Same Party, Different House
https://fanlax.com/forum/
First off - California is quite possibly the most beautiful place on the planet, pick your pleasure (beach, desert, mountains, PNW, vineyards, pebble beach,...) so they have that going for them.youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:27 pm Afan - shouldnt they have an immense tax revenue stream with all those people. Hell, we are able to off load 65 Billion in less than year to Ukraine and not bat an eye, why is CA run so bad?
...maybe CA's geographic size & climate has something to do with it, rather than quality of governance.a fan wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:25 pmYep! You're not wrong. Cost of living from all the decades of folks moving there coupled with the explosion of Silicon Valley. They're facing some serious problems, as are so many States that have had their cost of living explode.old salt wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:16 pmhttps://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/ ... n-decline/
...the primary driver of the state’s population loss over the past couple years has been the result of California residents moving to other states.
Colorado is one of them.
Point is......obviously the desire to live there outweighs living in any other State. That's why they have the highest population...
You'll get no argument from me here, but this does pull out a leg on your definition of "nationalism", does it not?
It's why I say the far left and the far right are the exact same thing....
Not true. These are people who want the government to step in and stop culture from happening. They're asking for MORE government, not less. Restrict what teachers can say and teach. Restrict things like whether gays can marry or have rights. Did you see Pete's fake solution to gun violence? He wanted more laws and draconian enforcement in cities (where he doesn't live, naturally), while leaving where he is untouched. As if you can't get drugs and illegal guns everywhere in the US.
We're pretty lucky where we are in Colorado, where the D's and R's are pretty reasonable, and actually work together to find a middle way.HooDat wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:23 pm My only added point is that because politicians like writing laws, and regulators like writing regulations, and big corporations like manipulating both to suit their needs; perhaps there are some places where our laws and government don't serve the "people"....
Sure. But then you have to apply this idea to ALL States, instead of just California.
Great question. Want the answer?youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:27 pm Afan - shouldnt they have an immense tax revenue stream with all those people. Hell, we are able to off load 65 Billion in less than year to Ukraine and not bat an eye, why is CA run so bad?
Sorry, not buying it in its entirety. Where is the line item that CA is sending the tax revenue to the feds to be re-distributed?https://lifeguardwealth.com/learn/where ... -the-factsa fan wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:47 pmGreat question. Want the answer?youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:27 pm Afan - shouldnt they have an immense tax revenue stream with all those people. Hell, we are able to off load 65 Billion in less than year to Ukraine and not bat an eye, why is CA run so bad?
Because they're sending all the money to DC, where they ship it off to flyover America, my man! Can say the same thing about Texas if that helps.
Simple exercise: take your Federal income taxes and your State income taxes. The Fed number is MUCH higher, yes?
Picture inverting those numbers, where the Republican FINALLY do what they claim, and move the bulk of the power to the States.
How do you think California would fare in this system?
https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states ... overnment/youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 6:05 pmSorry, not buying it in its entirety. Where is the line item that CA is sending the tax revenue to the feds to be re-distributed?https://lifeguardwealth.com/learn/where ... -the-factsa fan wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:47 pmGreat question. Want the answer?youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:27 pm Afan - shouldnt they have an immense tax revenue stream with all those people. Hell, we are able to off load 65 Billion in less than year to Ukraine and not bat an eye, why is CA run so bad?
Because they're sending all the money to DC, where they ship it off to flyover America, my man! Can say the same thing about Texas if that helps.
Simple exercise: take your Federal income taxes and your State income taxes. The Fed number is MUCH higher, yes?
Picture inverting those numbers, where the Republican FINALLY do what they claim, and move the bulk of the power to the States.
How do you think California would fare in this system?
ClueMe too even when I struggle to fully understand academic speak-words do have value and it’s a vast universe within our language with each having its own value and signaling effect.HooDat wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:12 pmBoy do I love me some academia speak!Farfromgeneva wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 4:37 pm https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/en ... ion-system
Abstract:
Based on a dependent and competing failure modes model for the system degradation, we develop a maintenance cost model to assess and optimize a preventive maintenance policy involving inspection of the system, minimal repair (for non-maintainable failure mode), imperfect maintenance (for maintainable failure mode) and perfect replacement (for the whole system). In particular, we measure the time-dependent efficiency of the preventive imperfect maintenance actions through “improvement factors” which model explicitly the effect of preventive maintenance as the reduction of the failure rate of the maintainable failure mode. An optimization procedure to find the optimal tuning of the maintenance policy whose behavior is illustrated through numerical experiments.
Let's see if I have retained any of my "foreign language skills"...
So are they measuring for the best maintenance model: one that will minimizes the cost of maintenance, but will eventually lead to catastrophic failure; one that will allow for some failures but ones that are not catastrophic; and one just runs the thing and then replaces it wholesale before it stops working?
See, I am a fan of the second choice, given my view that perfection is unattainable. My problem is I feel like we are listening to our leaders argue over 1 or 3. Even worse, depending on the specific topic, I am not sure which side is arguing for which model...
Having moved south a bit over a decade ago from NYC and DC prior there’s a lot of cats down here, and Florida, who think it was their skill that made their rewards. Especially in “wealth management” (sales/asset aggregation) and RE/CRE - where you make your money going in on a basis not on adding value, 85-90% of the time.a fan wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:44 pmSure. But then you have to apply this idea to ALL States, instead of just California.
And looking at the scoreboard---they have 20 million more people than the next most populated State. Can't be all bad, no?
Personally? I'd NEVER start a business there. Remember...I'm a moderate. I prefer the happy medium moderate State of Colorado.
But then, I'd NEVER start a business in the South, where good ol' boy politics makes it as difficult as possible to open shop if you're an "outsider".
That attitude is what screwed us in Ann Arbor. Thanks, but no thanks.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/ ... january-6/
The Oath Keepers Verdicts Correct the Record on January 6
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, November 30, 2022
The jury concludes that there was a spontaneous riot at the Capitol, rather than an elaborate plot to make war on the United States.
It wasn’t an elaborate, multilayered plot. It wasn’t democracy hanging by a thread. It was a mob run amok, a riot. It was dangerous for those on the scene, and it was notorious because it happened at the Capitol instead of, say, on the streets of Minneapolis. But it was a spontaneous, chaotic, nearly pointless tantrum that had no chance of achieving even the nebulous, short-term aim of preventing Congress from counting state-certified electoral votes, much less of overthrowing America’s constitutional order.
Oh, and to hear prosecutors tell the story of January 6, Donald Trump had precious little to do with the whole thing.
These are the only logical conclusions to draw from the verdicts returned Tuesday afternoon by a jury in deep blue Washington, D.C. The panel acquitted three of the five Oath Keeper defendants whom the Justice Department overheatedly charged with seditious conspiracy — the crime of agreeing to levy war against the United States, or to forcibly oppose its authority. The jury did return seditious-conspiracy convictions against the Oath Keepers’ national leader, Stewart Rhodes, and his confidant, Kelly Meggs, who headed up the loose-knit organization’s Florida chapter. Yet jurors acquitted Rhodes on a charge of conspiracy to disrupt the January 6 joint session of Congress — the objective that, according to prosecutors, drove the seditious conspiracy.
On the other hand, all five defendants — Rhodes and Meggs, along with Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, and Thomas Caldwell — were convicted of what should have been the main charge in the case: the actual obstruction of a congressional proceeding. Like the superfluous seditious-conspiracy charges, obstruction carries a potential penalty of 20 years’ imprisonment; by itself, it would have provided more-than-adequate punishment for the defendants’ actions. Unlike conspiracy, actual obstruction need not entail a plan, much less a serpentine scheme to destroy our republic. Again, it was a better fit for what happened at the Capitol on January 6, which was chaos.
The verdicts seem irrational, but that is because the prosecution was irrational. To pull off even the nominal victory of nailing Rhodes on seditious conspiracy, the Justice Department had to present the case as if former President Trump was, at most, a bit player. In its way, this was as skewed a portrayal as that presented by the hyper-political, Trump-obsessed House January 6 committee, which would have you believe the former president directly and intentionally ordered his militant loyalists to attack the seat of government.
To the contrary (as we’ve previously detailed), the prosecutors concluded that Trump was not a member of the conspiracy and played no criminally culpable role in the violence. They depicted Trump as a mere pretext for the riot, rather than its orchestrator. In this telling, his election defeat and subsequent “stolen election” hogwash were the convenient excuse exploited by the Oath Keepers to rationalize an anti-government attack they’d begun contemplating long before the 2020 presidential campaign.
And in the end, the jury didn’t even buy that story. Rhodes never even entered the Capitol. A former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School grad, he is a crank who attended “stop the steal” rallies and pleaded in letters to Trump for the then-president to invoke the Insurrection Act in the delusional hope that his motley group could then be called into service as a militia (the letters were apparently ignored). Though Rhodes got the headlines, his friend Meggs appears to have been more culpable: Besides the seditious-conspiracy conviction, Meggs was also found guilty of conspiring to disrupt the congressional proceeding — an odd result given that, as a matter of law, it takes at least two people to conspire, but only he was convicted of that latter charge. Like Rhodes, the 68-year-old Caldwell — a U.S. Navy veteran who denied membership in the Oath Keepers and aptly described himself as a “bit of a goof” in trial testimony — also never made it to the Capitol. Harrelson and Watkins did storm the building with other rioters; like Caldwell, though, they were found not guilty of seditious conspiracy because the jury was convinced by their lawyers’ contention that the riot was an ad hoc eruption, rather than the result of a plot.
Tellingly, despite the weakness of their case, prosecutors did not call as witnesses the three Oath Keepers they’d squeezed into pleading guilty to seditious conspiracy. The Justice Department does not leave cooperating witnesses on the sidelines if it assesses that they will help prosecutors’ case. Plainly, although the government’s conspiracy proof was badly in need of shoring up, the DOJ decided that the defendants who’d sought leniency by pleading to conspiracy would not be able to explain what they and their supposed collaborators had done to commit conspiracy.
It is also worth observing that the jury in the case did not hesitate to convict the defendants of those charges for which the government had sufficient evidence. Three of the defendants were found guilty of interfering with police as they tried to respond to a civil disturbance. All five were convicted of tampering with official documents and proceedings. The jury, however, rejected the contention that a right-wing militia had waged war against the government, because the government couldn’t prove it.
As detailed before, I prosecuted the last successful seditious-conspiracy case brought by the Justice Department, decades before the Capitol riot cases. That was the 1995 trial of jihadists who bombed the World Trade Center and were thwarted while mixing explosives as they plotted to blow up other New York City landmarks. My team was not any more skilled than the able prosecutors in the Oath Keepers case. We were just more realistic about our evidence, and we were not under any political pressure to make something that was plenty bad enough seem even worse. It is the exceedingly rare trial that hinges on the skill of the lawyers; criminal cases come down to evidence.
My case involved unambiguous enemies of the U.S. who not only expressly declared themselves to be at war with our country, but trained and recruited for forcible attacks on it and then carried them out over the course of what turned out to be years. It was textbook seditious conspiracy. By contrast, in the 160 year-history of the seditious-conspiracy statute, we’ve never had a case in which the defendants could plausibly argue that, far from opposing the United States, they were trying to save it at the behest of the government’s top official, the president. That is why the Justice Department had to downplay Trump’s role in the riot to a nigh-parodic extent. When you attempt to try a case based on an unrealistic portrayal of what happened, you’re apt to get disappointing results.
What happened on January 6 was reprehensible. It is a blight on the history of the United States, whose proud boast is our tradition of peacefully transferring power from one administration to the next. Riots are terrible, but a riot is not a war. The Capitol uprising was a riot. It was over in a few hours, Congress reconvened in the Capitol to count the votes, and President Biden was confirmed as the winner, as it was inevitable he would be.
Of course, that’s not the story you’ll hear. The Justice Department’s press release does not mention the word acquittal. It reads as if prosecutors pitched a shutout. Echoing that storyline, the media-Democrat complex would have you believe that prosecutors won sweeping seditious-conspiracy convictions against militants who plotted to keep Donald Trump in power. You’d never know that the DOJ mostly lost on the main charge, that the verdicts overall were a mixed bag, and that Donald Trump — whose name doesn’t appear anywhere in the DOJ’s press release — was not even alleged to be criminally culpable.
History is written by the victors. That doesn’t make it accurate.
youthathletics wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 6:05 pm Sorry, not buying it in its entirety. Where is the line item that CA is sending the tax revenue to the feds to be re-distributed?
We're gonna do this AGAIN? Media +low self esteem and troubles at home.ggait wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 7:40 pm I agree that is all complete bull shirt.
And it will age terribly. There’s a whole series of 1/6 sedition trials coming up. And the cases are stronger than this one.
There will be a whole bunch of these guys who will be spending 10+ years in prison.
Crazy that the main oath keeper dude is a Yale Law School grad.
For a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the govt ?There will be a whole bunch of these guys who will be spending 10+ years in prison.
Actually, a bunch of issues are actually 60:40, yet the political power divide isn't.HooDat wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 4:57 pmmaybe I could use a better word than wedge. Do you not find it strange that when taken in their sum, all the "issues" that divide us into Dem or GOP always seem to pan out at 49.9% to 50.1% - even if it means the parties have to flat out switch sides on a particular issue to get us there?Typical Lax Dad wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 4:51 pm PS, when everything is a wedge, nothing is….that’s what I believe.
Does it?
Sedition tally so far is two oath keepers and one proud boy. More to come.
That’s CRT talk….you sound “woke”. Just ask the Injuns.old salt wrote: ↑Wed Nov 30, 2022 7:11 pm I agree with this.https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/ ... january-6/
The Oath Keepers Verdicts Correct the Record on January 6
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, November 30, 2022
The jury concludes that there was a spontaneous riot at the Capitol, rather than an elaborate plot to make war on the United States.
It wasn’t an elaborate, multilayered plot. It wasn’t democracy hanging by a thread. It was a mob run amok, a riot. It was dangerous for those on the scene, and it was notorious because it happened at the Capitol instead of, say, on the streets of Minneapolis. But it was a spontaneous, chaotic, nearly pointless tantrum that had no chance of achieving even the nebulous, short-term aim of preventing Congress from counting state-certified electoral votes, much less of overthrowing America’s constitutional order.
Oh, and to hear prosecutors tell the story of January 6, Donald Trump had precious little to do with the whole thing.
These are the only logical conclusions to draw from the verdicts returned Tuesday afternoon by a jury in deep blue Washington, D.C. The panel acquitted three of the five Oath Keeper defendants whom the Justice Department overheatedly charged with seditious conspiracy — the crime of agreeing to levy war against the United States, or to forcibly oppose its authority. The jury did return seditious-conspiracy convictions against the Oath Keepers’ national leader, Stewart Rhodes, and his confidant, Kelly Meggs, who headed up the loose-knit organization’s Florida chapter. Yet jurors acquitted Rhodes on a charge of conspiracy to disrupt the January 6 joint session of Congress — the objective that, according to prosecutors, drove the seditious conspiracy.
On the other hand, all five defendants — Rhodes and Meggs, along with Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, and Thomas Caldwell — were convicted of what should have been the main charge in the case: the actual obstruction of a congressional proceeding. Like the superfluous seditious-conspiracy charges, obstruction carries a potential penalty of 20 years’ imprisonment; by itself, it would have provided more-than-adequate punishment for the defendants’ actions. Unlike conspiracy, actual obstruction need not entail a plan, much less a serpentine scheme to destroy our republic. Again, it was a better fit for what happened at the Capitol on January 6, which was chaos.
The verdicts seem irrational, but that is because the prosecution was irrational. To pull off even the nominal victory of nailing Rhodes on seditious conspiracy, the Justice Department had to present the case as if former President Trump was, at most, a bit player. In its way, this was as skewed a portrayal as that presented by the hyper-political, Trump-obsessed House January 6 committee, which would have you believe the former president directly and intentionally ordered his militant loyalists to attack the seat of government.
To the contrary (as we’ve previously detailed), the prosecutors concluded that Trump was not a member of the conspiracy and played no criminally culpable role in the violence. They depicted Trump as a mere pretext for the riot, rather than its orchestrator. In this telling, his election defeat and subsequent “stolen election” hogwash were the convenient excuse exploited by the Oath Keepers to rationalize an anti-government attack they’d begun contemplating long before the 2020 presidential campaign.
And in the end, the jury didn’t even buy that story. Rhodes never even entered the Capitol. A former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School grad, he is a crank who attended “stop the steal” rallies and pleaded in letters to Trump for the then-president to invoke the Insurrection Act in the delusional hope that his motley group could then be called into service as a militia (the letters were apparently ignored). Though Rhodes got the headlines, his friend Meggs appears to have been more culpable: Besides the seditious-conspiracy conviction, Meggs was also found guilty of conspiring to disrupt the congressional proceeding — an odd result given that, as a matter of law, it takes at least two people to conspire, but only he was convicted of that latter charge. Like Rhodes, the 68-year-old Caldwell — a U.S. Navy veteran who denied membership in the Oath Keepers and aptly described himself as a “bit of a goof” in trial testimony — also never made it to the Capitol. Harrelson and Watkins did storm the building with other rioters; like Caldwell, though, they were found not guilty of seditious conspiracy because the jury was convinced by their lawyers’ contention that the riot was an ad hoc eruption, rather than the result of a plot.
Tellingly, despite the weakness of their case, prosecutors did not call as witnesses the three Oath Keepers they’d squeezed into pleading guilty to seditious conspiracy. The Justice Department does not leave cooperating witnesses on the sidelines if it assesses that they will help prosecutors’ case. Plainly, although the government’s conspiracy proof was badly in need of shoring up, the DOJ decided that the defendants who’d sought leniency by pleading to conspiracy would not be able to explain what they and their supposed collaborators had done to commit conspiracy.
It is also worth observing that the jury in the case did not hesitate to convict the defendants of those charges for which the government had sufficient evidence. Three of the defendants were found guilty of interfering with police as they tried to respond to a civil disturbance. All five were convicted of tampering with official documents and proceedings. The jury, however, rejected the contention that a right-wing militia had waged war against the government, because the government couldn’t prove it.
As detailed before, I prosecuted the last successful seditious-conspiracy case brought by the Justice Department, decades before the Capitol riot cases. That was the 1995 trial of jihadists who bombed the World Trade Center and were thwarted while mixing explosives as they plotted to blow up other New York City landmarks. My team was not any more skilled than the able prosecutors in the Oath Keepers case. We were just more realistic about our evidence, and we were not under any political pressure to make something that was plenty bad enough seem even worse. It is the exceedingly rare trial that hinges on the skill of the lawyers; criminal cases come down to evidence.
My case involved unambiguous enemies of the U.S. who not only expressly declared themselves to be at war with our country, but trained and recruited for forcible attacks on it and then carried them out over the course of what turned out to be years. It was textbook seditious conspiracy. By contrast, in the 160 year-history of the seditious-conspiracy statute, we’ve never had a case in which the defendants could plausibly argue that, far from opposing the United States, they were trying to save it at the behest of the government’s top official, the president. That is why the Justice Department had to downplay Trump’s role in the riot to a nigh-parodic extent. When you attempt to try a case based on an unrealistic portrayal of what happened, you’re apt to get disappointing results.
What happened on January 6 was reprehensible. It is a blight on the history of the United States, whose proud boast is our tradition of peacefully transferring power from one administration to the next. Riots are terrible, but a riot is not a war. The Capitol uprising was a riot. It was over in a few hours, Congress reconvened in the Capitol to count the votes, and President Biden was confirmed as the winner, as it was inevitable he would be.
Of course, that’s not the story you’ll hear. The Justice Department’s press release does not mention the word acquittal. It reads as if prosecutors pitched a shutout. Echoing that storyline, the media-Democrat complex would have you believe that prosecutors won sweeping seditious-conspiracy convictions against militants who plotted to keep Donald Trump in power. You’d never know that the DOJ mostly lost on the main charge, that the verdicts overall were a mixed bag, and that Donald Trump — whose name doesn’t appear anywhere in the DOJ’s press release — was not even alleged to be criminally culpable.
History is written by the victors. That doesn’t make it accurate.