Rov_Scam
13hr ago
All true, and that doesn't even begin to touch the strategic issues. I don't think the GOP is going to clear the field for Vance or any other candidate, which means a competitive primary, which in turn means that some candidate would have to run as Trump's stooge, which might in and of itself cost that candidate the primary. Or Trump could run Don Jr. or someone as a crypto-stooge, but if they aren't clearing the primary for Vance there's no way in hell Vance or any other credible candidate would step aside so Don Jr. can run as a stand-in. And even if the GOP was on board with the whole scheme, it's still a huge risk. Once Trump is named as the vice presidential nominee, the whole eligibility thing is going to overshadow anything else about the election. There will also be a wave of litigation in every state to keep him off the ballot. What happens if this litigation is successful? If the entire selling point is "Trump will still be president", will voters be willing to back a stooge replacement on his own? If the outcome is that he isn't on the ballot in Pennsylvania but is everywhere else, do you find a replacement? What if the Supreme Court rules him ineligible at the worst possible moment? What if the GOP goes along with the scheme and Trump stays on the ballot in all states, but voters are so disgusted with the GOP that he loses in a landslide and the Democrats win large majorities in both houses? And sitting Republicans are primaried out next go around because of it?
There's been a lot of discussion on here in the past about why Trump always seems to outperform his poll numbers, and the most popular explanation is a "shy Tory" effect, but I think it has more to do with what I call the "Trump Constant". One of the big stories about Trump when he first entered politics was his appeal to disaffected people who normally wouldn't vote. Since they're on the margins of political discourse they don't participate in polls and they don't vote in elections unless Trump is involved, though they will vote Republican down ballot if asked to. These are the people who started flying Trump 2028 flags in January and don't really give a shit about the Constitution, or decorum, or any of the other things that Trump seems to have a disregard for.
I don't mean to toot my own horn, because this idea hadn't crystalized yet at the time, but I more or less predicted Ron Desantis's downfall when he was the toast of the "smart set" of the Republican party and of a lot of people on this board. If you remember, in early 2022 Trump's viability going forward was in question after the election nonsense and January 6, and Desantis was trying to portray himself as the future of the party. But there were still a ton of people doing MAGA. He was trying to walk a tightrope where he'd keep his distance from Trump without openly criticizing him. At the time I argued that this would only work if Trump declined to seek reelection, but that he painted himself into a corner because his unwillingness to cozy up to Trump and his image at a fighter meant that he couldn't just not run and yield the nomination. But if he ran he couldn't directly criticize Trump either, and I predicted that his campaign would turn into an incoherent mess, which is exactly what happened.
But when I made this argument to bona-fide Republicans, they dismissed it, and kept pushing the Desantis line. If the "Trump Constant" had been a theory at the time, the media and everyone else wouldn't have been so bullish on Trump, because it would have been clear that Jesus Christ himself wouldn't get the same boost Trump got, especially in a primary. He was so far ahead at the outset that he didn't even bother to debate, and he was so untouchable that none of his opponents save Christie would even dare criticize him. It was the stupidest primary election in history. The theory also explains why the GOP underperformed in 2022; by that time pollsters were making adjustments to account for the "shy Tory" effect or whatever, but they misapplied it since Trump wasn't on the ballot. Normal polling would have predicted the modest GOP pickups. It explains why Conor Lamb ended up beating "Trump before Trump" Rick Saccone (nice guy; I voted for him when he represented my district in the state house) in a District that was Trump +18. It explains why polling in 2016 and 2020 was so awful.
And it explains all this third term nonsense. Trump is convinced that the "Trump Constant" represents the majority of voters. In the past, Trump has convinced the GOP to go along with ideas that would have seemed unthinkable a few months prior. And thus far, he's proven that there are no political consequences for doing so. So it stands to reason that he might be willing to give this a try. But he has to remember that he's not invincible. He's never won as an incumbent, and for all the upheaval of 2020, it was nowhere near the level it would be if he was blatantly trying to circumvent the constitution to retain his hold on power. People in the GOP who would say that this is a bridge too far may ultimately backtrack if this nonsense becomes a reality, but Trump's only holds the office based on a margin of a few points in a few states. It doesn't take much for things to tip back in the other direction, and if he loses he will be done for good, and there's no way he is making a comeback at 86. I don't think he'll seriously pursue a third term, but I wouldn't entirely be surprised if he did.
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
That's not how the worker's compensation system is set up. As @ToaKraka notes below, the abnormality requirement only applies to psychological injuries, not physical injuries. As far as physical injuries are concerned, any injury that is work-related is eligible for compensation, and most of the litigation surrounding claims is question of either whether the claimant is too injured to do his job or whether the injury is actually work-related. If you wrench your knee climbing into the cab of the truck you drive for work, that counts. If you work with dangerous chemicals and are permanently disabled due to an explosion, it counts. If the workplace was seriously negligent, it counts. If it was an unpreventable accident, it counts. If the worker was injured because he failed to take required safety precautions, it still counts.
The idea behind the system is that traditionally, people injured on the job would have to sue their employers for lost wages, and the amount of time it takes suits to go through the courts meant that they could experience significant financial hardship even if their suits were successful. By eliminating the requirement of proving fault claims can be adjudicated in a matter of weeks (and subject to appeal if necessary) and claimants can receive benefits while they're actually out of work. The employer pays into the system like insurance.
The tradeoff is that this is the employer's liability is limited to what is available to the employee through the system. So if you're in an accident where the employer is seriously negligent (e.g. there's an explosion that makes the news and was caused by terrible safety practices) you won't get a multimillion dollar lawsuit but the relatively meager award based on a percentage of your average wage. The caveat here is that this only prevents suits against employers, so if you're injured on the job due to an accident caused by a contractor, you can still sue the contractor, or if you work for a contractor working at a steel mill and a mill employee does something stupid you can still sue the mill. The added requirements for psychological injuries is to prevent people from saying that they're job is too stressful so you should pay them not to work.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Is it really that you can't get them to do caselaw searches or that they just aren't experienced enough to know that they need to do them? I actually had to assign a newer kid some research into a motion in limine I was preparing a few weeks ago. He called me five minutes later with the disappointing news that I was wasting my time drafting it because he only got as far as the rules before seeing that it wasn't going to work, but he never complained about it or anything. But if they are pushing back on it it reminds me of a scene from The Wire where Herc calls the procedures "more bullshit" and Freamon says "This right here IS the job. When you came down here what did you expect?" Maybe it's because when I switched practice areas I harbored no delusions about what the job would entail, even though I didn't know what the job would entail. There's always an outside impression that's at least somewhat at odds with the workaday reality of any job. I'd honestly rather have younger attorneys who at least ask you what they should do. I've found it preferable to the ones who don't ask you anything and then turn in terrible work product, and then stay bad at their jobs long enough that they can't even ask some questions without eliciting "how long have you been working here?" as a response.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I can't speak to young attorneys not wanting to do real work, but I've definitely sensed a "grass is greener" mentality among several of them. It's usually that they're convinced that a particular line of work is boring and that there's something interesting and more glamorous out there. I've never done criminal defense, but I interviewed with the DA's office a number of years back and was told that the job was in the DUI division; I'd be doing nothing but drug DUIs, all day every day, and if I needed help I could ask the regular DUI guy for advice.
I think part of the problem stems from the fact that in law school you're constantly moving between different areas of the law, but when you get into practice you're mostly doing the same thing, and novel legal issues don't come up so much as novel factual issues. It's been at least a year since I've had to read any caselaw, but I spent last week going over hundreds of pages of contracting records from the 70s.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
A federal judge should not accidentally issue a ruling that leaves people referencing NAACP v. Alabama in rejoinder.
It's unclear whether NAACP would actually apply in this case. That case involved an as-applied challenge, not a facial one, and an challenge in this case would accordingly only be successful if the Plaintiffs could demonstrate both that the disclosure was unnecessary and that it would subject the members to harm. The first bar is difficult for them to overcome since the government has a clear interest to know with some degree of particularity whom the judgment applies to. The plaintiffs assert that it's up to the government to figure out how to comply with the order, but they don't cite any case law for that, just an article from the Harvard Law Review arguing against nationwide injunctions. Interestingly enough, the cited article actually refers to a case where the court granted universal relief based on the idea that it would be difficult for law enforcement to identify members of the plaintiff association, and argues that that this was unnecessary because members could simply identify themselves! The second prong would be even harder for the plaintiffs to meet, because similar challenges in the past have failed because the plaintiffs were unable to demonstrate any harm beyond minor harassment. The NAACP members were able to show clear cases of death threats and other serious activity. If there were similar instances of harm against the named plaintiffs in this case, then they might be able to meet that burden, but I haven't seen any evidence of this so far. I would also add that courts are generally impatient when it comes to plaintiffs refusing to make disclosures that would advance their interests in the context of the case. The cases I'm aware of that involve disclosure of membership involve the government suing or imposing requirements on organizations that never asked for anything, not plaintiffs who are unwilling to participate in litigation they commenced. On a weekly basis I deal with plaintiffs who bitch about having to be deposed for days on end and asked questions they couldn't possibly know the answers to, to which I want to tell them "You can make this stop right now if you drop the suit." My point here isn't that requiring such a disclosure would necessarily be impermissible, just that the judge isn't incompetent for assuming it wouldn't be, as there's no blanket rule prohibiting the government from making such a request.
the court could have read 44 pages and written a 2 page order in less than 18 days
Yeah, they could have, in a vacuum, but, and this may surprise you, this isn't the only case the judge is dealing with. You have no idea what else the judge had to deal with in those 18 days, and he isn't going to drop everything to issue one order among many he has on his plate. The fact that he got it in within 30 suggests that he had a normal workload, but if the submissions hit in the middle of a trial it could have taken months before he got to it. I know this is your hobby horse and you think that these cases should take precedence because they involve fundamental rights or whatever, but every case involves someone looking for their rights to be vindicated.
Going to relative competence, it's a problem if this is that average behavior, and that these are Just The Ways Things Are Done in the courts.
It seems that your overriding problem with the courts stems not so much from any of the things you describe, but with the fact that they don't always rule the way you want them to. You can complain all you want about the court's willingness to grant extensions, but would you consider it a preferable outcome if the court refused to grant the Plaintiffs an extension to file a reply brief and they ended up dismissing the case with prejudice? Because something similar to that is bound to happen, and the judicial system as a whole would love to be able to clear their calendars, but everyone involved recognizes that people have other shit to do and that the system works better if everyone grants some professional courtesy here and there. Yeah, things move slow, but no lawyer can make a living on one case at a time, and if you want judges to do the same you're going to be paying for a lot of waiting around.
The ability of courts to offer widespread orders even very early in process and posture is not a casualty of CASA.
No, it isn't, and I never said that it was. But I'm not sure what your argument is here by posting a totally different case from a different court. Just because courts grant emergency releif in some cases doesn't mean it's appropriate in every case, and you haven't made the argument that it would have been appropriate here. They didn't ask for emergency relief because there was no grounds to do so, and of course the judge wouldn't grant the motion.
I can point out that the Most Pro-Gun Administration Ever futzed around...
If this is your complaint maybe you need to consider the possibility that you hold a fringe position that's broadly unpopular, and that it's unreasonable for you to expect the courts to do everything you want them to do, or that maybe Federal judges know a little more about the law than you do.
I'm trying to make a prediction, and to get a prediction in response: if the case is not mooted or lost, do you believe that its final judgement will be solely limited to the seven current plaintiffs?
I don't know whether the groups in question are willing to provide the names of people whom the order would still apply to in a meaningful way. If there are a few such people, they might, with consent, release the names to the ATF in order to secure the injunction. I think this is what next week's conference is going to be about, and why the judge wants to hold one instead of simply signing a joint order. But beyond that, the upshot of the case is that the government won't be able to prosecute FFL holders for selling guns to 18-year-olds in the Fifth District. Even absent an injunction, any such prosecution will get kicked pretty quickly. Whether or not any gun stores will be willing to sell to anyone under 21 is an open question, and is up to the discretion of the stores themselves. The risk is that the ATF prosecutes anyway and wins when the case is overturned by the Supreme Court. An injunction would not prevent this outcome. If the ATF decided to prosecute for an underage sale in contravention of the Fifth Circuit's decision, and there was an an injunction against doing so, and the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court, the result is not that the case would get kicked, but that someone would get prosecuted for contempt. In that situation, it's nothing more than a consolation prize.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
The entire tattoo is of an Appalachian Mountain Club TFC (Trail Fucking Crew) logo, with Est. 1919 written on either side, and 2002 written at the bottom. Apparently he worked on the crew that summer. I'm not a Platner fan and I think a lot of this stuff should raise alarm bells, but this isn't one of them.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I don't think it's a coincidence that the Reddit allegations came to light shortly after Governor Mills entered the race. I imagine that Collins would prefer to go up against a political unknown with a hard lefty streak rather than an established politician who has shown she can win a statewide election. As for the working class, this guy reminds me a little too much of Fetterman, who had a cadre of fanboys who thought he could do no wrong and ignored every red flag because they thought the party needed a true progressive to drive boring-ass moderates like Conor Lamb out of the party (although interestingly enough, the House seat Lamb vacated went to Chris Deluzio, who is basically a clone of Lamb). Fetterman was always rabidly pro-Israel but this suddenly became a huge problem when the war in Gaza started. He was always a bipartisanship advocate but this suddenly became a problem when he refused to cast meaningless votes against Trump's cabinet appointments. If Platner gets elected it wouldn't surprise me if he ends up holding some opinions that anyone critical of them could have guessed at and they'll be whining again about how he's "practically a Republican", even if he votes with the Democrats 90% of the time.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I'm sure they were, but nobody knows who Henkel is, and the largest adhesives manufacturer, 3M, is known to most people for making office supplies and dust masks. They're part of the chemical industry, but they don't get the same bad rap as companies like DuPont and Monsanto.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
A year ago, that was a plausible argument. It's not longer a plausible one. The normal operation of the judicial system now has the highest court in the land intervene to defend absolute randos in overnight on a holiday weekend. It means something when that happens then, and literally never here.
I'm not sure what you mean here since there weren't any emergency petitions in this case, and when the delay is on joint motion, I'm not sure how you can complain about it. What was the court supposed to do, guess what kind of order the parties were looking for and then wait for it to get appealed?
Do you think that standard will be consistently applied to other causes?
I'm not sure what the case you linked is supposed to prove since the opinion was issued before CASA was decided. Either way, is the judge supposed to just blatantly ignore precedent because another judge might in the future in an unrelated case (and get reversed on appeal)? Whether or not vendors trust the ATF to not enforce the law is irrelevant if the court is powerless to grant an injunction.
It's a violation of federal law to lie on a form 4473 -- you may remember some high-profile schmuck with a neopotistic background getting a pretty weird pardon after a big criminal lawsuit on this matter -- and this would leave a lot of valid ways for anyone with a brainstem to think of ways for the ATF to validly prosecute violations only where they had reasonable belief, without first having a full list of the org's membership, that a specific member did not belong to the org. You know, if they weren't also claiming that they were not going to prosecute this particular unconstitutional offense to start with, making the whole question moot.
I'm not sure what your argument is here, but mine was poorly phrased, so let me reiterate: The organizations don't want to turn over membership lists, which is understandable. If the ATF had, apropos of nothing, added a question to its forms about memberships in certain organizations, these organizations would be rightly up in arms about it. But now one of these organizations suggests with a straight face that that's exactly what they do? And it gets worse; they weren't looking for this to be a narrowly tailored question that was part of the order, but just throwing it out there as something that was already within the ATF's authority. They don't want to turn over a list, but they have no problem making their members voluntarily disclose their affiliation every time they buy a gun. I find it curious and a bit disingenuous, that's all.
In all, I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Most of the time your legal analysis is pretty good for a non-lawyer, but here you seem to have mucked up the analysis because you didn't understand the procedural posture of the case, and you seem to be advocating an outcome that's facially against the law and that neither party asked for in the first place. And all of this is underlain by your woe-is-me routine where absolutely everyone in government is completely ignorant of Second Amendment rights even as you ask a court to overturn a law that's been in place for over 50 years and has been upheld multiple times, including by the circuit in question.
I don't know anything about Summerhayes but he was a Trump appointee and I don't see anything in this case that suggests he's anything other than a straight shooter. I didn't write that comment with the intent to question the Fith Circuit's decision or anything like that, just to explain why the case unfolded the way it did, and why it's over for now.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
With a 3% conversion rate to paid models, this is the entire point. If the free models were crap that nobody used, it would be one thing, but when Google is inserting these summaries into search results without anyone asking for it, this is what AI is. Period. Nobody cares about the accuracy of models that no one uses.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
In my opinion, Congress is actually controlled by the adhesives industry. They create a lot of products that are presumably nasty, yet you never hear about an executive from Loctite or JB Weld being dragged in front of a congressional subcommittee. I have no evidence of this but it isn't implausible that this is why they keep such a low profile.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
So now we're waiting til October 27th to even start planning on how to have a final judgement in a case whose appeal opinion issued on January 30th, and I can accurately joke about how a healthy woman can make a baby faster than Robert R Summerhays, a duly-appointed honorable member of the federal court system, can make a decision protecting the real rights of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
Some context here: After the 5th Circuit made their decision, the parties agreed to hold of on entering a final judgment until the deadline for a cert petition had passed on July 1. After the government declined to appeal, a judicial conference was held on July 2 wherein Summerhays asked the parties to confer on a joint order. On July 29 he granted a joint motion to extend the deadline until September 2, at which point they could either submit a joint order or submit their own proposed orders. The parties reached an impasse, and submitted their own proposed orders on that date. The Plaintiffs included a statement that they'd submit briefs upon request of the court. The government submitted a brief with their proposed order. The Plaintiffs then submitted their own brief on September 14. The court issued its initial judgment on October 7. I'm not seeing any undue delay here, just the normal operation of the judicial system.
As for the judgment itself, you write:
But finally, a major change that could drastically impact a lot of people could apply to jurisdictions too wide for legislatures to just file the serial numbers off and try again, even if it's just one circuit....Only where the buyers are under-20 and were members of the groups a half-decade before does the declaration apply.
A couple things need to be distinguished here. First, the ATF made it clear that it recognizes the court's decision and does not intend to enforce the prohibition within the geographic boundaries of the Fifth Circuit. That's the general consequence. That's to be distinguished from the specific order the District Court enters, which formally binds the parties at the risk of contempt. In that sense, the Plaintiffs probably imagined that an order such as you have in mind was possible when they filed the suit, but the law does not exist in a vacuum, and with the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc. that possibility went out the window.
To refresh your memory, District Court injunctions can only bind parties to the suit. In this context, the Plaintiffs concede that a universal injunction is off the table. The crux of the argument is over whether the order covers anyone who was a member of the Plaintiff organizations at any time, now and forever, or whether it is limited to specific people who meet certain criteria. These arguments come down to the scope of organizational standing, and I don't want to get too far into it because the details are highly technical and are prone to changing opinions based on culture war elements. Suffice it to say that the government's argument was that the Plaintiffs were trying to use organizational standing as an impermissible backdoor around filing a class action suit. And while the Plaintiffs made good arguments overall on this point, the most they could have gotten by my admittedly brief reading was an extension to members as of the date of the judgment.
The other point was the release of the membership lists, which the government argued were necessary because they needed to know who they were enjoined from prosecuting under the order. Again, the Plaintiffs made good arguments that there was no precedent requiring this and that it was up to the Defendant to figure it out, but the examples they gave on how they were supposed to do this were ludicrous to the point that they'd probably regret it if the ATF actually implemented them (one suggested that the ATF form be amended to ask if the buyer was a member of a Plaintiff organization; aside from the impracticality of the government amending its forms to account for a small subset of purchasers, I doubt these groups want their members undergoing a guaranteed ATF investigation to verify their memberships).
I think that what happened in the end is that, in light of the CASA decision and that nether party could provide anything that was really on point and not possibly overruled by CASA, the judge was disinclined to grant any specific relief to any parties beyond those absolutely necessary to resolve the case, and gave the government more or less the order they asked for.
the judge demanded each org provide a verified membership list within 21 days, which wasn't going to fly at SAF for a variety well-formed objections and the government (claims to) have never asked for or wanted in the first place. So now we're waiting til October 27th to even start planning on how to have a final judgement
Again, you have to look at the procedural posture. Three days after judgment was entered the parties filed a joint motion to amend, and the judgment was vacated a few days after that. The conference on the 27th is more or less a housekeeping item where the judge talks to the parties about their agreement before entering judgment. To be clear, the government never specifically asked the court that they enter an order compelling the Plaintiffs to turn over membership lists, only that the judgment be limited to verified members. The parties are looking to amend the judgment so that it applies to those members who the organizations voluntarily disclose to the court. It's certainly possible that Judge Summerhays has an independent streak and wants membership lists so he can name individuals in the final order, but I highly doubt it, and I expect the judgment to be entered as agreed to by the parties before the end of the month. The Plaintiffs can appeal, but I doubt that will happen, given the limited practical implications and the minefield they'd be entering. If they were to appeal and win, it would have serious implications for the kinds of injunctions Trump has so far successfully prevented, as it would allow Plaintiffs to for nebulous organizations, allow judges to grant injunctive relief to anyone who is a member of the organization, regardless of time, and put the burden on the government for determining whether someone is a member of the organization.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Baseball's thing wasn't age of consent but the idea that anyone who reached puberty should be legally treated like an adult and be able to skip school, evidently unaware that compulsory schooling laws end at 16 in most states. He also thought that the government shouldn't really treat them like adults and that their parents still had an obligation to take care of them.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I've been a lawyer for over a decade and have worked with many female lawyers, including at the supervisory level, and I can't say that I've ever seen a situation where empathy inappropriately played a role in any attorney's decision, whether male or female. I will grant that I spent a long time doing oil and gas work where it would be difficult to find a situation where empathy would even come into play, but for the past few years I've done litigation work that involves defending unsympathetic companies against suits brought by highly sympathetic plaintiffs, my boss and two other supervising partners are women, and I haven't seen any women ever back off for what would be considered empathetic reasons. The only judge I've ever seen who acted overly sympathetic toward plaintiffs was an 80-year-old white guy in West Virginia. And he's no longer on the bench. I also haven't dealt with many female judges in this context, but the one I have dealt with was more of a stickler for the rules than her male counterparts. I think this, though, is a consequence of her being a judge in a county that doesn't see a ton of these cases and thus hasn't had the opportunity to go on autopilot.
I have certainly seen bad women attorneys, but they were all bad in the same ways that men are bad attorneys: They're lazy and/or sloppy. There are a few male plaintiff's attorneys I deal with who will let my client out of the case at the slightest resistance, because not doing so would mean that they have to argue a motion. But talking about empathy in the context of practicing law doesn't make sense, because a large percentage of law is purely transactional, and in litigation your job is to defend the interests of your client, and being able to empathize with your client is a good thing, not a bad thing. It certainly prevents the laziness from taking over. And in judicial contexts, there are two sides to every story. You seem to be making the argument that women would be more empathetic to a defendant from a disadvantaged group. But why would this be the case? If empathy is the overriding factor, they might just as easily be overly empathetic toward the victim.
Which brings me to my final point: Even if your premise is correct, and female judges will be empathetic to criminal defendants, you're basing your conclusion on the idea that there is some kind of Platonian "correct" outcome, and that male judges consistently achieve this outcome. What constitutes a correct outcome is a political question and not a legal one in instances where the judge has discretion, like sentencing, and the appropriate response would be for legislatures to revise sentencing guidelines if sentences become too lenient. But beyond that, there's the possibility as well, that male judges are simply too harsh, and that the overriding goal of public safety is ill-served by oversentencing; maybe it's the women judges who are closer to achieving the policy goals the criminal code exists to implement. I'd be a little more cautious before going down the overly reductive road that a legal system that is majority women will somehow cause the whole thing to go to shit, just because it conforms to whatever stereotypes or personal policy preferences that you have.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
You're missing my point. With the frequency I hear people complaining about Romney having been called a fascist, I'd expect there to be innumerable examples out there, as if it was something that was unavoidable at the time of the election. Instead, all you can come up with is an NPR article that doesn't directly call him a fascist, comments from three people you couldn't pick out of a police lineup (one of whom apologized), and comments made after the election about not Mitt Romney by a comedian who is known for making edgy remarks. What's even more curious is that you seem invested in defending this point, but you're almost certainly relying on the internet for your examples; I doubt you came to the conclusion that Romney was called a fascist because you read that NPR article upon publication or were paying attention to what Dick Harpootlian was saying in 2012.
More importantly, though, I don't know what the importance of pointing this out is. So five people called Romney a fascist in 2012, so what? What relevance does it have on contemporary politics. It's nowhere near the number of Republicans who were calling Obama a socialist or Marxist at the time, so it's not like one side has a monopoly on political hyperbole. The most common response I get is that people can't trust the Democrats when they call Trump a fascist because they said the same thing about Romney. Okay, and if these five examples didn't exist you would trust the Democrats and would have voted for Clinton, Biden, and Harris solely to prevent the rise of fascism in America? Come on, give me a break.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
Who called Romney a fascist? The only example I can find is a comment made around the time of the Democratic convention by a delegate from Kansas, but I'd bet you couldn't name him without looking. Maybe you can find something I can't, but I've done a bit of looking and I can't find any contemporaneous sources describing him as such. The "binders full of women" comment is a different kettle of fish entirely, largely because he embellished the story. He didn't go out and look for female appointees and compile a binder; it was handed to him by MassGAP, a bipartisan advocacy group. The further criticism was that he spent 25 years in business and evidently didn't know any qualified women.
As for the rest of your comment, the glib thing to say would be that Democrats are indifferent to white men while Republicans are indifferent to everyone else, but that would be overly reductive. In another post I made today about jury instructions I say that:
I'm pretty defensive of the legal system here, because it usually works better than people give it credit for, but I'm not so in the bag for it that I don't realize that a system run by lawyers and judges gets us a system that works well for lawyers and judges. We spend so much time immersed in this stuff that it's easy to forget that people out in the real world don't have a clue about any of this and will do things that make sense to them but not to the court, which is a big problem when we're relying on them to make important decisions.
The rest of the post gives some additional context, but the upshot is that lawyers need to put themselves in the shoes of the people who will actually be acting on the jury instructions rather than automatically assume that since they make sense to them they'll make sense to anyone. And this is true for most of the legal system; if you have a system created and run by lawyers and judges you have a system that works great for lawyers and judges, even though when the system fails it ultimately isn't lawyers and judges who have to deal with the consequences. Any number of legal reforms over the years were met with stiff resistance from within the legal community along the lines of "that won't work because this is the way we've always done it and it simply can't be done any other way. This is true even for things that seem blindingly obvious in retrospect. In 1843 there was a murder at Yale University. A young man was charged with the crime, posted bond, then returned home to Pennsylvania, at which point the Connecticut prosecutors closed the case. In the view of the lawyers involved in the case, this was an appropriate resolution. That’s the way things were done. A bond is posted to ensure that the defendant appears at trial. If the defendant doesn’t appear for trial, he forfeits the bond, and the books are closed. It has to be done that way, the lawyers argued. Otherwise, what is the point of posting bond? The press had a different take. As the press saw it, the failure to prosecute the murderer because the murderer was wealthy enough to forfeit the bond was an outrage. The lawyers thought that the reaction of the press was ignorant. These people just didn’t understand the process. The press brought to it a different perspective—and the press was right, and the press won. The practice of abandoning warrants when a defendant posted bond and fled the jurisdiction was gradually curtailed.
What we've had in America, historically, is a system that works well for white men and varying degrees of less well for everyone else. And while it hasn't worked well for all white men, as a group white men have been in the best position. You can mock the Green New Deal statement, and I'm generally not a fan of this kind of posturing but it at least makes sense. It doesn't name white men, but every group named has a counterpart, and alleging indifference to the counterparts ranges from cringe-inducing to ridiculous:
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of those descended from settlers
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of majority-white communities
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of native-born Americans (okay, this one does have some traction)
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of people in areas with good economies
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of people who live in big cities
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of the rich
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of high-income workers
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of men
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of working-age people
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of able-bodied people
- Democrats are indifferent to the plight of adults
The whole point is that some people in the US are in a worse position than the should be as a result of policies that were designed with indifference to them but which worked well for certain majorities, and that it is more just to change those policies so that we have a system that works equally well for everybody. One of the more recent frontiers in legal reform is getting rid of the plea bargain system. There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I'm not necessarily in favor of the idea, but one of the worst arguments against it is that it isn't feasible because there's no way we could have that many trials. Complaining about alleged Democratic indifference to white men is like arguing that the plea bargaining system is necessary because it's easier for the lawyers and judges.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
There was a case in Allegheny County earlier this year in a similar vein, though it wasn't of the type to result in an opinion. A woman with cancer sued Johnson & Johnson claiming that their talcum powder contained asbestos. Plaintiff's counsel is a highly aggressive national plaintiff's firm out of Texas who regularly engage in questionable practices just to piss off defendants. They drive a hard bargain and aren't afraid to take a case to verdict. I actually sat in on this one for a few hours while I was at the courthouse attending to another matter, but I'm not familiar enough with the evidence to speculate on how the jury reached their conclusion. Anyway, per the verdict slip, the jury found that J&J's talcum powder did indeed contain asbestos, but that the Plaintiff had insufficiently proven that exposure to the powder caused her illness. The jury accordingly awarded $0 in compensatory damages. However, because they still thought J&J acted poorly, they tacked on $16 million in punitive damages. Unfortunately for the Plaintiff, since you can't receive punitive damages if the defendant isn't liable, she walked away with nothing, and the aggressive Plaintiff's firm who was used to winning just blew a couple hundred grand litigating a defense verdict that would have netted them millions if the jury had awarded a dollar for compensation.
The case you posted is an interesting one because it illustrates the difference between the way a case looks on paper and the way it presents in the courtroom. Haley was in an accident that the defendant unquestionably caused. She testified that the symptoms started immediately after the accident, sought medical treatment within a few days, was given a diagnosis, and has continually sought treatment over the succeeding years. There are objective diagnostic findings. The defense put forth incompetent experts. The plaintiffs got the testimony of treating physicians (rare), and had experts who were able to testify as to damages.
Yet the jury only awarded a fraction of the damages the Plaintiff asked for, and didn't award anything for pain and suffering. I looked Haley up, and she is a somewhat large young woman. I'm guessing she presented on the stand as overly dramatic, and that the jury didn't believe the damage evidence that she played sports in high school and worked out regularly and was depressed that she couldn't do these things anymore. There was also the testimony that suggests it was a relatively minor collision and not of the type where one would expect serious ongoing medical problems. They probably felt like since she wasn't at fault and obviously experienced some kind of injury she should get some money for the aggravation, but not enough to really mean anything, and they just skipped the pain and suffering part because, as the opinion notes, the jury doesn't have to award pain and suffering for the typical kinds of aggravation everyone experiences. In other words, girl gets in minor car crash, claims major injuries, okay, the other person was liable, but seriously? Except they don't know how to properly express this on the jury form and they end up giving the Plaintiff another bite at the apple. If they had awarded $12,000 in future expenses and $4,000 in pain and suffering then the verdict would be much harder to challenge.
I'm pretty defensive of the legal system here, because it usually works better than people give it credit for, but I'm not so in the bag for it that I don't realize that a system run by lawyers and judges gets us a system that works well for lawyers and judges. We spend so much time immersed in this stuff that it's easy to forget that people out in the real world don't have a clue about any of this and will do things that make sense to them but not to the court, which is a big problem when we're relying on them to make important decisions. I wouldn't have a problem with instructions that explained to the jury that yes, this can be second guessed by a court, and here are the reasons a court will second guess it. Saying someone suffered injuries resulting in thousands of dollars in medical treatment but didn't experience any pain and suffering beyond what is comparable to being sore for a few days doesn't make sense, and a court won't let it stand. Saying that the defendant didn't cause the plaintiff's injury but the defendant did bad stuff so they should pay anyway doesn't make sense, and a court won't let it stand. We fight over these jury instructions so much that we end up with something that might not make sense.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
It's not so much about whether Nazi ideas are held by a significant number of Republicans/conservatives, but whether there is a popular perception that they are. A lot of people on here seem to think that the Democratic Party is hostile to men, or white men, or whatever. It's a reasonable conclusion to come to if you listen to certain voices that are amplified by people looking to influence your opinion, but if you take an objective look at the party itself, it's absurd. The party chairman is a white guy. The most recent president was a white guy. All across the country, at all levels of government, there are white guys in elected positions as Democrats, and there are plenty more who were nominated by the party and lost.
In 2022, when Pat Toomey's seat opened up, there were four options for the Democrats. Val Arkoosh was a doctor who showed some early promise but withdrew before the primaries. Malcolm Kenyatta was a black, gay, state legislator from Philadelphia who was able to wrangle some early endorsements and seemed like the favorite son of the party. But when Conor Lamb entered the race, practically everyone who mattered in the party threw their support behind him, aside from the state party and Governor Wolf, both of whom declined to endorse any candidate. Lamb is about as sterotypical upper middle class white guy as it gets. Hell, just being an attorney from Mt. Lebanon signals as much to anyone from Pittsburgh. Lamb eventually lost the nomination, though, to a non-stereotypical white guy with a higher public profile.
These do not come off as the actions of a party that is hostile to white men. But there's a perception nonetheless that it is, and there's certainly a brand of lefty that is hostile to white men, and, as I've been saying for years, the influence of this kind of person among normie Democrats is wildly overstated by people trying to portray the party as a caricature for political purposes. And it's a problem for Democrats, and while I won't go as far as saying that it has cost them elections, it is certainly plausible to think so. If people get the impression that the Republican Party is insufficiently condemnatory of white nationalists, or Nazi sympathizers, or people who make racist jokes in private, or whoever, then it could come back to bite them in the ass regardless of whether these people make up a significant number of registered voters or elected officials.
This is why people like Stefniak are quick to condemn these people and call for their resignations. If you recall Stefniak was gunning for a UN Ambassadorship, only to have her nomination pulled by Trump. She's in a nominally safe seat, but Trump had recently had to travel to Florida to after the seat vacated by Mike Walz was in danger of being lost to a Democrat, a seat Walz had carried by 30 points. the GOP underperforms when Trump isn't on the ballot, and if Trump's popularity declines it could spell trouble in 2026. Probably not enough trouble for Stefniak to lose her seat, but an opponent being able to roast her for ignoring people from her district in party-affiliated offices making these kinds of remarks in a semi-official forum then it could be enough to tip things over the edge. It's at least enough of a concern that Trump was unwilling to risk a special election.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
It's even worse than that, because at least Yahoo and Microsoft had viable business plans and are still around years later. ChatGTP and other AI-only companies are more similar to Pets.com than the boosters want to realize. The news stories about the site's downfall always focused on the amount they spent on advertising, but they were selling the stuff they bought for less than what they paid for it, plus free shipping, in a bid to corner the market. ChatGTP is even worse because 97% of the users aren't paying anything, there is no advertising on the platform (and banner ads aren't going to cut it), and the 3% who do pay are likely power users who get more than their money's worth. So it's like if Pets.com gave 97% of their stuff away for free, sold the remaining 3% at a discount, and justified it by assuming that online shopping would be revolutionary and everyone would buy everything online. They were essentially right, they just went about it the wrong way to keep the spigot flowing. Add in spending large sums on infrastructure (i.e. warehouses vs. data centers) and the parallels are all too clear.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
MY brother is unpretentious and got into Wallace after I showed him the essay about the cruise ship that we both quote relentlessly. On year at the beach he read Infinite Jest because he wanted to read Wallace. He not only finished it, he's reread it several times. I think part of it is that none of his friends even know who Wallace is so he came into it as a book written by a writer he found funny (we both have an excessively dry sense of humor) and not as something he felt obligated to read. I started it years ago but with my own knowledge of the book's import I found it impossible to continue, even though my brother insists that it's right up my alley.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I think he was referring to a system they have in places like Sweden, where if you're a normal W-2 employee the government would look at your W-2 income and take the standard deductions and do all the stuff that they will correct anyway if you did it differently and didn't get the maximum refund. The first time you claim a child they could keep track of the age and take the deduction every year until 18. If you wanted to take more deductions than they were offering, then you'd file your own return. But most people wouldn't have the need to do that. The predatory thing comes with H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt opening up places in the 'hood where they'll offer to do poor people's taxes so they can charge a percentage of the EITC they recover.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
To attempt an actual answer, I think it's because cycling is an individual sport with clear rules and an adjudicative body. Armstrong not only broke the rules, but took active measures to conceal his rulebreaking. And there was no question about what he did. Contrast this with the MLB, where no one is discussing whether or not the wins were legitimate, rather whether the records should have an asterisk. And the only case where anyone is really talking about that is with respect to the Barry Bonds home run records, which already have their own problems. The Aaron record is the most defensible one to revert back to, but the McGwire one can't be done because he was juicing too, which takes us back to Maris, who had his own asterisk discussion because he had a longer season to work with than Babe Ruth did. Plus there's the issue that if you officially strip Bonds and others of home runs for record purposes, then shouldn't you make them not count for games, either? It gets complicated real fast.
And add to that the much thinner evidence that Bonds was juicing. It's one of those things where people who were sort of paying attention to the scandal at the time are aware of the broad strokes, but no one remembers the actual evidence. Bonds never admitted doing anything illegal, and it basically comes down to a crooked doctor and that his head got bigger (which is an effect of HGH, which wasn't banned at the time). It isn't a 1–1 comparison but they do this all the time in auto racing for cars that don't pass post-race inspection. A few years back they disqualified the winner and the runner up of the Pocono race because they had an illegal piece of tape on the front of their cars. One can make the argument that this had real-world implications rather than merely historical ones because they lost the points they would have earned for the season and got zeroes instead, but that seems to be more severe than not being recognized on Wikipedia (which they aren't). And for what it's worth, the official NCAA coaching wins lists don't include wins that were stripped by the NCAA. For the 2004 USC team, it merely gives an asterisk, but that's understandable since the BCS wasn't run by the NCAA and the NCAA does not award a championship.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I'm not sure how to tell you this, and I'm not an architect, but I don't see how the layout you're under contract for makes sense. My admittedly amateur eye sees several problems that suggest to me that there's a reason you don't see house layouts like this:
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Starting with the front door, it's path is in conflict with the door to the utility room, since the utility room door swings outwards.
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The reason it swings outwards is because the layout of the utility room doesn't make sense. There isn't enough depth to store the washer and dryer without them sticking out into the entry path from the door. And assuming you're putting the water heater, furnace, and panel box in here, plus possibly a stationary tub, the room isn't long enough to put them far enough back to keep them out of the immediate ingress path.
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The living room-as-central-hall concept will reduce the usable space by half. My house was built in 1945 and the upstairs hallway is 36" wide, and it's narrow; newer homes have 48" hallways. I'd say three feet is the minimum clearance you'll need around the doors to have adequate movement without it being cramped. Since you have doors on both sides of the room, nearly half of the total width needs to be kept clear for ingress and egress through the area.
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The upshot of the above is that there will be very little room for furniture. The couch will have to be practically in the middle of the room. I think I see how you have a plan to mount the TV on the wall between two doors. With this TV location, you'll have to get a very small "apartment sofa" dead center in the room, and you might have room for a small end table or another chair on the wall next to the door. And that's it. That also means that the highest traffic area of the house will be directly between the couch and the television.
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Another issue with having a central hall is that the private areas of the house are exposed to the living area. If you're entertaining people will be looking in bedrooms, and will be going to the bathroom with nothing but an inch and a half of birch between them and the party.
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Why the double doors in the bathrooms? They have conflicting swing paths and seem unnecessary. Make the master bath en suite and the spare open up to the house.
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What do you need two bathrooms for? And two large bathrooms at that; a typical size for a full bath in a small house is 8' × 5'. I don't know why you'd build a house with an 800 ft² footprint and waste space on two bathrooms.
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Why no basement? I know they're more expensive, but if I understand correctly you're in the Philly/NJ area, which isn't exactly the South. Here in Pittsburgh the frost line is at 36" and while I imagine it's less over there, it couldn't be that much less. Building on a slab means sinking a footer at 36" and then building up frost walls, which is still ultimately less expensive but doesn't usually make sense considering that a basement gives you a lot of extra space. Slabs are also more difficult to heat. The only time people build on slabs around here is if there's some special consideration like they're building on an old industrial site, there are mine subsidence issues, or they're in the mountains where there's shallow bedrock. The only house I saw that was build on a slab for no reason had a lot of other puzzling decisions made by the guy who built it, who I knew and was surprised he'd build a house like that.
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Not as big a deal, but the lack of a rear door seems concerning.
If you want to look at efficient houses, look at a typical ranch or split-entry layout. They're all practically mirror images but when they were building tract houses in the '50s and 60's the builders wanted to maximize usable space while still making the house livable.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
It's mostly left-wingers who left Twitter after Musk enshittified it my ramming his preferred content down everyone's throats. They don't want a monoculture so much as they don't want to be forced to look at posts by Ted Cruz. The fact that they were getting a reputation as you described is probably a big part of the reason they are so flippant currently. If the woke scolds who are the face of the company but a small percentage of total users want to leave, let them leave. I went on Bluesky today without an account and I didn't see anything relating to politics, mostly sports and scenic photos. I can't say the same about my Twitter account, which shows me a bunch of right-wing political posts even though I'm almost exclusively following sports journalists.
The issue was that they never really understood the level of systemic risk involved. The whole securitization scheme was based on the idea that, while high-risk mortgages might be too risky on an individual basis, in aggregate only a small percentage of them would default, and the riskiness led to higher interest rates. If you're assuming that a certain percentage of the mortgages are going to default over a given time period, you can price that in. They didn't forsee that there would be a foreclosure crisis that would lead to default rates grossly in excess of what was anticipated, and that this would cause a domino effect whereby the problem would keep getting worse.
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