booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

Posts

2

Comments

487

Joined

2 yr. ago

they can't use the threat of a primary against her

She lost the 2010 primary during the height of the Tea Party movement, ran a campaign to have people vote for her as a write in candidate, and won as a write in.

In the end, the problem is that her vote doesn't actually matter this cycle, at least not by itself. In order to flex any muscle she'd need to actually persuade some colleagues to stand up to Trump. At this point she's more of a Republican Fetterman than a Republican Sinema/Manchin.

Ha I should be clear, in my normal day to day responsibilities I mainly sue over money, which tends not to involve political considerations at all. That being said, the arbitrary way that the Trump admin has canceled contracts, yanked grants, canceled things that others have had to rush in and fill the vacuum on (including spending their own money), I might very well end up with a politically charged case at some point.

And maybe there's something to be said to committing some time or effort or money to public interest and public impact litigation for the types of cases not typically in my wheelhouse.

I keep pushing back on this sentiment because I think it's wrong.

Even if it is inevitable that he will win in court, it's still worth fighting every step of the way:

• It ties up their resources, including chewing up loyalists who burn out trying to defend the indefensible. It's no coincidence that the second Trump term is filled with people who are simply less competent at their jobs, compared to the people in the first Trump term.
• It forces them to actually make statements and stake out positions about what they're doing. No amount of journalism or activism could've gotten the Trump administration to admit that they got it wrong by deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia, because that was the work of opposing lawyers and a tough judge. And even though they fired the lawyer who first conceded that point, Trump's own Solicitor General admitted it, too, to the Supreme Court.
• If the administration tears down the rule of law, that will have unintended consequences that harm them as well. You know how Trump blinked when it became clear that his ill-conceived tariffs were going to hurt his friends, and destroy his own popularity among the people whose approval he most craves? That dynamic will play out multiple times as he undermines the rule of law.
• Practically speaking, his contempt for the rule of law undermines his popularity and support from many of those he actually draws power from. He wants the financial world, the business world, the press, the film/art/literature/culture world, religious institutions, and the sports world to admire him and support him. Each time he breaks something, he has to deal with the backlash among his own supporters.

I'm not going to comply in advance. I'm fighting every step of the way, because even if he beats me every time, his unforced errors as he does so will still jeopardize his power.

Exactly. I'm gonna do the lawful good thing on my end, and work my hardest to protect the actual institutions that still have power to provide some checks on the government currently in the hands of a wannabe dictator.

Authoritarianism only stays strong when people don't do the most basic of things to oppose it.

Yeah, I subscribe to the Green Lantern/Tinkerbell theory of authoritarianism: the dictator only has power as long as people believe it. So skepticism of claims of power become self fulfilling, and belief in dictator power also becomes self fulfilling.

So don't comply in advance. Make them work for every inch, even on things that seem inevitable. Every delay you cause to their agenda buys someone else a reprieve.

In reality, it will take all of us doing different things to resist, and hopefully, that collective effort over time will be enough. It will still suck in the meantime.

Exactly this.

I'm a licensed attorney and I sue the government from time to time. I still think I can do that.

I've always known that the courts have limited power to reign in the President, especially in the modern era where American political parties have strengthened to the point where there's very little internal party resistance to the President's agenda (contrast to earlier eras when a Speaker of the House might have tanked the same-party President's agenda).

But the point of suing and getting the court orders is still important for the "lawful good" types to lay as much groundwork as possible for us to try our best to preserve the rule of law. If it gets frayed or bent in places, we still fight within that framework the best we can, knowing full well that in a vacuum where the law no longer constrains the powerful, that situation legitimizes any movement to do things in a "chaotic good" kind of way, from nonviolent civil disobedience to destructive acts to outright violence.

Those of us who are lawyers (and judges and even elected politicians) have our lane, at least for now, to try our best to maintain accountability within the law. If the law can't keep up, then we should still be satisfied that we tried our best to keep it within that lawful framework, because losing on that front still has the silver lining of increasing the popular will and support for extra-legal options. If they sidestep the restrictions of the law, then they'll find themselves outside the protections of the law. And maybe they have some confidence in their odds in a "might makes right" situation, but their current power structures still depend heavily on the law (even basic things like whether a dollar is legal tender or whether a piece of paper says you own something valuable).

No, even if tuition and books are free, financial aid still needs to help full time students have food to eat and have a place to live and ordinary day to day expenses. In many places, the aid on room and board is much more money than aid on tuition and fees.

And community colleges tend not to have their own dorms or anything like that, so it comes in the form of a monthly payment that helps the student pay their rent. That's an incentive for fraud.

They got a lawful order from a court to turn around flights and just didn't. The order doesn't need to be at the end of an appeal to the Supreme Court before it has effect.

I know. That was on a collision course for a constitutional crisis then, and then the Supreme Court bailed out Trump by saying the order was invalid, right before the judge was going to hold contempt hearings.

Now we're gonna see possible contempt hearings on disobeying an order that was affirmed by the Supreme Court.

No, this is probably the first one.

The previous one where they disobeyed a court order (turning around planes to El Salvador, stopping new planes from taking off) they successfully appealed that court order to where the Supreme Court declared that order void.

This one (facilitate the return of a wrongfully deported man) is the first one where they've just outright refused, and are pretending they can't comply.

This is a big deal, and it's unprecedented, even for Trump. This is the red line, and we're going to see a full blown constitutional crisis this week if it doesn't get resolved.

Getting close. Over the weekend the Trump admin might have crossed the line in Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. They might try to weasel out of the Supreme Court's order by saying they're following it the best they can, but Trump is also the type of person who seems incapable of that nuance, and might basically force that showdown with the Supreme Court.

Yeah, investing in a company is investing in the whole company and all of its projects. Lies about your company are only fraud when the lies rise to the level of making a material difference to how a typical investor would value that company. If the lies are about a very minor percentage of revenue or profit, then it's not gonna rise to the level of securities fraud.

You serious? Your own examples aren't even isolated to Boomers. Beanie babies was primarily a Millennial and Gen X phenomenon (which made sense because it was a toy trend amplified through the rise of the internet as mainstream, and took off among those early adopters of dial-up), and was one of many consumerist toy trends of the 80's and 90's, like pogs or Cabbage Patch Kids or Magic: The Gathering cards.

Satanic panic was driven as much by Silent Generation as it was the boomers, and is unfortunately part of a long line of religious othering that traces back to the dawn of human history. Mike Warnke's The Satan Seller hit bestseller lists in 1972, and Silent Generation authors like Lauren Stratford and Lawrence Pazder ran away with their made up stories (and made a killing on book sales). By the time that panic hit its peak in the early 80's, most parents of young children were boomers, but the collective messaging was still driven by older people in publishing and news.

Meanwhile, the basic idea of fads or trends are universal. The people mimicking TikTok dances or YouTube pranks transcend any one generation. More seriously, people are falling for conspiracy theories en masse, of all generations. Is anti-vax, or anti-seed-oil, or 9/11 truthers, or QAnon believers confined to a specific generation? This shit is everywhere, and believing that these things will die off with the boomers is going to result in a lot of surprise and disappointment that these things will always be with us.

That's not unique to any one generation. Herd behavior is, like, part of the human condition.

Your link is wholesale prices of white non-organic caged eggs, updated daily. It also excludes the eggs sold on long term contracts.

The AP article takes the CPI report of the consumer price of all eggs (white vs brown, organic vs non organic, caged versus cage free versus free range) in a weighted average of how much is sold, and averages over the entire month. Plus retailers simply can't update prices daily, and prefer to price things at numbers that end in 9.

The bird flu issues seemed to affect caged non-organic producers harder, so that those prices moved a lot more than the free range organic stuff. That led to some unexpected flips of which was more expensive, as I'd seen some traditional eggs going for $8.99 (up from around $3 before) while the free range organic stuff was only slightly up to $7.99 (up from about $5 before), literally in the same store on the same shelves.

Taken all together, you'd expect the monthly CPI price of an average of all types of eggs to be much less volatile than the daily wholesale spot price of the cheapest type of grade A whole fresh eggs.

Anecdotally I've already seen egg prices drop this month. Lots more availability of the sub-$5 options when I was in the store earlier this week. I'd expect next month's CPI report, about the current month, to reflect a drop in retail egg prices.

I have a watered down version of this, but I'm a lawyer so it's very very valuable. If I get a question I might not know the answer to, if I've read it somewhere I usually know roughly where to go back to get it. And since lawyers mostly look things up instead of trying to memorize everything, a powerful "indexing" memory is valuable in the profession. At least in my practice.

The Senate has already passed a bill that limits the President's power to set tariff rates on Canada. The House probably won't take that up.

Right now, there's also a Senate Bill with 7 GOP senators signed on that would limit the President's power to unilaterally set tariffs (requires 48 hours notice to Congress, can't last more than 60 days without Congressional approval, gives Congress fast track procedures for voting down new tariffs). There are some serious constitutional flaws in it (most notably the legislative non-aggrandizement doctrine, but also an issue with tying to sidestep the bicameralism and presentment requirement), though, and I'm not sure it would hit the point where it could overcome a presidential veto.

So right now it's not clear whether this GOP opposition would actually build into real legislation that could actually have an effect, or whether this is all showmanship trying to influence Trump himself to roll this back.

1987: Black Monday

That one didn't really matter that much to regular Americans. Less than a third of Americans owned stock back then, and that crash didn't have an obvious cause from actual economic fundamentals. And the Fed managed to contain the liquidity crisis, as your linked Wikipedia page describes, so that the broader economy was largely unaffected.

Recessions matter. Stock market crashes only matter when they are caused by, or are the cause of, an actual recession in the real world.

Sure, I get if the "good side" were to be as cavalier with the law as trump is, the entire thing falls apart even faster. But I have no doubt in my mind the "rule of law" in the USA is over.

I'm not willing to make that call, yet. It's on life support, with the doctor in charge coyly hinting at whether he's going to finish it off himself, but it hasn't happened yet.

And in this case, the Supreme Court bailed out the President. They went ahead and said all 9 justices disagree on whether the courts have the power to review this dispute (rejecting the most extreme and most unaccountable theory of executive power), but said that the proper forum is in Texas, not in DC. So this DC judge who was weighing contempt was stripped of jurisdiction to do so.

That's not a constitutional crisis, which is what I'm very concerned about being that uncrossable line, but it is still separately a bad result.

These are nuanced distinctions, and I don't want to make it seem like I'm only watching out for a constitutional crisis and ignoring all the other ways that Trump is hurting the rule of law, but I think that violating court orders is a special kind of harm that needs to be viewed as its own especially dangerous thing.

No. The 7% breaker went off 4 separate times in March 2020, though.

It's a rule hard baked into the NYSE that trading is paused for at least 15 minutes if it drops 7% in a single day. It is paused again for at least 15 minutes if it drops 13%, and then trading is ended for the day if it drops 20%.