[QUOTE=xilman;483886]It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Nixon was a crook. Having accepted that, what else can be said about him? A good fraction of US citizens seem to believe that he was, if not the worst, in the top three worst ever presidents.[/QUOTE]No argument about Nixon being a crook. Anything like his little dodge claiming a half-million dollar tax deduction on his Vice-Presidential papers by way of backdating a deed to circumvent having missed a deadline, would have landed any of us common folks in jail for tax fraud. (As it was, the IRS disallowed the deduction, and he had to pay, with penalties and interest.)

But -- one of the three worst three? Just off the top of my head, I would say that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren G. Harding were worse presidents than Nixon.

In a curious historical coincidence, James Buchanan has to date been our only bachelor president. A much more recent contender for the position who never (thank God!) made it, is also surnamed Buchanan (first name Patrick), and is also a bachelor.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;482988]It seems that, a few weeks ago, the ACLU had filed suit against the El Paso County Sheriff. He was holding defendants on requests from ICE, even though they had either tied [sic] to post bond or had resolved the cases that has led to their detention in the first place. The ACLU's suit claimed that this was a violation of Colorado law. By issuing an [url=https://acluco-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/2018-03-19-Order-Granting-Preliminary-Injunction.pdf]ORDER GRANTING PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION[/url], the judge ordered the affected detainees released, and also indicated the suit was likely to succeed on the merits.

The Sheriff's reaction may be summed up as, [url=https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/crime/el-paso-co-sheriff-will-appeal-ruling-on-immigrant-inmates]Justice has prevailed. Appeal immediately![/url][/QUOTE]

Appeal denied.

[url=https://www.denverpost.com/2018/04/12/colorado-supreme-court-holding-immigrants-appeal-denied/]Colorado Supreme Court denies sheriff’s appeal of immigrant inmate ruling[/url]
[quote]The state Supreme Court has denied an appeal by a Colorado sheriff ordered to release people who are wanted for possible deportation by federal authorities but have paid bond.

The Colorado American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in February on behalf of two men being held in the El Paso County Jail, arguing that the sheriff’s office was improperly holding them after state law required their release.

The sheriff’s office has argued that it is housing immigrants on federal agents’ behalf.

District Court Judge Eric Bentley ruled in March that Sheriff Bill Elder cannot use immigration authorities’ requests to continue holding immigrants after they pay bond. He ordered the men released.

The Supreme Court on Thursday denied an appeal of that ruling by the sheriff’s office.[/quote]

Here we go again...
 

Oh, joy! [i]Il Duce[/i] has lobbed more missiles at Syria. He very considerately told Russia, days in advance, to "get ready" -- and they did, moving military assets out of harm's way. It seems that Britain and France were in on the latest fireworks show. When news of the latest missile strikes came out, some Russian bigwig compared [i]Il Duce[/i] to Hitler, on the grounds that the missile strikes were carried out around 4AM, the same time o'clock [i]Der Fuhrer[/i]'s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union began. It seems that Russia is claiming that most of the missiles were shot down.

[quote]The President must get Congressional approval before attacking Syria-big mistake if he does not![/quote] -- [url=https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/373581528405905408][i]Il Duce[/i] on Twitter, 4:02 PM - 30 Aug 2013[/url]

Now that [i]Il Duce[/i] is president, it seems that attacking Syria without Congressional approval has been just fine and dandy, since at least a year ago. Unfortunately, we don't know [i]what[/i] their legal rationale is, because the legal memo they claim to be relying on is [i]classified[/i]. The closest anyone has come (as far as I can tell) is a [url=https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4375427/PD-DOJ-Civil-Vaughn-Index.pdf]list[/url] (Vaughn Index) of documents provided in response to a FOIA lawsuit. The WH is still refusing to disclose the memo.

Of course, if things go south, his tools can always blame it on the Democrats, right?

[QUOTE]Of course, if things go south, his tools can always blame it on the Democrats, right? [/QUOTE]
Indeed. To hell with Congress, the UN, the OPCW, and International Law.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;485289]Now that [i]Il Duce[/i] is president, it seems that attacking Syria without Congressional approval has been just fine and dandy[/QUOTE]

Since when did the Exceptional Indispensible Nation need to follow its own laws or anyone else's? Oh, hey, where were you when we destroyed Libya? or started fomenting civil war in Syria by arming the jihadis there? Operation [url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore]Timber Sycamore[/url] ring any kind of bell?

(In fact, Truman's "police action" in Korea seems to have been the start of the era in which congressional war resolutions were seen as entirely optional.)

Anyway, you've already concluded 100% that Assad and Putin done it, so you should be pleased, except insofar as this latest strike appears to have been more "missile strike theater" rather than the real thing. Don't worry, your beloved democratically elected and highly accountable-to-the-people Deep State will make sure we get the real thing soon enough, either under Trump or someone else. The good people of the United States of America™ demand it!

[QUOTE]Oh, hey, where were you when we destroyed Libya? or started fomenting civil war in Syria by arming the jihadis there? Operation [URL="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore"]Timber Sycamore[/URL] ring any kind of bell?[/QUOTE]
I know it's not directed at me, but the answer to the above is, "Fuming, ranting, drinking, and gulping antacids." Also, cringing in fear of what the next Act(s) in the play would bring.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;485393]Since when did the Exceptional Indispensible Nation need to follow its own laws or anyone else's? Oh, hey, where were you when we destroyed Libya? or started fomenting civil war in Syria by arming the jihadis there? Operation [url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore]Timber Sycamore[/url] ring any kind of bell?

(In fact, Truman's "police action" in Korea seems to have been the start of the era in which congressional war resolutions were seen as entirely optional.)

Anyway, you've already concluded 100% that Assad and Putin done it, so you should be pleased, except insofar as this latest strike appears to have been more "missile strike theater" rather than the real thing. Don't worry, your beloved democratically elected and highly accountable-to-the-people Deep State will make sure we get the real thing soon enough, either under Trump or someone else. The good people of the United States of America™ demand it![/QUOTE]

Out of curiosity, what evidence would convince you that Assad and/or Putin did do it? Along the same lines, what would convince you that Russia, say, actively meddled in the 2016 election (or colluded with the Trump campaign or hacked the DNC server)?

[QUOTE=wombatman;485460]Out of curiosity, what evidence would convince you that Assad and/or Putin did do it?[/quote]
Letting the OPCW folks actually do their job would be a good start!

And the thing is, this is not the first time such an attack has taken place and the regime-change-bent Wester powers have immediately blamed the Syria government. Remember Seymour Hersh's now-famous (but "banned in the West" as far as MSM coverage of it went) [url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line]The Red Line and the Rat Line[/url] published in the wake of the Ghouta sarin attack? (If you haven't read it in full, I urge you to do so ... it also mentions an earlier false-flag gas attack by the rebels which failed to provoke the desired response, in the wake of which - per Hersh - the rebels learned to invoke the magic word 'sarin' in order to implicate the government. I note it has also been expanded since its initial publication with the inclusion of multiple letters from readers - some good exchanges in there, including an official-narrative-hewing 'objection' by Jamie Allinson at top, which is thoroughly debunked by MIT expert Ted Postol a few letters further down). Hersh:
[quote]Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’.[/quote]

Moreover, one of the productive suggestions by the Deplorable Russians in the wake of that incident was that the Syrian government would sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN (i.e. OPCW) supervision, something which was done, though US/UK have resumed blaming the regime for more-recent gas attacks in April 2017 (Khan Shaykhun) and now Douma.

Again, the rebels have a very clear motive for carrying out such atrocities and trying to implicate the regime. Why would the regime and the Russians risk giving the U.S. et al a pretext to renew their regime change efforts, when their conventional forces are clearly beating back the rebels and winning the civil war?

The mention of the UK's Porton Down in Hersh's piece also gets us back to the poisoning of the former Russian intel (double) agent and his daughter. That was instantly blamed with claims of great certitude on Russia, only to have the certitude bit debunked by the OPCW folks, once they had been allowed to do their job. And the whole story - including what happened to the Skripal's pet animals - is so bizarre it reeks of wheels-within-wheels intel intrigues. Pinning dastardly deeds on The Other Side is a tried and true strategy when one is trying to gin up a war, and the Brits are absolute experts at it. Remember this bit from the film [i]The Good Shepherd[/i] in which the U.S OSS agent (Matt Damon) is sent to London to learn from the masters?
[i]
Welcome to London. You’re going to have to learn as quickly and thoroughly as possible the English system of intelligence. The black cards, particularly counter intelligence. The uses of information, disinformation and how their use is ultimately … power.

They’ve agreed to open their operations to us. They can’t win the war without us but they don’t really want us here. Intelligence is their mother’s milk and they don’t like sharing the royal tit with people that don’t have titles.[/i]

[quote]Along the same lines, what would convince you that Russia, say, actively meddled in the 2016 election (or colluded with the Trump campaign or hacked the DNC server)?[/QUOTE]
How about actual evidence supporting said claims? There are multiple technical analyses of the DNC server incident which point to "leak, not hack". Further, irrespective of whodunnit, the information about the corruption of the DNC in rigging their primary against the insurgent Sanders was, so far as we know, [b]true[/b]. How can one construe the bringing-to-light of factual evidence of election tampering [b]by one of the 2 establishment parties[/b] as "election meddling"? It is simply absurd. There have also been wild evidence-free claims about Russia hacking voting machines, and "running a disinformation campaign on Facebook" - one whose details, especially the amounts of money involved, were utterly, laughably small once revealed. Again, show us the actual (and not just as easily explained by other means) *evidence*. Not intel "assessments" (a code for "take our word for it - we're the Intel services and you can trust us"), not hack allegations which ignore than in cyberspace, spoofing is easy and attribution is hard, not conflation of "having an interest in the election and its outcome" with "state-sponsored meddling in the election".

And, before starting a war with Russia over alleged meddling, perhaps have the honesty to consider 2 important pieces of the broader context:

1. Other governments 'meddle' in US elections all the time. Israel and Saudi Arabia spring to mind.

2. The US and CIA have a very long history of election meddling, rigging and outright coup-fomenting in countries all over the world, just 2 example being Iran 1953 (leading to the brutally repressive regime of the Shah and ultimately the Islamic Revoution there) and a whole lot of evidence pointing to the US helping to rig the 1996 Russian presidential election for the western-friendly (as in, "let the looting by the oligarchs and the western powers begin!") Yeltsin. The subsequent evisceration of the Russian economy (GDP fell by 1/3, life expectancy crashed) was a key factor in Putin's subsequent rise to power - while he is clearly not a cuddly nice guy and has corruption issues of his own, it is incontrovertible that he reined in the worst excesses of the oligarchs and stopped the downward economic and living-conditions spiral. So Putin may very well be blowback from our own "meddling".

It isn't just the Russians trying to fiddle our election process. The Republicans have long since taken over duties previously in the bailiwick of Southern Democrats (most of whom became Republicans after enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act).

Remember the head of [i]Il Duce[/i]'s Advisory Commission on [strike]disenfrachising all non-Republican voters[/strike] Election Integrity? [url=http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article209268109.html]Federal judge finds Kris Kobach in contempt of court in voting rights case[/url]

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;485698]It isn't just the Russians trying to fiddle our election process. The Republicans have long since taken over duties previously in the bailiwick of Southern Democrats (most of whom became Republicans after enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act).

Remember the head of [I]Il Duce[/I]'s Advisory Commission on [strike]disenfrachising all non-Republican voters[/strike] Election Integrity? [URL="http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article209268109.html"]Federal judge finds Kris Kobach in contempt of court in voting rights case[/URL][/QUOTE]
It is good to hear this. I wonder how much Her Honor really expects the creep to comply. I wish she would order his presence in court, and then perp walk him for the cameras. A bit of time in the pokey would make some kind of impression, one hopes.

[QUOTE=kladner;485728]It is good to hear this. I wonder how much Her Honor really expects the creep to comply. I wish she would order his presence in court, and then perp walk him for the cameras. A bit of time in the pokey would make some kind of impression, one hopes.[/QUOTE]
My favorite part:[quote]Instead of a fine in the contempt matter, Robinson ordered Kobach to pay attorneys fees for the plaintiffs in the case.[/quote]
Ouch!

Of course, it's another case of "Justice has prevailed -- appeal immediately!"

One part of the scheme of [i]Il Duce[/i] and company deals with changes that Koback proposed to federal election law. Some of them, shown in a document disclosed in the above-reference court case as 2:16-cv-02105-jar-jpo document 373-2 [Exhibit S] deal with that part of the law known as 52 U.S.C. 20504(c)

[quote](c) Forms and procedures
__(1) Each State shall include a voter registration application form for elections for Federal office as part of an application for a State motor vehicle driver’s license.

__(2) The voter registration application portion of an application for a Statemotor vehicle driver’s license—

____(A) may not require any information that duplicates information required in the driver’s license portion of the form (other than a second signature or other information necessary under subparagraph (C));

____(B) may require only the minimum amount of information necessary to—

______(i) prevent duplicate voter registrations; and

______(ii) enable State election officials to assess the eligibility of the applicant and to administer voter registration and other parts of the election process;

____(C) shall include a statement that—

______(i) states each eligibility requirement (including citizenship);

______(ii) contains an attestation that the applicant meets each such requirement; and

______(iii) requires the signature of the applicant, under penalty of perjury;

____(D) shall include, in print that is identical to that used in the attestation portion of the application—

______(i) the information required in section 20507(a)(5)(A) and (B) of this title;

______(ii) a statement that, if an applicant declines to register to vote, the fact that the applicant has declined to register will remain confidential and will be used only for voter registration purposes; and

______(iii) a statement that if an applicant does register to vote, the office at which the applicant submits a voter registration application will remain confidential and will be used only for voter registration purposes; and

____(E) shall be made available (as submitted by the applicant, or in machine readable or other format) to the appropriate Stateelection official as provided by State law.[/quote]

The proposed changes are as follows (my emphasis):

[quote] Delete 52 U.S.C. 20504(c)(2)(A)

In 52 u.s.c. 20504(c)(2)(B) delete "may require only the minimum amount of information necessary to" and replace with "may require [b]any information[/b] the state deems necessary to"[/quote]

Plus another gem:

[quote]Add new subsection 52 U.S.C. 20504(f) "Nothing in this section shall be construed to prevent a state from requiring documentary proof of citizenship from any applicant."[/quote]

Two other proposed amendments were redacted from the published document.

[i]Any[/i] information? How about, say a [url=http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html]literacy test[/url]?