CatBus

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Old news:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2017/07/19/john-mccain-blood-clot-james-comey-hearing/485937001/

New news:

Trump holds an official press conference today for the first time in over a year and a half.

Watch this press conference for about five minutes to see the connection… but it’s not for the faint of heart.

EDIT: Nevermind, he’s totally not gibbering uncontrollably on live TV. He is so stable and undeniably connected to reality that he should sit down and do that interview with Mueller right now. Right. Now.

Mea culpa is a tough thing for anyone to say, but you’d think it’d be easier if you were already pretty fluent in Latin.

moviefreakedmind said:

It wouldn’t even matter if Kavanaugh admitted to doing these things, Republicans would still support him. They wouldn’t care just like they didn’t care about Trump admitting to sexual assault.

Republican support in general, yes. But it’s 51 particular Republicans that matter. Among that number, we have one with a record of standing up to pressure (Murkowski), one with a record of antagonizing Trump verbally, if not with votes (Flake), and one with a record of being a principled maverick a few years back and recently selling out for no particular reason (Collins). If two of those three were on board, Kav would already be confirmed. There’s a slim chance Murkowski and Flake will hold out. There’s even a chance Flake has no intention of voting for Kav, but is dangling the possibility so that this process drags out and causes maximum political damage to Trump. But my money’s on eventual confirmation too, even with a positive paternity test on an underage victim from last year. Murkowski’s 50/50 though.

And even if he isn’t confirmed, he’ll become a cause célèbre among the sort of conservatives who use the term “Borked” to refer to decent, qualified justices who get screwed by politics, even though they were merely the DOJ Hatchet Man who helped obstruct justice by not having enough scruples to refuse Nixon’s orders for the Saturday Night Massacre like his immediate two predecessors. Well, okay, they tend to leave off that part of his resume.

Collipso said:

dooku became dookan because dooku would sound like ‘do cu’, which means ‘from the asshole’, so yeah.

It has a similar problem in English, but they didn’t change it for us 😕

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Warbler said:

Collipso said:

most countries do at this point in time.

in democracies there are ways to solve problems without resorting to an actual revolution.

The discussion was triggered by the mention of upcoming challenges to the Voting Rights Act under the new court. I’m not sure large swaths of this country qualified as functional democracies prior to the VRA, and I see no reason to believe they’d qualify as such after it’s (hypothetically) struck down.

That said, I think the (remaining bits of the) VRA will survive, unless Trump is able to also replace Roberts or a moderate at some point in the future. But if he does, it’s toast.

The thing is, I think Roberts can be counted on to protect the parts of the Voting Rights Act he didn’t already gut, so it’s not hopeless. Civil Rights Act could see trouble though.

IMO Round 1 is certain to overturn both Obergefell and Roe. Round 2 is going to be centered on overturning Griswold, striking down the Civil Rights Act, and the remainder of the Voting Rights Act – and we’ll be counting on Justice Roberts to hold the line there. Yeah, that Justice Roberts. A Republican-dominated court we’ve lived with for decades (might actually be over a century, not sure). This court would be different.

Make that two anecdotes, quite possible there’s some data behind that too somewhere. Guilting yourself into suppression of your own urges can lead to at least considering a life in the church, as a means of keeping a lid on it. IIRC Dan Savage was once a seminarian – had he stuck with it, English speakers may have still been cobbling together several words just to simply say santorum.

I just checked out the 2-disc version of this, and it’s already my new go-to version of FOTR:EE. Previously I’d used You_Too’s blanket color correction, but there were some shot-specific issues in that, and most notably, it turned Merry’s waistcoat orange. I’d seen other attempts that managed the shot-specific issues better, but they seemed pretty subjective/haphazard in their correction choices overall. This one seems to be a great balance of handling the varying correction needs through the film, while sticking closely to a consistent, objective reference. And Merry’s waistcoat is yellow again 😉

Great work!

Not to mention that quite a lot of abusers were themselves abused as children. They may very well have been abused in a church themselves, and while most of the abused may have felt repelled by or conflicted about the church, they may have felt even more drawn to it.

I’m sure some mugger somewhere has attempted the “they attacked me just because I ascribed to a controversial, offensive pro-mugging viewpoint” defense. I’m sure I could spare as much sympathy for them.

IMO there are three varieties of Nazis: people who have been directly involved in genocide, people who aspire to be directly involved in genocide, and people who aspire to facilitate/be accessories to genocide. I don’t have much issue with any of those categories getting punched. And if they can’t be described in those terms, they’re probably not a Nazi.

Warbler said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

I’m no fan of religion (well, except the FSM). However, is the abuse rate any higher in the catholic church than in other religions? Or even when compared to large secular organizations? I haven’t seen any such statistics, and I wonder if it is just an unfortunate aspect of humanity in general.

FSM?

Flying Spaghetti Monster. IIRC he has difficulty keeping his noodly appendage to himself.

Welcome back.

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moviefreakedmind said:

CatBus said:

moviefreakedmind said:

FiveThirtyEight puts a Democratic majority in the House at an 83% chance with a median of a 36-seat gain.

They don’t take Russian interference into account at all, otherwise I’d be pretty close to agreeing.

I don’t see how Russian interference could be so widespread as to send dozens of individual seats all over the country into Republican control.

It seems like a smaller job than 2016 to me. They’d just need to target specific close congressional races, which is exactly what they already did in 2016 (the less-reported Russia story is it wasn’t just Trump they assisted, but dozens of downballot Republican Congressional candidates as well). So they just repeat 2016 without having to worry about the President this time. The overall national vote tally could be more-or-less unchanged, most districts could swing hard toward the Democrats, but close races could simply defy the national average and not swing enough. And the Russians have a freer hand to do things this time, with no federal coordination of cybersecurity anymore, more well-positioned Russian assets in government this time, etc. And maybe they don’t just play with Facebook and stealing e-mails anymore, but start corrupting voter databases to make voters in key districts ineligible (why bother changing votes when you can just make specific votes not count, right Mr. Kobach?). No need to assume they’d use the same tactics twice, although I think it’s pretty safe to assume they’d have the same objective.

Will any of this happen? Who knows? I’m saying it’s a risk that’s plausible enough to consider and take into account for predictions, since it already happened once before and the conditions are actually more favorable for them this time around. It’s also quite plausible that 2016 was a one-off and that the general public now has the benefit of knowing well in advance that the Russians plan to attempt to swing the election in favor of the Republicans (although, to be frank, everyone with an ounce of sense knew that going into 2016 as well) – it’s one of our “known unknowns” in Rumsfeld-speak.

moviefreakedmind said:

FiveThirtyEight puts a Democratic majority in the House at an 83% chance with a median of a 36-seat gain.

They don’t take Russian interference into account at all, otherwise I’d be pretty close to agreeing.

moviefreakedmind said:

I doubt that Democrats will fail to take a majority in the House. They won’t take the Senate, though.

Most analysts put the threshold at 8-9% (8-9% Democratic victory means coin flip for House control, due to gerrymandering). Most analysts do not even attempt to account for Russian interference. I added 3% for that, based on 2016, but that’s a big wildcard. It may be too much, it may not be enough. But if Democrats only win by 7%, everyone agrees they’re not taking the House.

The fact that I have Democrats only losing one seat in the Senate means I think they’re going to have a strong year. Gaining three though? Yeesh.

Incidentally, 7% was the margin Republicans won by in the “Republican Revolution” that swept them to power in 94. It just shows the power of the gerrymander: having a message that resonates with 7% more voters than the other party could mean either an unquestionable game-changing mandate, or narrow loss, depending on which party you belong to.

Just following up on some predictions from March, because circumstances change…

CatBus said:

If I were a betting man, I’d say Mueller’s investigation, before it’s shut down, will still lead to more evidence of arguably legal/arguably illegal collusion, but few if any charges filed on these issues. This in itself will be a fairly huge scandal for some and not for others. He will also file charges (and in fact, he already has) of obstruction/lying to investigators/witness tampering/destruction of evidence which are not about the collusion itself, but about the coverup. Again, I predict this will be a fairly huge scandal for some and not for others. Lastly, I predict a raft of charges of money laundering/tax fraud/bribery/corruption/RICO-type things (such as those charges already filed against Manafort), again not really about the collusion itself, but about illegal things uncovered during the course of the investigation.

Papadopoulos: Pleaded guilty to making false statements.
Patten: Pleaded guilty to failure to register as a foreign agent.
Manafort: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the US, various financial crimes including money laundering, and witness tampering.
Cohen: Pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations.
van der Zwaan: Pleaded guilty to making false statements.
Gates: Pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the US and making false statements.
Pinedo: Pleaded guilty to identity fraud.
Flynn: Pleaded guilty to making false statements.

At the end you’ll have a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion: the Trump campaign will be exposed to have colluded with Russian intelligence services in an arguably illegal manner, many staffers and high ranking officials will be charged with a broad range of crimes, from obstruction to money laundering. And Trump supporters will still say that collusion is not a crime and this was all a witch hunt by the liberal Comey/Mueller/Rosenstein cabal, a fishing expedition that merely netted a few dozen high-ranking or cabinet-level bad apples who were just low-level volunteers after all.

So far so good. No real corruption or RICO stuff yet, and the cabinet hasn’t quite been breached, but the show’s far from over and that all seems more likely than before IMO. Rudy’s even already telegraphed Team Trump’s new approach to formerly-decent-and-honest-witch-hunt-victim Manafort with his blatant Tweet revision: “the President did nothing wrong and Paul Manafort will tell the truth”, the party line changing 180 degrees in full public view like fine Soviet clockwork.

And, most importantly, I’m still predicting the Republicans will hold the House and Senate in 2018 (although I’m predicting Democrats will win a landslide in terms of votes cast), and that this is when the Mueller investigation will definitely be shut down if it hasn’t been already. So regardless of charges filed, impeachment will never be considered for any officials at any level, and I think Trump will have a strong chance of re-election in 2020. The House and Senate may, however, decide to launch an investigation into Mueller.

Haven’t changed my mind here either, but this is still prediction-land. I currently have Democrats nationally winning by a spectacular 11 point mega-landslide margin, but still narrowly failing to gain enough seats to take control of the House, and losing a seat in the Senate. When the Democratic advantage hits 12, things get interesting on both fronts, and that’s a possibility I wasn’t considering even remotely plausible back in March.

And here I thought Manafort wouldn’t even be offered a cooperation agreement because he was a big enough fish to be worth all the effort of the investigation to begin with (Trump’s insistence that his campaign manager was a low-level volunteer who mostly just got coffee notwithstanding). Turns out, not so much. There are bigger fish in Mueller’s sights after all. And there aren’t many fish bigger than Manafort who aren’t family.

What’s Manfort’s value in a cooperation deal? Aside from the obvious (Trump, Russian Oligarchs, Roger Stone, Russian Intelligence, GOP platform changes and other campaign work including other candidates), there’s this: aside from a few missteps around Flynn, Pence has done a pretty good job keeping an arm’s length between himself and the crime syndicate he works with, at least in public. His only other widely-known direct link, aside from Flynn, is Manafort.

Certain serious crimes cannot be prosecuted at all without a minimum of two witnesses.

Not sure. I think that churches and schools are historically problematic because of the high chance of unobserved time with an adult and a child, which make them attractive occupations for predators. It goes without saying that most abuse happens within families, where this is unavoidable. Both churches and schools are improving in this respect (the CCTV in my kid’s daycare was both impressive and vaguely Orwellian, but I know why it was there), but very slowly.

Part of the complication of this is the long reporting times, so the church that allowed this abuse may have implemented decades of reforms since. Not enough, certainly, but at the very least, the leadership has been replaced multiple times since then. Unfortunately, I think this is scandal is being abused by those who seek to reverse the current Pope’s (mild, minimal) overtures to the LGBT community, because there’s a long and ugly history of attacking the LGBT community using child abuse as an excuse (much as lynching was often given the moral cover of avenging alleged sexual assault).

ChainsawAsh said:

Ah, okay, that makes much more sense!

My hovercraft is full of eels.