It’s worth pointing out that there is literally no requirement that pardons _even be signed_, only that the President has granted them
I agree! The question is whether someone who is not the president can give a pardon on the president's behalf because it's what the president would want.
I believe that the J6 pardons were all a single document. I believe that he signed it on camera (there are pictures of him holding up the document having been signed).
But to address the fundamental point, I believe that the argument about the president issuing pardons is that the president has to issue them.
Not his staff. Not his best buddy. Not some guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes a button.
If the argument that a guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes the button has a legit pardon, I think that there are legitimate complaints about that argument and it's not to the argument's benefit for them to become (even more) public.
Yeah, how the process is actually managed is going to be really important here... because what the process actually is versus what people assume it is (to the extent that they've considered it at all) is likely to have very little overlap on the Venn diagram.
The process getting sunlight is probably to the benefit of everybody except the people involved with the process itself.
If Biden didn't know about it and didn't sign it... is it still a presidential pardon?
While reasonable people all know that the answer is "yes, because we believe that if Elon put a pardon for himself in the machine and pressed the button that it'd be a real pardon", there are unreasonable people out there who think that an Elon Pardon that Trump didn't know about and didn't sign wouldn't be a real pardon.
And we have a new constitutional crisis and it's not even 8AM.
Donald Trump has announced that the pardons Biden handed out in his final days as president were not signed by Biden but were, instead, signed by autopen and Biden knew nothing at all about the pardons.
Given that Biden didn't know about the pardons and that they weren't "signed" by him, Trump has declared the pardons null and void.
How difficult is it for a contract to be annulled because the person who signed it was an elder who was non compos mentis? If that's something that never happens, it should be easy to dismiss the claims that it applies to pardons.
Our favorite restaurant in the universe (since closed) was a little place on the Vegas strip that specialized in "tapas".
If you're not familiar with that word, as we weren't in 2005, just imagine hearing "we're going to go eat at the tapas place."
"I beg your pardon."
Anyway, the theory to "tapas" is that the appetizers are better anyway so just get those. Get 5 or 6 appetizers between 2 or 3 people and everybody gets their first and second pick and you can play the "oh, try this!" game with the stuffed mushrooms or the black and bleu steakbits and if you find something that makes the entire table moan, order a second plate of them.
The little place we went to has been closed for years and years, I guess, replaced with one that looks exactly the same and so googling for tapas places (or even tapas places that shuttered) isn't that helpful.
But making a meal out of the appetizers can be a thing. Grab your main squeeze and a third wheel and make a night of it.
I mentioned these in the waning days of the last thread but I'm going to mention them again because they strike me as indicators for the summer and autumn:
A Labour minister was last night at the centre of an explosive row over claims he rubbished high-level intelligence pointing to Covid's origins in a Chinese laboratory.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.
But Lord Vallance, the science minister who was the Government's chief scientific adviser at the time, is accused of ignoring the report, possibly for fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardising research funding.
A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.
Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe, without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.
Lotta passive voice in that title, there.
To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.
And unevenly distributed. There are folks who look around and cannot even comprehend why something like this might be necessary even as others, such as the NYT, realize that they're in the middle of a five-alarm fire.
What does the president of Wesleyan know anyway? Wait, lemme google "Wesleyan"... it's probably a Christian thing... yep. Named after John Wesley. OH! A Methodist to boot!
Yeah, he can probably be dismissed along with anybody who agrees with him or has any sympathies whatsoever to his point about insular thinking in the academy.
Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe, without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.
If you like the passive voice, you will thrill as you read this one.
To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.
Oh, and the answer to the question "why are you still talking about this?" is in the conclusion of the piece:
"We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third."
A Labour minister was last night at the centre of an explosive row over claims he rubbished high-level intelligence pointing to Covid's origins in a Chinese laboratory.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.
But Lord Vallance, the science minister who was the Government's chief scientific adviser at the time, is accused of ignoring the report, possibly for fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardising research funding.
A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.
We will soon be at "why are you still talking about this?"
Eh, a million years ago, we had (reportedly, anyway) two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
A democrat was in office, however, and so we were treated to a bunch of essays about how we shouldn't use "two consecutive quarters of negative growth" as an indicator of a recession. We got new definitions of "recession" and a bunch of people acting like they'd never heard that definition ever before. Like it was brand spankin' new.
Anyway, you say "Jaybird, you say sh*t like this assuming people know what the f*ck you’re talking about, but no one ever does, because the thing you have linked it to when you evidentially end up having to explain is _extremely obviously_ not the same thing at all." and, from where I sit, I think "I was just talking about how two consecutive quarters of negative growth meant that we were in a recession".
And, suddenly, I'm being asked to defend my definition of "recession" and when I say something like "two consecutive quarters of negative growth", they look at me like I'm growing a second head.
Anyway. I digress.
"Deja vu", I'm trying to say. No, not the gentlemans' club.
Okay. We saw Novocaine. It was a fun dumb movie. IT WAS RATED R!!! So, like, if you've seen the trailers and wonder "how hard of an R is it?"
Well, on the drive home, Maribou and I hammered out that it was "Action-Comedy with a *LOT* of Body Horror".
So it's a Body Horror Comedy Action movie. If your response to that is "oh, good! I was hoping they'd make one of those!", this is a good one. I mean, if you see it with your doctor friend, he's going to be like all of the computer guys who went to Live Free or Die Hard and explained that "that's not how computers work".
But if you can get past the fact that that's not how computers work, you're going to enjoy a pleasantly dumb movie that is glad that you bought a ticket and wants you to come to Novocaine 2: Lidacaine.
They're all beneficiaries of the funding. The kids setting up barricades *AND* the ones going to class. Or not going to class. The ones chasing tail. The ones listening to Aqualung on vinyl on Friday night because they don't have dates.
Each and every student is a beneficiary of the funding.
Which means that some of the beneficiaries of the funding are preventing other beneficiaries of the funding from going to class and, theoretically, *NOT* benefitting from the funding.
Now, you may say "well, they're just *SAYING* that they care, they really only care about crushing dissent!"
That may be true, but the whole thing about some students complaining about other students building a barricade opens the door a crack because now the Poindexters can claim that their rights are being violated.
"Rights". Try to get a date instead of using your right so much, amirite?
I think the US government has to care because of funding.
I think that if we were able to just divorce the funding from the university, everybody would be happier. They'd have as much Free Speech as they could handle and we could ask anybody and everybody "why do you care?" about anything that happens on campus.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/17/25”
It’s worth pointing out that there is literally no requirement that pardons _even be signed_, only that the President has granted them
I agree! The question is whether someone who is not the president can give a pardon on the president's behalf because it's what the president would want.
Which... well, it's not a slam dunk, is it?
"
I believe that the J6 pardons were all a single document. I believe that he signed it on camera (there are pictures of him holding up the document having been signed).
But to address the fundamental point, I believe that the argument about the president issuing pardons is that the president has to issue them.
Not his staff. Not his best buddy. Not some guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes a button.
If the argument that a guy who sneaks into the room with the autopen device and pushes the button has a legit pardon, I think that there are legitimate complaints about that argument and it's not to the argument's benefit for them to become (even more) public.
On “Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil, and Protest Expectations”
There was a story a few years back about a protest where a bunch of protestors blocked a subway train. They prevented the subway car from taking off.
The story went on to talk about how some of the riders went vigilante and forcibly removed the protestors so the subway could get back to business.
This was described as the vigilantes removing the free speech rights of the people who were trying protest.
The question of whether there were any other rights of note in the entire situation went unremarked.
A fine trick.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/17/25”
Yeah, how the process is actually managed is going to be really important here... because what the process actually is versus what people assume it is (to the extent that they've considered it at all) is likely to have very little overlap on the Venn diagram.
The process getting sunlight is probably to the benefit of everybody except the people involved with the process itself.
"
What if the special investigator comes back and says "I'm not sure we can try Biden... he'll come across as an elderly man with memory problems"?
Because if that happens, it'll be to the benefit of Trump's argument.
"
Why are you denying that Trump said these things?
"Um, I'm not?"
"Well, I'm now going to argue against you as if you were."
Here's a link to what Trump said.
If your argument is that we still don't know whether Trump *ACTUALLY* said that or if he just had one of his staffers write it on his behalf, yes.
That is the fundamental argument here. Yes. Exactly.
"
So you agree that Elon can put a pardon in the autopen machine without Trump knowing about it and it's perfectly legit?
Because that's the argument. Elon can put a pardon in the autopen machine without Trump knowing about it.
"
If Biden didn't know about it and didn't sign it... is it still a presidential pardon?
While reasonable people all know that the answer is "yes, because we believe that if Elon put a pardon for himself in the machine and pressed the button that it'd be a real pardon", there are unreasonable people out there who think that an Elon Pardon that Trump didn't know about and didn't sign wouldn't be a real pardon.
"
And we have a new constitutional crisis and it's not even 8AM.
Donald Trump has announced that the pardons Biden handed out in his final days as president were not signed by Biden but were, instead, signed by autopen and Biden knew nothing at all about the pardons.
Given that Biden didn't know about the pardons and that they weren't "signed" by him, Trump has declared the pardons null and void.
How difficult is it for a contract to be annulled because the person who signed it was an elder who was non compos mentis? If that's something that never happens, it should be easy to dismiss the claims that it applies to pardons.
On “Lies, Damn Lies, and Appetizers”
Our favorite restaurant in the universe (since closed) was a little place on the Vegas strip that specialized in "tapas".
If you're not familiar with that word, as we weren't in 2005, just imagine hearing "we're going to go eat at the tapas place."
"I beg your pardon."
Anyway, the theory to "tapas" is that the appetizers are better anyway so just get those. Get 5 or 6 appetizers between 2 or 3 people and everybody gets their first and second pick and you can play the "oh, try this!" game with the stuffed mushrooms or the black and bleu steakbits and if you find something that makes the entire table moan, order a second plate of them.
The little place we went to has been closed for years and years, I guess, replaced with one that looks exactly the same and so googling for tapas places (or even tapas places that shuttered) isn't that helpful.
But making a meal out of the appetizers can be a thing. Grab your main squeeze and a third wheel and make a night of it.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/17/25”
I mentioned these in the waning days of the last thread but I'm going to mention them again because they strike me as indicators for the summer and autumn:
From The Daily Mail: Labour minister 'rubbished' spy chief's secret dossier on Wuhan lab leak theory during pandemic despite Boris demanding probe... to 'avoid offending China'
And, on Sunday, the NYT published Zeynep Tufekci: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
Lotta passive voice in that title, there.
On “From The New York Times Editorial Board: The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education”
"too little, too late"
And unevenly distributed. There are folks who look around and cannot even comprehend why something like this might be necessary even as others, such as the NYT, realize that they're in the middle of a five-alarm fire.
"
See? The obvious conclusion is that there shouldn't be debates!
It makes you wonder why the New York Times is printing stuff like this in the first place. Are they trying to distract us away from... DONALD TRUMP?!?
"
Personally, I don't think that medical treatments should be debated at all.
This isn't House.
"
What does the president of Wesleyan know anyway? Wait, lemme google "Wesleyan"... it's probably a Christian thing... yep. Named after John Wesley. OH! A Methodist to boot!
Yeah, he can probably be dismissed along with anybody who agrees with him or has any sympathies whatsoever to his point about insular thinking in the academy.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Ice Cream Theory”
You'd think that there'd be a sherbet or something, though... lemme google.
It's apparently the name of a strain of weed.
Okay, there are a couple of pinky-extended small-batch artisanal places that make it. But it ain't common. Get rainbow instead, I guess.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/10/25”
Oh, jeez. And now Zeynep Tufekci has an article: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
If you like the passive voice, you will thrill as you read this one.
Oh, and the answer to the question "why are you still talking about this?" is in the conclusion of the piece:
"We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third."
"
From The Daily Mail: Labour minister 'rubbished' spy chief's secret dossier on Wuhan lab leak theory during pandemic despite Boris demanding probe... to 'avoid offending China'
We will soon be at "why are you still talking about this?"
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Gems in the Steam Spring Sale”
Oh my gosh! Playing EU4 with an AI buddy! That's absolutely nuts! I love it!
"
My favorite review of EU4 was "I mostly watch tutorials on Youtube".
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/10/25”
Eh, a million years ago, we had (reportedly, anyway) two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
A democrat was in office, however, and so we were treated to a bunch of essays about how we shouldn't use "two consecutive quarters of negative growth" as an indicator of a recession. We got new definitions of "recession" and a bunch of people acting like they'd never heard that definition ever before. Like it was brand spankin' new.
Anyway, you say "Jaybird, you say sh*t like this assuming people know what the f*ck you’re talking about, but no one ever does, because the thing you have linked it to when you evidentially end up having to explain is _extremely obviously_ not the same thing at all." and, from where I sit, I think "I was just talking about how two consecutive quarters of negative growth meant that we were in a recession".
And, suddenly, I'm being asked to defend my definition of "recession" and when I say something like "two consecutive quarters of negative growth", they look at me like I'm growing a second head.
Anyway. I digress.
"Deja vu", I'm trying to say. No, not the gentlemans' club.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Ice Cream Theory”
Okay. We saw Novocaine. It was a fun dumb movie. IT WAS RATED R!!! So, like, if you've seen the trailers and wonder "how hard of an R is it?"
Well, on the drive home, Maribou and I hammered out that it was "Action-Comedy with a *LOT* of Body Horror".
So it's a Body Horror Comedy Action movie. If your response to that is "oh, good! I was hoping they'd make one of those!", this is a good one. I mean, if you see it with your doctor friend, he's going to be like all of the computer guys who went to Live Free or Die Hard and explained that "that's not how computers work".
But if you can get past the fact that that's not how computers work, you're going to enjoy a pleasantly dumb movie that is glad that you bought a ticket and wants you to come to Novocaine 2: Lidacaine.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/10/25”
They're all beneficiaries of the funding. The kids setting up barricades *AND* the ones going to class. Or not going to class. The ones chasing tail. The ones listening to Aqualung on vinyl on Friday night because they don't have dates.
Each and every student is a beneficiary of the funding.
Which means that some of the beneficiaries of the funding are preventing other beneficiaries of the funding from going to class and, theoretically, *NOT* benefitting from the funding.
Now, you may say "well, they're just *SAYING* that they care, they really only care about crushing dissent!"
That may be true, but the whole thing about some students complaining about other students building a barricade opens the door a crack because now the Poindexters can claim that their rights are being violated.
"Rights". Try to get a date instead of using your right so much, amirite?
"
I think the US government has to care because of funding.
I think that if we were able to just divorce the funding from the university, everybody would be happier. They'd have as much Free Speech as they could handle and we could ask anybody and everybody "why do you care?" about anything that happens on campus.
"
Rand Paul was a principled Republican vote making the opposition to the cloture bipartisan.