjoyed and cared about. The social studies lessons in between? Boring as fuck. I'm the one who took the initiative to teach them about tracking and dangerous animals and poisonous plants. For an organization that was always styled as teaching literary Native American style woodscraft, the entire program is designed to be completed at a school playground.
For full disclosure I was a Cub Scout and Den Chief as a kid but other than that I had little involvement with Cub Scouts. As a professional, I helped out with program during special winter weekends we hosted but I never did anything beyond that, and I never served on the Cub Committee as a volunteer. But I had a lot of colleagues and friends who were involved heavily in the Cub program, some of whom continue to be involved to this day. This program was completely overhauled in the early 2010s, with changes taking effect in 2015. It is now significantly more masculine, or whatever, than the program it replaced, which was basically a continually tweaked version of what they had been doing since at least the 1950s. I checked the requirements, and yes, Bears need to do a 1-mile hike, and a 3-mile hike is part of the Webelos program. Before that it was zero.
Cub Scouts was deliberately separate from Boy Scouts, intended to be a more family-oriented program. Your parent signs off on the requirements, not someone with the Troop/Pack. The program was thus designed around things you could do at home with your family. Except different families do things differently. Some families just aren't going to go camping, or hiking, or whatever, and while there was always that opportunity at the Den or Pack level, they weren't going to make it part of the requirements. Cub Scout leadership is also more transitory than in Boy Scouts. Parents usually only participate while their kids are there, then cross over to Boy Scouts with them. It's not like with Boy Scouts where you have old Scoutmasters who can't give it up and college kids who hang around as adult leaders. Therefore, the program has to be doable by the kind of person who isn't as dedicated as a typical Boy Scout leader.
The reason for the changes was similar to the reason for the admission of girls, and the same reason that underlies the lion's share of decisions the BSA has made over the past 15 years: Numbers. The problem we had was that there was a lot of interest in the Cub program but crossover rates were in sharp decline. The idea was that if we modeled the Cub requirements as junior versions of the Boy Scout requirements it could ease with the transition. Girls were admitted because, when you're looking to increase numbers, it doesn't help to exclude 50% of the youth population. Even in my program things were liberalized a lot more than I would have expected. National Standards had a list of activities that were prohibited in all circumstances. Some of them were inherently dangerous (exploring abandoned mines) and would never be approved under any circumstances, but others were normal recreational activities that the conservative brass in Iriving thought weren't in the Scout Spirit. Then they not only removed ATV riding from the prohibited list but made it part of the camp program. I don't think I'm terribly conservative when it comes to this, but this kind of thing irritates me more than anything they do with politics. I'd rather see it it turned into a woke DEI paradise than have it degenerate into a third-rate tourist trap where our camp offers paddle boats and miniature golf. Part of the reason I left was that I saw things trending in this direction, and my own program was expected to do things that I wasn't comfortable with and knew I couldn't sell to leaders. But that's another story.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Great question. I think the main source of your misunderstanding is that your conception of the kind of grants involved are different from those that are at issue here. Most people's idea of a grant is some fixed sum of money that's available for a specific purpose that the government awards to a specific group, and that's true of a lot of grants relating to things like the arts, scientific research, local government, etc. These each have their own criteria that vary, and I'm not going to get into that here because it's not really the point. The grants at issue here aren't for specific sums of money but are reimbursement for services that the government is paying for. Think of something like Medicaid—a qualifying individual who seeks medical treatment will have the cost of qualifying care covered by the program. It doesn't really work, though, if you just ask doctors to apply for $500,000 grants that they can use to provide free care. There are a lot of people who are going to need a lot of services and we can't really identify the particular amount each person is going to need from a particular provider, and we want as many providers as possible to participate in the system so that there won't be as much friction.
So the way it works is that every provider who wants to participate gets qualified and once the permission is granted they submit bills from qualifying patients to Medicaid for reimbursement, which they're paid based on a fixed schedule. To be clear, not all providers participate, but most do, and when you're aiming for coverage to be as wide as possible you make it so any provider who meets the criteria is eligible. What you can't do then, legally, is deny the ability for a provider who meets the criteria to participate based on you're own prejudices. You need a concrete reason.
Feed Our Future was a group that was purportedly providing a similar service, which would provide meals to children who qualified. Since they couldn't say in advance how many kids would show up each day, they would keep records and submit them for reimbursement. So say if one location served 100 meals per day on average, and the government reimbursed at $10/meal, they'd send a bill at the end of the month for $30,000. The state had denied them grant money for years based on their perception that they were shady, which was probably based on legitimate reasons. The problem was that in 2020 they were applying to participate in a COVID-era Federal program that was being administered by the state, and the Feds set the eligibility requirements. So while they may not have met the requirements the state had set in the past, the state couldn't use that as a justification to deny them Federal money distributed under a different program. So it was ultimately the Federal government who prosecuted them, not the state, as they had stolen Federal money.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
For all those words, the niggling constitutional problem that the good professor doesn't address is the fact that such an interpretation would render the Appointments Clause meaningless, as the president could effectively avoid Senate confirmation permanently by just renewing the appointments every 120 days. But there's a larger practical problem; if court appointments are unconstitutional, as he says they are, then any US Attorney who has been so appointed does not have the authority of the office. At present, this is the vast majority of US Attorneys in the country. If the Supreme Court rules as the good professor wants them to, do you think that being forced to vacate nearly every Federal indictment since this summer (and a lot of rulings on cases that were indicted before them) is a good tradeoff to confirm the authority of fucking Lindsey Halligan?
Rov_Scam
5d ago
You're giving her too much credit. If you want to see what an insurance case actually looks like read this. This was not the kind of thing Halligan was doing. She was in "insurance defense", which is basic civil defense. It's just called that because 99% of civil tort cases are covered by insurance; the insureds don't really care much about the suit because the settlement is covered, and the insurance companies are the ones who hire the attorneys and call most of the shots. So if you're injured in an auto accident and decide to sue, the guy who hits you's insurance company will be hiring the attorney and covering the settlement. Ditto if you slip in the parking lot of the grocery store and break your arm.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Commentariat: “How could Trump screw up this badly? Why doesn’t Trump have competent lawyers? Does Trump hire too many bimbos? Why was his 2+2=4 case so weak?”
I don't know if you understand the full scope of what happened over the past couple weeks. The broad outline is this: Back in 2019, one of Comey's attorneys was investigated as part of another case that was closed in 2020. The Justice Department seized a bunch of evidence in this attorney's possession and had it stored on DVDs. The proper way to obtain this evidence would have been for Halligan to obtain a search warrant with the proper scope delineated and have the material reviewed by a court-appointed special master to remove anything that was privileged or attorney work product. Instead she just looked at all of it and used some of it as part of her case to the Grand Jury.
This is itself evidence of either incompetence or malevolence, but I'm not going to belabor the point or argue about it because these are honestly forgivable offenses, at least for someone who is wholly inexperienced in criminal law. Regardless, this was a problem for the prosecution, because if she presented any privileged information or attorney work product to the grand jury it would be grounds for dismissing the indictment, and the possibility that she even viewed such information herself would be grounds for removing her from the case (though I doubt the defense would ask for that). The defense requested that the court take the unusual step of releasing the grand jury information to them so that they could review it and determine if they had grounds for dismissal. A court granted that request, and while Halligan did not present anything privileged to the grand jury, what transpired was much worse.
The only witness who testified was an FBI agent who had no personal knowledge of what he was testifying to but had heard things from other agents. Hearsay testimony is allowed in grand jury proceedings, but it's inadmissible at trial, and it says a lot that she couldn't get the agents with first-hand knowledge to testify. The real shocker though was the ending phase, when she was giving the jurors instructions on how to proceed. She made the following two averments:
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In response to a question from a juror about the facts of the case, she said something to the effect that if Comey had a satisfactory answer then he could testify at trial and the jury could choose to believe him or not. She implied that a jury could draw a negative inference from the defendant's failure to testify, but more importantly, she implied that such a question would shift the burden of proof to the defendant.
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She told the grand jury that they could assume the prosecution would present more evidence at trial. In other words, you can base your decision to indict on theoretical evidence that we might have at the time of trial.
It's been fifteen years since I graduated from law school, and I've seen a lot of incredibly stupid shit in that time. While I can't say that this is necessarily worse than anything I've witnessed, I can confidently say that I haven't seen anyone do anything remotely this bad and not get fired immediately. It certainly presents a logical conundrum for people such as yourself, because there are only three possibilities here:
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She's incompetent to the degree that she doesn't understand the most elementary concepts of the US criminal justice system.
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Her case is so weak she felt the need to lie about the law to obtain an indictment. An indictment.
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She's so morally bankrupt that she would intentionally lie to a grand jury regardless of the strength of her case to ensure the maximum possibility of obtaining an indictment.
And of course some combination of the three. What does not exist is this fantasy land where the case against Comey is strong, Halligan is a competent attorney who scrupulously adheres to the canons of ethics, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a crypto-Democrat trying to distract the country from how low prices are getting. In a world where Trump, Bondi, et al. were rational, they would, regardless of what they thought of the opinion, at least hedged their losses by accepting the decision and allowing the court to appoint a real US Attorney, at least while the case was under appeal. Based on my own knowledge of how they operate, I would expect them to do nothing.
But no, showing that their idiocy knows no bounds, they have somehow found an option that's even worse. After the decision disqualifying Halligan was handed down, attorneys were instructed to stop signing her name on court filings and to use the name of the First Assistant instead. That guidance lasted about an hour before it was superseded by new guidance that they were to continue to use Halligan's name. This is an administration that is so committed to law and order that they are willing to take legally dubious measures to deploy the National Guard to "Democrat cities" because of "out of control crime". Yet he is unusually willing to risk every ongoing Federal prosecution between Virginia Beach and Washington, DC. If I'm a defense attorney I'm licking my chops right now over the prospect that any motion I file while this circus continues will effectively be unopposed. If the Eastern District courts have any sense whatsoever they'll make it clear that any pleadings that come in with her name on them will be rejected, and maybe the administration will get the message. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
The judge doesn't seem to have released any information beyond the overturn and acquittal
Except a 55 page order that outlines the facts of the case in excruciating detail, accompanied by the relevant analysis. There's no way to link to the order, but you can find it by searching https://publicaccess.courts.state.mn.us/ for Case No. 27-CR-24-13734. The gist of the opinion is that the prosecution did a very good job of proving that the defendant's brother was committing fraud through a home-health entity that the defendant owned. The brother was managing the business and hired a consultant who produced documents that were submitted to Medicaid showing inflated hours for legitimate clients as well as hours billed to fictitious clients. The issue was that none of the witnesses with direct knowledge of the fraud were able to implicate the defendant. Most had never met him at all, and the few who had testified that they only met him a couple times and just made small talk. There wasn't even any evidence that he had any direct involvement in the management of the company.
The circumstances that the jury convicted on were that he was the chartered owner of the company, that he received substantial cash payments from the company, and was in possession of a company debit card. There were also a few checks with his purported signature, though the signatures are inconsistent and he was out of town on the dates that some of them were signed in Minneapolis, so it's an open question which ones are genuine. His signature also appears on the padded Medicaid submissions, but the consultant testified that she forged his signature at his brother's direction. I quote the standard in a comment below, but the gist of it is that if a case relies entirely on circumstantial evidence, then the defendant's guilt has to be the only reasonable conclusion inferred from the circumstances. Since you can also reasonably infer that the defendant was an absentee owner who simply collected money from the business and didn't participate in its day to day affairs and neither knew of nor participated in the fraud his brother was perpetrating. The prosecution, therefore, didn't reach their burden and the conviction must be set aside. You may disagree with the reasoning, but its difficult to say that she let this guy go just because she felt sorry for Somalis.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Minnesota uses a two-step analysis laid out in State v. Silvernail:
Under the circumstantial-evidence standard, we apply a two-step analysis. State v. Ortega, 813 N.W.2d 86, 100 (Minn.2012). The first step is to identify the circumstances proved. State v. Andersen, 784 N.W.2d 320, 329 (Minn.2010). In identifying the circumstances proved, we defer “ ‘to the jury's acceptance of the proof of these circumstances and rejection of evidence in the record that conflicted with the circumstances proved by the State.’ “ Id . (quoting State v. Stein, 776 N.W.2d 709, 718 (Minn.2010) (plurality opinion)). As with direct evidence, we “construe conflicting evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict and assume that the jury believed the State's witnesses and disbelieved the defense witnesses.” State v. Tscheu, 758 N.W.2d 849, 858 (Minn.2008). Stated differently, in determining the circumstances proved, we consider only those circumstances that are consistent with the verdict. State v. Hawes, 801 N.W.2d 659, 668–69 (Minn.2011). This is because the jury is in the best position to evaluate the credibility of the evidence even in cases based on circumstantial evidence. Id. at 670.
The second step is to “determine whether the circumstances proved are ‘consistent with guilt and inconsistent with any rational hypothesis except that of guilt.’ “ State v. Palmer, 803 N.W.2d 727, 733 (Minn.2011) (quoting Andersen, 784 N.W.2d at 330). We review the circumstantial evidence not as isolated facts, but as a whole. State v. Hurd, 819 N.W.2d 591, 599 (Minn.2012). We “ ‘examine independently the reasonableness of all inferences that might be drawn from the circumstances proved’; [including the] inferences consistent with a hypothesis other than guilt.” Andersen, 784 N.W.2d at 329 (quoting Stein, 776 N.W.2d at 716 (plurality opinion)). Under this second step, we must “determine whether the circumstances proved are ‘consistent with guilt and inconsistent with any rational hypothesis except that of guilt,’ not simply whether the inferences that point to guilt are reasonable.” Palmer, 803 N.W.2d at 733 (quoting Andersen, 784 N.W.2d at 330). We give “no deference to the fact finder's choice between reasonable inferences.” Andersen, 784 N.W.2d at 329–30 (citation omitted) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Rov_Scam
5d ago
In theory, yes. In theory, there's also someone already in the office who would automatically become Acting US Attorney in the event of a vacancy without an appointment. In practice, both of these are the same person—a career prosecutor who anticipates outlasting the current administration and would prefer to prosecute boring criminal cases rather than participate in Trump's revenge tour. So what happens is the Administration appeals the court ruling and fires whoever the court appoints, or tries to use some backdoor shenanigans to appoint their preferred candidate to a position where she'd automatically take over as US Attorney upon her own disqualification, creating confusing arguments where one holds multiple titles at once. At least this is how it's playing out in New Jersey. I'd offer a more detailed explanation but I'm not entirely sure I understand Pam Bondi's reasoning so I'll hold off.
The upshot here, though, is that the Trump Administration is going to continue to insist that Halligan is the US Attorney for the EDV, despite a court ruling saying she isn't. Imagine if you got an email from your company saying that your boss was no longer employed there, but he continued to show up and was assigning your team work that would cost the company a lot of money. When you email top leadership they tell you he doesn't work there anymore, but when you email his immediate supervisor you're told that he does and just continue the way things have always been. How much work do you think gets done in that situation? How long can the company continue to operate amid the uncertainty? How efficient will any work be? Now assume that this guy is also entirely unqualified for the job and was hired for the position because he was his boss's college roommate and he occasionally makes bizarre decisions that no one in the company can justify. You have absolutely no idea what's going on. What do you think morale is like? This is basically what's going on in New Jersey right now, where the entire office isn't doing anything because nobody knows who has the authority to do anything.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I think the OP does a pretty good job of explaining Trump's interpretation of the law and why the court didn't buy it. As for the second part, there are four US Attorney's offices operating without a US Attorney for the time being. While the district courts can appoint a US Attorney, I don't know how long this will take, and I don't know what's going to happen if they appoint someone the administration doesn't approve of. Right now it's currently a matter of dispute who is, in fact, the US Attorney, if anyone even holds the position at all, and Federal prosecutions there have accordingly ground to a halt.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
It did ultimately lead to the clusterfuck that's happening now, though. If Bondi could have appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump's enemies, she likely would have done so. But because of the Smith decision, she had to push the interim appointments laws beyond where the court was willing to take them and throw the district offices into disarray as a consequence. There is effectively no one in charge of four offices at this point, though I can imagine that the career supervisors there will keep things running in the meantime, at least as far as routine matters are concerned.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
See my above comments, but those concerns aren't really valid when you consider:
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There's no way Halligan was getting Senate confirmation and
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This wouldn't have been an issue at all if there had been literally one other person in the office willing to sign the indictment.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Easier said than done. I can't speak for the other three, but Lindsey Halligan would not make it through Senate confirmation. Her Wikipedia bio says:
After graduating from law school, Halligan worked for Cole, Scott & Kissane, an insurance law firm specializing in residential and commercial properties. She became a partner in 2018. At Cole, Scott & Kissane, Halligan represented insurance companies against lawsuits filed by homeowners and corporate plaintiffs.
This is a bit misleading for someone not familiar with the legal industry. Cole, Scott, & Kissane is what's known as a "defense mill". She did not represent insurance companies directly in coverage cases or bad faith cases, etc., she represented them as carriers covering other defendants. So if you get into an accident that's your fault and the person you hit isn't happy with what the insurance company is offering they sue you, your insurance company pays for your representation and pays the settlement. While they're the ones paying for everything and (mostly) calling the shots, they aren't the named defendant; you are. These places are known for low pay and high billing requirements, and that she made partner after five years isn't surprising because most attorneys will jump ship as soon as they get a better offer. And being partner doesn't mean that you can bring in business like it does at most firms, just that you get to bill at partner rates which are ten bucks an hour more than associate rates. This is mostly just to compensate for a lower billable requirement due to increased administrative work.
After nearly a decade of doing that, during which time she never once took a case to trial, she met Trump and he hired her as one of his personal attorneys in the classified documents case, where she basically did doc review. I don't want to denigrate what she did here (there's a kind of do review that's bottom of the barrel in the legal profession, but this isn't that), because reviewing documents and analyzing them is a core part of legal work. But it hardly qualifies one to be United States Attorney. Most of these people are career prosecutors with significant trial experience. Halligan is about as qualified to be US Attorney as I am, and I'm not qualified at all. There are people associated with this board who are more qualified by virtue of their having worked as criminal defense attorneys for some amount of time. The only real "qualification" she had was that she was willing to sign an indictment that literally no other attorney in the office was willing to sign.
Amateur hour is the fact that these indictments even happened. The Comey one was already on incredibly thin ice anyway after Halligan failed to read the corrected version of the indictment to the grand jury before they voted on it. Or that the James indictment, which didn't have a lot of meat on the bone to begin with, somehow failed to make the best argument. Or that literally everyone in the US Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia, including Trump's named interim US Attorney, came to the conclusion that unemployment was preferable to being involved in these prosecutions. Given Trump's vindictiveness, it's a miracle he didn't order Halligan to fire the entire staff and just not have any prosecutions in the Eastern District for a while. If there's one silver lining to the corruption it's that it's balanced by a heavy dose of incompetence.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I don't know if the repeated interim appointment thing has ever been done, but that's not really the whole story, because it likely wouldn't have mattered in the past. The problem is that she was the only one in the office to sign the indictment. Typically, a line prosecutor would be in charge of the case and sign the indictment, but these indictments were so incompetently handled and obviously politically motivated that nobody else in the office was willing to sign them. Hell, her predecessor got fired for refusing to sign. So the only person who signed the indictment had as much authority to do so as you or I do, so they aren't valid.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
There was an article in last week's Reader's Digest called "Increase Your Word Power" that included a bunch of vocabulary words and underused expressions, and that was among them. /s
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I would note that the fraud at issue here isn't welfare fraud in the popular sense of people lying on application forms to get an extra $367/month from the government or whatever, but a more sophisticated form of white collar crime that is both more damaging in terms of total dollar amount and harder to detect. A lot of public services aren't provided by the government itself but are in essence contracted out to private companies and nonprofits, who are reimbursed for their services at fixed rates. The fraud comes in when these providers submit reimbursement claims for fictitious services.
At one extreme, this scam doesn't involve the provision of services at all. One can simply rent an office, buy a bunch of personal information for the demographic you're targeting, and start submitting reimbursements for services you never provided for clients who may be entirely fictitious. This is cheap and easy to do, but is necessarily limited, as one can only keep it up for so long before someone starts asking questions, at which point the entire operation falls apart because you can't credibly claim the charges were legitimate. At the other end of the spectrum, the fraud can exist as part of a legitimate organization that actually is providing most of the services it claims it's providing. The upside to this is that if anyone investigates your operation looks perfectly normal, with offices full of clients and invoices for relevant expenses. The downside is that you actually need to go through the process of providing services, which involves incurring expenditures that you may not be compensated for, including employees who may be inclined to blow the whistle when they start wondering why they're seeing reimbursement bills for services they know weren't provided. One upside, though, is that in the event that an investigator does find something untoward, it can be explained away as an administrative error or the consequence of a legitimate dispute.
Which end of the spectrum the fraud falls on usually depends on whether the fraudster intended on the whole thing being a sham from the beginning or if he realized he could pad his income by committing a little fraud on the side. The frauds in question here lean more towards the former, though they weren't quite as blatant as the first example I gave. They created enough of a front that the fraud wouldn't be obvious through a casual inquiry, but would be easily uncovered by a dedicated investigation. I would note that one thing that's misleading in both the Post article and the post itself is that these weren't "open secrets" that were only covered by independent journalists but actual scandals. The biggest fraud, the Feeding Our Future fraud, broke in 2022 and was covered in local media, including both major newspapers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, local television news, and the local NPR affiliate. And even that scandal, in which Feeding Our Future bilked $250 million from taxpayers, wasn't exactly due to incompetence on the part of the government.
Feeding Our Future was founded in 2016 but was denied government grant money due to concerns over the group's administrative practices. In 2020, with a ton of COVID money available, they decided to sue the Minnesota Department of Education over these denials. The nonprofit was allegedly applying for grant money that would be used to feed hungry children (MDE was administering the grants as part of the school lunch program). In the face of the suit, MDE approved the grants in November, but slow-walked the disbursements and demanded additional documentation. The matter went before a judge in April 2021, who effectively ruled that MDE's suspicious were not enough on their own to justify a denial of payment or the imposition of conditions that wouldn't apply to other organizations. The matter was complicated by the fact that MDE had by this time referred the matter to the USDA for a Federal investigation. The judge didn't order them to make payments exactly, but ruled that the withholding of payments had been in proper and that Feed Our Future was owed $20 million in back payments. MDE felt they had no choice but to resume payments. The whole thing came to a crashing halt in January 2022, when the FBI raided Feed Our Future's offices and MDE stopped making payments. To date, over 70 people have been convicted in the fraud.
In the aftermath of the FBI raid and the revelation that $250 million had been stolen, there was a lot of finger pointing over who was responsible (aside from the scammers, of course). Republicans blamed the Democratic state government for being incompetent, Democrats claimed their hand was forced by the judge, Tim Walz called for the judge to resign, the judge claimed he never technically ordered MDE to make payments and they were made voluntarily because they didn't appeal, MDE claimed that realistically they had no choice and the matter was out of their hands due to the Federal investigation, etc. In the end, though, it's hard to blame anyone in particular for what happened, and the idea that Democrats were covering up massive fraud to protect Somali immigrants doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. MDE smelled a rat from the beginning and tried to withhold payments, but were prevented from doing so by a judge. The judge may have not had a choice in the matter, since it's unclear what evidence MDE had at the time, and what they were able to actually argue in court in light of the ongoing Federal investigation. The Feds, for their part, had to contend with the fact that frauds like this are hard to prove, and even in a relatively straightforward fraud such as this it still took them a year to gather enough evidence to be confident in obtaining convictions.
I don't know much about the other scams, but what's concerning about them isn't so much that they say anything about the character of the Somali people as it does how much more money could have been stolen if they had been either a little more sophisticated or a little less brazen; the only thing really that surprising about these is that they were able to steal so much money while being under an investigative microscope. When scams at the other end of the spectrum happen, where the scammers are using fraud to pad the income of legitimate businesses, the totals can be truly staggering. Historically, the most prevalent frauds of this category have been for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. While there are some cases of these frauds existing with sham patients, it's unusually easy for a legitimate healthcare provider to slip in bills for reimbursement for services that weren't provided. This is especially true in the case of older patients, who go to the doctor so much they can't remember every test they have, or hospitals, that charge for so many things it's unlikely an individual patient can say whether something is legitimate or not. Hospital Corporation of America operates numerous real hospitals and paid nearly 2 billion in settlements stemming from such fraud that occurred in the 1990s, though the total amount of fraud remains unknown. This wasn't incidental fraud, either; there was an entirely separate set of books documenting the real profits the company was making (and not paying taxes on) as opposed to the public books that showed reimbursements for services that presumably cost them money to provide. It was, at the time, the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud case in US history, though such fraud still costs the American taxpayer tens of billions annually.
I can't take the Post or any other conservative publication or individual conservative seriously when they talk about this kind of crime, because the only time they seem to care about it is when they can use it as ammo against a group they don't like. In the eyes of a Republican, the only crime the Somalis involved really committed here is that their scheme wasn't sophisticated enough to succeed long-term and that they didn't properly insulate themselves from criminal repercussions. The CEO of HCA and the founder of the parent company was forced to resign when the fraud was discovered, but he never faced any criminal charges personally, or had to pay back any of the money himself. After all, it was the company that committed the crimes, not him, and by stepping down he was "accepting responsibility" for what happened on his watch. This acceptance of responsibility came with a $5.1 million cash payment ,$300 million in stock and options, and a $950k/year consulting position. He would later run several other healthcare companies before becoming governor of Florida and United States Senator, a position he holds today. But I have not yet heard anyone in the Republican party or conservative media criticize Rick Scott for being responsible for one of the biggest scams in US history. Instead they give full-throated defenses of how he was somehow a victim of circumstance and how, contrary to what witnesses said, he was totally unaware that providers were upcharging almost every expense. And I somehow doubt that a few Somalis bringing this kind of issue to national attention will lead to any kind of reckoning and calls for Scott to resign. So please, if you're going to look for a reason to denigrate Somali immigrants, don't cry crocodile tears about how bad fraud is, at least unless you're willing to have an equal amount of concern when rich white people do it.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Eh, it wasn't liberal in the slightest, it just seems like it in retrospect considering the rhetoric conservatives espouse these days. They were still pushing for tax cuts and cuts to social programs, they just talked about how well-off Americans have an individual responsibility to the poor that they can achieve through donating to the church food pantry. And then there was the whole faith-based initiatives thing that was criticized for being a cover to take money from comprehensive social programs and funnel it into churches. I knew a lot of religious Bush supporters at the time, though, and I can't recall any of them having political views that were at odds with anything the Republican Party had been preaching since the Regan Administration, and I don't remember anyone taking it seriously other than Bush.
How about e) more about the fact that I find it pleasurable regardless of any of the other factors you mentioned? a is only relevant if you're doing it competitively, and most people aren't. I'm beter at skiing than any of my other hobbies, and I've never raced in my life beyond the extremely casual "race you to the bottom" on an easy run with your friends. b is completely irrelevant, because it only gives you social status with a select few people. The fact that I'm incredibly good at skiing means absolutely zero to people who don't ski because they'll never see me ski, and if they somehow did then the fact that I can go down a moderately difficult run would be as impressive to them as skiing Corbet's Couloir. The only social advantage to being good is that if you want to do it regularly, the kind of person who goes regularly is probably pretty good, and you'll have more fun if you can keep up, but this is still a pretty low bar that anyone can attain with enough practice. c is relevant to an extent, but there are some things I'm never going to be able to do and I'm cool with that. I mountain bike a lot and I can't jump to save my life, despite it being a fairly common skill, and an essential one for riding some lines, but I don't see a future where I'll be able to do it well and I have enough fun not doing it that I don't care if I can. Maybe I'll learn someday but maybe I won't. d can be fun, but I wouldn't consider it essential, and I greatly prefer a world where that's more of a possibility rather than something I have to rely on. I'd prefer easy, reliable access to every trip being a time-consuming slog that had good potential of being a total bust. There may be fewer first ascents or new routes, but for all the people who discovered them there was a lot of trial and error. Driving two hours, getting fully unloaded and set up, only to get a quarter of the way up and realize that the route isn't doable may be a fun adventure if you're doing it every once in a while, but I wouldn't want that to be the outcome of a significant number of trips I took.
If your goal is to actually be good at something relative to the current number of participants, there are plenty of unpopular activities that you can participate in where few enough people participate that you'll have a legitimate shot at being among the best with enough persistence. I'm not talking about obscure shit that nobody has heard of, either, but things that were popular enough at one time to have developed a mature ecosystem but that have faded from popularity. For instance, chess has been continuously popular for centuries, people teach it to kids at an early age, and people competing at the grandmaster level have skills that you never will. But bridge is significantly more difficult. Chess players don't believe me, but you can teach anyone to play chess poorly in under an hour; you need to take lessons and develop your game for months before you'll be able to play bridge with the same level of facility. Even computers can only play at a rudimentary level. Yet in the 1940s and 1950s it was America's most popular card game. A survey from the card manufacturers' trade association done in the 40s showed that 30% of men and nearly half of women played it. In the early 60s there was even a weekly half-hour television show where top players (often business leaders and distinguished politicians) would play each other with strategic analysis provided for the home player. Now, the number of people who know anything about it at all is much lower, and they're all dying off, but it has enough staying power that there are bridge clubs in most cities, international tournaments, daily newspaper columns, and the like. You'll probably never be able to defeat the top players in the game, but being the best bridge player in your town is a distinct possibility.
You may argue that since there's no longer any social status to being good at bridge that doesn't matter, but that's my point; there was no social status associated with being good at cycling, or rock climbing, or whatever, in the 1950s. These things come up periodically. In the 1970s backgammon was popular. In the 1980s there were racquetball places everywhere. Prior to the pandemic it was axe throwing and escape rooms. Since 2020 pickleball seems to be the current thing, though it doesn't require much skill so maybe it has more staying power. Disc golf is difficult enough that people will be mildly impressed if you're good at it but easy enough that you can actually be good at it with enough practice (unlike regular golf, which is impossible for most people). I'm sure there are still Parkour people out there.
But there's a friend of mine who is a much better mountain biker than I will ever be, and he's one of those people who can just pick up new skills easily despite the learning curve. We have another friend who is pretty good at a lot of things as well, but he's completely insufferable about it. He insists he's one of the top C1 canoeists on the East Coast. When we ride mountain bikes with some of his friends, he tells us that we'll be riding with some of the best in Pennsylvania. He refuses to ski at our local mountain because it isn't challenging enough, and unironically claims that whenever he skis in the East he's invariably the best person at the resort. I say "unironically" because this is a common joke on /r/skiing, i.e. people complaining about other skiers while insisting that they're the best person on the mountain. I found out about this on a ski trip with our friends that he couldn't attend, and I insisted that I was better than he was (which I genuinely believed) if only because I ski regularly and he hadn't in years. This led to my friends joking that I must be one of the top 3 skiers on the East Coast (which I am most assuredly not). As to my first friend, he told me once that if you're going to say that you're better than any other dedicated amateur (except maybe a total beginner), that you'd better be doing it for a living. And I'm inclined to agree with him.
The upshot of all of this is that the opportunities are much, much greater now than they were in 1959. I said in another post that if you were into the outdoors back then, hunting and fishing were pretty much it. Anything else was a niche activity that was expensive and difficult to learn. These things became more easily accessible beginning in the 1970s and have increased in popularity since then. Yes, it may have been easier to be among the best back when few people did the activity in question, but you wouldn't have had the conceptual knowledge to even think of doing it. There's probably something that exists now that will become popular in a decade that you can get on the bleeding edge of, but you won't, because unless you're in some niche group where you find out about it, or invent it yourself, you're not even going to think of doing it.
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