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Gaston de Foix

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Everything posted by Gaston de Foix

  1. The big difference for the low-information voter between past 3 years and Trump's 4 years is, as the Death of Horses has stated, inflation. It touches every facet of our lives. I also think we are discounting Biden's age as a major (and rational) concern for people who do not pay much attention to politics. We saw how it played out in weird ways against McCain for example. He's old, people know he's old, and people who maybe gave him the benefit of the doubt in 2020 may not vote for him in 2024 because they think Kamala might become president. Racism, sexism, yadda, yadda, call it what you like, but it's gonna be a real thing. I'm a liberal. I don't see any reason why I can't worry about both.
  2. Yeah. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/06/19/fbi-resisted-opening-probe-into-trumps-role-jan-6-more-than-year/
  3. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, why the fuck didn't the DOJ already know this by tracking his phone data? And if they did, where is the indictment? Where is the professional disciplinary complaint? For that matter, where is Ken Chesebro's presence at the riot reflected in the Jan. 6 report? The really shocking thing is that CNN is revealing this information in August 2023. And what is really important is not just that he was there, but that he was playing an important role quarterbacking with Alex Jones the attack on the capitol, receiving instructions on his phone throughout from someone and ensuring Alex Jones left the scene soon before the riot turned violent and breached the capitol: The whole basis of the DOJ investigation from 2021 onwards was that it was bottom-up, painstaking and time-consuming but thorough and based on well-established investigative principles. In fact, it was and is a casual, slapdash, incomplete and amateurish response to an attack on the seat of American democracy by a sitting American president and his co-conspirators. And only a local DA in Georgia has the cojones to call out this wicked and traitorous scheme in full. Fani Willis went to Emory Law. Ken Chesebro went to Harvard Law. Of the four Supreme Court clerks in the Senate, three were fully implicated in the attempt to overthrow the Constitution. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
  4. Have you never seen this scene, mate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFrag8ll85w
  5. Yeah, but the audience is there primarily for the complaints. I'm skeptical you'll get nearly as many eyeballs and clicks for a documentary about wounded vets. Hence the catch-22. Megan at least has a profession. Harry put his profession as "Prince of the United Kingdom" on his son's birth certificate. That's not a job but rather an admission of never needing one. A lot of what has happened now is also because they stretched themselves too thin. A memoir, a children's book, deals with Spotify and Netflix, interviews, charity gigs. There was a real sense they wanted to earn generational wealth to be fully financially independent and were painfully aware their marketability would decline over time. They couldn't fulfill their commitments or do the work to earn respect from those around them. At least, with Harry's memoir, it is exceptionally well-written and does an outstanding job of making his case to the world. Haven't watched any of the rest of their products, but I think that the book is the exception not the norm and that's the root of the problem. I'll tell you one thing that I think Harry and Megan can do that would work. A Diana documentary. There are many out there, but particularly with Harry's skepticism about Diana's death, I think it would be absolutely gripping viewing assuming he actually rigorously engages with the debate and allows himself to accept he may be mistaken.
  6. Yes, that's absolutely the theory. But when the sitting president tries to overthrow the constitution and remain in power, the jury is also the voice of the community and expresses communal outrage. Perhaps I worded it poorly, but I feel like what happened has kind of faded into noise and whataboutism due in part to the relentless coverage with Fox and Tucker Carlson. And that makes a low-information, busy juror more vulnerable to spin and alternative facts. Like, we keep worrying about a convicted felon becoming president. And it is worrying. But imagine if he gets acquitted in the middle of the campaign or a few weeks before the election. We may well have have 2016 redux then.
  7. I think Meadows is gonna argue he did as told as COS which is what the job title entails and because Article II vests the executive power in the president. The district court cannot remand on the basis that what Meadows did is criminal - that would be pre-empting the final jury verdict. I think the DA has drafted the indictment so that some of what she alleges is part of a criminal conspiracy can also be characterized as part of the job duties of the COS. The specific focus will be on whether the totality of acts Meadows has alleged to have committed fall within the COS description, partly fall within the role, or are completely outside. That's why it is debatable, at least for him. And that's why he's going first. Because making a similar argument for Trump is a LOT more difficult. But splitting the trial isn't feasible either. That's my understanding, but federal criminal law is not exactly my field.
  8. This is smart lawyering because this is a (somewhat) debatable legal proposition and the motion could potentially go all the way up to the Supreme Court thus running out the clock. We'll see how much interference the Court wants to run for Trump and his acolytes. For Meadows to file this first (he has the strongest chance of success amongst the 19) is evidence of coordination between his lawyers and Trump's. That indicates that rumors he has flipped are perhaps exaggerated although he has certainly provided sufficient cooperation to avoid being indicted (for now) in the federal proceedings. This takes me to a broader point. Fani Willis has brought the claim the DOJ could and should have brought first if it had hit the ground running on 20 Jan 2021. The insistence on a "bottom-up" investigation in accordance with DOJ policy when the facts of Trump's criminality were ubiquitous and in the public domain was a massive fuck-up (i've said this a couple of times now). Memories faded, messages were deleted, the outrage of Jan 6 faded, and even the Jan 6 committee was off to a very slow start. Nothing signals weakness more to the US' foreign adversaries than its failure to robustly defend its democracy. If you had told me on Jan 21, that the DOJ would take 2.5 years to indict Trump based on facts that were mostly in the public domain, I wouldn't have believed you. Between the McConnell's failure to allow Trump to be impeached and removed from office prior to Jan 20., and DOJ's slow response there is a very real cost to allowing his participation back in the public domain. We are genuinely courting catastrophe by allowing the voters to decide in 2024 if they want Trump back in the WH. The delay has also signfiicantly weakened the legal case. Jury members simply won't have a clear recollection of what happened between Nov. 2020 and 6 Jan 2021.
  9. No it's just that there's been no proper investigation by the DOJ of Jared's activities. You would think a $2 billion dollar deal would set off red flags at the Public Integrity Division but they are just hitting snooze on the alarm there. This is because Merrick Garland was every conservative's favorite Democrat before they killed his USSC nomination, and Lisa Monaco is a political animal. Just no fire in the belly, and no sense of outrage.
  10. I agree. Trump would have been jailed if he were anyone else by now. De-platforming works. Pass it on. Throw him in jail and ignore his words. More seriously, while we should take his threats incredibly seriously, any harm to a judge or prosecutor will just lead to their replacement by an equally implacably determined decision-maker.
  11. This is the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751. It doesn't actually require a criminal conviction - instead it is self-executing with state and federal officials being lawfully required to kick Trump off the ballot for his actions in 2020. It's been downloaded 36,000 times in a couple of weeks (which is a lot for an academic paper!), and is damn compelling. Sad to say, none of this is reflected in Jack Smith's indictment.
  12. Sorry, I missed this addendum. That was precisely my point. It doesn't disturb you to agree with Gingrich? I live in Washington DC. Don't you live in NYC?
  13. So it turns out, in a surprise to precisely nobody, that Twitter is throttling access through the app to its competitors and (bizarrely or maybe not) the NYT. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/15/twitter-x-links-delayed/ At this point, my Twitter usage is largely because (I) I don't have an invite to Bluesky; (ii) I find it useful to for soft-news/education like the Cultural Tutor and Art History in a Tweet. I have the app set on receive rather than transmit. But the explosive growth of Threads has slowed, and we are going to live in a multi-platform world for the foreseeable future. I still find it amazing that Elon Musk is devoting so much time and effort to actively burning his cool new toy. If he did nothing after his purhcase, Twitter would have twice the value it does today.
  14. Furious. Desperate. Horrified. But blowing up the country is not the answer. Secession is not the answer. Civil war is not the answer. Like you do recognize that your rhetoric exactly mirrors those on the right like Tim Poole who consistently talk about civil war right? This is not a stupid both-sides argument. This is about being smart. Abortion rights have won on the ballot pretty much across the country. Republican excesses have the potential to create a great new realignment in 2024. Just as in 2020, we took back the country, passed climate change legislation (finally!), provided aid for COVID, and kicked Trump out of the White House. We can do it again. The majority of the country has always been with you, and it's close to a super-majority now across the board.
  15. Little disturbed by this rhetoric however well-intentioned. Polarization benefits Trumpists and the Republicans. It will take decades to undo the harm they have wrought to this country, but they are a minority and are losing on almost every front in the political arena.
  16. This is all in furtherance of the the "I genuinely believed there was fraud and I was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election so no corrupt intent" defense he's going to be running. Let's not waste time paying attention to the performance. It's all aimed towards jury nullification.
  17. That's a lot. I'm sorry you had to go through that. Perhaps it also explains, in part, some of your low opinion of lawyers. I'm kinda amazed that he managed to keep his law license through all of this and/or didn't go to prison, although perhaps he did. That's some Saul Goodman level shit, although it sounds like your dad had many more vices than Jimmy McGill.
  18. Umm, what? I feel like there's a novel in that sentence somewhere. Please elaborate. What types of crimes did he commit and also (a question of more specialized interest, I admit), what branch of law did he teach?
  19. That's the estoppel argument. Couldn't you also argue this is a Carbolic Smoke Ball type unilateral promise?
  20. Newsom is terrible. Any man who can marry Kimberly Guilfoyle is a man with epically bad judgment. And breaking lockdown rules to eat at the French Laundry (they never even gave me a reservation, the bastards!).
  21. This is true. The charges are being filed at state level without coordination with DOJ. There's no orchestrated plan here. That said, there's no chance that a Republican president will be able to weasel out of pardoning Trump for all federal charges if they do make that promise. That will simply provoke the ire of the base, and not get them anything in return. But ALL of this is besides the point. As you say, either Biden will be re-elected or Trump will be.
  22. I would say, in defense of Spocky, that it is possible to have (i) an impossibly rosy view of Corbyn and (ii) a raging-hate boner for Starmer and still have a point. Starmer's approach to politics seems to be pander and dress it up as principle. Why attack Sadiq Khan's ULEZ policy? Why the U-turn on the child-benefit cap? These are bad decisions, and contrary to Labour's values. Look it's a responsible and grown-up feature of British politics that we expect opposition leaders to have fully-costed plans and policies and tell the British people exactly what policies their government will implement rather than the gauzy promises that characterize US politics. But what exactly is Starmer's substantive defense to criticism? That he will make tough choices (see, e.g., here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/18/keir-starmer-defends-decision-not-to-scrap-two-child-benefit-cap#:~:text=Keir Starmer has doubled down,to win the next election.). OK, but what exactly are you spending the money on if not this? What's the tough trade-off that's worth it? You can't just keep Tory tax-and-spend policies because it is in some vague way "tough" and "responsible".
  23. This is true in the abstract, but any non-Trump nominee is going to under enormous pressure to commit to pardoning Trump during the campaign to unite the non-MAGA wing with the MAGA body of the Republican party. Dollars to donuts they succumb to try to win 2024. Even if they don't, the MAGA congresspeople will condition their co-operation on any nominees/legislative agenda on a pardon for Trump. And, controversial opinion, but if Trump actually wins 2024, Biden will almost certainly pardon him anyway to spare the country a constitutional crisis. Pence told the truth, albeit under subpoena, to the DOJ and will be testifying against Trump. Like, Christie is now speaking out and running in the anti-Trump lane, fine, good for him. But between the two of them Christie has the words and Pence has the deeds. Neither is anything other than a profile in cowardice though for enabling Trump between 2015-Dec. 2020. No heroes to be found here. Asa Hutchison is the normie Republican in the race, IMHO.
  24. The real question is if the trial can be done in under a year before Trump officially becomes the Republican nominee (likely to happen much sooner than that) or even before 20 Jan 2025 when he will theoretically take office as president. Probably not. There's just no way that the appeals will be done by then. Any Republican president will pardon Trump. Which means that the outcome of this trial really depends on the Democrats winning the next GE. And if you are looking for whom to blame, blame Merrick Garland who did nothing for a year and a half until the Jan 6 committee shamed him. History will remember him as the one of the worst AGs.
  25. It's going to drop by the end of August. Trump's attorneys are bringing frivolous motions and lawsuits to delay it.
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