illinilaw08

I mean, "grossly negligent" and "extremely careless" don't really matter legally if you aren't charging her with anything. Either is a really bad quote. Both are negative connotations. And whether "grossly negligent" or "extremely careless," we're talking about her handling of classified info. We're not charging her, but she's lucky we aren't is the conclusion I take away from either quote. If the FBI was in the pocket for Clinton, they would literally have just said, "no charges" and closed the investigation. "To their dismay" is some serious editorializing. I'm sure there were some people who were dismayed that the investigation was reopened, just like the FBI agents that leaked stuff to Nunes and Giuliani during the campaign had a bias. It sure didn't help Clinton though! And like with the ongoing Trump campaign investigation, if the FBI was in the tank for Clinton, they literally would have sat on that until after the election. Since the Russia investigation was ongoing during the campaign, the Liberal FBI was really, really bad at their jobs if they said, "welp, no reason to bring this to light ahead of the election, but we'll REALLY have him if he is elected president and we continue the investigation!" SB said this better than I, but my read of the IG Report matches up with his "If anything I think that all of this has shown that Comey helped Trump because he thought Clinton was going to win and after her win he didnt want the right wing conspiracy groups to say that the FBI helped Clinton."

IF the people at the FBI investigating Clinton really wanted to take steps to swing the election to Trump, they did so in the dumbest way possible. You had Comey - while not charging Clinton - said that she was "extremely careless." Then, they reopened the e-mail investigation - publicly - literally weeks before the election. The FBI took a number of steps that sure didn't help Hillary Clinton on the e-mails issue. If the FBI really wanted to stop Donald Trump from becoming President, they literally could have leaked to the media "Trump campaign's connections to Russia under investigation by the FBI!" There was absolute silence on that until after the election was completed. I'm really hard pressed to see how the conspiracy to stop Donald Trump from being elected president (a) trumped (no pun intended) up a connection between the Trump campaign and Russia illegally; (b) illegally spied on his campaign; and (c) did... nothing... until after he was elected President? Rabbit, you are a smart guy. If the FBI was in the tank for Clinton, why in the world did they not. do. anything. with publicizing the investigation until after the election? Why did Comey go out of his way to chastise Hillary Clinton while calling for no charges? Why did they reopen the investigation publicly on the eve of the election. It's only after Comey gets fired - and President Trump admits in an interview that Russia was on his mind when he fired him - that Sessions recuses himself and Mueller is appointed to continue the investigation. The very idea that this is all part of a vast conspiracy against the President is patently absurd...

So... I'm not sure that quote says what you think it says. Even if there WAS bias (more on that in a second) in the handling of Clinton e-mail investigation vs. the Trump/Russia connection prior to the election, one of those things was highly publicized, and the other came to light after the election was over. If an FBI investigation influenced the 2016 election, it was objectively the investigation of Hillary Clinton's e-mails. All of the concern about bias with the Trump/Russia investigation stem from texts and statements prior to the election. In the absence of, I don't know, actual evidence that the Mueller probe is biased (and stop with the all Witch Hunt cries considering the number of indictments that have already come down), the fact that there were some admittedly bad text messages prior to the election has no bearing on the Mueller investigation. And here's an actual quote from the IG Report, “Our review did not find documentary or testimonial evidence directly connecting the political views these employees expressed in their text messages and instant messages to the investigative decisions we reviewed,” the IG report states." https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/14/17465360/peter-strzok-text-inspector-general-stop

You don't fight a war on multiple fronts. The Trump administration has started a trade war with Canada, Mexico, multiple individual countries in Europe, the EU, and China. This is a dumb trade strategy that is going to hurt US consumers and US markets.

Definitely an Obama quote from 2006. With that being said, Obama did not separate families at the border, and also tailored his immigration enforcement to deportations of people with records. But nice try anyway Rabbit...

Is it just me, or does it feel like the Nuggets would be a great basketball destination for Lebron? Their best player (Jokic) is a great passer, plus shooter, and doesn't need to dominate the ball. Murray, Harris and Milsap are all plus shooters who would space the floor. Denver isn't a particularly large market, but Lebron would be a legitimately good fit there - certainly better than the Lakers...

Interesting article from Vox on the US' role in maintaining global peace for the longest period on record. https://www.vox.com/world/2018/6/12/17448866/trump-south-korea-alliance-trudeau-g7 The difference in the reactions to Trump in NK and Trump scuttling the Iran deal in the Conservative press is... really interesting to me. The Trump administration got rid of the Iran deal because they believed Iran was violating the spirit of the deal by their influence in the region, and their conventional weapons programs. But the one thing that the Iran deal absolutely had was a strong oversight and enforcement mechanism on nuclear weapons. This North Korea thing has... nothing right now. And all the talk is denuclearization with no talk about all the conventional weapons NK has pointed at Seoul. Further, Trump is giving up some South Korean leverage and is talking about withdrawing US troops for South Korea. In exchange, North Korea has done... nothing? Don't get me wrong, I think that diplomacy with North Korea is sensible, because the cost of war would be catastrophic (I'm not ignoring the human rights abuses in NK). But the US seems to be giving up quite a bit just to get NK to the table...

Except there are a lot of better ways to handle this. Postcards can get lost in the mail. People move within the same district, but forget to update their voter registration, so they would not receive that postcard. Even if it gets there, people ignore mail like that all the time. The State's own records can verify addresses in a better manner (particularly via tax returns). The question is - what is the bad act that this is intended to fix. If it's clearing the voter rolls to reduce administrative costs, then why don't you allow people to re-register day of for the people who didn't realize they had been removed? Every. Single. Legitimate study on voter fraud finds that it is so statistically insignificant that it is not something to legislate around. Republicans push this type of legislation, and cheer results like this from the Supreme Court, because it enables voter suppression - voter suppression that ultimately acts in their favor at election time. You say any restrictions on voting have this impact. I say what is the harm that the restrictions on voting are in place to stop? On the firearm side, there is significant evidence that increased access to firearms costs lives. Hence, some reasonable restrictions on firearms provide value to society. Absent some compelling evidence that restrictions on voting serve society (like taking the vote from convicted felons, for example), your comparison between the right to vote and the 2nd Amendment doesn't hold water.

My understanding is that you had to be registered 30-days prior to the election. So if you have been removed from the voting rolls, and you don't actually know that you were removed (lost in the mail, moved, whatever), you have effectively lost the right to vote in that election. Same day registration solves that issue. Here's how I see this. I can't serve a lawsuit by mail absent some sort of compelling justification, and after an additional notice from a court. I have to serve them in person, so that the Court knows that the defendant is on notice of the proceeding against them. It shouldn't be easier than that to divest somebody of the right to vote. Inattention and lack of participation should not be sufficient to divest somebody of their right to vote.

Under SB's example, yes you are taking away his right to vote in that election. Trump carried Ohio by around 400k votes. If, since 2011, Ohio has purged 2M voters since 2011 (as SS cited in a prior post), that tactic could have swung 2016. I'm not saying that it DID, but that's a huge number. Further, the State has a lot less intrusive ways that they could handle this. The State can send requests to the Department of Revenue and Secretary of State to get current addresses from tax returns and driver's licenses. They can provide same day re-registration for people who weren't aware that they were purged from the rolls.

Rabbit - here's where I stand on this. I think that religion and faith are deeply personal (raised Catholic, currently agnostic). While I don't hold to an organized religion, I don't begrudge people their personal faith... so long as that personal faith does not intrude upon the public sphere. Conservatives in statehouses across the country (and in Congress) are attempting to legislate via faith. Simply put, there is no religious lobby or atheistic lobby that has nearly the same level of impact on legislation in this country as Evangelical Christians have. I also believe that diversity is important! Cultural and racial diversity is important - my experiences with law enforcement, obtaining housing, attending school - are very different than an African-American woman (for example). People govern from their own experience. When overwhelming majorities of the government are white and male, there is an important perspective that is missing. I'll also argue that socioeconomic diversity is also important. It wasn't until I was out of high school, and exposed to people from different socioeconomic backgrounds than my own that I started to even scratch the surface of some of the things I took for granted that keep people in poverty. To get to equality, the people that pull the levers in society need to be able to understand the different experiences and problems of people across cultural, racial, and economic divides. We aren't even close to there yet...

This year's Lebron - even in a pretty weak East - has no equivalent with any Jordan Finals roster. The second best player on this team is Kevin Love - a really good offensive player who can't stay on the floor defensively late in games. Pippen was always the perfect complement to Jordan - a guy who could take some of the scoring load and - probably more importantly - all of the defensive load off of Jordan. Could Jordan have made the Finals without Pippen, without Grant or Rodman, and with a guy like Kevin Love as the only other above average guy on the roster? Maybe? I don't know why there's this automatic need to tear down Lebron. Leaving aside the Mavericks Finals - which was 7 years ago (as a quick aside, I don't get why the Mavs series is a killer for Lebron but Jordan leaving basketball for 2 years doesn't impact Jordan's legacy) - Lebron has lost to (a) a Spurs team whose core won 4 titles; and (b) a Golden State team that ranks among the best of all-time (and Lebron beat them the year that they won 73 games). Simply put, Jordan - for all his greatness - never had to face as stacked of a roster in the Finals as Lebron has faced in the Warriors over the last 4 years. He never had to face a team as accomplished as the Spurs teams in the Finals. That's not to take anything away from Jordan - at a minimum, I think he and Lebron are 1a and 1b all-time - but 6-0 vs. 3-5 in the Finals is an argument that demands context. Further, the teammate argument always seems to forget that Pippen was a top-10 player in the league for the majority of the Bulls' Finals runs, and each Jordan title team had an All-Star level power forward to do some dirty work. Jordan had a pretty strong supporting cast.

NBA teams aren't historically good defensively because offenses have gotten so much better and efficient. That doesn't alter the fact that NBA defenses are much more sophisticated and team based than they ever were previously. The best defenses are basically moving as one, on a string. The college game doesn't come close to the level of teamwork you get at the NBA level defensively. Zach Lowe is great at showcasing this, and would make the point far more eloquently than I will here, but NBA teams run a ton of action away from the ball. They also run a pretty unique variety of pick and rolls. The level and variety of offensive basketball at the NBA level - I'd argue - is actually more team based than on the college side of things.

This is how it has worked over my last decade of practice...

So, generally I agree that the truly destitute are not likely to go through bankruptcy (they can't afford it, no sense to get bk protection if you are just going to need it again in a year). And I also agree that a creditor is going to attempt to determine whether they can collect prior to going after people in collection, and that collection efforts against someone who is "judgment proof" is throwing good money after bad (though writing off debt doesn't mean that the debt no longer exists). But "poor people with nothing" is a really, really broad term. If somebody works and takes home $1,500/m, subsisting otherwise on benefits like SNAP, I wouldn't consider them to be middle class - they are working poor, better than destitute and below the middle class. But a creditor (including a hospital!) is likely going to get their judgment, garnish wages, and ultimately force that poor person into bk to stop the garnishment. So the working poor - ie, lots of debt, garnishments pending - don't fit into the "middle class" designation, but are a hell of a lot more likely to file bankruptcy than someone in the middle class with assets that they can't exempt in the bankruptcy filing as a means to protect their wages. Pre-ACA, people WITH health insurance were forced into bk because their insurance didn't cover enough, an emergency happened, and all of a sudden they were $80k in debt. People who worked but were effectively barred from the insurance marketplace because (a) no employer coverage; and (b) pre-existing conditions (or they had hit lifetime caps) ended up in bk because they, too, quickly found themselves with $80k+ in medical debt. The ACA does a good job of avoiding those catastrophic scenarios. That's important! The effect, however, of insuring more people and providing more comprehensive coverage is that coverage becomes more expensive. There are definitely people who were negatively impacted by that as well, and that's important to recognize as well.

Rabbit, we've talked about this before. The ACA has cut bankruptcy filings significantly. https://www.consumerreports.org/personal-bankruptcy/how-the-aca-drove-down-personal-bankruptcy/ There were certainly times that hospitals - like everyone else - writes off debt, but I can attest, as a bankruptcy attorney on both sides of the aisle (creditor and debtor) - and as a former collection attorney for hospitals - that hospitals don't just write off debt because. So, Rabbit, on that issue, your experiences absolutely do not match up to my professional experiences.

This hurts smaller, craft brewers way more than it hurts the big guys. Most of the small shops can their product, and their margins are pretty thin on the liquor store shelf. Alcohol may not be a monopoly, but the increase in the price of raw materials hurts the smaller guys a lot more than the big guys. Source: friends who own breweries.

Why would you exclude lives taken by suicide from the equation? Some good stats on firearms and suicides in the linked article below. Pay particular attention to the drop in suicides in the Israeli military after the army stopped letting soldiers bring their firearms home on weekends... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/upshot/gun-deaths-are-mostly-suicides.html

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ Apr 13, 2018 -> 12:46 PM) It was a check on Congress who could pass unfair/dangerous laws and the judiciary that had to enforce those laws. But when it's used to pardon friends, yes, it's an abusive/dangerous power. The White House statement is the absolute worst. “I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a statement, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tru...m=.b3172571fd60 Good thing the President doesn't know anything about the guy he just pardoned...

QUOTE (raBBit @ Apr 10, 2018 -> 04:31 PM) I am CPA. I know the basics about bankruptcy and inflation and time value of money. That's not really that important to my argument though. The supply and demand is skewed and colleges can and have charged whatever they want. Imagine how many cars Tesla could sell if 18-year-olds could get one now and don't have to think about the loans until they're 22. Tesla could ratchet up their prices and still sell way more. Also, you say loans are necessary. How many loans did your father have? What does that While I, generally, agree that most 18 year olds are dumb - particularly about the long term impact of borrowing money (I certainly was - and I was still dumb at 22 when I was taking out law school loans), here's my response... 1) Tesla cars aren't a prerequisite to getting jobs, so it's apples and oranges. 2) If Tesla had that program, and 18 year olds made bad decisions, they could ultimately get rid of the debt (and, of course, the car) in a bankruptcy filing. So once again, apples to oranges. 3) My dad was fortunate enough to not need loans to get his degree. But here's CNBC with inflation adjusted tuition numbers over the last 30 years. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-co...88-to-2018.html - per the numbers in the article, we see a big jump in '07-'08. 4) According to this article, the direct loan program began in 1992. https://lendedu.com/blog/history-of-student-loans Here's my point. College is a barrier to entry to a lot of jobs. If college is only something that the wealthy can afford, that just creates a greater wealth disparity in this country. Most entry level jobs out of college pay, well, not a lot. Student loan debt is a massive problem. That cuts two ways - (1) how do we make tuition affordable without making college a luxury (or conversely, how do we shift the market back to creating a large labor pool for those without college degrees); and (2) how do we provide opportunities for people to get out of debt. I'm not saying that availability of loans ISN'T a factor in tuition increases, but I don't think it is as critical of a factor as you propose. Particularly at state schools, the reduction in funding from the state plays a larger role than availability of loans. And even if availability of loans was the major factor, you have to balance that against access to college regardless of income level...

QUOTE (Whitesoxin2019 @ Apr 10, 2018 -> 03:43 PM) I don't think the Amazon mess is personal. Amazon is becoming too much of a big fish (with unlimited automation potential) that is taking advantage of the USPS and taxpayer money. If this continues amazon will have 90% marketshare, almost all their product from foreign countries and not enough jobs to match the market share. Care to show me the instances where President Trump has attacked Walmart? Also, you are, of course, aware that the services the USPS provides Amazon are profitable, no?

QUOTE (Whitesoxin2019 @ Apr 10, 2018 -> 03:40 PM) Debunk anything I linked. Everything I linked he is responsible for. That's why I linked it. The links are well organized for your bookmarking and viewing pleasure. It was my honor to provide this community with a little bit of numbers. There's... not much analysis there. Just pulling out an example - the tariffs - and the retaliation from China on pork and soybeans sent futures for both spiraling, hurting loads of farmers around the country. But that doesn't show up in your post or your links. There's just a link that says the steel tariffs happened - and that article, for the record, contains plenty of criticism of the tariffs...

QUOTE (raBBit @ Apr 10, 2018 -> 02:45 PM) There is no free market at play here. This is pretty simple supply and demand. The government is subsidizing the costs of education that keep increasing while the value of the degrees are decreasing. As a result, you have is people graduating with mortgages with few job prospects. When my father was in college, his parents didn't have any money but he was able to pay for it by selling shoes on the weekends and in the summers. Why has the price quadrupled since then? Now the government just lets the students graduate with a boatload of debt regardless of whether their degree has any utility whatsoever. The government is making billions a year on their student loans. Academics are feeding lies that college is empowerment and every one should go but it is bulls***. College isn't worth the cost anymore unless you go to school for something that has future job prospects. Leaving aside the fact that some of the increase in education costs is just inflation (ie, my dad's tuition at U of I in the 1960s was less than $1,000, but so were some cars). IMO, government loans aren't the issue. Government loans are necessary to allow people whose parents are at any and all levels of income to go to college. We talk about upward mobility as a society... well, it's a lot easier to do that with a degree. College should not only be available to those whose families can afford it. Until the last decade, state funding for colleges, at a minimum, kept in state tuition affordable. That funding dried up, and the cost of education has risen dramatically at state schools, for in state tuition. But, as to loans, government is subsidizing ALL student loans. Just not in the way that you are discussing. Student loan debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. That means that if you leave college with $65k in debt, and you can never earn enough to cover the loans, they can't ever go away (there are some federal programs that were put in place in recent years that create exceptions to those rules, but I'm not here to talk about the exceptions). There are very few other debts that receive the same treatment - certain IRS tax debt, and child support are the main ones. Simply put, Congress, through the Bankruptcy Code, made it impossible for people to shed student loan debt. How would I fix that? Make it subject to discharge in a bankruptcy after 10 years. It's a long enough timeframe to discourage a large swath of people from trying to game the system (ie, take out loans and file for bankruptcy immediately after graduation). This both allows the government to continue to get banks to fund student loans because they have decent prospects for repayment on the debt, and it eliminates the segment of college graduates who have no hope of ever getting out of debt. (ends rant)

QUOTE (raBBit @ Apr 10, 2018 -> 12:19 PM) Why has the price of college skyrocketed? That is really the important question. It's because of government intervention. We have government guaranteed loans. It completely skews the supply and demand. If colleges know regardless of what they charge people will go there they can charge whatever they want. That is why tuition increases annually at more than twice the rate of inflation. That is why people are able to get 100k+ in student loans with a social work degree. Plus, our society is acting as if everyone needs to go to college to be "successful." It's totally flawed rhetoric with harmful consequences. The number of people I knew that went to college just because their parents wanted them too or because they didn't want to be judged by their peers is incredible. Don't let the government empower academia to charge whatever they want. Don't let people get loans that will ruin their lives. Don't act like college is the only way to go. Only then could they start to make a dent in that issue. Balta jumped on this, but I'll chime in as well. Student loans have been around for a long time. The cost of law school at the University of Illinois (where I got my law degree) jumped exponentially after I graduated. Can you point to a policy in the last decade that would have led to the cost of education at a state school jumping as much as it has at Illinois, I'd be glad to hear it. As to the point on the value of a college degree, it's a lot harder to find an entry level job without a college degree than it is with one. This chart shows unemployment rates by education levels. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/unemploym...anuary-2017.htm Note that the chart does not get into the disparity in earning power associated with a degree versus without.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Apr 10, 2018 -> 12:25 PM) I didn't say that was a nuanced idea. I said the generalizations about the poor and rich deserve more nuance. Most educated people know how much they make and how much they take and can deduce whether they put more in or take more out. But you made a statement that was a generalization, and completely without nuance. As to the second sentence, disagree. That analysis doesn't account for use of public goods. For example, I make a decent living, but I probably "take" more than I "put in." Why? I use roads. I use parks (both state and national). I use bike lanes and paths. I fly places and use airports and the infrastructure that comes with that. I "take" more than I "put in" because it's not a simple calculation on my balance sheet.