This. The problem arises when policy positions become principles unto themselves rather than mere means to further certain principles. This problem does not necessarily have anything to do with whether one is a technocrat or a partisan, though. Instead, it has much more to do with forgetting or minimizing the actual goal of a particular policy or denying that said policy has effects on other legitimate goals.
I seriously need to trademark this, but once again, "Have too many principles and you soon have none."
The problem isn't ideology per se, it's rigid ideology that mistakes means for ends, policies for principles, and positive claims for normative claims (and vice versa).
@alan-scott FWIW, and while I somewhat disagree with Murali's overall point in this post, the "sincere belief" standard is functionally and legally incapable of much investigation or inquiry. There's a widespread belief amongst many judges that in almost all instances (and in fact I there's quite a bit of case law supporting this), an inquiry into the sincerity of a religious belief would itself present a huge First Amendment free exercise problem - to do so in most instances would be to tell someone what their religious beliefs actually require.
The only instances of which I'm aware where courts have said they're at all permitted to inquire into the sincerity of a purported religious belief are (1) instances where the purported belief was so incredibly outlandish and bizarre as to trigger the presumption that no person could sincerely believe it; and much more frequently (2) instances showing that the person at issue regularly acted in a manner inconsistent with that belief.
In other words, courts for the most part can't and won't inquire into the purported basis for the belief or whether it is actually religious in nature; instead, they mostly have to limit their inquiry to whether the person asserting the belief actually believes it.
Otherwise, we're left with a pretty totalitarian view of religion in which we prevent people from having their own beliefs and interpretations of their own religion. We're left with judges telling people from other religions and religious sects what their religions do and do not say, essentially turning those judges into theologians. We're also saying that, in effect, religious organizations get to dictate alleged adherents' beliefs in toto despite the fact that there are huge numbers of members of any significant religious group that disagree with that group's official organization on one or more points of significance.
That's bad news, and would not only create huge free exercise problems, but it would also probably amount to a pretty severe violation of the establishment clause, placing courts in the position of enforcers of official church doctrines.
Again, though, courts can absolutely inquire into whether a particular person actually believes and acts in a manner consistent with a given purported belief. But they can't question their assertion that the belief is religious in nature.
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, no “compelling governmental interest” was found in the government’s claim to seek broadened access to contraception by people in general.
This seems incorrect to me. From the Hobby Lobby majority's opinion: "Under RFRA, a Government action that imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise must serve a compelling government interest, and we assume that the HHS regulations satisfy this requirement."
It's debatable whether that can be construed as a determination of a compelling interest, but it's hardly language that would support the notion that this was not a compelling interest.
I'd also point out that the court explicitly indicated that, at the very least, anti-employment discrimination laws serve a "compelling governmental interest." I don't think it would be a stretch to say that this would be extended to include public accommodations laws more generally.
I think the "compelling interest" standard in the context of RFRA in general seems to have a different meaning than a "compelling interest" standard in other contexts.
I also suspect that in this case, the "substantial burden" test will not be a slam dunk for the business owners. I think they'll win on it, to be sure, but I think the fact that historically their business has been anything but religious in practice will weigh against them, whereas Hobby Lobby had made a pretty good case that its business practices had a basis in religious expression.
The least restrictive means question, assuming it gets reached, is a tough one for me. I think what I get back to is that they have not historically treated their business as having any kind of religious character. They've acted as a public accommodation throughout and, lest we forget, they are not being asked to perform the religious sacrament of marriage, only to handle the legally required aspects of civil marriage. I don't see a way that we can say that the goals of public accommodations laws can be achieved if exceptions are provided for public accommodations that are operated by people with religious beliefs.
But this last is a really close issue for me, so I'm not certain where I come down in the end.
@mad-rocket-scientist There may conceivably be some circumstances where it would be a full faith and credit issue, but by and large it would not be - full faith and credit typically only applies to the validity of documents and judgments (especially judgments), but says little to nothing about what the effect of those documents and judgments should be in the second state.
All states *do* recognize other state’s licenses, but that’s because every state decided to do so.
This is incorrect. If a state hypothetically refused to recognize an out of state driver's license, it would be clearly unconstitutional under the "dormant commerce clause." (It would not be the full faith and credit clause, but that's another topic altogether).
States can theoretically in some instances refuse to allow someone who would be too young to drive in their state to do so even with a license, but the charge wouldn't be "driving without a license," it would be "driving underage."
Refusal to recognize CCW permits from other states probably would not be viewed as a violation of the dormant commerce clause, though that is by no means a guarantee since it's a balancing test. But if the dormant commerce clause applied, it would be the same analysis as long as the arresting state had some form of CCW permit.
I’m a little baffled as to how you think this *should* work? Should people from another state be allowed to wander around armed in violation of state law?
This completely misses the point - there is a rather large difference between a felony and a misdemeanor and a traffic ticket. Google Shaneen Allen. Tell me you're ok with what was happening to her until her story became such a cause celebre that the governor was forced to order the prosecutor to back down.
And what if someone needs to stop for food at a rest stop while driving through a state? Are we really going to say that it's simple common sense for them to leave the firearm unattended in the trunk of the car when they have a CCW permit in their home state?
Who said anything about shortening the barrel? Why can't it just be a slightly too-short replacement barrel? Shorter barrels closer to the legal limit are widely viewed as superior for home defense.
Yes, I’m sure there are a few actual hobbyists out there that would like to be able to modify their guns for fun, with completely innocent intent, and I have sympathy, I do. But they are completely drowned out by the people deliberately making their weapons more dangerous, because of paranoid ravings they hear promoted by the gun industry.
Cite please. What modifications, exactly, both make a gun more dangerous and are popular with firearms owners? How, exactly, do those modifications make the gun more dangerous?
Fact is that there are quite a few reasons why firearms owners modify their guns - maybe they want a more comfortable or stable grip, or they want to make it easier to carry by making it more lightweight, or they want it to have less recoil, or they want to be able to fire a different caliber, or they want to make it more accurate for shooting competitions. Or maybe they just don't want to go deaf when they shoot the firearm.
These modifications are not "just for fun." They're to make the firearm more appropriate for the owner's intended - legal - use.
And then they whine and complain that modifying something that is legal to possess into something that is illegal to possess turns out to be…illegal.
No. The complaint is that it's abnormally difficult to figure out what is and is not legal, and that the consequences for being wrong are not merely a fine or a misdemeanor, but instead are being prosecuted for a felony.
In a rational gun-owning world, no weapons would even be slightly near ‘illegal’. We wouldn’t worry about whether or not you could attach a suppressor…who the hell attaches suppressors?
Uhh, people who don't want to go deaf or make people near where they're hunting go deaf? Suppressors do not make firearms completely silent or really anything approaching silent. Instead, they reduce the noise level by about 15-20%. That's still going to be very loud. It just won't make you deaf nearly as fast.
Seriously, you'd be surprised at the countries where suppressors are generally legal or are no harder to acquire than firearms themselves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressor
I can think of several, but that's also missing the point. It's incredibly hard to have much faith in government's ability to solve problems (rather than just do stuff that purports to solve problems) if proven and persistent corruption (not pork barrel politics, actual corruption) isn't going to be a disqualifying factor for executive branch candidates.
Though I am a bit amused by the notion that actual bribery and corruption should be no big deal, but allowing outside groups to spend money on advertisements to express their opinion around election time signals the death knell for democratic government.
The thing is that in this case, we may well be talking about someone whose corruption basically ensured that the state's health exchange would be an abysmal failure.
It's all well and good to overlook corruption and incompetence when you're talking about a legislator, but when you're talking about an executive, corruption and incompetence mean that having all the "right" positions on your litmus tests will approximately amount to diddly-squat.
I'll admit I'm pretty surprised by Sotomayor not joining this- she's been pretty good on crim pro issues. Perhaps she thought that they'd be unable to get a fifth vote to reverse?
As far as the CTE stuff, it is looking more and more like every hit (big or little) counts, and effect is cumulative. So we can’t just count concussions, and we can’t just count games, and we need to look at every sport that has contact to the head as a regular occurance.
While it is absolutely true that we can't just count concussions, and while there certainly should be a willingness to look at whether and how much CTE is linked to every sport where there is contact with the head, it's not at all clear that literally every little hit involving the head counts, and at this point it seems very unlikely that outside of football, boxing, and perhaps hockey "enforcers," the prevalence of CTE is sufficiently large to warrant radical changes. Unfortunately, there's an element of risk to all sports, and for injuries/risks that are not immediately fatal, I'm hesitant to even consider radical changes absent a showing that the long-term risks will dramatically impact post-career quality of life for a substantial percentage of players.
That varies according to the risk of course- if soccer players suffer ALS at any rate at all comparable to the rate in football, that's a huge problem. And football players seem to eventually suffer dementia at a rate double the rest of the population's, meaning that somewhere on the order of 1 in 5 or 6 football players will suffer dementia directly attributable to football. That's a huge problem worthy of radical changes even if most of those don't experience symptoms until their late 60s/early 70s.
But at this point, there's not any evidence to suggest that the risks associated with brain injuries in soccer are at all comparable to the horror of brain injuries in football.
Shorter me: In soccer, the issue really does seem to be concussions or effects similar to concussions far more than widespread CTE or dementia, at least at this point.
Honestly, I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that soccer players suffer long-term brain damage with nearly the frequency of American football players. Certainly, it may happen, but given the sheer number of people who play soccer well into adulthood around the world, it's really hard to conclude that the risk of long-term brain damage is particularly significant.
We have many, many reports of early-onset dementia and memory loss with football players, and that trend was often noticed long before the letters "CTE" were juxtaposed together. To an even greater extent, it was also noticed and often commented upon with respect to retired boxers. Neither of these were ever sports with particularly remarkable youth participation rates, even on just a national scale - football's participation rate has never, AFAIK, been more than a little over half of baseball's, and even before the concussion crisis, it was well under half the participation rate for soccer and basketball. (Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579350892629229918)
But despite the sheer volume of people who play soccer around the globe, and despite the fact that it's history as the world's most popular sport goes back quite a long while, I don't think there's ever been a stereotype of retired soccer players suffering from dementia or having particularly severe cognitive problems. There is, however, this study: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/14/science/la-sci-soccer-brain-injury-20121114
But there seems to me to be a big difference between "mild" and "severe" even there - a "mild traumatic brain injury" is just a synonym for "concussion" so far as I can tell. From what I can tell, the finding is essentially that soccer players' brains look like the brain of the 30% of people who suffer a concussion that never fully heals. http://www.germaninnovation.org/docs/GCRI-Interview-Dr_Koerte.pdf
Obviously concussions that never fully heal obviously aren't good, but my point is that effects similar to the effects of one concussion that never fully heals aren't so severe as to warrant radical changes.
There are, to my knowledge, two confirmed reports of severe CTE in soccer players, one of whom died at the age of 83 and does not appear to have exhibited any symptoms of dementia or lost memory until his mid-60s, with it only becoming debilitating in his mid-70s. The other player (a career semi-pro) is a much more troubling case, to be sure, but statistically it's impossible to reach any significant conclusions from such a small number of cases.
Last but not least, it seems that in soccer the bigger issue is not the heading of the ball itself - done properly, heading the ball really should not be particularly violent - but the contact with the head that can occur in the air with other players or the goalposts, which seems to be what is most likely to cause the types of subconcussive (and concussive) injuries with life-changing long-term effects. There are fairly easy ways to mitigate these problems - padding or softening the goalposts, requiring goalies to wear headgear, and encouraging field players to do likewise.
I'll second the recommendation. The pilot episode was actually a bit disappointing on the whole, though it had enough moments for me to give it another shot. But....it was a pilot, and the problems with it were mostly just the types of chemistry problems that exist in most pilots. The other two episodes have been unbelievable, to the point that it's got to be the funniest family sitcom since at least season 1 of Modern Family. Laurence Fishburne's performance is putting him into "national treasure" territory.
Larry Wilmore's influence is crazy obvious, though, so I'm a bit worried for how season 2 will wind up looking without him behind the scenes.
@chris From your link (and the 538 link contained therein):
And according to Comstock’s data, which tracks millions of athletes, football’s clearly, dramatically more risky for the brain.
“For every 10,000 kids playing in a football game this Friday across the country, we expect 33 of them to sustain a concussion,” Comstock told me.
In comparison, for every 10,000 boys playing in one high school soccer game, there are 12 concussions.
This is directed at Chait's point that the difference between football and girls soccer is about 2:1, and that this difference, while sizable, is also incremental, along the lines of the increased risk of driving an older car vs. a new car. I don't see how referencing a ratio of 2.5:1 as compared to boys soccer affects Chait's point. What's more, the citation to per-game incidence seems to ignore that soccer players have about two and a half times more games than football players. This is equivalent to the old claim of drug warriors that emphasized how much more tar is in a joint of marijuana as compared to a single cigarette even though almost no one would smoke the equivalent of 20 joints a day, while plenty of people (at least at the time) smoked a pack of cigarettes a day.
For what it's worth, and since I should have said this yesterday, I actually quite like the "good kid/cool kid" dichotomy to describe the two most significant and independent factions of the GOP. I don't think it's right to say that the "cool kid" types are emerging because of clickbait rhetoric, but that's another story altogether and not really an important part of your argument.
But one of the reasons I like the dichotomy is that you've put it in the context of a 1950s/60s-era understanding of "good" kids and "cool" kids. Today, I suspect that the terms have a bit of a different connotation in that the term "good kids" is probably viewed as synonymous with kinda nerdy and introverted types, while "cool kids" is probably more or less synonymous with "popular."
But in the popular imagination and stereotype, a "good kid" from the 50s/60s would probably be not only law-abiding and clean-cut, but also perceived as kinda heroic, an "Everybody's All-American" type, and probably the most popular guy in school, the type of kid that big business can't help but put in their commercials. The "cool kid" would be more aloof, disrespectful, disruptive unconcerned with popularity, reckless, and devil-may-care, often a real and present danger to himself and others. On the other hand, though, he'd also be quite fun-loving, self-reliant, and independent, willing to hang out with anyone willing to put up with his crap (and in fairness, he gives a lot of crap).
But the "good kid" looks down on the "cool kid" and his lack of conformity and respect for authority. For all his outward claims to decency, he can often be indistinguishable from the Omegas from "Animal House," gleefully willing to use his status and close ties to authority to crush any who he views as a threat to his status and institutions. Obviously, the "good" Omegas cannot long coexist with the "cool" Deltas.
Allowed to reach the highest heights, it is this self-superior side of the "good kid" that takes over, as he loses any concept that he is distinct from the entities he values. That which he does is right because he is a good Patriot, and good Patriots do what he does. Whatever he does that will earn him more money or maintain his status becomes acceptable, even if that means cheating, or agreeing to become a walking, talking billboard for Uggs.
He becomes, in a word, Tom Fishing Brady, He must, at that point, be stopped, taken down a few pegs, and ruthlessly defeated. He must lose his throne atop the AFC East and made to kneel down before those whose hopes and dreams he has most frequently and ruthlessly crushed - the nerds, the losers, the Buffalo Pegulaville Bills. And this must happen this Sunday.
So let it be written, so let it be done.
Wait, what were we talking about again?
Oh, right, Fox News. Like you said, the good kids, the Omegas, who have been the faces of the GOP forever, cannot long coexist with the cool kids, the Deltas. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc.? They're Babs, Mandy, and their sorority full of Southern belles - they've always been the Omegas' sisters, and can't imagine living without the prestige, power, and influence that comes from that relationship, but frankly they're getting pretty bored and they're a little intrigued that the Deltas are trying to court them. They haven't decided to hop in the convertible with Bluto yet; in fact, they're actually quite scared of the Deltas and the their potential for destruction. But in their hearts, they realize that they'd be the biggest loser in any war between the Omegas and the Deltas.
Unlike the sorority girls in Animal House, though, Fox News & Co. are willing to do whatever it takes to keep that from happening for as long as possible, even if war is inevitable in the long run. They figure that the Deltas love the idea of revolting enough that they won't care whether they're actually revolting against authority or acting as counter-revolutionaries, and the Omegas have so defined themselves as indistinguishable from the institutions they purport to hold dear that they'll view attacks on any non-Omega in charge of those institutions as an actual defense of those institutions.
What I don’t see is anyone addressing my idea that you can either have policies that are friendly to workers, minorities, and protect the environment or you can support small-business duck dynasty type upstarts.
The problem with this is that it assumes that the groups that comprise the "liberal" base and the "conservative" base are static, rather than just a function of messy coalition politics. The fact is that each of the groups you're worried about protecting have very limited areas of united interests and quite often have very divergent interests. Historically speaking, of course, many labor unions were especially and uniquely hostile to racial minority groups. For a very long time, environmentalists and labor are likewise often very hostile to each other - witness the decades-long battles between John Dingell and Henry Waxman over myriad pieces of legislation that eventually culminated -after, what, 30 plus years? - in Dingell's ouster by Waxman as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
It was only 15-20 years ago that the GOP had no shortage of proud and outspoken environmentalists like Christine Todd Whitman, Tom Kean, Sr., and Sherwood Boehlert, amongst others. Boehlert (full disclosure - I worked on his campaigns in college) was also very close with the IAFF (firefighter's union; I also once interned for them for a summer) and plenty of other unions. Kean was an ardent environmentalist who also happened to be a leading figure in the push for welfare reform and welfare program cuts. Ditto Whitman, to a lesser extent. Kean and Whitman (and, perhaps to a significantly lesser extent, Boehlert) were also backed to the hilt by both small and large business.
Do you think it is possible to support the civil rights act, the fair labor standards act, family leave, general sick leave, various anti-discrimination acts, environmental protection, etc while also supporting deregulations that allegedly help small-business owners?
Absolutely, or at least it's no less possible to do so than it is to (1) defend Medicare; (2) view defense spending as sacred; (3) demand tax cuts; and (4) demand a balanced budget.
I mean, why are you assuming that there is only one way to represent each of those groups' interests? Fact is, representing small business owners' interests doesn't have to mean deregulation or even opposition to increased regulation. There are plenty of other ways to represent those interests, and indeed there are plenty of ways that regulations can be structured to actually advantage small business, just as there are plenty of ways that regulations can be structured to advantage big business at the expense of small business, etc.
By that same token, there are plenty of ways to represent any one of the liberal interests you describe by using deregulation or opposition to new regulations as a tool. Ending the War on Drugs comes to mind as a way of helping minority groups; rolling back the regulations of Taft-Hartley comes to mind immediately as one of the most helpful possible things that could be done for unions. Environmentally beneficial deregulation is trickier off the top of my head, but there are deregulations that could help the environment, such as vehicle safety regulations that add weight to vehicles and thus decrease fuel efficiency.
Now, maybe it's no longer possible to simultaneously represent small business interests, environmental interests, minority group interests, and labor union interests, if it ever was. But there's absolutely no reason why small business has to be on one side and the other three groups have to be on the other side on any given issue, nor even on the majority of issues.
And even that is an oversimplification, because each of those four groups consists of people with their own interests that may be different from others in that group. And this is what I was trying to get at above with my sixth point. "Small business" and "big business" are not monoliths, and even if they were, they wouldn't need to be. And it shouldn't even bear mentioning that minority groups and union workers are not monoliths (or even environmentalists, for that matter). The question isn't whether the interests of those groups are consistent with the interests of any given other group. What matters is what issues are most important to members of any given group at a given point in time and how those interests interact with the interests of any other given group at that point in time. And just as importantly, it matters which of those issues are being subjected to public debate at a given moment in time.
I also don’t place much stock in how people self-describe themselves because the word conservative can mean different things to different people and people pick words that they think sound good.
Ok, that's all well and good, but then you've got to define who exactly it is that you're referring to when you're generalizing about conservatives. But I don't think you can come up with a definition that encompasses the Red State cultural conservatives like Sarah Palin who you've referenced repeatedly in this thread, the economic elites that are the lifeblood of the GOP's coffers and whose elite status conservatives purportedly want to preserve, and anti-regulation small business owners, but somehow avoids encompassing the overwhelming majority of that 40 percent who self-identify as conservative.
When the political process delivers a result that I don’t like, it’s special interests.
Quoted for truth. Because my interests are "public interests," yours are "special." The phrase "special interests" is far and away one of my biggest pet peeves in all of politics. Fact is that whenever you advocate for a particular political position on a particular issue, you are acting as an "interest." When you do so in a coordinated fashion or through an organization of some sort, you are part of an "interest group."
And that's a good thing, not something to be ashamed of. The problem isn't that we have too many "special interests," it's that we've got way too few. Grumble grumble Federalist #10 grumble grumble.
Corey Robin does not see conservatism as being the upholding of small-government to defend liberty but a way of maintaining privilege for small group of people. If you see some truth in this definition of conservatism, the destruction of the New Deal and other Welfare State measures make perfect sense because such measures level the playing field and remove power from the elite. They are constraints on business owners and impositions of morality and ethics.
There are a massive number of problems with this characterization. First, if all conservatism is about is maintaining privilege for a small group of people, then the 40 percent of Americans who call themselves conservative are either not conservatives or are a "small group of people," both of which are absurd claims.
Second, to the extent that he's just claiming conservatism is only about maintaining (or obtaining) privilege for conservatives, it's a claim that's neither interesting nor falsifiable, indistinguishable from the claims conservatives make about liberals that liberalism is only about giving "goodies" to liberal groups. Technically speaking, both claims are also, in fact, true. But only because they're essentially tautologies - the simplest and broadest definition of politics is that it is how societies determine "who gets what, where, when, and how."
Third, it ignores that there are in fact numerous different strains of ideologies that fit under the broad umbrella of "conservatism" in the US, no one of which is particularly dominant - remember the whole three-legged stool analogy? While it was an over-simplification, it was (and largely still is) a pretty good description of the elements of the American Right for a very long time.
Fourth, as @kim and @j-r both point out, many of the programs you reference in fact helped further entrench established economic elites, and I'm not just talking about "liberal" elites, but even more so about business elites, and particularly big business elites. I mean....it's hard to come up with a policy that would more entrench existing economic elites than the not-short-lived-enough National Recovery Act, with its insistence that industries develop legally binding "codes" for "fair" competition. That is nothing if not a legal requirement that industries cartelize. It was also a particularly prominent part of the supposedly equalizing New Deal.
Fifth, let us recall that it was died-in-the-wool conservatives (along with the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party) who most vehemently opposed the bank bailouts in 2008, to the point that the majority of Republicans in the House voted against the bailouts, even going so far as to successfully defeat them in their first iteration. Indeed, their rationale for opposing the bailouts was more or less exactly the same rationale as that of liberal Democrats who opposed the bailouts. While we can debate the merits of those bailouts, the point here is that given the choice between protecting the status of economic elites and undermining the power of economic elites, the conservative majority of Republicans chose the latter, even in the face of dire warnings that doing so would allow catastrophic damage to the economy in the short-term. Say what you will about that decision, but one thing it sure as hell wasn't was "a way of maintaining privilege for a small group of people."
Sixth, Robin and really most liberals fail to recognize that conservative regard for so-called "economic elites" is really quite limited and disparate, and that the interests of, say, the Kochs, and multi-national corporations are very frequently at odds with each other. This, indeed, is one of the main reasons why the GOP's coalition has become so fractured in recent years - surely, we haven't forgotten how completely and utterly enfuriated the big-business dominated US Chamber of Commerce was with conservatives over the government shutdown last year.
@notme It would be news to....everyone to learn that we were actually in Afghanistan in the 80s and early 90s in any meaningful sense other than indiscriminately providing lots of heavy weaponry to anyone who was fighting the Soviets. And, well, we haven't actually withdrawn from Afghanistan if you're referring to the post-9/11 forces.
In terms of leaving a power vacuum in Iraq, have you forgotten that: (1) this power vacuum was in fact created by us deposing Saddam, and the fear of creating a power vacuum was why Bush the Wiser declined to depose Saddam after kicking him out of Kuwait; (2) the agreement to withdraw from Iraq more or less completely was signed during the Bush Administration; and (3) to the extent that our withdrawal enabled a power vacuum, that vacuum was going to happen whenever we withdrew, whether it was in 2005, 2010, or 2020.
And I've got no idea what you're referring to about Obama relying too heavily on Pakistani intelligence when it was his administration's decision to work around them that finally got UBL.
@mad-rocket-scientist I overstated my point a bit there for purposes of brevity - obviously intent is something that can be taken into consideration; what I should have said was that there needs to be some sort of judicial determination as to intent beyond a reasonable doubt in order to say that the felony was a "violent felony" if there was no actual violence committed. That is not the case here, obviously.
@tod-kelly I can understand why the prosecutor made the argument, and in the context of the 8th Circuit, the prosecutor was probably even correct in doing so. But that doesn't mean the 8th Circuit was right in the first place (not that you're saying they were) - it seems that it had previously ruled that possession of a sawed-off shotgun was a violent felony, despite the weight of authority in other circuits and despite some strong guidance from SCOTUS itself. So the issue is less with the prosecutor here than it is with the prior case(s) in the 8th Circuit (and, potentially, with the prosecutor in the prior case(s), though I don't know any specifics about that case(s) to say anything definitive).
It's also worth re-emphasizing that the question here is not whether the guy had a legal right to be in possession of this, or even whether he should evade jail time. He clearly did not have a right to be in possession of it - it's a felony for anyone to possess a functional sawed-off shotgun in the State of Minnesota, and it's a federal crime for convicted felons to be in possession of a firearm. The issue is instead whether he should be subjected to a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years or a mandatory minimum penalty of 15 years. It seems pretty clear that possession of a sawed off shotgun is not, in and of itself, an act of violence.
Collecting firearms is common enough, and hardly violent. Not that this particular defendant was likely to have been collecting, but I don't agree with MRS that we shouldn't be taking intent into account for purposes of determining whether a felony is "violent." Either it's violent or it's not. And it's not as if the guy gets off scot-free if the answer to this is no - he just avoids qualifying for the enhancement.
@james-hanley Here are the statistics you're looking for: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.pdf
What @davidtc is saying about revenues through 2008 is true. However, I don't think we can realistically say that the decrease since then is purely or even primarily due to the recession.
What happened was that businesses started finding cheaper and more effective ways of reaching consumers than direct mail. Direct mail won't ever completely die out - as it becomes more scarce, its marginal effectiveness will increase and it will eventually hit an equilibrium if it hasn't already - but it's declined dramatically, from 103 billion pieces in 2007 to about 80 billion the last two years. The result is that not only has first class mail been on the decline for awhile, but the total number of pieces handled by the USPS is at its lowest point since 1987 despite a much larger population, and more mailboxes than ever before to serve. In fact, since 2006, there's been almost a 30 percent decline in the number of pieces handled by the postal service, despite a growing population and despite what I assume is the increased use of SmartPost.
On “Is Ideology really the enemy? It Depends…”
This. The problem arises when policy positions become principles unto themselves rather than mere means to further certain principles. This problem does not necessarily have anything to do with whether one is a technocrat or a partisan, though. Instead, it has much more to do with forgetting or minimizing the actual goal of a particular policy or denying that said policy has effects on other legitimate goals.
I seriously need to trademark this, but once again, "Have too many principles and you soon have none."
The problem isn't ideology per se, it's rigid ideology that mistakes means for ends, policies for principles, and positive claims for normative claims (and vice versa).
On “On Purity taboos and the Profane (Updated 27/10)”
@alan-scott FWIW, and while I somewhat disagree with Murali's overall point in this post, the "sincere belief" standard is functionally and legally incapable of much investigation or inquiry. There's a widespread belief amongst many judges that in almost all instances (and in fact I there's quite a bit of case law supporting this), an inquiry into the sincerity of a religious belief would itself present a huge First Amendment free exercise problem - to do so in most instances would be to tell someone what their religious beliefs actually require.
The only instances of which I'm aware where courts have said they're at all permitted to inquire into the sincerity of a purported religious belief are (1) instances where the purported belief was so incredibly outlandish and bizarre as to trigger the presumption that no person could sincerely believe it; and much more frequently (2) instances showing that the person at issue regularly acted in a manner inconsistent with that belief.
In other words, courts for the most part can't and won't inquire into the purported basis for the belief or whether it is actually religious in nature; instead, they mostly have to limit their inquiry to whether the person asserting the belief actually believes it.
Otherwise, we're left with a pretty totalitarian view of religion in which we prevent people from having their own beliefs and interpretations of their own religion. We're left with judges telling people from other religions and religious sects what their religions do and do not say, essentially turning those judges into theologians. We're also saying that, in effect, religious organizations get to dictate alleged adherents' beliefs in toto despite the fact that there are huge numbers of members of any significant religious group that disagree with that group's official organization on one or more points of significance.
That's bad news, and would not only create huge free exercise problems, but it would also probably amount to a pretty severe violation of the establishment clause, placing courts in the position of enforcers of official church doctrines.
Again, though, courts can absolutely inquire into whether a particular person actually believes and acts in a manner consistent with a given purported belief. But they can't question their assertion that the belief is religious in nature.
On “A Lovely Wedding Conundrum”
This seems incorrect to me. From the Hobby Lobby majority's opinion: "Under RFRA, a Government action that imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise must serve a compelling government interest, and we assume that the HHS regulations satisfy this requirement."
It's debatable whether that can be construed as a determination of a compelling interest, but it's hardly language that would support the notion that this was not a compelling interest.
I'd also point out that the court explicitly indicated that, at the very least, anti-employment discrimination laws serve a "compelling governmental interest." I don't think it would be a stretch to say that this would be extended to include public accommodations laws more generally.
I think the "compelling interest" standard in the context of RFRA in general seems to have a different meaning than a "compelling interest" standard in other contexts.
I also suspect that in this case, the "substantial burden" test will not be a slam dunk for the business owners. I think they'll win on it, to be sure, but I think the fact that historically their business has been anything but religious in practice will weigh against them, whereas Hobby Lobby had made a pretty good case that its business practices had a basis in religious expression.
The least restrictive means question, assuming it gets reached, is a tough one for me. I think what I get back to is that they have not historically treated their business as having any kind of religious character. They've acted as a public accommodation throughout and, lest we forget, they are not being asked to perform the religious sacrament of marriage, only to handle the legally required aspects of civil marriage. I don't see a way that we can say that the goals of public accommodations laws can be achieved if exceptions are provided for public accommodations that are operated by people with religious beliefs.
But this last is a really close issue for me, so I'm not certain where I come down in the end.
On “Linky Friday #86: Actual Hitler Edition”
@mad-rocket-scientist There may conceivably be some circumstances where it would be a full faith and credit issue, but by and large it would not be - full faith and credit typically only applies to the validity of documents and judgments (especially judgments), but says little to nothing about what the effect of those documents and judgments should be in the second state.
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This is incorrect. If a state hypothetically refused to recognize an out of state driver's license, it would be clearly unconstitutional under the "dormant commerce clause." (It would not be the full faith and credit clause, but that's another topic altogether).
States can theoretically in some instances refuse to allow someone who would be too young to drive in their state to do so even with a license, but the charge wouldn't be "driving without a license," it would be "driving underage."
Refusal to recognize CCW permits from other states probably would not be viewed as a violation of the dormant commerce clause, though that is by no means a guarantee since it's a balancing test. But if the dormant commerce clause applied, it would be the same analysis as long as the arresting state had some form of CCW permit.
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This completely misses the point - there is a rather large difference between a felony and a misdemeanor and a traffic ticket. Google Shaneen Allen. Tell me you're ok with what was happening to her until her story became such a cause celebre that the governor was forced to order the prosecutor to back down.
And what if someone needs to stop for food at a rest stop while driving through a state? Are we really going to say that it's simple common sense for them to leave the firearm unattended in the trunk of the car when they have a CCW permit in their home state?
Who said anything about shortening the barrel? Why can't it just be a slightly too-short replacement barrel? Shorter barrels closer to the legal limit are widely viewed as superior for home defense.
Cite please. What modifications, exactly, both make a gun more dangerous and are popular with firearms owners? How, exactly, do those modifications make the gun more dangerous?
Fact is that there are quite a few reasons why firearms owners modify their guns - maybe they want a more comfortable or stable grip, or they want to make it easier to carry by making it more lightweight, or they want it to have less recoil, or they want to be able to fire a different caliber, or they want to make it more accurate for shooting competitions. Or maybe they just don't want to go deaf when they shoot the firearm.
These modifications are not "just for fun." They're to make the firearm more appropriate for the owner's intended - legal - use.
No. The complaint is that it's abnormally difficult to figure out what is and is not legal, and that the consequences for being wrong are not merely a fine or a misdemeanor, but instead are being prosecuted for a felony.
Uhh, people who don't want to go deaf or make people near where they're hunting go deaf? Suppressors do not make firearms completely silent or really anything approaching silent. Instead, they reduce the noise level by about 15-20%. That's still going to be very loud. It just won't make you deaf nearly as fast.
Seriously, you'd be surprised at the countries where suppressors are generally legal or are no harder to acquire than firearms themselves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressor
On “A Devil on Each Shoulder: Oregon’s Race for Governor”
I can think of several, but that's also missing the point. It's incredibly hard to have much faith in government's ability to solve problems (rather than just do stuff that purports to solve problems) if proven and persistent corruption (not pork barrel politics, actual corruption) isn't going to be a disqualifying factor for executive branch candidates.
Though I am a bit amused by the notion that actual bribery and corruption should be no big deal, but allowing outside groups to spend money on advertisements to express their opinion around election time signals the death knell for democratic government.
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@will-truman This.
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The thing is that in this case, we may well be talking about someone whose corruption basically ensured that the state's health exchange would be an abysmal failure.
It's all well and good to overlook corruption and incompetence when you're talking about a legislator, but when you're talking about an executive, corruption and incompetence mean that having all the "right" positions on your litmus tests will approximately amount to diddly-squat.
On “Two-Thirds of Supreme Court Justices Okay With Defendant Going To Prison For A Crime He Didn’t Commit”
I'll admit I'm pretty surprised by Sotomayor not joining this- she's been pretty good on crim pro issues. Perhaps she thought that they'd be unable to get a fifth vote to reverse?
On “Linky Friday #85: Designated Hitler Edition”
@gingergene
While it is absolutely true that we can't just count concussions, and while there certainly should be a willingness to look at whether and how much CTE is linked to every sport where there is contact with the head, it's not at all clear that literally every little hit involving the head counts, and at this point it seems very unlikely that outside of football, boxing, and perhaps hockey "enforcers," the prevalence of CTE is sufficiently large to warrant radical changes. Unfortunately, there's an element of risk to all sports, and for injuries/risks that are not immediately fatal, I'm hesitant to even consider radical changes absent a showing that the long-term risks will dramatically impact post-career quality of life for a substantial percentage of players.
That varies according to the risk of course- if soccer players suffer ALS at any rate at all comparable to the rate in football, that's a huge problem. And football players seem to eventually suffer dementia at a rate double the rest of the population's, meaning that somewhere on the order of 1 in 5 or 6 football players will suffer dementia directly attributable to football. That's a huge problem worthy of radical changes even if most of those don't experience symptoms until their late 60s/early 70s.
But at this point, there's not any evidence to suggest that the risks associated with brain injuries in soccer are at all comparable to the horror of brain injuries in football.
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Shorter me: In soccer, the issue really does seem to be concussions or effects similar to concussions far more than widespread CTE or dementia, at least at this point.
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Honestly, I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that soccer players suffer long-term brain damage with nearly the frequency of American football players. Certainly, it may happen, but given the sheer number of people who play soccer well into adulthood around the world, it's really hard to conclude that the risk of long-term brain damage is particularly significant.
We have many, many reports of early-onset dementia and memory loss with football players, and that trend was often noticed long before the letters "CTE" were juxtaposed together. To an even greater extent, it was also noticed and often commented upon with respect to retired boxers. Neither of these were ever sports with particularly remarkable youth participation rates, even on just a national scale - football's participation rate has never, AFAIK, been more than a little over half of baseball's, and even before the concussion crisis, it was well under half the participation rate for soccer and basketball. (Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579350892629229918)
But despite the sheer volume of people who play soccer around the globe, and despite the fact that it's history as the world's most popular sport goes back quite a long while, I don't think there's ever been a stereotype of retired soccer players suffering from dementia or having particularly severe cognitive problems. There is, however, this study: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/14/science/la-sci-soccer-brain-injury-20121114
But there seems to me to be a big difference between "mild" and "severe" even there - a "mild traumatic brain injury" is just a synonym for "concussion" so far as I can tell. From what I can tell, the finding is essentially that soccer players' brains look like the brain of the 30% of people who suffer a concussion that never fully heals. http://www.germaninnovation.org/docs/GCRI-Interview-Dr_Koerte.pdf
Obviously concussions that never fully heal obviously aren't good, but my point is that effects similar to the effects of one concussion that never fully heals aren't so severe as to warrant radical changes.
There are, to my knowledge, two confirmed reports of severe CTE in soccer players, one of whom died at the age of 83 and does not appear to have exhibited any symptoms of dementia or lost memory until his mid-60s, with it only becoming debilitating in his mid-70s. The other player (a career semi-pro) is a much more troubling case, to be sure, but statistically it's impossible to reach any significant conclusions from such a small number of cases.
Last but not least, it seems that in soccer the bigger issue is not the heading of the ball itself - done properly, heading the ball really should not be particularly violent - but the contact with the head that can occur in the air with other players or the goalposts, which seems to be what is most likely to cause the types of subconcussive (and concussive) injuries with life-changing long-term effects. There are fairly easy ways to mitigate these problems - padding or softening the goalposts, requiring goalies to wear headgear, and encouraging field players to do likewise.
On “Did you know…?”
Yeah, I'm curious about that as well.
On “Domestic Violence Is A Giant Problem. Is It Also a Football Problem?”
Thanks for that link, Nob. I've updated the post accordingly.
On “Did you know…?”
I'll second the recommendation. The pilot episode was actually a bit disappointing on the whole, though it had enough moments for me to give it another shot. But....it was a pilot, and the problems with it were mostly just the types of chemistry problems that exist in most pilots. The other two episodes have been unbelievable, to the point that it's got to be the funniest family sitcom since at least season 1 of Modern Family. Laurence Fishburne's performance is putting him into "national treasure" territory.
Larry Wilmore's influence is crazy obvious, though, so I'm a bit worried for how season 2 will wind up looking without him behind the scenes.
On “Linky Friday #85: Designated Hitler Edition”
@chris From your link (and the 538 link contained therein):
This is directed at Chait's point that the difference between football and girls soccer is about 2:1, and that this difference, while sizable, is also incremental, along the lines of the increased risk of driving an older car vs. a new car. I don't see how referencing a ratio of 2.5:1 as compared to boys soccer affects Chait's point. What's more, the citation to per-game incidence seems to ignore that soccer players have about two and a half times more games than football players. This is equivalent to the old claim of drug warriors that emphasized how much more tar is in a joint of marijuana as compared to a single cigarette even though almost no one would smoke the equivalent of 20 joints a day, while plenty of people (at least at the time) smoked a pack of cigarettes a day.
On “The Good Kid vs. The Cool Kid”
For what it's worth, and since I should have said this yesterday, I actually quite like the "good kid/cool kid" dichotomy to describe the two most significant and independent factions of the GOP. I don't think it's right to say that the "cool kid" types are emerging because of clickbait rhetoric, but that's another story altogether and not really an important part of your argument.
But one of the reasons I like the dichotomy is that you've put it in the context of a 1950s/60s-era understanding of "good" kids and "cool" kids. Today, I suspect that the terms have a bit of a different connotation in that the term "good kids" is probably viewed as synonymous with kinda nerdy and introverted types, while "cool kids" is probably more or less synonymous with "popular."
But in the popular imagination and stereotype, a "good kid" from the 50s/60s would probably be not only law-abiding and clean-cut, but also perceived as kinda heroic, an "Everybody's All-American" type, and probably the most popular guy in school, the type of kid that big business can't help but put in their commercials. The "cool kid" would be more aloof, disrespectful, disruptive unconcerned with popularity, reckless, and devil-may-care, often a real and present danger to himself and others. On the other hand, though, he'd also be quite fun-loving, self-reliant, and independent, willing to hang out with anyone willing to put up with his crap (and in fairness, he gives a lot of crap).
But the "good kid" looks down on the "cool kid" and his lack of conformity and respect for authority. For all his outward claims to decency, he can often be indistinguishable from the Omegas from "Animal House," gleefully willing to use his status and close ties to authority to crush any who he views as a threat to his status and institutions. Obviously, the "good" Omegas cannot long coexist with the "cool" Deltas.
Allowed to reach the highest heights, it is this self-superior side of the "good kid" that takes over, as he loses any concept that he is distinct from the entities he values. That which he does is right because he is a good Patriot, and good Patriots do what he does. Whatever he does that will earn him more money or maintain his status becomes acceptable, even if that means cheating, or agreeing to become a walking, talking billboard for Uggs.
He becomes, in a word, Tom Fishing Brady, He must, at that point, be stopped, taken down a few pegs, and ruthlessly defeated. He must lose his throne atop the AFC East and made to kneel down before those whose hopes and dreams he has most frequently and ruthlessly crushed - the nerds, the losers, the
BuffaloPegulaville Bills. And this must happen this Sunday.So let it be written, so let it be done.
Wait, what were we talking about again?
Oh, right, Fox News. Like you said, the good kids, the Omegas, who have been the faces of the GOP forever, cannot long coexist with the cool kids, the Deltas. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc.? They're Babs, Mandy, and their sorority full of Southern belles - they've always been the Omegas' sisters, and can't imagine living without the prestige, power, and influence that comes from that relationship, but frankly they're getting pretty bored and they're a little intrigued that the Deltas are trying to court them. They haven't decided to hop in the convertible with Bluto yet; in fact, they're actually quite scared of the Deltas and the their potential for destruction. But in their hearts, they realize that they'd be the biggest loser in any war between the Omegas and the Deltas.
Unlike the sorority girls in Animal House, though, Fox News & Co. are willing to do whatever it takes to keep that from happening for as long as possible, even if war is inevitable in the long run. They figure that the Deltas love the idea of revolting enough that they won't care whether they're actually revolting against authority or acting as counter-revolutionaries, and the Omegas have so defined themselves as indistinguishable from the institutions they purport to hold dear that they'll view attacks on any non-Omega in charge of those institutions as an actual defense of those institutions.
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The problem with this is that it assumes that the groups that comprise the "liberal" base and the "conservative" base are static, rather than just a function of messy coalition politics. The fact is that each of the groups you're worried about protecting have very limited areas of united interests and quite often have very divergent interests. Historically speaking, of course, many labor unions were especially and uniquely hostile to racial minority groups. For a very long time, environmentalists and labor are likewise often very hostile to each other - witness the decades-long battles between John Dingell and Henry Waxman over myriad pieces of legislation that eventually culminated -after, what, 30 plus years? - in Dingell's ouster by Waxman as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
It was only 15-20 years ago that the GOP had no shortage of proud and outspoken environmentalists like Christine Todd Whitman, Tom Kean, Sr., and Sherwood Boehlert, amongst others. Boehlert (full disclosure - I worked on his campaigns in college) was also very close with the IAFF (firefighter's union; I also once interned for them for a summer) and plenty of other unions. Kean was an ardent environmentalist who also happened to be a leading figure in the push for welfare reform and welfare program cuts. Ditto Whitman, to a lesser extent. Kean and Whitman (and, perhaps to a significantly lesser extent, Boehlert) were also backed to the hilt by both small and large business.
Absolutely, or at least it's no less possible to do so than it is to (1) defend Medicare; (2) view defense spending as sacred; (3) demand tax cuts; and (4) demand a balanced budget.
I mean, why are you assuming that there is only one way to represent each of those groups' interests? Fact is, representing small business owners' interests doesn't have to mean deregulation or even opposition to increased regulation. There are plenty of other ways to represent those interests, and indeed there are plenty of ways that regulations can be structured to actually advantage small business, just as there are plenty of ways that regulations can be structured to advantage big business at the expense of small business, etc.
By that same token, there are plenty of ways to represent any one of the liberal interests you describe by using deregulation or opposition to new regulations as a tool. Ending the War on Drugs comes to mind as a way of helping minority groups; rolling back the regulations of Taft-Hartley comes to mind immediately as one of the most helpful possible things that could be done for unions. Environmentally beneficial deregulation is trickier off the top of my head, but there are deregulations that could help the environment, such as vehicle safety regulations that add weight to vehicles and thus decrease fuel efficiency.
Now, maybe it's no longer possible to simultaneously represent small business interests, environmental interests, minority group interests, and labor union interests, if it ever was. But there's absolutely no reason why small business has to be on one side and the other three groups have to be on the other side on any given issue, nor even on the majority of issues.
And even that is an oversimplification, because each of those four groups consists of people with their own interests that may be different from others in that group. And this is what I was trying to get at above with my sixth point. "Small business" and "big business" are not monoliths, and even if they were, they wouldn't need to be. And it shouldn't even bear mentioning that minority groups and union workers are not monoliths (or even environmentalists, for that matter). The question isn't whether the interests of those groups are consistent with the interests of any given other group. What matters is what issues are most important to members of any given group at a given point in time and how those interests interact with the interests of any other given group at that point in time. And just as importantly, it matters which of those issues are being subjected to public debate at a given moment in time.
Ok, that's all well and good, but then you've got to define who exactly it is that you're referring to when you're generalizing about conservatives. But I don't think you can come up with a definition that encompasses the Red State cultural conservatives like Sarah Palin who you've referenced repeatedly in this thread, the economic elites that are the lifeblood of the GOP's coffers and whose elite status conservatives purportedly want to preserve, and anti-regulation small business owners, but somehow avoids encompassing the overwhelming majority of that 40 percent who self-identify as conservative.
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@j-r
When the political process delivers a result that I don’t like, it’s special interests.
Quoted for truth. Because my interests are "public interests," yours are "special." The phrase "special interests" is far and away one of my biggest pet peeves in all of politics. Fact is that whenever you advocate for a particular political position on a particular issue, you are acting as an "interest." When you do so in a coordinated fashion or through an organization of some sort, you are part of an "interest group."
And that's a good thing, not something to be ashamed of. The problem isn't that we have too many "special interests," it's that we've got way too few. Grumble grumble Federalist #10 grumble grumble.
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There are a massive number of problems with this characterization. First, if all conservatism is about is maintaining privilege for a small group of people, then the 40 percent of Americans who call themselves conservative are either not conservatives or are a "small group of people," both of which are absurd claims.
Second, to the extent that he's just claiming conservatism is only about maintaining (or obtaining) privilege for conservatives, it's a claim that's neither interesting nor falsifiable, indistinguishable from the claims conservatives make about liberals that liberalism is only about giving "goodies" to liberal groups. Technically speaking, both claims are also, in fact, true. But only because they're essentially tautologies - the simplest and broadest definition of politics is that it is how societies determine "who gets what, where, when, and how."
Third, it ignores that there are in fact numerous different strains of ideologies that fit under the broad umbrella of "conservatism" in the US, no one of which is particularly dominant - remember the whole three-legged stool analogy? While it was an over-simplification, it was (and largely still is) a pretty good description of the elements of the American Right for a very long time.
Fourth, as @kim and @j-r both point out, many of the programs you reference in fact helped further entrench established economic elites, and I'm not just talking about "liberal" elites, but even more so about business elites, and particularly big business elites. I mean....it's hard to come up with a policy that would more entrench existing economic elites than the not-short-lived-enough National Recovery Act, with its insistence that industries develop legally binding "codes" for "fair" competition. That is nothing if not a legal requirement that industries cartelize. It was also a particularly prominent part of the supposedly equalizing New Deal.
Fifth, let us recall that it was died-in-the-wool conservatives (along with the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party) who most vehemently opposed the bank bailouts in 2008, to the point that the majority of Republicans in the House voted against the bailouts, even going so far as to successfully defeat them in their first iteration. Indeed, their rationale for opposing the bailouts was more or less exactly the same rationale as that of liberal Democrats who opposed the bailouts. While we can debate the merits of those bailouts, the point here is that given the choice between protecting the status of economic elites and undermining the power of economic elites, the conservative majority of Republicans chose the latter, even in the face of dire warnings that doing so would allow catastrophic damage to the economy in the short-term. Say what you will about that decision, but one thing it sure as hell wasn't was "a way of maintaining privilege for a small group of people."
Sixth, Robin and really most liberals fail to recognize that conservative regard for so-called "economic elites" is really quite limited and disparate, and that the interests of, say, the Kochs, and multi-national corporations are very frequently at odds with each other. This, indeed, is one of the main reasons why the GOP's coalition has become so fractured in recent years - surely, we haven't forgotten how completely and utterly enfuriated the big-business dominated US Chamber of Commerce was with conservatives over the government shutdown last year.
On “Serious Question”
@notme It would be news to....everyone to learn that we were actually in Afghanistan in the 80s and early 90s in any meaningful sense other than indiscriminately providing lots of heavy weaponry to anyone who was fighting the Soviets. And, well, we haven't actually withdrawn from Afghanistan if you're referring to the post-9/11 forces.
In terms of leaving a power vacuum in Iraq, have you forgotten that: (1) this power vacuum was in fact created by us deposing Saddam, and the fear of creating a power vacuum was why Bush the Wiser declined to depose Saddam after kicking him out of Kuwait; (2) the agreement to withdraw from Iraq more or less completely was signed during the Bush Administration; and (3) to the extent that our withdrawal enabled a power vacuum, that vacuum was going to happen whenever we withdrew, whether it was in 2005, 2010, or 2020.
And I've got no idea what you're referring to about Obama relying too heavily on Pakistani intelligence when it was his administration's decision to work around them that finally got UBL.
On “First Monday 2014”
@mad-rocket-scientist I overstated my point a bit there for purposes of brevity - obviously intent is something that can be taken into consideration; what I should have said was that there needs to be some sort of judicial determination as to intent beyond a reasonable doubt in order to say that the felony was a "violent felony" if there was no actual violence committed. That is not the case here, obviously.
@tod-kelly I can understand why the prosecutor made the argument, and in the context of the 8th Circuit, the prosecutor was probably even correct in doing so. But that doesn't mean the 8th Circuit was right in the first place (not that you're saying they were) - it seems that it had previously ruled that possession of a sawed-off shotgun was a violent felony, despite the weight of authority in other circuits and despite some strong guidance from SCOTUS itself. So the issue is less with the prosecutor here than it is with the prior case(s) in the 8th Circuit (and, potentially, with the prosecutor in the prior case(s), though I don't know any specifics about that case(s) to say anything definitive).
It's also worth re-emphasizing that the question here is not whether the guy had a legal right to be in possession of this, or even whether he should evade jail time. He clearly did not have a right to be in possession of it - it's a felony for anyone to possess a functional sawed-off shotgun in the State of Minnesota, and it's a federal crime for convicted felons to be in possession of a firearm. The issue is instead whether he should be subjected to a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years or a mandatory minimum penalty of 15 years. It seems pretty clear that possession of a sawed off shotgun is not, in and of itself, an act of violence.
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Collecting firearms is common enough, and hardly violent. Not that this particular defendant was likely to have been collecting, but I don't agree with MRS that we shouldn't be taking intent into account for purposes of determining whether a felony is "violent." Either it's violent or it's not. And it's not as if the guy gets off scot-free if the answer to this is no - he just avoids qualifying for the enhancement.
On “The Bank of Wal-Mart?”
@james-hanley Here are the statistics you're looking for: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.pdf
What @davidtc is saying about revenues through 2008 is true. However, I don't think we can realistically say that the decrease since then is purely or even primarily due to the recession.
What happened was that businesses started finding cheaper and more effective ways of reaching consumers than direct mail. Direct mail won't ever completely die out - as it becomes more scarce, its marginal effectiveness will increase and it will eventually hit an equilibrium if it hasn't already - but it's declined dramatically, from 103 billion pieces in 2007 to about 80 billion the last two years. The result is that not only has first class mail been on the decline for awhile, but the total number of pieces handled by the USPS is at its lowest point since 1987 despite a much larger population, and more mailboxes than ever before to serve. In fact, since 2006, there's been almost a 30 percent decline in the number of pieces handled by the postal service, despite a growing population and despite what I assume is the increased use of SmartPost.