Oh wow it turns out maybe Joe Biden did, in fact, have a legitimate rationale for pardoning his son https://t.co/potevYoohg
— The okayest poster there is (@ok_post_guy) December 5, 2024
"Yes, absolutely. Jack Smith's name is on my (pardon) list. Liz Cheney's name is on my list. I think that they should all be preemptively pardoned."
–@RepJamesClyburn on who @POTUS should consider pardoning. pic.twitter.com/uBBCTT8t32
— Laura Coates (@thelauracoates) December 4, 2024
Needless to say, this whole mishuganah is *very* exciting for Politico — “Biden White House Is Discussing Preemptive Pardons for Those in Trump’s Crosshairs”:
… Biden’s aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments, a sense of alarm which has only accelerated since Trump last weekend announced the appointment of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Patel has publicly vowed to pursue Trump’s critics.
The White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who’ve committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms, and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them.
The deliberations touch on pardoning those currently in office, elected and appointed, as well as former officials who’ve angered Trump and his loyalists.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic…
At issue, to repurpose a phrase, is whether to take Trump seriously and literally when it comes to his prospective revenge tour against Democrats and others in the so-called Deep State who’ve raised his ire.
The White House is facing contradictory pressures from Capitol Hill. Some longtime Democratic lawmakers, like Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), have talked favorably about the precedent of former President Gerald Ford’s preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon, issued before any charges were filed against the disgraced former president.
“If it’s clear by January 19 that [revenge] is his intention, then I would recommend to President Biden that he provide those preemptive pardons to people, because that’s really what our country is going to need next year,” Markey said on WGBH last week.
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Penn.), a close Biden ally who hosted the president in his district shortly before the election, issued a plea Wednesday for Biden to offer blanket pardons.
“This is no hypothetical threat,” Boyle said in a statement, adding: “The time for cautious restraint is over. We must act with urgency to push back against these threats and prevent Trump from abusing his power.”
Other lawmakers, I’m told, have been just as emphatic in private with Biden’s aides in calling for preemptive pardons…
Some senior Democrats I spoke with… wonder how many of those facing retribution are adopting a version of the vote-no-hope-yes mantra that often surrounds difficult legislative votes. Which is to say: Some may publicly oppose preemptive pardons, for reasons of innocence or precedence, while privately hoping the president offers legal protection.
What has some Biden aides particularly concerned is that even the threat of retaliation could prove costly to individuals because they’d be forced to hire high-priced lawyers to defend themselves in any potential investigation.
Especially for those officials without significant means, the specter of six-figure legal bills in the coming years is unnerving. Some Biden appointees, I’m told by people facing scrutiny, are already considering taking the best-paying jobs next year in part to ensure they have the resources to defend themselves against any investigations.
Adding to Biden’s challenge in the final weeks of his presidency is the pressure he’s also feeling from Democrats who want him to offer the same generous clemency to those less privileged that he handed his son.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) invoked Hunter Biden’s pardon this week in calling on the president to, on a case-by-case basis, spare “the working-class Americans in the federal prison system whose lives have been ruined by unjustly aggressive prosecutions for nonviolent offenses.”
Mark Milley, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, Letitia James, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Liz Cheney, Judge Arthur Engoron, Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troye, himself….
— Gary Farber (@garyfarber.bsky.social) December 2, 2024 at 1:05 PM
They're already assumed to be guilty by Donald and his cult. The rest of us know the pardons would be solely preventative. Just effing do it.
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca.bsky.social) December 4, 2024 at 6:07 PM
Wild that Biden’s pardon of his son reached back in time to enable, nay, to *force* Trump to pardon his son in law’s dad and Joe Arpaio and Eddie Gallagher. Hell, Biden pardoning Hunter probably somehow caused January 6 too.
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs.bsky.social) December 2, 2024 at 12:59 PM
it’s the same shitshow over and over again, trump runs amok setting everything he can’t steal on fire while the nation’s punditry wants to hand a ticket to any democrat they can find jaywalking
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 2, 2024 at 6:55 PM
It's almost as though the GIGANTIC lie about Project 2025 has disappeared into the ether.
It's not even a li'l oopsie-doodle—there's NOTHING in re: his blatantly lying abt it to such an extent during the campaign that *factcheckers* chided the Harris campaign for warning voters. https://t.co/QDucryIGli
— Cullen Martin (@CulRMartin) December 3, 2024
*you* will use the Hunter Biden pardon to provide cover for Trump. And when you do that will be 100% *your* choice, and a very deliberate one to curry favor and access in Trump world just like everyone should expect from the worthless political press at the Times https://t.co/sJmdrl2Tn2
— The okayest poster there is (@ok_post_guy) December 2, 2024
Rep. Dan Meuser just now: "This is nonsense. Nobody is gonna be going after Liz Cheney."
Trump in July: *calls for Liz Cheney to be tried for treason during a televised military tribunal* (https://t.co/pMYJJXRlDT) pic.twitter.com/o4fMuv0hs2
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 5, 2024
If Biden really gives pardons to anti-Trump people simply so they can avoid illegitimate prosecution it means that at the highest level of American intelligence and policy that there is a strong belief that Trump will lead a fascist and constitutionally destructive government
— 🥥🍦Centrist Madness🍦🥥 (@CentristMadness) December 5, 2024
On The Road – Athenaze and Ariobarzanes – In the Footsteps of the Marathonomachoi: Walking the Athens Marathon (Part 2 of 2)
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I hold out a forlorn hope in the fact that no Presidential pardon can keep a felon convicted under New York State law from being sent up the river to Sing Sing
(And I have a horrifying feeling that the revenge tour may be looking for state-level prosecutors to take up the cudgel against Hunter and anyone else Biden tries to shield from the revenge tour.)
Gretchen
Come on, people. Kash Patel gave us a list of the people he will use the FBI to pursue by fair means or foul. Why don’t you believe him? Why won’t you protect the people he has promised to destroy?
John S.
@Gretchen:
Let people actually get destroyed or worry about destroying fictitious norms which no longer exist…
What’s a Democrat to do?
Baud
He needs to pardon his dogs too.
WereBear
Morning Joe is scared.
Good.
We don’t condone violence. Trump is deeply demented now.
Can he walk? Will he grab some boobs and honk them like bicycle horns? He’s already wearing diapers.
Look at how the media convinced people that Biden’s signs of aging meant he was the demented one, not the guy swaying on the stage talking about choices: Hannibal Lecter or electric sharks, I think.
We could flood them with perfectly reasoned emails and we’d still get fluff pieces on Republicans. Youtube is easily more reliable than any corporate media now. The only ones I watched were the few allowed on MSNBC but I’m done now.
Corporate media was never the answer, and that’s why there are grassroots outlets who are gathering viewers, because they think they are journalists. Not anchors on Entertainment Tonight (oh, that dates me, doesn’t it?)
Gloria DryGarden
Don’t you have to be charged, to be pardoned?
or is it enough to be on the dictators hit list?
they’re wasting my tax dollars investigating dumb stuff hunter Biden did. It’s already been litigated. There are way more important things to investigate.
I would like congress to make themselves useful.
Shalimar
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: We already know people on the revenge list wouldn’t be safe from Paxton in Texas. I am sure there are several dozen other states too. If you’re a Trump enemy, never travel to states with Republican Attorneys General.
Baud
A lot of y’all going to be highly disappointed when you see how many of the liberals you follow cheeer some of Trump’s vindictive prosecutions.
Shalimar
@Gloria DryGarden: Next year they will be wasting you tax dollars investigating things Democrats and other Trump enemies say on television. They might as well make Elon “Free Speech” Musk the new FBI director just to make it clear how full of shit they are about everything.
WereBear
@Shalimar: They framed a Texas democrat within living memory.
AnonPhenom
Laughing wryly at conservative media who’ve spent the last 36 months supporting the “anti-hero” “retribution” candidate (see Serwer’s article in The Atlantic) being *SHOCKED* that the public has the same attitude to members of the Corporate Elite C-suite.
MagdaInBlack
@Gloria DryGarden: Recall Marjorie T. Greene was one of several who asked trump for pardons after J6. We still don’t (officially) know what she needed that pardon for.
WereBear
@Baud: Perhaps they shouldn’t be in our club, then.
Let’s see true colors SOMEWHERE.
There’s obvious pent-up demand.
Planetjanet
Thank you, Anne Laurie. Your posts are a fundamental part of my day.
WereBear
@AnonPhenom: That’s the aspirational heroes they have, and they are learning how much they are welcome to them.
raven
@WereBear: no he’s not
Shalimar
@Baud: If they think that’s gonna save them, they haven’t been paying attention. For example, I predict that Ro Khanna’s opponent will get a $20+ million donation from some mega-rich tech bro who wants a Republican representing him.
satby
@Planetjanet: Co-signed! Anne Laurie always brings the goods.
lowtechcyclist
@Gloria DryGarden:
No. For instance, Nixon hadn’t yet been charged with anything before Ford gave him a blanket pardon.
In addition to all of TrumpWorld’s obvious targets, I think Biden should give a blanket pardon to anyone employed by the Executive Branch or by any Federal regulatory agency during the period from January 20, 2021 to noon on January 20, 2025 for any acts they may have committed during that period as part of their service. From Cabinet members all the way down to the lowliest GS-1.
Gloria DryGarden
@MagdaInBlack: I’d so much rather Marjorie could go to court for trial. Maybe some People need to be tried, and any pardon they got can apply, but first we know they’ve been a felon. We need to know more about these dangerous doings and government thugs.
Ramalama
Tony Fauci better get a pardon. My neighbors, Canadian in Canada, are antivax nutters, so it turned out, and were bad mouthing him as though they knew all about his criminal activity. Clearly watching some channel you can only get if you go out of your way and pay for it? I’m thinking if they knew to badmouth Fauci, there’s got to be a very concerted Amerucan effort to go after him.
Jeffro
What I think about the pardons is that Elon Musk spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to buy himself a president to play with, and that, frankly, ought to be a crime.
oh and he bought himself a few other toys, too
Why listen to voters, or craft policies designed to make their lives better, when you can just grab yourself an Elon Musk or two?
MagdaInBlack
@lowtechcyclist: Where that will lead is ” See, the Biden admin were all such criminals they had to pardon everyone.”
Not arguing, just pointing out that little talking point for their side.
Shalimar
@Ramalama: With Fauci, the government takes payments from drug companies for patents developed by government scientists, and distribute part of that money to the scientists who made the breakthrough. Fauci, as an actual scientist working on potential pandemics for his whole career, has made millions from this program. That isn’t enough for the conspiracy theorists, so they claim he has made the entire hundreds of millions these programs have paid out.
They (including tiny kennedy) write entire books about how evil he is, all built on distortions and lies. In their minds, he intentionally caused and benefited from Covid.
satby
I get what Bob Cesca is saying, but I can’t quite get past the idea that preemptive pardons will be read by low info voters as confirmation that there was criminal activity by those opposing Trump just for opposing him or doing their jobs. And we shouldn’t feed into that insanity, even inadvertently, by apparently confirming it.
Then again, it’s unlikely that they’ll come for me so easy for me to say.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@WereBear: Youtube is not reliable and has had a very clear role in spreading Q-Anon and radicalizing young men.
sab
@Baud: Is he getting the last dog back? Maybe for a rescue it’s better to leave the furball in his newest home?
sab
@Planetjanet:
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Good morning, sunshine.
sab
@satby: If preemptive pardons will be needed (they might with Trumps creatures in charge) then Biden should grant them and fuck the low info voters. The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.
TBone
Rick Steves with a ‘Better Safe Than Sorry’ stark reminder:
https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/memorial-to-the-politicians-who-opposed-hitler/
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: If that’s where we are headed, a pardon won’t mean anything to them.
On that cheery note, off to work. It’s warmed up a wee bit in Chicago-land.
WereBear
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Like Facebook or X.
What we do with the tool is our responsibility. I found a Quaker meeting and they have a channel there. I found their “advertising” so appealing, and it was all accurate. :)
That’s the kinds of things I support there, especially lately.
It’s like BlueSky. If a service lets one curate, and we do so mindfully, we sift the flowers from their dirt.
JerseyBeard
Honestly who cares what low info voters think? Protect everyone you can who needs it. The idiots will idiot no matter what. Fuck ‘em.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: a Nazi solution is the first thing I expect from these fucks. I’m only taking them at their own words, after all.
I hope your day IS cheery and warm, you always make me feel better.
Baud
Pardons or not, the next four years are going to produce martyrs, whom we’ll hopefully honor rather than forget.
TBone
@Baud: I’ll be in the crowd storming the Bastille!
Baud
Apparently, Jon Stewart says chill out. (Click through to see quote)
Chief Oshkosh
Many more preemptive pardons are needed. Hopefully President Biden will not attempt to rely to heavily on legal scholars sussing this out as there’s not much time, and at the end of this day, the decision is political.
Pardons should be just the first step, though. What’s also needed in the last days is offense. What might that include? Surely there is enough data at this point to hold Musk on espionage charges – hell, he BRAGS about scheming with Putin. He sure as shit should be entirely separated from his companies that have defense contracts. THAT should’ve been done a long time ago.
WereBear
@Chief Oshkosh: Because it would rip open the giant ant nest their corruption has made of our government.
If it was a house in Florida it would have to be tented for days.
Time for some younger, hungrier, and more ethical journalism. Let’s give money to Propublica, if we can.
Conservatives have put sand in the gears so much that things people have been screaming for and voted for still don’t get done.
They are the ones creating the atmosphere where a Capitalist Criminal (just like war criminals go too far) is murdered and sympathy for the victim is thin on the ground.
The Republican Party wants us demoralized. But now, like it or not, some of us are energized.
Others are snapping out of their Candide comas and waking up to, “Why is murder for profit okay if you’re a corporation?
I’m an LLC. Is that the key to making money on contract killings? By golly, that is one weird trick.
satby
@sab: if the convict’s creatures are in charge, a little “piece of paper” like a pardon won’t really stop them.
Edit: especially with this SCOTUS.
Ok, and a further edit: I wouldn’t take one if I was in the position. I’m not, so easy for me to say. I would rather stand for the idea that doing my job competently in spite of threats is more important than covering my ass. It’s not about the low info voters, it’s about standing against the criminals, which as Baud points out, will cause martyrs.
geg6
@MagdaInBlack:
So what? They’re already saying it. We have to quit giving a shit about their stupid talking points. We have to quit reacting or pre-emptively reacting to what they may say or do. Act.
WereBear
@satby: The Cheney’s can afford to buy part of a country and move there. They are hardly public servants on any subject except anti-fascism, and they can take care of themselves.
I’m thinking of the hardworking public servants who don’t have those kind of resources.
It’s the right thing to do. A non-violent way of avoiding violence.
J.D.
I don’t see why anyone thinks pardons are going to help at all against trumped up charges or investigations that financially ruin people. Pardons are only retrospective, and imaginary crimes can be just as easily imagined to occur after the pardon as before it. For example, a pardoned person can be compelled to testify as they have forfeited their 5th amendment right, but if a pardoned person then lies during their testimony (or, more likely, is accused unjustly of lying) then perjury or a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1001 is a new crime not covered by the pardon. Sure it would be a bullshit charge, but then so is prosecuting Fauci for gain of function research or Liz Cheney for her work on the Jan 6 Committee. As the panicky Democrats currently stampeding into a bad decision are saying, bullshit charges can still ruin you. IMO, we would be better off building funds to support prosecuted people financially so they can fight it out in court, where bullshit charges wither and die (so long as you have enough money). Blanket pardons don’t actually have any protective upsides, they only have the downsides of forever tarnishing innocent people and the Democratic brand with the stink of implied criminality.
WereBear
@J.D.: It gives you a route to take against illegal action.
Even the Nazis didn’t do things illegally on the regular. Just like corporations can kill with impunity.
Because it’s legal.
RL
@Baud: Jon Stewart jumped to Chappelle’s defense after he tripled down on trans bigotry. This is my not shocked face.
TBone
@WereBear: hard agree. The veneer of legality was the Nazis’ best weapon, at first…
satby
@WereBear: It’s illegal to criminalize non criminal government service. That any of you think pardons would be honored is kind of quaint, really.
satby
I think so too.
J.D.
@WereBear: A pardoned person still has no protection whatsoever against new supposed crimes, like perjury.
Baud
Via blue sky
satby
This is so breathtakingly wrong I barely know where to start.
Ned F
The Supreme Court has preemptivley pardoned DJT, so yeah, I support protective pardons .
TBone
Palate cleanser about love in action. I am unabashedly corny and must water my hope so it stays green at the roots. Mary is twelve years old.
https://www.robertleefulghum.com/saint-mary-the-buddhist/
TBone
@Ned F: 🎯
WereBear
@satby: It all depends on how bad it gets. But anything that will keep them at bay should be tried.
What, we’re holding back our One Weird Trick?
This is Act Three. New freakin’ rules and I think the populace is tired of the old ones.
The CEO in question was also involved in a stock rigging scheme, last year. Were I to write thrillers (and I have) that is enough timing for thoughts to occur.
Had the election gone the other way I doubt it would have happened. But here we are
Nice Polite Democrats, a campaign of help and caring, was very narrowly rejected and Electoral College (a long simmering resentment now turned up to eleven) and you know what?
I don’t care about polite anymore. I can’t afford it.
evodevo
@WereBear: Yep…and that was even before the reign of Paxton…
“Siegelman’s prosecution bears a striking familiarity to the FBI investigation of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower in 1990, and the conviction of two of his aides.”
https://washingtonspectator.org/did-karl-rove-help-send-an-innocent-man-to-jail/
Elizabelle
@sab:
Love that sentence. Applies to the media industrial complex too.
Baud
@Shalimar:
Speaking of…
https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lcna5evup225
Doug
@Shalimar: “tiny kennedy”
That’s perfect!
NotMax
♬ Pardon me Joe, is that your pen that’s making new news?
;)
Baud
lowtechcyclist
@MagdaInBlack:
Maybe so, but (a) Dem elected officials, up to and including Biden, should do what they can, and (b) it’s not like they (ETA: Trump henchmen) can magically do it all themselves, other people – regular government employees, not MAGAts – have to carry out their orders. Some of them will obey anyway, but it gives people who don’t want to some ground to stand on.
TBone
@NotMax: the pen can be mightier than the sword!
I did not place pen next to is.
Baud
FWIW, I put no demands on Biden because unfulfilled demands always end up becoming someone’s excuse for not caring.
WereBear
@J.D.: They want to execute Dr. Fauci for what he did during the Pandemic.
It helps with that. Now, they would have to do a Hunter Biden Putin Laptop job on him, for Fox, and get nowhere with it.
I think this collapse of first run Cabinet members is a grand thing. If we do it right, they can get enough rope to at least trip them up. Constantly. So their little toddler minds find another anthill to torture with a magnifying glass.
WereBear
@satby: Not until the Night of Broken Glass. The populace woke up when it was too late.
Sure, we could quibble, but they had the Wannsee Conference for public relations about “acting to take care of the problem” they created.
But everything was signed off and legal inside the German state, and much in the Eastern Balkans was turning loose Deplorable locals to take the blame.
But no. Just like corporations are people and money is free speech. Our fascists want it legal, too. That is why they took the Supreme Court.
TBone
@WereBear: another hard agree.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Then consider them to be recommendations. 🙂
NotMax
@TBone
OT: reminded me the internet can be deceptive.
In its early days the URL for Pen island was penisland.com.
:)
narya
Here’s a thought: can the Federal Tort Claims Act be used to force the government to pay for/provide the defense for people who are accused by the incoming assholes? Typically people/entities are deemed to be eligible (i.e., it’s not automatic), but I would think that anyone who’s high-up enough might be covered. I only know about FTCA in the context of federally qualified health centers–which have to apply to receive that deeming, and which have to comply with various regs–and in the context of TCFG getting covered for some of his bullshit in the last maladministration. It would be a fight worth having, I’d think.
NotMax
@Baud
Kind’a sort’a quasi-obligatory?
(Any excuse to visit Judy is a good one.) :)
WereBear
I recommend the book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. I’ve been reading about WWII (which goes back to the Great War if you really want to make sense of it) all my life. But this was personal, from the diplomat’s family and staff who arrived impressed with the “New Germany.”
It was this access to secrets which that let them know what was going on before the population did, but there wasn’t much response, and they had to stay diplomatic and lock their lips.
A major pivot in the book is the effect of that one night. From the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
YY_Sima Qian
Pardons required the pardoned to admitted to the crime(s), right? What crimes have these people committed? How does preemptive pardon work?
TBone
@NotMax: tee hee!
WereBear
@YY_Sima Qian: The way the Supreme Court handed Trump immunity.
“Whatever you did was in accordance with your job, done.”
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
When I took over some responsibilities from a co-worker who retired, I noticed that a bunch of his files were labeled ‘cumfile [topic]’ or ‘cumfile [date]’.
Turned out that ‘cumfile’ was his shorthand for ‘cumulative file.’
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Thank you WearBear and TBone for highlighting how the Nazis operated during their first 5 years in power.
The legal veneer was important and took that long to get everything lined up so that when they did start letting the freak flag fly, ie Kristallnacht, it was too late.
And to understand just how popular the Nazis actually were here in the good ole USofA prior to Pearl Harbor:
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Friends-Reichs-Supporters/dp/1250148952
ETA: I see WearBear has recommended ‘Garden of the Beasts’, another must-read.
Lemme add to that ‘Good-bye to the Mermaids’:
https://www.amazon.com/Good-bye-Mermaids-Childhood-Hitlers-Berlin/dp/0826216900
TBone
@NotMax: I love that clip so much, I frequently rewatch it at periodic intervals so thank you.
Eunicecycle
@narya: but that would assume the Trump administration would follow that law. Not exactly a given.
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: yours in service,
TBone
I appreciate your commentary here just as much!
TBone
@YY_Sima Qian: ask Nixon?
lowtechcyclist
@YY_Sima Qian:
What crimes did Richard Nixon admit to?
The President just pardons someone for any and all crimes that person may have committed in the past. And they’re pardoned for those potential crimes. That’s all.
Only works for Federal crimes, is my understanding. So anyone so pardoned who might be in Trump’s or Kash Patel’s or Stephen Miller’s (etc.) sights would do well to stay out of states with a Rethug AG.
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
[George Takei voice] Oh my.
:)
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Yes, the world does go on spinning. I’ve read that Assad’s last hope is to get Trump to pull all support from SDF and then get some other faction back to fighting the HTS (I get lost in the acronyms). Looks like this may be a case of “Missed it by THAT much” for Assad.
WereBear
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Thank you for the book recc, will hunt that down.
I have a bit of mad money since I will be cancelling my Everand Subscription. It’s gone straight to MBA hell.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
Good point, but we can wish and hope (I’ve sent letters to my electeds telling them to more publicly resist – not sure what else to do in that direction).
Dorothy A. Winsor
I had a root canal yesterday, so today will be better.
WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Gosh yes. Rest up. It’s a small wound but a big deal.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Interesting You Tube story about a mall in Providence that converted upper levels into small apartments as a way to enliven the ground floor stores and supply needed housing.
Suzanne
This talk of preemptive pardons makes me wonder….. can a president do a prospective pardon? For crimes that haven’t been committed yet? Is that even a thing? I could see TFG having his goons invent some “crime” and simply saying that their target committed it on or after January 21, or something.
Soprano2
@satby: They’re threatening to try some of these people for treason just because they did their jobs. I think they should be protected from that. Alexander Vindman’s wife said in a podcast she wants them to leave the country, she’s terrified TCFG is going to try to have her husband executed for treason. I think we should take that seriously.
UncleEbeneezer
@lowtechcyclist: Exactly. Pardons would tie things up in courts. And make politically motivated prosecutions much more costly.
A fave podcaster of mine joked yesterday that Biden should do ALL THE PARDONS and then when anyone tries to give him shit about it just smile and say he has no idea what they are talking about. Must be one of those senior moments they all worried so much about…
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WereBear: I feel good. I’m just overwhelmed by a bunch of medical appointments, mine and Mr DAW’s. I still need a crown on that tooth, and I’ve been struggling with sudden hearing loss in my left ear. The ENT said he wanted a base hearing test before he did anything else, and those were scheduled 3 months out. I’m finally getting it next week.
Another Scott
This press frenzy strikes me as yet another example of “only Democrats have agency”.
If Biden issues federal pardons for people who were doing their job, then (as stated above) DJT will try to make military commissions a thing, and his allies in the states will try to tie them up in court on state charges. And there will be civil suits. And who knows what else. It’s what they do. We know this.
I have confidence that Biden and his team will game all this out and do whatever makes sense. I’m not going to obsess over it.
I do not have confidence that Biden and his team can protect everyone. He’s not our Benevolent Despot. The monsters will keep monstering. The rest of us have to do our parts because there are no magic executive orders and pardons and commutations or anything else that will stop the monsters because there’s never One Weird Trick.
We have to keep our eyes on the prizes and vote the monsters out.
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Chief Oshkosh
@WereBear: Agree, In the Garden of Beasts is a good read. It’s a tiny bit fictionalized because it sometimes states what people are thinking at the time, which of course is impossible to know.
Something that stuck with me is how much the Nazis achieved early on by simply cornering an official (say, a diplomat from another country or one of their own ministers) in their offices or somewhere else away from other people, and then just screaming at them until they acquiesced to the demand of the day. Typically they’d get the official to physically sign some document, then run from the office to proclaim that that official had stated whatever he’d just signed off on. They’d then go on to the next victim.
Of course we know that once this snowballed and they reached a critical mass of obedience, they didn’t bother to get these false allies on board – they just did whatever they wanted since it was now “all legal.”
Soprano2
@satby: If you thought there was going to be an investigation of you that necessitated spending six figures to keep yourself out of prison you might think differently. Plus there’s the toll on your mental and emotional health that an investigation would cause.
WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Yes, that is a lot to be on anyone’s mind.
Chief Oshkosh
@WereBear
Agreed on both.
WereBear
@Chief Oshkosh: I think there was some access to diaries and letters and declassified material, to share actual thoughts if not in the exact moment.
This works if the writer has researched the person enough to understand their personality and mode of expression.
Someone comes home from witnessing something terrifying, I don’t think they’d be thinking of the price of eggs.
Layer8Problem
@WereBear: Now he can do it himself.
“It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this has done what he has done.”
RICHELIEUTRUMPGin & Tonic
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The Arcade is an interesting place – it was the first indoor shopping mall in the country, built in 1828. But to suggest it was recently a mall in any sense you’d understand that word is an exaggeration. It hasn’t really worked in any shopping sense in decades. It’s located in “downtown,” yes, but a dead area that has very little night life, and since WFH has taken off isn’t very active in the daytime either. So, yes, converting the upper floor to housing units is cute, but it only works because all of the spaces in there were small – think mid-19th-C storefronts. There was never a Sears or Macy’s there, it was shops of a few hundred square feet.
They are staving off demolition for now, but just barely, IMO.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Soprano2: I heard Andy McCabe talk about the stress of being targeted on the Jack podcast. The Trump administration took his case to two different grand juries who both found insufficient evidence to charge. But he said it ate his life as well as his funds. He may have used Go Fund Me or something.
Omnes Omnibus
@YY_Sima Qian: There is Supreme Court case law that explicitly states that the acceptance of a pardon is not an admission of guilt. I don’t have the citation to the cases directly to hand at the moment.
Barry
@MagdaInBlack: “If that’s where we are headed, a pardon won’t mean anything to them”
Fallacy of the excluded middle.
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I heard that too, which informed my comment. It’s easy to say people should be targets of investigations when you aren’t one of those people. If I remember correctly he had to go to court to get the pension he had earned, too.
YY_Sima Qian
@TBone:
@lowtechcyclist:
@Omnes Omnibus:
Thanks for the clarifications! Forgot about Nixon! Which is embarrassing since I just re-watched Frost/Nixon
In that case, pardon away Joe! (But maybe not the Cheneys, certainly not the father!)
oldgold
There is an old saw that bad facts make bad law. The same is true here.
I get that the extraordinary bad facts and circumstances surrounding the upcoming administration make these preemptive pardons seem like the prudent thing to do. But, I think it sets a very bad precedent that will be exploited by future Administrations and will result in not only the President but their entire administration and corrupt cronies being above the law.
Geminid
@YY_Sima Qian: I’m wondering if you have read about the interview Syrian rebel leader Mohammed al-Jolani gave to CNN. I have only read short excerpts but it sounds very interesting. Jolani said all the “right things;” I guess we’ll get to see in coming weeks whether Jolani really means them and whether his militia allies follow his lead.
Reports are Russian navy ships have left their base at Tartous on the Syrian coast. They may have sail to Kaliningrad to find a base because there’s no way Turkiye is letting them into the Black Sea.
To the south and not far from the port of Latakia, Russia’s air base at Khmeimen has been under attack by rebel drones. The Russian attack helicopters there are said to have flown south to a base near Damascus.
It’s unclear whether Assad’s forces can defend the coastal region, or how hard they will try. This is said to the Alawite heartland and its loss would be a hard body-blow to the regime.
Layer8Problem
@WereBear, @Chief Oshkosh: In regard to In the Garden of Beasts, I had to stop reading it about halfway through. I was too enraged by the willful stupidity of the ambassador and his family and was worried about damaging the book.
Soprano2
OT – I just had the strangest experience. On December 3rd I got an e-mail from AT&T asking me to review my order. I was like “what order, I didn’t place an order”. When I looked at it last night it appeared to be to cancel my home phone service! I know I didn’t do that, so I called them this morning. The person I finally got on the phone said that the order was to cancel my home phone because it was being transferred to another company. I know I didn’t do that, and I doubt John did it because he never answers the phone unless it’s someone he knows. It took them over 30 minutes, but they did cancel that “order” so my home phone won’t be cancelled. Do you think I got “slammed”? I thought companies couldn’t do that anymore.
YY_Sima Qian
@oldgold: In normal times, yes. Just like Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden.
However, the courts & the laws are no longer functional at the highest levels, for the highest level people. The SCOTUS has made sure of that. Screw the precedents! (Something I would not have said as recently as 2022.) We can rebuild rule of law after the reactionary counterrevolutionaries are defeated & the retrograde SCOTUS is remade.
This is war (albeit still very low intensity in terms of kinetic warfare) to restore liberal democracy, & warfare (however defined) is never pretty. Of course, as in any warfare there are lines we should not cross, or the entire anti-Fascist cause becomes a farce, but I don’t think preemptive pardons of the targets that the reactionary counterrevolutionaries have marked for legal persecution is one of those lines.
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor: There’s a similar Arcade in Cleveland that has been converted into a beautiful hotel.
It’s not really a model for modern or contemporary shopping malls, but it’s a great way to keep some of these gorgeous places.
WereBear
@Layer8Problem: But that’s just like people everywhere over the last month.
We’ve been creeping up on this for a long time. We had advance warning. And we still act like the rubber band will “snap back.”
That can’t happen now. But look how many still think there’s a past to return to.
For one thing, I don’t think MAGA is going to have less than 10% “coming to their senses,” and even if there’s an emotional reunion they will backslide. Look how long it’s been.
And I no longer want them back. They’re dangerous, now. Untrustable.
My conclusions, the research of others. But I believe it.
WereBear
@Soprano2: But now they all said TRUMPWORLD and returned to their dirty tricks on consumers.
Ramalama
@RL:
This might be a good phrase to use for Watergirl’s Communication post.
The Thin Black Duke
@WereBear: People need to stop thinking It Can’t Happen Here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ramalama: This is not my shocked face so STFU?
Ramalama
@Shalimar:
I did not know this. I used to work at MIT, but not for anyone in public health. Or anything that caused the faculty I knew to reap those kinds of benefits. Not that they didn’t earn them.
But anyway, I could not hold back my temper and yell at these neighbor people who I had considered my friends of 20 on and off years about Tony Fauci and his work on AIDS.
p.a.
@WereBear: The Nazi regime did get some pushback from the existing judiciary, mostly to maintain the pretense of legality, and the regime did pump their supporters into open jobs, but most of the judiciary carryover from Weimar was just peachy-keen on what the Nazis were doing. A long time conservative institution concerned about stability above all.
Numerous acquittals of right-wing murderers whose defense was “I killed someone who I was convinced was a threat to German society.” Mulligan!
YY_Sima Qian
@Geminid: I have seen the interview & been following the events on Twitter & BlueSky. We’ll see. All kinds of terrible autocrats can come off as polished & urbane in interviews, including Bashar Assad.
I can only hope Syria can achieve some level of relative calm so people in different regions can start to rebuild their lives & societies, & I can only hope that Syria can get there w/o further massive bloodletting (including of the Alawites).
I have little hope that there will be a unified country even if the Assad regime is toppled, or that any of warlords holding territory can be even enlightened soft authoritarians (let alone liberal democrats), or that the regional (Iran, Türkye, Israel) & great powers (Russia & the US) will refrain from carving out spheres of influence in the country for themselves. Relatively competent & development/reconstruction minded regional lords that do not incessantly fight each other would already be a miracle.
Layer8Problem
@WereBear: Yeah, it’s certainly been a rough month for me. Fundamentally it was a choice between Good and Evil. And too many people’s votes were informed with “Yeah, back to Evil!!”, “Well, I’m sure he won’t do those bad things and he’s such a successful businessman”, “Duh?”, and “Why isn’t Biden at the top of the ballot? Who’s Harris?”
Soprano2
@WereBear: The guy said the order was placed sometime in November. The first I knew about it was Tuesday. You might be right about that.
Soprano2
@The Thin Black Duke: I agree, but most of them still do.
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all!
Cold here on MS Gulf Coast … but not as cold as a lot of other places.
Covered up the plants I could outside last night and fired up halogen work lamps to hopefully keep them from getting annihilated.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
RevRick
@Gloria DryGarden: We’re talking about a GOP Congress here. They most certainly will not do anything useful. Shovel a ton of money into the laps of those who already have a ton of money? That they will. But by all measures it is worse than useless. Okay mass deportations? That they will. But by all measures it is worse than useless.
Omnes Omnibus
@p.a.: IIRC about one third of judge simply refused to participate in Nazi crimes at all. The Nazis left them in place for a while and simply worked around them. You know, filing suit in specific courts in Texas, relying on the Fifth Circuit, and such like.
Ella in New Mexico
The Biden team should not only be working on a list of people to shield with preemptive pardons. They should be working on a prisoner exchange list of people Trump would love to get pardons, the top of which list would be TFG himself.
Set up a meeting with Trumps team and let them know Biden would be willing to pardon Trump and any of a list of folks he wants to generate if he agrees to start from scratch on his terrible Cabinate picks and replace them with competent and normal candidates. Hand them a list of reasonable suggestions R’s in the Senate would approve, then see what they do. One pardon for each switch, even Steven.
Trump’s would require he totally dump DOGE, drop RFK and Oz plus maybe one or two more personally painful appointments. Kushner would be good
(Yeah, I know, we’re not in an episode of West Wing)
Barry
I am seeing a bunch of people who are pointing out that if we get to the Night of the Long Knives, pardons won’t work.
But until then, they will help, and the cost is minimal.
sab
@Suzanne: IANAL but I think the president can pardon you for crimes or non-crimes you have or have not already committed that have or have not yet been charged or even noticed, but he cannot pardon you proactively for crimes you will or may commit in the future.
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: That wouldn’t be a pardon, that would be immunity for future crimes.
Ramalama
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah. Though the phrasing would need a workaround.
“Finding your [social security] on the chopping block? This is my not shocked face.”
WereBear
@The Thin Black Duke: And that of course it would look different than 1933 in Germany.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ramalama: I still think the STFU part is the most important. I am pretty sure I am still at the anger stage.
WereBear
@p.a.: Eerily similar to Castle Doctrine in FLorida, and no surprise.
Much like the Reagan years pioneered the Twinkie Defense.
WereBear
@Layer8Problem: Yes, the first time I didn’t sleep for a week, this time it took a month to get it back near normal.
schrodingers_cat
OT: For BJers who shop on Clinique, it has amazing deals today on its website. You can get 2 of their famous dramatically different moisturizing lotions for the price of one. They also have good gift sets which are about 30% off now
I stocked up, these made for great gifts when I had to go to India in a hurry this fall and had no time to shop.
WereBear
@Soprano2: When did my phone light up with telemarketers and our mailbox full of scams?
I do remember. Who it was in office.
WereBear
@Omnes Omnibus: One third of policemen refused orders to murder, and were returned to their duties to be actual policemen. Because someone had to be.
Ramalama
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, I hear ya. I veer back and forth. Anger / disdain.
Geminid
@Chief Oshkosh: The Kurdish YPG militia that is supported by the the U.S. mission in Northeast Syria is not capable of toppling Assad, and might not want to even if it could. They have carved out the enclave of “Rojava” in Northeast Syria and preserving that is their top priority. Regardless, Assad’s fate will almost certainly be decided before Trump takes office.
As for the YPG, they are under pressure in Aleppo to pull their forces there to east of the Euphrates River. The Kurdish neighborhoods in northern Aleppo are still a conflict area, but so far have avoided heavy fighting between the HTS , YPG and a third military force, the Syrian National Army.
The SNA is basically a proxy army contolled by Turkiye’s M.I.T. intelligence service. The Turks are very hostile to the YPG which they regard as a branch of the PKK organization which has waged an armed insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984.
WereBear
@Ella in New Mexico: No, see, you are still stuck in denial.
This is Black Mirror.
WaterGirl
@Baud:
I hope you are seriously wrong about that!
citizen dave
We’re one month out from Nov. 5 and though I knew it then, I’m not ever getting over it. I’m at the same level, if not higher, of disgust, disappointment, bewilderment, etc. Shitty electorate indeed (as a valued commenter put it the other day–sorry don’t remember who–but simply: Great candidate, great campaign, shitty electorate.
I have some advice for the Trumpworld folks, courtesty of Mr. Dylan:
Well, I finally started thinkin’ straightWhen I run outta things to investigateI couldn’t imagine nothin’ elseSo now I’m home investigatin’ myselfHope I don’t find out too much, good God
Jackie
@Baud: What’s Tulsi’s response? //
The Thin Black Duke
@WereBear: “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.”
BlueGuitarist
guessing that the leak to Politico is an invitation to those concerned to get in touch,
to better inform internal discussion
and to communicate directly administration thinking.
Which might be bad news because
Also guessing that trmp henchmen will ignore preemptive pardons, calling them unconstitutional, moves by those prosecuted for dismissal on the grounds they’ve been pardoned
will be deferred by sccotus, sending cases back for prosecution,
with a decision on constitutionality of the pardons deferred until much later.
Also guessing that we can make a difference in 2025 and 2026 elections.
New Deal democrat
@The Thin Black Duke: I saw an episode of true crime last night in which one victim died immediately, and the other was mortally wounded, but took 8 years to finally succumb.
This is where I think the 1789 Constitution is: mortally wounded, but still on its feet. And on the subject of history rhyming, much like the last few decades of the Roman Republic, as norm after norm went down in flames.
It’s worth a much longer comment, but I won’t bore you with that (at least, not yet).
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: I think Baud is probably wrong, but only in degree. I don’t think a lot will cheer Trump on, but I think many will “reluctantly see the necessity of such actions in troubled times such as these.”
NotMax
@Jackie
“We’ll always have
ParisDamascus.”//
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Layer8Problem
@WereBear: I’m kind of wondering if The West Wing primed people to believe that Republicans were regular guys deep down who cared about their country and its institutions and who could be swayed with logic and well-phrased appeals. Sorta like The Apprentice made people think that lunatic was a savvy businessman. Our stories might be killing us.
And yeah, Black Mirror. Brrr.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Disappointed?
Yes
Surprised?
No 😞
rikyrah
@Baud:
Hmmm 🤔 🤔
Layer8Problem
@rikyrah: Morning!
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: All I can say is, “may they get what they voted for.”
Like the Black women watching the city burn while sipping Starbucks, “it’s above me, now.”
EVERY GODDAMN DAY I find myself saying, “oh well. It is what it is.” We tried.
PJ
@satby: just be aware, that defense of your non-crimes will likely cost you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, which would bankrupt the average civil servant. And if a Trump appointee like Aileen Cannon is your judge, you may wind up in jail no matter how good your defense is and how ridiculous the charges are.
Geminid
@Jackie: These events in Syria come at a bad time for Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard was Bashar Assad’s leading American apologist throughout the Syrian civil war, and it’s become clear that the popular support she falsely claimed Assad had was never in fact there.
My take on the Gabbard nomination is that a substantial cohort of Republican Senators simply do not want her in the DNI post. They do not trust her, and there is ample reason not to. Gabbard’s position on Assad exactly mirrors the Russian line on this conflict, and could provide the “hook” on which Republican Senators can hang their suspicions on.
Kay
My “norms” takeaway is this : if the norm serves the truth, follow it. If it doesn’t, don’t.
Anthony Fauci did nothing wrong and ruining the end of his life of public service with a political prosecution does not serve the truth. It’s a lie.
Hunter Bidens pardon served the truth – political prosecution. Go in that direction. The Trump visit to the WH, while supposedly a norm, was a dumb charade performed for media. Don’t do those.
NotMax
@Layer8Problem
Never seen so much as half a second of either.
NotMax
@Geminid
Gabbard stuck between a Raqqa and a hard place?
//
Miss Bianca
Somehow, the whole pre-emptive pardon thing reminds me of a scene in The Three Musketeers, where Athos confronts Milady in an inn and wrests from her the assassination order for D’Artagnan that she got from Cardinal Richelieu.
In my mind, I want to hear Biden say to Trump what Athos says to her: “Now that I have drawn your fangs, serpent, bite if you can.”
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Which ones do you have in mind?
WereBear
@Layer8Problem: The answer is yes, I agree.
West Wing was there for the smart people, so I don’t think it affected MAGA. But if they had heard accurate things about Republicans there would have been a tantrum.
Those Moral Majority people cancelled all my favorite shows.
Kay
This is our way forward, IMO. Everyone here knows we give massive subsidies to farmers – used to be aid, is now a kind of insurance. What if we just SAID that? The D base would fall off their chair “the truth!”
What if we told the truth about police, that the their funding goes up every year but their clearance rate goes down – especially amazing since basically the whole country is under video surveillance.
Just stop pandering (lying). I think it would be an incredible renewal. Go toward the truth and away from telling groups what they want to hear.
WereBear
@Kay: I couldn’t agree more. Look where coy got us.
NotMax
@WereBear
Somehow at the time Max Headroom sneaked through.
:)
YY_Sima Qian
@Geminid: It seems the Türkiye government is trying to create conditions for reconciliation w/ the PKK & bring it into the open political process?
PJ
@oldgold: I guess you missed it, but the Supreme Court has already held this year that the President cannot be charged for “official acts”. And as for precedent, did a corrupt administration like Trump’s need precedent to do anything?
This is the kind of “but it looks bad!!” handwringing that drives me crazy. Crooks don’t need a precedent to commit crimes!
sab
@rikyrah: Good morning.😀🐅 (that dog emoji looks just like my Ponyo.) Until I embiggened it and it looks like a tiger, or Solomon the biggest cat I have ever seen, being mild-mannered in my basement.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
I’m really hoping that’s the case and that the (R) Senators a) have some spine, and b) actually see the dire national security ramifications the incoming (mal)administration brings along with it.
At least blocking her sorry ass from being DNI would be a little something they could do to at least try to mitigate the fact that Putin’s Bitch will be prezidenting.
They might be onboard with the rest of his picks designed to vandalize the federal government but typically, (R) Senators have some semblance of responsibility on the national security front.
Oh wait, he’s called ‘Moscow Mitch’ for a reason, wtf was I thinking?
The asteroid strike can’t happen soon enough.
NotMax
@YY_Sima Qian
PKK: “Fool me once….”
Layer8Problem
@NotMax: Delicate sensibilities like ours might find Black Mirror a tad dark and everything I read pretty much noped me out, even if good. Someone however directed me to the “San Junipero” episode and I found that one decent and humane, in a science-fictiony way.
As for The West Wing I know many people love it. Hell, I live with one. I just had no patience for wishcasting and long expositions on How Things Are and How Things Really Should Be.
schrodingers_cat
People who unceremoniously pushed out our presidential nominee after one bad debate and those cheerlead the effort need to STFU but instead here they are making demands of Biden. You got what you wanted. He owes you nothing.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: The Old Post Office in DC was originally, well, a post office. It’s a landmark because it’s the only building in DC taller than the Capitol dome (buildings afterwards couldn’t be that tall). After it was a PO it was (among other things) a shopping mall kinda thing, then it was/is (infamously) a hotel.
It’s good that important old buildings get repurposed, but progress means that eventually even important old buildings need to be replaced.
(My workplace has been working on renovating some old historic buildings for us to move to for 15+ years. Lots of hurry up and wait. Lots of delays because “Whoops – who put that 16″ I-beam perpendicular to where we need to run the HVAC duct??” Etc., etc. They’re still not done. And the way building codes have changed over the years, lots of the new spaces will be too small for us. So it’s not clear what changes will be needed when they’re “done”, and when or if we’re actually going to move. Lots and lots and lots of issues in trying to “save money” via renovations. [/preaching to the choir])
(sigh)
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kay
My younger sister and I are ridiculous so we have this game where I pretend I’m running for the House, except I tell the truth about voters and the country.
Heres how it works. I step up the podium in my county and I say “the only reason farms survived under Trump is taxpayers gave farmers 60 billion dollars, no strings”
Im picking on farmers but you could do this with all interest groups. We have to stop lying!
Kay
@WereBear:
Can you imagine our base if we just said “fundamentalist religions want special snowflake rules that no one else gets”.
Imagine media! They wouldn’t know what to do. Democrats aren’t pandering! They’re telling the truth!
Imagine our base. Finally someone says what they all think.
Miss Bianca
@Layer8Problem: I too could not get through that book. I forget whether it was that, or some other thing, that stuck in my craw about the way the writer was portraying events. But since I was studying Weimar and Nazi Germany pretty intensely for my graduate work, it musta been something!
Layer8Problem
@NotMax: Ah, Max f’kin’ Headroom. My youthful cyberpunk dreams brought to television. When I grew up [Narrator: Layer8 already was] I wanted to be Blank Reg.
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the British original because I loved the American show so much. And then they screwed up the second season, presumably so normies could also enjoy it instead of dystopian types like me.
WereBear
@NotMax: Oh, yes. I was involved with the Amiga community at the time, which did some of the graphic work. Like for Babylon 5.
Omnes Omnibus
And yet the French have repaired the damage to Notre Dame.
catclub
@WereBear: Also Alabama governor
UncleEbeneezer
Synagogue built by Holocaust survivors set on fire in arson attack in Australia. But 80% of those survivors were probably Zionists so it’s all good… /sarcasm
WereBear
@Layer8Problem: I’m more of an NYPD Blue fan. “This is how bad people can be.”
They are the kind of the Yin Yang of each other, come to think of it.
WereBear
@Another Scott: You mean…
I COULD live at the PO?*
*Southern Literature Reference
BlueGuitarist
@Kay:
speaking of police, this story is … idk the right word
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-selling-restricted-guns-posties/
Kay
I went to a Christmas concert – basically a work thing. Our group was probably 80% Republicans. It was fine for the music part but the milling around part went bad. Lawyer acquaintance comes up to me and says the COUNTRY had a good election night and you can tell because everyone accepts Trump – it’s peaceful”. I said “must be nice to have a decent person who concedes when she loses instead of pitching a 4 year fit” I said this with WAY too much heat, so I am somewhat at fault. I’m bitter and I know it. Anyway – his response “fuck you” and he walked away. So that went well.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Another Scott:
That line of thinking means the French should have just finished the job the fire started on Notre Dame, scraped it and put up some fuglyplexes in it’s place. Sorry, no.
40% of landfill input is from building demolition. If one looks at what’s been lost over the years from reckless scrape and build mentalities, it’s heartbreaking.
Do all “old” buildings need to be “saved”? No. But, to use your phrase, “important old buildings”, are important parts of our history and culture. And every time an “important old building” has been saved over my adult lifetime, people are so grateful down the line that people “back in the day” put up the good fight. The Old Post Office in DC is a prime example of that and it’s simply one of many nationwide.
Adaptive reuse is sustainable and offers far more to a place in the long term. It’s something that most residents want to see.
Is adaptive reuse harder? Yes. Oftentimes more expensive? Yes. That’s why the bottom-line, narcissistic sociopathic mentality of developers mostly hate it, it’s not easy and means they “lose” money (they define “losing” money if the make $2m on a project instead of $3m, for example).
But to say that “important old buildings” must be torn down in the name of “progress”? That’s patently absurd. “Progress” in one decade might be viewed 30 years later as the height of stupidity. “Progress” in Denver in the 60s and 70s meant scraping some of the most magnificent late-19th century architecture in the US and replacing it with parking lots. People here would kill now to have those buildings back and adaptively reuse them.
https://savingplaces.org/stories/six-reasons-save-old-buildings
https://tomorrow.norwalkct.org/news/importance-preserving-promoting-historic-buildings/
https://preservationvirginia.org/why-preservation-what-are-the-benefits/
https://www.austintexas.gov/page/why-we-preserve-historic-buildings-and-sites
ETA: I see that OO already made the reference to Notre Dame. Good.
WereBear
@Kay: Short and pithy get through to people, sounding good even if it’s wrong.
Let them “do their own research” and find out it’s true.
mozzerb
@oldgold: I would have thought Iran/Contra started that process going.
Another Scott
@Omnes Omnibus: “Something something the exception proves the rule.”
[ snerk ]
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kay
@BlueGuitarist:
It just seems like the clearance rate should go up since their funding literally goes up every year and the entire country has license plate readers at every jurisdictional boundary. They know exactly where we are.
NYPD gets 6 BILLION a year. We don’t have to go along with their whining that they’re underfunded – it’s a lie and under our New Rules we don’t validate lies.
J.D.
@PJ: “@satby: just be aware, that defense of your non-crimes will likely cost you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, which would bankrupt the average civil servant. And if a Trump appointee like Aileen Cannon is your judge, you may wind up in jail no matter how good your defense is and how ridiculous the charges are”
The problem though is this is all still true regardless of whether a person is pardoned. Pardons only protect you against prosecutors if those prosecutors are not bad faith ratfuckers. For a sufficiently determined ratfucker, like Kash Patel, a pardon is just a speed bump in the road to revenge. They will just ‘discover’ new crimes after (and therefore not covered by) the pardon to persecute people with. So you get all of the downsides in terms of public perception of mass blanket pardons, with essentially none of the upsides of protection against the incoming horde.
Layer8Problem
@Miss Bianca: One thing I keep meaning to ask in your earshot is do you have any notions on an economically sustainable, responsible, and non-corporate press, you being in the business and all? Is it the sort of thing doable with branch office level printers, free software, and poor but committed writers and editors? It might be a question better left to journalism schools.
Omnes Omnibus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: My comments tend to be shorter, so I can frequently post something faster than the more prolix among us. Even if they had the idea at the same time.
YY_Sima Qian
@NotMax: I am reading analyses that suggests the Turkish government may be more sincere this time. Trying to shore up domestic vulnerabilities in anticipation of much more turbulence going forward, specifically that eliminating from the US.
oldgold
@PJ: “This is the kind of “but it looks bad!!” handwringing that drives me crazy.”
In my view, this goes beyond “but it looks bad.” It is a bad precedent that will haunt this Republic long into the future. Further, handwringing is not necessarily a bad thing; particularly, when the subject is the future of the rule of law.
Now, a few rifled preemptive pardons is one thing, a wide ranging shotgun approach is another.
NotMax
@Layer8Problem
Black Mirror had its (darker than dark) moments, eventually devolving into a cybercentric one trick pony.
Debating with myself on sampling the similarly bleak Thai series TOMORROW + I, also on Netflix.
Ever tried the more elementary but cohesive (IMHO) Taiwanese Futmalls.com on Netflix?
Kay
@BlueGuitarist:
If youre a white 20 year old low income rural male in OH or MI I want to know why you aren’t 1. Working or 2. In one of the hundreds of subsidized trades training.3 receiving a Pell grant and at a community college.
Answer that and maybe I’ll listen to your whining.
Layer8Problem
@Kay: “Fuck you” = “You contradicted me with reality, you insensitive person!”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kay:
Okay, sincere question here: just how available are Pell grants?
I was able to go to college on them for 3 years of undergrad before fucking Reagan’s efforts to effectively gut the program began to take effect…which then coincided with the entire student loan push.
Has something changed decades later that have made Pell grants a bit more available?
Also too, the “fuck you” encounter at the show does strike me as going pretty well. People like that need to have pushback constantly. If they don’t like it, oh well, suck on it snowflakes!
Layer8Problem
@NotMax: “Ever tried the more elementary but cohesive (IMHO) Taiwanese Futmalls.com on Netflix?”
No but I shall make a note of it, thank you.
Professor Bigfoot
@Kay: “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. ‘One word of truth outweighs the world. ‘”
schrodingers_cat
@UncleEbeneezer: Gaza gave performative leftists a chance to virtue signal and be antisemitic at the same time. Win-win.
Also in this thread: people yelling Genocide Joe and their cheerleaders want Joe to save them from the incoming facsist horde.
NotMax
@Layer8Problem
it’s sort of a Young Adult version of Black Mirror, but with an edge.
One of those like it or leave it type of series.
tam1MI
“If the President does it, it is not a crime.”
– Richard Nixon
Professor Bigfoot
@BlueGuitarist: “Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.”
Puns intended.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Another Scott
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Since I seem to have struck a nerve, I’d like to revise and extend my remarks.
Sometimes temporary buildings built in a hurry, say during a war, end up doing important work that is recognized as historically significant and they end up on a historic registry. Sometimes other buildings end up on historic registries for other reasons. But renovations of those buildings are needed if they are to continue to actually be useful, to be structurally sound, to have roofs and windows that work, etc. The historic designations means that some things (like much of the exterior and much of the footprint) must be maintained. So if an organization needs to reuse those old buildings, as a result of budget constraints or for other reasons, then it can cause big problems for the proposed new tenants.
I’m reminded of the squash court at Stagg Field at Chicago. Something very important happened there. But did they keep the squash court and the stands for all time? No, they put up a plaque and a sculpture. Sometimes, a plaque and a sculpture is the sensible solution to mark an historic event in a building that was thrown up in a hurry, etc.
In 50-500 years, were Notre Dame proposed to be turned into a shopping mall or condos, because Paris is a city of 50M people, I wouldn’t expect everything about the exterior or interior of the building to remain as we see it today. But I don’t actually expect that to happen to Notre Dame – and I certainly wouldn’t be around to see it.
Could be wrong!!
tl;dr – There are always exceptions. ;-)
Best wishes,
Scott.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: I’d say it did go well!
Professor Bigfoot
@Kay: Amen, and thank you Jesus.
I don’t know what straight white Christian men have to complain about, but that never stops them.
Suzanne
@Another Scott:
I tend to be on the side of preserving and reusing old buildings that are genuinely important for some reason, either a significant event happened there, or it’s a good example of a style.
The issue I have is when neighborhood groups will attempt to declare some shitty building “historic” as a means to delay or stop redevelopment. Like, fuck you, that shitty 60s era strip mall is not “historic”.
I will also note that adaptive reuse can be really difficult, expensive, and produce a worse product. It can work well, depending on what you’re converting from and to, but it can also be shit. Buildings built 30 years ago or more often don’t meet modern standards for energy efficiency, fire code, sprinklers, equipment needs, etc. They often need asbestos and mold abatement.
If something is genuinely precious, great. But most buildings are not, and they are ultimately meant to serve us.
Miss Bianca
@Layer8Problem: Oof, I dunno. I would say yes – seems like the only way to go these days if you’re starting a grassroots news organization is the nonprofit route. The Ark Valley Voice went nonprofit a couple years back, and there’s a scrappy little one-guy news org called The Florence Reporter that’s doing something similar the next county over from me.
But I am a very, very small fish in this particular pond, so what I know may not amount to a hill of beans. Or fishbowl gravel. :)
New Deal democrat
@oldgold:
@PJ:
Both of the above statements are true, and illustrate the Hobson’s choice facing the Biden Administration.
If the Trump 2 Administration both civilly and criminally goes after the legislaturs, prosecutors, and judges – and their staffs – who tried to hold the Trump 1 Administration to account (which I think is a 99% certainty), then we are knowingly creating some serious martyrs to the cause of upholding norms and “the rule of law” if we fail to shield them. On the other hand, preemptively pardoning those people shatters yet another norm which will almost certainly be used routinely in the future.
The way I see it, it is a question of whether we only want the GOP responsible before history for the fall of the first American Republic, or whether Democrats participate as well. In resolving that calculus, the damage done by the Roberts Supreme Court – most especially in holding that the President is largely above the law – must be taken into account. When long-standing legal precedents and clear Constitutional provisions are just so much toilet paper to an activist Court, you can no longer fairly say that we still have “the rule of law” in any substantive vs. pro forma way.
Which means that I believe issuing blanket pardons is the least worst option.
Suzanne
Example: lots of old hospitals get converted to office buildings. Space standards have grown, so old hospital rooms can’t legally be used often for modern healthcare. They don’t have enough floor-to-floor height for modern healthcare equipment, they don’t have enough capacity for modern IT systems. But they can often become open office spaces. So, that’s a good adaptive reuse.
But office buildings almost NEVER become hospitals. (I know of literally one example in the entire country of this happening, and it was a behavioral health hospital, not a medical hospital.) The adaptive reuse simply cannot be done effectively.
TBone
@BlueGuitarist: should be front page news everywhere! On TV, newspapers, blogs, etc.
I found it yesterday at Atrios’s blog and posted it here twice since then.
It’s freaking explosive in all the right/wrong ways…
Another snippet
Geminid
@YY_Sima Qian: The Turkish army has succeeded in pushing the PKK’s armed forces out of Turkiye. This effort began after the ceasfire negotiated in 2013 collapsed in 2015, resulting in urban battles in Southeastern Turkish cities.
This summer Turkiye launched an offensive in the Quandil Mountains of northern Iraq where the PKK has maintained its headquarters. The offensive was carried out with the acquiescence of both the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil and the central government in Baghdad.
On another front, Turkiye has finally persuaded European nations which hosted the PKK’s fundraising operations to crack down on organization. This was not that tough a sell because the PKK raises most of its money through heroin trafficking and extortion of Kurdish businessmen.
The PKK was major organized crime problem for the Europeans. Nato Secretary General Stoltenberg pointed that out to Sweden when he was brokering the deal between the Swedish and Turkish governments that enabled Sweden’s NATO accession.
Those governments will probably never stamp the PKK out but their efforts have still weakened its financial position in Europe, and its political position as well. Just last week the British police shut down the London office of an organization they said was a PKK front.
It was against the larger background that Devlet Bahceli, head of the ultra-nationalist MH Party and Erdogan’s junior coalition partner since 2015, made his bombshell speech to the National Assembly a few weeks ago. Bahceli called for the release of PKK leader Ocalan from the prison he has been held in for the last 25 years so he could address the Assembly and renounce armed resistance.
Bahceli’s party has always been fiercely anti-PKK, so this was a big story in Turkiye. So was a friendly visit Bahceli made the week before to the headquarters of the HD Party, which is widely seen as Turkiye’s pro-Kurdish political party.*
Bahceli did all this with President Erdogan’s aporoval, and with knowledge of ongoing negotiations with the imprisoned Ocalan.
A couple days after Bahceli’s speech, a PKK attack on a Turkish Aerospace Industries facility in Ankara seemed to derail the peace process, and the Turkish Interior Department resumed removal of MH Party mayors in southeastern towns.
Turkiye’s government claimed the attack was staged out of Rojava, the Syrian enclave in northeast Syria, so they commenced a bombing campaign against YPG forces and assets there while avoiding direct conflict with the ~800 soldier US Army mission nearby.
So the immediate result of Bahceli’s speech was more comflict. But the fundamentals for a settlement of the Turkiye/PKK war are still there. Mr. Demeratis, the imprisoned MH Party leader, has backed the process as have others in his party. From what I know, I’d say there is a good chance this 40-year conflict could finally end in 2025.
*Erdogan’s AK Party is Turkiye’s largest political party by Grand National Assembly representation. The opposition CH Party is second, while Bahceli’s nationalist MH party and the leftwing/Kurdish HD Party are third and/or fourth, I’m not sure which.
Under Turkiye’s electoral system a party must exceed a 10% threshold in order to receive Assembly representation. That is how Erdogan’s AK Party won an Assembly majority in 2003 with less than 40% of the vote.
Riverboat Grambler
I see nothing about the UnitedHealth CEO shooting but you’ve got tweets from CentristMadness. lol. Real finger-on-the-pulse stuff here. How’s that guy’s podcast doing these days? Is he your Joe Rogan from the center-right?
Not surprising that you guys wouldn’t want to talk about the shooting, considering this place regularly carries water for the murderous industry that Brian Thompson represented. The only thing that ever seems to whip your party into fighting shape is fighting on private healthcare’s behalf; that, and unconditionally funding the genocidal apartheid state of Israel. How shameful.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Another Scott:
I know all of that. I have a fairly high profile in Denver in the historic preservation arena given the effort I led to stop a predatory developer from ripping down a place (only the second time that’s been successful).
I regularly meet with the Exec Director of Historic Denver and do volunteer research work for people looking to get their houses designated as landmarks, coordinate amongst half a dozen registered neighborhood orgs on landmark and conservation overlay issues/projects, etc.
I routinely work with people who are new to the process and often caution them, particularly if they’re looking at buildings that, to most eyes, don’t rise to the level of “importance” (or have massive issues that get in the way of any economic viable way to save or reuse the building) that “not everything can be saved and not everybody will look at something the way you do.” It’s often “pick your battles”, particularly in a city like this one which is pro-development/hyper-gentrification.
I just finished helping a resident work thru this exact same scenario in which we got the developer together with neighbors to discuss this:
https://www.westword.com/news/city-park-west-neighbors-oppose-developer-boring-buildings-22033890
The main argument opposing the scrape had more to do with the current building offering affordable commercial/retail space for businesses the ‘hood actually wants. We hosted one community meeting where the majority of residents opposed the rezone.
But, eventually the main person leading the opposition sat down with the developer (I was also part of it) to hammer out mostly technical things. It helped that this particular developer has done some residential projects in our ‘hood that aren’t heinous and he’s not a complete asshole. It also helped that I, with my reputation in historic preservation, was there to help the neighbors get their voice heard but also walk them thru the realities of “saving” a building built in the 60s and how it’s not gonna be seen by most people (like our City Council) as being something “worth saving”. Again, pick and choose your battles but make sure your voice is heard because there will be more of these issues down the line.
What was good about the process was a lot of sincere, back-and-forth on the issue and ultimate outcome (building will get scraped). It’s not always this single, anecdotal story about “asshole residents opposing development”. Most of us in this sphere take a very pragmatic and realistic approach to the playing field we work in.
What residents ultimately want is that their voices were actually heard and that the process isn’t basically Community Outreach Performance Theater…which Denver excels at doing.
sab
@Suzanne: Some frat boys at Akron U wanted to save a mansion near Akron U that my own great grandfather didn’t want anymore. Had he wanted to preserve it he would have sold it it to a responsible owner.
Property owner who bought it apologized to my brother at his kid’s wedding. My brother had never even seen the property. 50+ years later it still has a post office and some non-profits, one of them medical.
Good development of problematic property.
NotMax
@Riverboat Grambler
Ever considered scrolling down the front page? Multiple posts and threads about that.
Sheesh.
Layer8Problem
@Miss Bianca: We all hear quite a lot from the deep thinkers at the 40,000 foot level and from dilettantes like me. You’re where the rubber meets the pavement and frankly where we need to regroup.
Layer8Problem
@Riverboat Grambler: Oooh. You’re gonna cut yourself with that edge.
TBone
@Riverboat Grambler: you’re a day late and many sandwiches short of a picnic.
(“Son of a bitch! I touched it anyway!”)
tam1MI
He’s owed them nothing since July.
sab
@Kay: “My parents traumatized me by their bad marriage so now I now I need drugs or anti-anxiety meds.”
Kids not kids anymore that I knew..
“I am okay but it took me twenty years to get here and meanwhile all of my friends overdosed. They were not just drug addicts to me. They were friends, with families who loved them. Now they are dead.”
Suzanne
@sab: There’s definitely good historic preservations and adaptive reuses. As I said, as a default, I support keeping good old buildings and finding something to do with them.
Buildings have gotten much more technically complex in the last 40 years or so. Building science has made some big strides. Buildings are built with a lifespan in mind. Like, we don’t think twice about replacing bridges. It’s not in conflict to say that “good and valuable old buildings should be preserved” and “many old buildings have outlived their usefulness and should be replaced”.
Gloria DryGarden
@Kay: any thoughts on what you wished you’d said instead?
It’s so hard to prepare for these things. I think I need a headful of questions & civil comebacks., messages and branding.
It’s natural to want to lash out.
Miss Bianca
@Layer8Problem: I see my role as a government meetings reporter as laying out what’s going on at the town or county level within the context of what’s going on in a regional, state, or national level, where those parallels can or need to be drawn. (for example, citing state statutes or decisions that inform – or *don’t* inform – a local government decision. Or larger housing policy issues in the context of a planning commission meeting.)
It’s not much, and much of the time I feel like I’m whisper-shouting into a void, but every once in a while someone says something nice about my reporting which makes me feel like I’m making at least a modest contribution to the commonwealth.
Citizen Alan
@TBone: i still worry that “dictator on day one” means that on the first day, he will order the arrest and detention of enough democratic politicians to give the republicans a filibuster proof majority in the senate. And then congress will pass something equivalent to the enabling act as its first order of business so everything trump does afterwards will be perfectly legal. Including the concentration camps.
Citizen Alan
@satby: i think the argument is that everything they did was not actually illegal under german law on account of laws that the nazis passed to make them legal.
Layer8Problem
@Miss Bianca: You’re doing the heavy lifting. All I can offer is a heartfelt “Thank you for your service.”
zhena gogolia
@Kay: That is enraging!!!
Another Scott
@Citizen Alan: Even in “emergencies” things move slowly.
Remember when Hank Paulson said on September 19, 2008 that unless Congress instantly gave him $700+B the word economy was going to end?
It took until October 3, 2008 for a revised bill to make it through Congress and be enacted.
Politics is slow.
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Bupalos
I think any kind of blanket, forward looking pardons would be ineffective. You’d be undermining the political system that you’re counting on to protect those people. I think the reality is that the only defense against manifestly unjust prosecutions is the political system and individuals standing up to manifestly unjust prosecutions. We’re still strong enough to do that. This would be another kind of ineffective attempt to retreat to a place that doesn’t exist. Fleeing to your Canadian girlfriend’s house.
i feel like people are operating a bit under the “one weird trick mentality. It doesn’t matter how justified or unjustified it is or appears to be to any given person. Blanket preemptive pardons in a democracy is just kind of impossible by political logic.
The Audacity of Krope
@schrodingers_cat: Fuck off. Still failing to notice that the crowd of elected Ds who stood by Biden were the same ones critical of our Palestine policy.
One is not the other and your trying to force everything into an anti-Left basket is deplorable in a way fitting of Republicans.
VFX Lurker
@Layer8Problem:
I borrowed the audiobook from the library. Here’s what I wrote about it in March:
Elizabelle
@Miss Bianca: Good for you. Context is crucial.
We can see its absence in the pearlclutching by the press corpse types.
BlueGuitarist
@TBone:
sorry that I missed your posts about this!
haven’t been able to keep up here as much as I’d like….
Love all y’all
Parfigliano
@oldgold: Already there.
dnfree
@WereBear: I still don’t like equating “wears diapers” with being mentally incompetent. I know people who function normally in every other respect but wear diapers for legitimate medical reasons, whether after surgeries or after too many vaginal deliveries of babies. Diaper-wearing shouldn’t be shamed.
The Audacity of Krope
@dnfree: Sometimes it’s sudden. Or sometimes you just can’t move fast enough.
dnfree
@Kay:
That was a GOOD ANSWER.
Glory b
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: If a Pell grant isn’t available, get some trade training.
In Western PA, the Builder’s Guild, a consortium of trade unions, are giving stipends for those who join their pre apprentice training program. Anyone completing it is guaranteed entry into any of the unions’ apprentice ice programs, gets OSHA certification & several other goodies.
Honestly, if it was available back in the day, I might have done that instead of going to college.
There was an npr segment a while back calling union apprentice programs as “the new grad school” because so many young people with Bachelors degrees discovered they could make a lot more money as electricians, carpenters, boilermakers, etc, than working in a cubicle.
YY_Sima Qian
@Geminid: Thank you for the elaboration on current state of Turkish politics!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Glory b:
Back in the day when I completed undergrad and unemployment hovering around 10%, I would have done that in a heartbeat.
Geminid
@YY_Sima Qian: I first got interested in Turkiye in 2022 because of their dual role in the Ukraine war. After that I followed the elections in May of 2023, and that sucked me in. I find Turks to be a fascinating people, in ways more like Americans than Europeans seem to be.
Ed. I’m dealing with a small sample here; the Turks I have interacted with on social media tend to be secular Liberals dissatisfied with both Erdogan’s AK Party and the main opposition party, the CHP founded by Kemal Ataturk.
Right now Turkiye is in the news a lot because of their role as a regional power. Hakan Fidan, Erdogan’s trusted Foreign Minister, is a key player in the eastern Mediterranean region..
Some fun Fidan facts: while he was a Turkish Army non-commissioned officer posted at a NATO headquarters in Germany, Fidan eaned a degree in International Affairs from the University of Maryland Global Campus.
Fidan went on to earn a PhD and was teaching at an Istanbul Universty in 2005 when then-Prime Minister Erdogan tapped him to be his diplomatic trouble shooter.
Fidan later did his post-doctoral work in the hardnosed school of realpolitik as head of Turkiye’s intelligence agency M.I.T, and was the architect of Turkiye’s successful intervention in Libya earlier this decade. He’d been M.I.T. chief for eleven years when Erdogan elevated him to Foreign Secretary in June of 2023.
Fidan’s father is Kurdish, which is a likely reason he’s been Erdogan’s pointman in negotiations with the PKK, first in Europe and then directly with PKK head Abdullah Ocalan at the prison he’s been held in since 1999.
WTFGhost
That is why blanket pardons (IMHO – in my H-for-humble opinion) can’t work. While Meuser says “no one is going to go after Liz Cheney,” you have to prove that, oh, yes, they most emphatically will go after Liz Cheney.
And that means you can’t protect her – or Meuser can always say “it was so stupid to pre-emptively pardon her, because he never would have gone after her!” and deny the corruption.
If you argue with me “WTF, ghost, they’ll be investigated into bankruptcy anyway! That’s more than enough ruin that people will see that ‘not even pardons protected these people from financial ruin,'”, I (obviously) couldn’t argue against you.
Gloria DryGarden
@oldgold: rock and a hard place