State of the Discussion

Judge Boasberg has appeared fair to me in the handling of the Alien Enemies Act case. I realize Venezuelan gang members are not particularly popular people and I'm amenable to the idea of deporting very bad hombres.

The ask is that the government do this legally, that the government comply with orders of the court in good faith.

That this case should go before a judge who has now experienced the government offering facile, bad-faith interpretations of the law and his own orders in a transparent attempt to evade compliance with the law? Yeah, I think that's a good thing.

Don't pee on the court's leg and tell the judge that it's raining. That's what FRCP 11 is for.

Yea but that's kind of what I mean. Biden was apparently in a state of serious cognitive decline. As reluctant as I was to believe that* it's something I've over time been convinced very likely explains a lot of the more baffling turns of his administration.

What's Trump's excuse? That they're just as out of their depth as the administration's harshest critics have been saying? No possible answer is a good one nor is it the kind of thing that lends itself to keeping score.

*I can take an L, it is what it is.

I mean I lay the blame for HRC's loss on HRC first and foremost but the GOP did string it out through long drawn out investigations and the hypocrisy is shocking.

I'll also note that you have this amusing tic vis a vis the Clintons where, when a right wing figure is literally convicted in a court of law or otherwise caught red handed in something you shrug it off and then wax rhapsodic into speculative tea leaf reading about unsubstantiated crimes the Clintons are alleged to have committed to somehow balance it out.

Also, full credit, the idea that Clinton was running a private email server just like Colin Powel did before her so she could sell pardons (so Obama then was selling pardons? Really??) is a new and entertaining one for me.

Yes, they're in the same barrel. But it will blow over until they constantly lie about it and/or continue to do this.

For this to be truly damaging we need a way to keep it in the news for months. So we'd need them to pretend it wasn't a big deal, have more news about it, find they're still doing it, and then have them pretend it's not a big deal again.

The bulk of HRC's damage wasn't in what she did but how she handled the aftermath.

My impression was that she couldn't tell the truth about what she'd done because it was something along the lines of "if I engage in criminal activity like selling pardons I need to be able to destroy the emails". So she was always trying to tell one more self serving lie which would in turn be found out to not be true and kept this in the news for months.

It's not the crime, it's the coverup.

I think looking at this as a set of side by side tally marks fails to capture what's really going on. Clinton's email server was damaging politically because it played into a larger, cross partisan narrative about her sense of entitlement to power and/or that the normal rules don't apply. Even Hilary supporters, if they're being honest, have to admit that this was a problem for her and her political brand. The Lloyd Austin thing was bad but I don't think it really registers the same way. At this stage it's a partisan talking point that may still play well on Twitter but in real life no one cares or remembers it.

Bringing it to Trump, this is a real problem for him because one of the narratives that he and his set of uh... unconventional cabinet officials are up against is the perception that they're idiots. Even if Republicans don't agree, or think it's something that can be worked around, understand could go cross partisan and overall is a liability that they can't let get out of control.

Thoughts are cheap. If they said something like "I said publicly *link* that Lloyd Austin should have resigned; That's why I think Pete should." that's a strong and defensible position and one meriting respect.

But the standard position has been either they said one thing and it's now opposite now that it's their side doing it and why are you even bringing it up? Or it's "we've made a thousand idiotic and nakedly false assertions about your guys and one of them turned out to have some merit to it, how dare you have disregarded that one?!?!? *cough*Biden's age *cough*

Bell Labs was way ahead of Bellerose Lanes (Queens, NY) in that era. I remember the grease pencils and transparent score sheets that were projected above each lane for my parents League Night.

Did your automated scoring system look like the one Yogi Berra was selling in this commercial?

https://youtu.be/FFjWXOYVtbU?si=OI9A3ZZ1FW7qITgr

The very idea that bowling existed pre-automation blows my mind. I don't like bowling much to begin with but that the game even existed when they would have to put the pins back up by hand and count the scores manually? *mind blown* I always assumed bowling only came about once machines existed to run the game for you- like frogger.

Which is why very secret things are not discussed over normal networks. Best practice for this kind of conversation is all being in the same room that's under guard 24/7, or paper documents in locked briefcases carried by brick walls wearing black suits.

If you're going to discuss Top Secret things electronically, there's a protocol for that involving specially set-up devices that absolutely do not use 3rd-party networks to carry the information.

Perception is reality in this case. It's easy to equate the 2 cases. If one side wants to point a finger at the other, it better have clean hands.

If the Dem's held the Hill right now, you'd better believe there'd be hearing. Alas!

This is just a demonstration of the well understood fact that there are two types of people: 1) important people who can get away with doing stuff and 2) everyone else who'd be in a world of legal trouble or worse. And everyone in 1 are populated by politicians and other well connected folk.

Hillary was investigated by two House Select Committee headed by Republicans and by the IG at State in Trump’s first term. She was not found to have done anything other then exercise poor judgement.

No matter what Twitter-pates republicans think, the left was correct to shrug.

It's bad. The Dems handwaving away of Hilary's private server is the only arrow the other side will need in its quiver to brush this one aside. Judging by r/Conservative, that's already the mindset.

Nope. I don't agree with Loomis about much but I do agree with him that Dems in R+X districts should not be primaried and should be encouraged to stay in office forever.

IN D+double digits X districts, though, I would not be at all opposed to regular primarying going on.

Not to totally rehash other comments I made on open mic but this illustrates the folly of filling up the senior ranks of the administration with people who have never really done anything, at least in terms of leading a big organization. This isn't to say many companies in the private sector have not found themselves in the position where they found out the dolt that clicked the dumbest fishing scam ever works in the C suite. However you hope that you put enough experienced people together that at least one of them will at some point in their career have heard of security protocol for sensitive communications, and either stop some screw up themselves or at least impress upon others the need to listen to those lower level people with the expertise. While I am sure that Waltz and Hegseth are fully capable of gutting a man in ways a civvy like me could never comprehend, there is in fact a little more to the roles they have found themselves in. And hell, if Vance can write a book, maybe he could also read the back of one sometime, or just the occasional email from the billion or so security personnel I assume he is now immersed in on a daily basis.

According to my brother, teens having a party when the parents are out of town is something that doesn't seem to occur to teenagers in Asian countries. He keeps hearing stories through his wife's friends where some sort of mild to medium level naughtiness would be the end point if an American told it and there is never that. When the teens say that they are going to study in the library with friends, that is what happens.

There is no network that hackers cannot hack.

But there are ones that 99% of hackers can trivially get to and ones that 99% of hackers cannot trivially get to and the latter ones also happen to be ones where you cannot possibly add journalists to it by mistake.