771–780 of 996 posts
Does anyone have some honest insight on why?
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I have a problem with that. It shows moral corruption. It's not corruption in the legal sense but outlines the issue of why the pardons do not make sense. ex-POTUS is still an influential individual and is just profiting after the binds of the position are lifted. I think it would be a pretty nice decree to disallow the president to become extremely wealthy X years after presidency. Let the influence slowly fade and…
Honestly most former presidents do “good work” in this sense. The power is gone so now there’s less outside influence. This law seems arbitrary and has no purpose, there’s like 4-5 former presidents alive at a time? This “problem” is at the bottom of my list of problems that need solving.
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The 'bias' in this community is for demanding evidence, of which you have provided none. You said "I can say similar things about many of the Obama pardons" - well, if you can, do, otherwise, well, STFU. And I'm not being facetious. It's worth comparing Obama's (or any previous president's) process for granting pardons with Trump's.
> or any previous president's You mean like Bill Clinton who pardoned his brother's drug charges?
It's weird to see the Republican party embrace intellectual property theft. Levandowski stole from his employer and his colleagues at Google to enrich himself at Uber. Why would that possibly be worth a pardon?
Donald Trump is not the Republican party.
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> or any previous president's You mean like Bill Clinton who pardoned his brother's drug charges?
Yes, exactly like that. That is a good, specific example that anyone can investigate and see how it compares to Trump's pardons. Still waiting on the examples from Obama that "you can say similar things about".
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I strongly disagree. A check and balance has been on great display in recent weeks. A President has stated, "the election was a fraud, I should get another term". Congress has stated, "the election was correct. Moreover, we may choose to prevent you from holding office ever again." The judiciary agrees. That Congress is likely to deadlock is arguably a feature, not a bug. (That voters don't demand better from their c…
> Is adding states too easy? There are three million US citizens in Puerto Rico without representation in Congress. "Statehood is too easy" is probably the wrong critique. The problem is that there is not clear enough guidelines for enforcing some criteria for what constitutes a new state. Thus we have a false positive like Wyoming, which shouldn't be a state with its minuscule population, and we a false negative in…
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiv#section3
As to what you consider a "false positive" state, that's a political question, and apportionment is not the only political consideration. Congress is just about the best option we have for settling such complex, interstate questions.
Moreover, the US has always had lopsided state populations. The 65:1 apportionment population ratio between California and Wyoming (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2010/data...) is definitely big, but it's still within an order of magnitude of where we started in 1789.
The first (pre-Census) apportionment, hard-coded in Article 1, Section 2, had a 10:1 Virginia:Rhode Island ratio in the House:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section2
After the first Census, the largest difference ratio of apportionment population (i.e. population after implementing the 3/5 compromise, excluding "Indians not taxed", etc.) was about 11:1, between Virginia and Rhode Island:
https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/ApportionmentInformation-...
If you were to undo that 3/5ths slavery effect, the Virginia:Delaware ratio becomes closer to 12.5:1.
FWIW I agree Puerto Rico ought to be admitted, just as the Virgin Islands, Guam, and Mariana Islanders ought to be as well. France's DOM-TOM system seems like a better model to follow than America's, and it could still happen within our lifetimes; France made major reforms here within the last few decades:
I have to say there is quite a lot to learn from Levandowski.[0] I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard. He'll probably be a shadowy billionaire quite soon. One quote stood out to me at the very end of the article: “The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study histor…
Literally everything about the world we live in has been shaped directly and indirectly by historical events and ideas. Everything , from what you wear, what you eat, the shape of the surface of the planet, the ideas you think, your conception of human beings in the universe, and the fact that you are reading this comment (and not listening to it or feeling it.) The idea that we all just “appear” on Earth from some f…
1. People are rarely in a position to effect changes or draw from historical lessons in the first place
2. Whatever lessons you can draw are often very contingent on the time and place and even taking into account patterns, we still end up in a situation where the lessons can't really be applied beyond general principles that are already well known without much study involved.
3. Often the understanding we think we have of historical events is hopelessly distorted anyway, and colored by the sources and narratives we have read or composed in our minds.
In the end, the people who do change history tend to barrel away at problems without taking the past all that much into account beyond some general references. Even if we take into account survivorship bias this is still an important phenomenon to consider. Hence the conclusions that there is much to learn from history is either trivial or actually under its own layer of naivete.
Did they wipe out the entire old site? The link isn't working anymore and everything looks different.
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Once you have all the money you need what value is a reputation?
Your reputation only matters if you wish to have relationships with other humans.