Ingesting lead can and will kill you, and it will impair your cognitive functioning in the meantime. Lead was banned from automobile gasoline in 1975, but it was too late. There are small amounts of lead in the air and water, almost everywhere, that will remain for centuries and that were not there before cars,

This case involved charges of fraud made against Trump’s company by the State of New York. This was a civil case, not a criminal case. The consequences were not supposed to be criminal.

The defamation lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll were also civil cases. She was not charging Trump with the crime of raping her many years ago; She was suing him (twice) for lying about whether he raped her many years ago. (She won both times.)

I think I get where you are coming from, though. When a person is rich enough to pay the fine, and also shameless enough to revel in the infamy of being found liable in a civil dispute, it can seem like that person doesn’t end up suffering any significant consequence for their actions at all.

$355M is a lot of money. Add in the $83M owed to Carroll and these recent fines top $400M, which is an estimated amount of Trump’s liquid assets. Trump is now likely running out of cash-on-hand, which could explain his recent takeover of the Republican National Committee – the GOP’s fundraising (and fund-spending) organization.

Criminal consequences come from criminal cases. Trump has invested most of his legal defense against the criminal cases he is facing. Pending criminal cases involving Trump include:

1.) A RICO (“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations”) case charged by the State of Georgia, against Trump and several others who allegedly conspired to steal the state’s 16 electoral votes, including by having the President call (Republican) Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and ask him to “find 11,780 votes” for him. Four people in that case have already accepted a plea deal. This case is currently delayed by a motion to disqualify the DA because she had a romantic relationship with a lawyer her office hired to help prosecute the case.

2.) A federal case against Trump for retaining classified documents. A year or so ago, it was found that former President Trump and former VP Mike Pence had kept classified documents after they left office, and that when Joe Biden left the office of VP in 2017, he also kept some classified documents. Both Pence and Biden complied with federal investigation and surrendered the documents immediately when asked. Unlike Pence and Biden, Trump did not comply with federal investigation, and instead took action to conceal the classified documents in his possession. This case is being heard in a Florida courtroom, because Trump was storing these stolen national secrets in a spare bathroom at Mar-A-Lago. The judge is a Trump appointee, and has demonstrated a tendency to rule in Trumps favor whenever she can, but if she shows too much bias she may get taken off the case.

3.) A federal case against Trump for his involvement in the insurrectionist attempt to disrupt the electoral vote count in congress on January 6, 2021. Trump has been indicted on four charges in this case: “conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.” Trump’s defense has been that he has “absolute immunity” for any actions he took while serving as President. This claim of immunity has been denied and appealed multiple times. Trump has now asked the SCOTUS to hear his appeal, but they haven’t said if they will yet. Until they do, that case is on hold, but there’s no one else to appeal to higher than them. If SCOTUS chooses not to hear Trump’s immunity appeal, the lower court’s denial of it will stand and the case will go forward.

The insurrection took place on January 6, 2021, which was three years ago.

Over 700 people have plead guilty or been convicted for crimes they committed at the capitol that day. Others have not yet been apprehended or gone to trial, and some others have not been identified. https://apnews.com/article/capitol-riot-jan-6-criminal-cases-anniversary-bf436efe760751b1356f937e55bedaa5

Trump has also been charged for his actions three years ago, but has delayed the trial with repeated appeals all the way up to SCOTUS. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4468789-trump-special-counsel-jack-smith-supreme-court-jan-6-trial/

I don’t know what Brazil has to do with January 6. In the United States – as in many countries with “decent legal system” – a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Anything less than proving Trump guilty beyond a reasonable doubt will be taken as a complete victory for him, and very possibly catapult him to re-election in November.

“People’s definition of good is also different.” That’s exactly what makes working as a server a difficult job.

Take you, for example. It sounds like you don’t like to be bothered when you’re dining out. An excellent server might be likely to recognize that and leave you alone after the first or second visit – as well as get your order right and bring your bill promptly. Even if not, there’s nothing wrong with politely asking to be left alone, but you can’t expect your server to read your mind. Some people do like to be bothered. Some people value the experience of being served while dining out to be as important as the food or the ambience. People have different definitions of good.

In your “first” part, I hear you talking about resentment toward feeling obliged to tip servers when they give poor service. I understand and agree, to an extent. Paying servers minimum wage (or more) would not necessarily improve the service, however, and could possibly allow it to become worse. The amount you leave as a tip – if anything at all – is still completely up to you. That’s a big part of tipping culture as well.

As for your “second,” and your “third,” I’m talking about tipping culture at sit-down restaurants in the United States.

Because you are able to conceptualize tipping as a “a mechanism to justify suppressing wages” does not mean that’s the only way to conceptualize it. Do you really believe that raising server pay to minimum wage (or more) would end tipping culture in the U.S.? I do not believe that at all. Because there really is a culture to it, even it is merely a custom to folks like you.

We can stop its spread – we can refuse to tip at places that never expected a tip before. But tipping at fancy sit-down restaurants is ingrained in American culture. It would take generations of social engineering to breed it out. There are people who like to be able to tip for good service, wealthy American people who will seek it out. Even if it became the norm not to tip at restaurants, I bet tipping would been seen as a status symbol at the fancier ones.

And what about the “excellent server” I talked about earlier, who makes more money in tips than anyone else on the shift? To you, maybe that person is akin to some sort of prostitute, to be asking for extra money in exchange for personal consideration, when already making almost as much as “ffs EMT personnel”? Seriously though, no matter how much you raise that server’s wage, they’re still not going to be making anywhere near as much as they did working those big-money shifts for big tips. All else being even, they’re not going to choose to work those crappy hours anymore either, so the restaurant no longer has its best staff working its most demanding shifts.

Anyway, it didn’t really seem like you were punching down. It did sort of seem like you failed to address some of the points I tried to make about tipping culture in the US, and instead provided information about your personal preferences and bad experiences dining out at full-service restaurants. That, and pushing the single-problem-single-solution minimum-wage idea, again without really addressing any of the possible collateral consequences I tried to suggest in the original post.

Tipping is more than just a custom; there really is a culture to it. If you’re tipping only because you know the server makes less than minimum wage from the restaurant (or that greedy restaurant owners are completely to blame for this injustice), I think you may be misunderstanding an aspect of this culture.

Working in a restaurant is as hard a retail job as there is, and working as a server is often the hardest job in the restaurant. Being a truly good server requires a rare mix of people skills, math skills, memory, and a thick skin. So why do people choose to take the hardest job there is in the whole restaurant, when it pays less than all the other jobs?

Most servers end up getting paid better than the people doing other jobs in the restaurant. In most restaurants, servers make more than minimum wage. At the end of their shifts, most servers in turn tip-out the front-of-the-house employees, such as hosts and bussers, who often do only make minimum wage.

A truly excellent server may be the highest-paid employee for an entire shift – that certainly includes the manager and anyone else on salary, and it may even include the owner, when you add in labor and upkeep costs.

In order to make all that money, however, this server has to work at all the times that everyone else is out having fun – Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday morning. This server must put up with drunks, picky eaters and other narcissists, as well as seating errors and kitchen mistakes, all with a smile, for six or eight or ten hours straight. This server, who earns more than anyone else on the shift, is working harder than anyone else on the shift.

This is the other aspect that I wanted to address. Tipping culture is what gives that excellent server the opportunity to earn a better wage, more appropriate to the effort and expertise they devote to the job.

I’m sure this all sounds very capitalist, because it is. This may not be the most capitalism-friendly forum, I know, but I’m not trying to make any larger argument here.

I’m just saying that to me, it seems like this should be a “don’t hate the players” (owners, managers, servers, rich/drunk people who like to leave big tips) “hate the game” (tipping culture). And even if you do hate tipping culture, it couldn’t hurt to consider how it works for the people who don’t hate it.

Removed by mod

I remember Gilbert Gottfried at a Friar’s Club roast. Can’t remember what the actual joke was, but I remember he lost the whole audience, and then won them back with a spontaneous telling of “The Aristocrats”

Kudos for Carlin, who made fun of government propaganda. Maybe not so much for Joan Rivers for making fun of FDNY widows.

(I’m not a boomer, though. Or a millennial. Or really that edgy anymore, if I ever was…)

This strikes me as a particularly ahistoric take. I’d like to make two points in that regard.

News Radio was the biggest gig yet for both Joe Rogan and Andy Dick, who played main characters on the show from the start. Jon Lovitz was already well known from his time on Saturday Night Live – arguably a higher-profile position than the one he took on News Radio.

Jon Lovitz wasn’t spawned by News Radio, is my first point. To the contrary: Lovitz was brought onto the show as an established big-name talent after (his friend and fellow SNL alum) Phil Hartman died.

And how did Phil Hartman die? Phil Hartman was shot and killed by his wife, Brynn Omdahl, who struggled with substance abuse. According to Lovitz, Andy Dick was said to have shared cocaine with her at a Christmas party at Hartman’s house.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lovitz-speaks-out-on-dustup-with-andy-dick/

“[Andy] was just complaining and really giving me a hard time for no reason. Phil told me that they had a Christmas party and Andy was doing cocaine and he gave it to Phil’s wife Brynn, who had been sober for 10 years. So Andy said to me, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be here,’ and I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t given Brynn coke in the first place.’”

After this on-set exchange, Lovitz and Dick were said to have made up and were able to work professionally together on News Radio. Later, however, when Lovitz was out at a restaurant, Dick came over to his table and invoked his ostensible involvement with Hartman’s murder:

“He’s standing there with liqueur dripping down his chin and he says, ‘I put the Phil Hartman hex on you, you’re the next one to die,’” said Lovitz. “And he’s smiling, and my blood just went to my head. I wanted to smash him, but if I hit him he would have gone flying into the table behind him. He was really drunk.”

My second point is that, while Jon Lovitz maybe be a “character,” he’s an entirely different class of character than Andy Dick. (Or Joe Rogan, for that matter, just to pretend this whole long reply still has something to do with the actual OP topic.)

So like, “Biden should seize the powers of the presidency to take a more authoritarian stance against authoritarianism.” Is this really what you mean?

finger wagging is for the powerless citizenry not the president

Contrary to your premise, Biden has consistently promoted an anti-authoritarian view of how our representative democracy should work. He thinks people should vote against authoritarianism, instead of them calling on a POTUS who was elected to office because of his anti-authoritarian views to start taking authoritarian action against his authoritarian opponents.

The citizenry is not powerless. The citizenry has the most fundamental power of all: power over who is elected to office.

Just because that power can be corrupted and diminished through gerrymandering, electoral college imbalances, and two-party FPTP distortions (and a million other for-better-or-worse Constitutional safeguards against mob-rule) does not change the fact the citizenry still holds the most basic and fundamental power of all.

Tweets and finger-wagging are fine too, if you like, but if you are against fascism, I’m glad too. I hope you vote, and I hope you vote strategically instead of out of anger.

Russian emails? Are you thinking of the Wikileaks stuff, with the hacked data from Clinton’s campaign staffers? I am pretty sure those are different and separate from the emails that Comey was investigating for the FBI.

There are two “Hilary’s emails” stories. It is easy to confuse the two – Republicans worked very hard throughout 2016 to make it easy to confuse the two – yet they are two different series of events and almost totally unrelated to one another.

The original “Buttery Males” story: Comey and the FBI investigated emails that were stored on a private server owned by the Clinton Foundation, a server that Hilary had used for official business while serving as Secretary of State. In July of 2016, Comey announced that while they did find a small number of documents marked “classified” stored on the server, this violation was obviously inadvertent and should not be prosecuted. “Sloppy but not criminal,” or something like that. Then later in October (after taking a few months of heat from his fellow Republicans for not going after Clinton harder) Comey announced that there may be files on a laptop owned by Hilary’s assistant, Huma Abedin, that the FBI had not yet had a chance to review. Comey announced this privately to a congressional committee and it was leaked almost instantly, about a week before election day.

The “From Russia with Love” email story: Meanwhile, Russian hackers infiltrated Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and stole thousands of personal emails and other data from her staffers and people they’d communicated with. None of these emails were classified and the FBI never investigated the Clinton campaign in this case (except as the victims of a crime). Wikileaks and Julian Assange got in on the action and built up lots of hype. That’s when, in the middle of a campaign speech, Trump made his famous on-stage plea: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Trump was clever, mendaciously associating the original “classified documents on your private server” controversy with the “Russia stole your data and is about to release it on Wikileaks” controversy, but the two stories don’t really have anything to do with one another, at all, and they never really did.

It may even be to their advantage, as the new candidate receives Trumps blessing and gives Trump clemency.

I also have been wondering what the race will look like in six months, when all this speculation about Trump’s trials (and potential prison time?) will be upon us for real.

Legally (so far at least) they say Trump can run from prison. If he were to win, as POTUS he’d have many options available to clear his name, dismiss his accusers, and attack his opponents.

I don’t think Trump will give another candidate his endorsement, even from prison. If he does, it won’t be without that other candidate publicly swearing fealty and promising to grant clemency, as you say. The way I see it, any candidate who’d be willing to do that will look weak and subservient, and probably look worse than Trump’s going to look, even from prison, by the time they get to the general election.

I think the only way another candidate wins the GOP nomination is by taking it from Trump – not by Trump lending it out to them.

We have a “voluntary” tax system in the U.S. – that’s always been the situation. “Voluntary” doesn’t mean that that you can choose to not volunteer to pay your taxes. It mostly just means that the way we run things, by default, it is each citizen’s responsibility to calculate and pay their taxes each April.

American taxpayers filled out 1040 forms in the days before computers, a lot like they do now. The IRS selected certain fillings for audits, just like they do now – sometimes because of an apparent discrepancy, and sometimes just at random.

It would be a lot more work, take a lot more resources, and be prone to a lot more error and lawsuits, if the IRS tried to calculate everyone’s taxes for them. Even now that we are in the days of computers, it is much more efficient for the IRS to only audit a fraction of the filings submitted each year.

I’m also pretty sure our “voluntary” tax filling system has something to do with the Fourth Amendment and other privacy concerns. A lot of Americans very strongly believe that it is not the government’s place to be all up in their private business.

– EDIT to add:

There is a difference between whether it would be possible for the IRS to calculate individual citizens’ taxes and whether we should abandon our voluntary tax system for one in which the IRS simply calculates the taxes owed by every citizen and send us each a bill. My original response was intended to address the latter, but now I’ll say something about the former:

For someone whose single source of income is a job working for someone else, of course it is possible for the IRS to calculate your taxes. You’ve already volunteered all the information the IRS needs to do so. Your employer has already told the IRS exactly how much income you’ve earned and exactly how much of it you’ve had withheld for taxes. Remember when you signed that withholding paperwork with the HR department on your first day? That was the moment when you personally volunteered your income information and payments to the IRS. You’ve literally already been reporting your income and paying taxes on it ever since.

The way taxes work in practice for a single-income employee does not reveal the potential complexity of tax accounting for individuals who are self-employed, who have multiple sources of income, and anyone who doesn’t want to make regular fillings and withholding payments throughout the year. The tax situation for single-income American employees is not the situation for all Americans. Not everyone has an employer who calculates their taxes and pays installments for them throughout the year.

It is common for Americans to have a single job with an employer who calculates and pays their taxes for them. This makes it very easy for the IRS to know exactly how much the taxpayer owes (or is owed) at the end of the year. If it ends up feeling to like this is the same thing as the IRS calculating your taxes for you, however, I’m guessing it’s because you forgot that it’s actually your employer who’s been doing that accounting job for you all along, with each paycheck.

A pastor usually leads a Protestant church. Catholic churches are led by priests.

Confession of sins to (God though) a priest is a rite in the Catholic church, but not in Protestant churches. Protestant churches often encourage members to ask forgiveness for their sins directly to God through prayer.

There are more Catholics than protestants in the world, but there are more protestants than Catholics in the U.S. The type of Christianity most often associated with socially conservative Republican/MAGA primary voters is Protestant “evangelical” Christianity.

Evangelicals are a hardcore subset of Protestants who take the Bible literally. They’re sometimes called “Born-again Christians” because of their belief in the importance of personal conversion. That is, you’re not really a real Christian until, as an autonomous adult, you willingly choose to surrender yourself, mind body and soul, and devote your life to (your pastor’s teachings about) the teachings of Jesus.

Anyway, now I’ve done an eight-hours-later four-paragraph TED-talk riff on what is otherwise quite a fine and clever comment. I mean no offense and hope none is taken. I mostly just wanted to note that when Nikki Haley talks about “pastors,” she isn’t talking to Catholics; she’s talking directly to the GOP evangelical voter base.

Jack Smith does not want to remove Cannon. Or he shouldn’t at least. Not at this point, anyway.

By far, the best possible outcome is still for Jack Smith to convict Donald Trump in Aileen Cannon’s Florida courtroom. As long as Cannon doesn’t start conducting the trial in a way that actually prevents Smith from winning that conviction, keeping her in place is in everybody’s best interest.

This morning’s (11/07/'23) headlines are all about how Trump verbally attacked the judge in his fraud trial in New York yesterday. Trump has repeatedly accused Judge Engoron of being partisan and biased, to the press and now in his sworn testimony. MAGA eats that shit up. The more Trump looks like a victim to them, the more riled up they get in his defense.

It seems to me that “The Case of the Stolen Nuclear Secrets” is going to be much simpler and easier for people to understand than “The Case of Strategically Shifting the Valuation of Heavily Leveraged Real Estate Properties for Various Tax and Loan Purposes.” Considering even just the evidence that has already been made public in this case (photos of boxes of classified documents haphazardly stacked in a spare bathroom; audio recordings of Trump bragging that he shouldn’t be sharing a classified brief he’d illegally kept) the chances of a conviction are strong.

If Trump gets convicted by a jury in a Florida courtroom run by so seemingly biased a judge as Cannon, it’s going to be a lot harder for him to claim it’s all rigged against him by the Democrats. It’s going to be a whole lot harder to work that conviction into the whole victimhood narrative that Trump is currently thriving on.

Trump did not win all 50 states in the GOP primaries. In 2016. Cruz won Texas and a handful of other Midwestern and non-coastal western states; Kasich won his home state of Ohio, and Marco Rubio won in Minnesota.

In 2020, in some states, the GOP didn’t even bother holding primaries or caucuses. States like Kansas, Nevada, SC, cancelled public voting in primaries and caucuses after the RNC pledged its undivided support to Trump in back February of that year. So Trump didn’t really “win” primaries in “all 50 states” in 2020 either, because primaries were not held in all 50 states.

There have been rumors about this for months now. We already know Meadows has met with Jack Smith, and that Meadows’ testimony about his book was used in making the DoJ’s federal cases against Trump.

So why is this story breaking now? Why are the rumors about Meadows’ immunity suddenly newsworthy?

I think it’s because Meadows is getting ready to flip in the Georgia case, too. His immunity deal with the DoJ doesn’t help him at all if he gets convicted in Georgia.

Meadows was unable to move the RICO case to a federal court. Now Hall, Powell, Chesebro, and Ellis have all taken deals in Georgia. Those who flip first get the best deals, and I bet Meadows is looking to be looking to be number 5 out of 19.

There will be no going back from this for him, though. The next flip in the Georgia case will be just as public as the last four have been. It will be Meadows’ Michael Cohen moment. The point of no return.

Hall --> Powell --> Cheesebro --> Ellis --> (?)

Flippity floppity. Who will be next?

Again, I acknowledge your point about accessibility.

When you say something like “I wouldn’t count Windsor,” however, it suggests to me that you’ve never been to Detroit and that you still don’t understand what I’m talking about.

–

EDIT to add:

I don’t think you’ve been to Detroit, but I’m not sure that you’ve been to New York City, either?

It seems as if you are thinking of Manhattan as all of NYC, or at least as the center of NYC. Geographically, it is not.

I’d agree Manhattan is “central” to NYC, in terms of culture and politics and money. But it could not be – it would not even exist as it does today – were it not for the other four boroughs. It takes all five boroughs to make New York City. The shape of the whole city is as irregular as any other city built on the water, and the center of it is nowhere near Central Park or Manhattan.

In fact, the only way that Central Park is close to being geographically “central” to the whole city is if you include Newark NJ as part of the city. But New Jersey is a totally different state from the State of New York. (I mean sure, you don’t need a passport to go across bridges or through tunnels, but still: You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?)

Detroit is laid out differently from NYC, more like the spokes of a wheel or a spiderweb, instead of a grid like Manhattan. Downtown Detroit (the most “urban” area of the city) and Belle Isle are both at the center of the wheel.

Not sure you’d get a sense of that by “looking at it” on a map, but Belle Isle at least as close to downtown Detroit as Central park is to lower Manhattan.

You do have to take a bridge to get there though, since it’s an island, so you may have a point about accessibility in that regard.

Nevertheless, Belle Isle is a large park in the middle of an urban area. Especially if you bring Windsor into the mix.

It sounds like this Scott Graham Hall guy flipped on Sidney. So now who’s Sidney going to flip on?

She was in a lot of meetings with a lot of people, including Trump and Giuliani. I bet she has a lot to say about that.

Giant food stores in Mid-Atlantic US