Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?
#20401
Posted 2022-August-31, 19:10
#20402
Posted 2022-September-01, 10:28
Winstonm, on 2022-August-31, 19:10, said:
Lets hope that they can keep this one
Could be rough
#20403
Posted 2022-September-01, 11:07
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State-owned news outlet Tass quoted sources that said he fell from a sixth-floor hospital window in Moscow. Tass later added that Maganov took his own life by jumping, according to the BBC.
#20404
Posted 2022-September-01, 14:02
Catherine Rampell, WaPo reporter said:
Even with poor track records, schools can receive more than 90 percent of their revenue from the federal government through student-linked grants, loans and other payments. Worse, they can get sued many times over for defrauding students and continue receiving public funds. Some of the institutions named in a recent major court settlement involving whether schools misled students are still eligible for federally subsidized financing, as University of Virginia economics and education professor Sarah Turner pointed out to me.
Absent the ability to get government-guaranteed loans, these schools might go out of business. And they probably should! They seem to spend more resources aggressively signing up students than providing them with a valuable education.
Also from Rampell on twitter:
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You can reasonably argue that just because the debt is concentrated within top lifetime wealth group doesn't necessarily mean this new spending is. That might well be true! Unfortunately -- conveniently -- the administration never tried to figure out if it *is* true.
And they're the ones with the data to do this. They've refused to release it. Similar calculations were done in past by Obama admin, to evaluate distributional effects of other changes to student financing system. This admin hasn't, and won't. That should tell you something.
#20405
Posted 2022-September-01, 14:20
Matt Yglesias said:
Burgess Everett at Politico said:
Collins: "I'm excited about that. And I think there is other Republican support"
#20406
Posted 2022-September-01, 15:20
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Manchin can always pull out the football and this bill will go tumbling...
#20407
Posted 2022-September-01, 19:54
Lindsey Graham's lawyers said:
#20408
Posted 2022-September-02, 22:42
Bill Barr said:
I, frankly, am skeptical of the claim that [Trump] declassified everything. Because frankly, I think it's highly improbable, and second, if in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them and said 'I hereby declassify everything in here,' that would be such an abuse and that shows such recklessness, it's almost worse than taking the documents.
Let me just say, I think the driver on this from the beginning was loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago. People say this [raid] was unprecedented -- well, it's also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay.
.. What people are missing is that all the other documents taken, even if they claim to be executive privilege, either belong to the government because they are government records -- even if they are classified, even if they are subject to executive privilege -- they still belong to the government and go to the Archives.
#20409
Posted 2022-September-03, 08:13
Emptywheel blog comments are filled with attorneys, ex-government employees, and many others who know the inside and out of classified documents, and Marcy Wheeler is more knowledgeable about the courts than many lawyers.
When this first broke Marcy was hammering the charges filed, citing over and over obstruction of Justice as the key while MSM was still framing this as some kind of bothsiderism dispute instead of a crime with immense repercussions for national security that it is.
#20410
Posted 2022-September-03, 10:08
John Friedman at NYT said:
It is certainly not a new idea that education can change a child’s life trajectory. Almost everyone has some formative school memory — a teacher with whom everything made sense, an art project that opened new doors or a sports championship that bonded teammates for life.
But what is new is the torrent of research studies using “big data” to show the power of education for shaping children’s trajectories, especially over the long term. In one study, for example, my co-authors and I found that students who were randomly assigned to higher-quality classrooms earned substantially more 20 years later, about $320,000 over their lifetimes. And it’s not only the early grades that matter; research suggests the quality of education in later grades may be even more important for long-term outcomes, as children’s brains don’t lock in key neural pathways for advanced reasoning skills until well into their teenage years.
Education changes lives in ways that go far beyond economic gains. The data show clearly that children who get better schooling are healthier and happier adults, more civically engaged and less likely to commit crimes. Schools not only teach students academic skills but also noncognitive skills, like grit and teamwork, which are increasingly important for generating social mobility. Even the friendships that students form at school can be life-altering forces for social mobility, because children who grow up in more socially connected communities are much more likely to rise up out of poverty.
Conversely, limited social mobility hurts not just these children but all of society. We are leaving a vast amount of untapped talent on the table by investing unequally in our children, and it’s at all of our expense.
Enlightened self interest, taken to the extreme, is a contradiction? Yup.
#20411
Posted 2022-September-03, 10:10
Randy Zelin said:
The bottom line is, there was not a "Trump raid on Mar-a-Lago." A search warrant was executed on a residence which just happened to be that of a former president of the United States. Nowhere in the law is there a carve-out permitting a former president of the United States to avoid his residence being the subject of a search warrant. And the truth is, a search warrant, by its very nature, is a check on the power of the government to violate our rights as United States citizens to be free from unwarranted government intrusion into our personal space.
Don’t take my word for it. A search warrant finds its roots in our Constitution. The Fourth Amendment exists to protect us from unlawful government searches and seizures. In fact, it is presumed that any search and seizure by the government without a warrant is unlawful. The Fourth Amendment reads: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That is why a judge, or a magistrate must first sign the search warrant. And before that judge or magistrate signs the search warrant, that judge or magistrate – who is "neutral and detached," must be satisfied that law enforcement has provided first-hand proof that it is more likely than not that evidence of illegality will be found in the place to be searched – what we call "probable cause."
That’s right – the search warrant actually protected the former president of the United States by ensuring that a neutral and detached judge first determined that it was more likely than not that evidence of illegality would be found at Mar-a-Lago before law enforcement could search the premises.
Which now brings us to question of "sealing" or "unsealing" the affidavit of law enforcement in support of the search warrant application. Typically, these affidavits are kept secret, and for obvious reasons. Laws cannot effectively be enforced if the government cannot put its cases together in secrecy. Witnesses would not come forward or could be tampered with; evidence could be secreted or destroyed. With the burden of proof always remaining with the government and the burden of proof being that of "beyond a reasonable doubt," which is a doubt so great that a jury believing that the defendant "probably did it" must lead to an acquittal – the government is given wide berth to conduct its investigation with the curtain closed.
However, the search warrant executed on the former president’s home brings new attention to the tension between and among the public’s right to transparency when it comes to our system of justice, against the government’s right to conduct its investigations without interference or obstruction – and against a putative defendant’s right to a defense. Sure, the public’s confidence in our system of justice is fostered through being able to see directly into the system. But we expect, if not demand, that the government protect us through the enforcement of our laws. The government cannot prosecute cases, take criminals off the streets, and deter future criminal offense conduct if the government cannot effectively investigate its cases. The government often prevails in this tug-of-war. Which means we, as law-abiding citizens, are the real benefactors as we are kept safe.
Because it is a former president of the United States whose home was searched, perhaps it is in the public’s interest to know more than usual. Because it is a former president of the United States whose home was searched, perhaps it is in the public’s interest for the curtain to be pulled back a bit. And perhaps it is this former president of the United States in particular – with his unique skills in polarization – who warrants (pun intended) the government being transparent in ways that this former president has heretofore successfully himself obscured.
But make no mistake – the search was warranted; all this talk of a special master is a distraction and the documents found at the former president’s residence are what they are. What will be will be.
#20412
Posted 2022-September-03, 22:02
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Is this any way to run a party of fiscally responsible conservatives?
#20413
Posted 2022-September-06, 14:23
#20414
Posted 2022-September-06, 16:40
The Judge stated that the defendant was trying to put lipstick on a pig.
Or as we say in Australia "you can't polish a turd."
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"I'm shocked. Just shocked," Griffin said. "I really did not feel like the state was going to move on me in such a way. I don't know where I go from here."
In his ruling Tuesday, Mathew (the Judge) wrote that Griffin's attempts "to sanitize his actions are without merit" and "amounted to nothing more than attempting to put lipstick on a pig."
Griffin and his organization Cowboys for Trump spent "months normalizing the violence that may be necessary to keep President Trump in office" and urging supporters to travel to Washington, DC, on January 6, Mathew wrote, including multiple inflammatory public speeches in which he likened the Stop the Steal movement to a "war" to keep Trump in office.
#20415
Posted 2022-September-12, 09:22
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That warning sign is flashing again: Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Mr. Biden in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton in 2016.
Wisconsin is a good example. On paper, the Republican senator Ron Johnson ought to be favored to win re-election. The FiveThirtyEight fundamentals index, for instance, makes him a two-point favorite. Instead, the polls have exceeded the wildest expectations of Democrats. The state’s gold-standard Marquette Law School survey even showed the Democrat Mandela Barnes leading Mr. Johnson by seven percentage points.
But in this case, good for Wisconsin Democrats might be too good to be true. The state was ground zero for survey error in 2020, when pre-election polls proved to be too good to be true for Mr. Biden. In the end, the polls overestimated Mr. Biden by about eight percentage points. Eerily enough, Mr. Barnes is faring better than expected by a similar margin.
The Wisconsin data is just one example of a broader pattern across the battlegrounds: The more the polls overestimated Mr. Biden last time, the better Democrats seem to be doing relative to expectations. And conversely, Democrats are posting less impressive numbers in some of the states where the polls were fairly accurate two years ago, like Georgia.
#20416
Posted 2022-September-12, 14:52
#20417
Posted 2022-September-12, 17:47
#20418
Posted 2022-September-12, 18:01
Chas_P, on 2022-September-12, 17:47, said:
It helps in the same way as locking up any criminal helps the average American. That is simply the job of the DOJ. In Trump's case there is also the additional factor of protecting American intelligence interests, which potentially could mean the difference between foiling another 9/11 attack or having it succeed.
#20419
Posted 2022-September-12, 18:15
Gilithin, on 2022-September-12, 18:01, said:
OK, got it. Keep Trump out of the White House (and I'm not opposed to that) and we'll all live happily ever after. Thanks.
#20420
Posted 2022-September-12, 19:01
Chas_P, on 2022-September-12, 18:15, said:
As far as I know, locking someone up is not a barrier to running for POTUS unless they are indicted as an insurrectionist or under certain Espionage Act charges. Locking up criminals has nothing to do with deciding who wins future elections; you fix those by putting into place rules that allow partisan legislatures to override the actual vote count.
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