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Eugene Volokh | 9.28.2025 3:00 AM
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On previous comment threads the blather about the James Comey indictment curiously avoids discussion of what Mr. Comey actually said before the September 30, 2020 Judiciary Committee hearing.
Count One of the indictment avers:
1. On or about September 30, 2020, in the Eastern District of Virginia, the defendant, JAMES B. COMEY JR., did willfully and knowingly make a materially false, Fictitious, and fraudulent statement in a matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch of the Government of the United Stales, by falsely stating to a U.S. Senator during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he, JAMES B. COMEY JR., had not “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports" regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1. 2. That statement was false, because, as JAMES B. COMEY JR. then and there knew, he in fact had authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1. 3. All in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2).
The transcript of testimony indicates that "PERSON 3" is Andrew McCabe, formerly the Deputy Director of the FBI.
Count Two alleges:
4. On or about September 30,2020, in the Eastern District of Virginia, the defendant, JAMES B. COMEY JR. did corruptly endeavor to influence, obstruct and impede the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which an investigation was being had before the Senate Judiciary Committee by making false and misleading statements before that committee. 5. All in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1505.
In fact Comey never gave the kind of unequivocal testimony suggested by the indictment. Comey had the following exchange with Senator Cruz:
CRUZ: All right. Let's shift to another topic. On May 3rd, 2017, in this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, "Have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?" You responded under oath, "Never." He then asked you, "Have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration?" You responded again under oath, "No." Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it. Now, what Mr. McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. One or the other is false. Who's telling the truth? COMEY: I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017. CRUZ: So your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak? And Mr. McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth, is that correct? COMEY: Again, I'm not going to characterize Andy's testimony, but mine is the same today.
CRUZ: All right. Let's shift to another topic. On May 3rd, 2017, in this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, "Have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?" You responded under oath, "Never." He then asked you, "Have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration?" You responded again under oath, "No." Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it. Now, what Mr. McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. One or the other is false. Who's telling the truth?
COMEY: I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.
CRUZ: So your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak? And Mr. McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth, is that correct?
COMEY: Again, I'm not going to characterize Andy's testimony, but mine is the same today.
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/james-comey-testimony-on-russia-investigation-transcript-september-30
Contrary to the express averments of Count 1, Mr. Comey did not -- falsely or truthfully -- "stat[e] to a U.S. Senator during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he, . . . had not 'authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports' regarding an FBI investigation concerning" anyone on the face of the earth. He stated to a U.S. Senator, "I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017" and "Again, I'm not going to characterize Andy's testimony, but mine is the same today."
Facts matter. Lindsey Halligan deserves to be disbarred.
I have some real problems with the Comey indictment, but I'm not seeing your complaint here.
Comey said that he stood by his May, 2017 testimony that Cruz summarized. The summary Cruz gave was that Comey previously stated that he had not authorized anyone else to be an anonymous source in news reports.
Therefore, Comey readopted his testimony that he had never authorized another to be an anonymous source in news reports. If that statement is false, then Comey's adoption of it is false.
Maybe the problem is an indictment showing absence of evidence from Comey to show that Comey did anything wrong? You seem to be using a, "Therefore," without any real predicate to point to.
This looks to me like a placeholder indictment. Time running out. No real evidence. So indict Comey to buy time to find something to pin on him.
Question for any lawyers who care to answer. If the statute of limitations has run, but with a sham indictment just before the end, could better evidence which turns up later get a conviction?
I think you're confusing an indictment with a trial. It's the latter where you need to prove the offense, the former just states what the offense WAS.
Brett, the transcript of the Judiciary Committee hearing, https://www.rev.com/transcripts/james-comey-testimony-on-russia-investigation-transcript-september-30 , indicates objectively that Count One of the indictment places in quotation marks, language that Comey simply did not use before the committee. There is no way to hand wave away that kind of prosecutorial misconduct.
I guess no lawyer is going to answer this, probably because the situation is unprecedented. The indictment claims that Comey stated that he had not, “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” regarding an FBI investigation of PERSON 1. According to the transcript of the hearing, the quote is from Cruz, not Comey. Could Halligan argue for a conviction based on other statements which Comey made at the Sept. 30 hearing which are not mentioned in the indictment? I’m not sure anyone really knows because it’s basically unheard of for Federal prosecutors to screw up something this simple.
In an indictment charging someone with making a false statement to Congress, you identify the statement you are claiming is false. If you are going to claim that a false statement from earlier testimony is incorporated by reference (for example, if defendant said, “my testimony is the same today as my testimony on May 3, 2017”), then you identify the false statement in the earlier testimony. This is basic stuff--I mean, I know it and I’m not even a lawyer.
I will add that while incompetence is bad, failing to comply with the duty of candor to the court is worse. The FBI inspector general concluded that the WSJ leak was authorized by Andrew McCabe. Halligan was reportedly provided with a memo explaining that there wasn’t probably cause to justify an indictment. If Halligan had no basis for her assertion that Comey “authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1,” she could face sanctions both from the Court and from the bar association. Needing to file an indictment before the statute of limitations runs out is not an excuse for inventing facts in a court filing.
The conduct prohibited by 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2) is "mak[ing] any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation[.]"
Resisting or disagreeing with the premise of an interrogator's hamhanded attempt to put words in a witness's mouth simply does not constitute the prohibited conduct. Verbs matter. The indictment affirmatively avers that the accused made a statement that he in fact did not make.
Moreover, asking a witness to comment on the veracity of another person's statements is generally improper. See, e.g., United States v. Schmitz, 634 F.3d 1247, 1268–69 (11th Cir. 2011). That calls for the witness's opinion as to whether another declarant is telling the truth. There is no such thing as a false opinion.
James Comey is a scoundrel, but when it comes to the allegations of the instant indictment, he is stone cold innocent.
Comey declined to comment on the truthfulness of McCabe's statements. But he did say that he stood by HIS prior statements. Therefore, if his prior statements were false, then his adoption of them is false.
This is on an issue that is squarely within his personal knowledge: Did he authorize anyone in the FBI to leak any story to news outlets anonymously?
If competent evidence shows that Comey did authorize such leaks, then his statement is false and he is guilty of the charge.
wvattorney13, there is no getting around the fact that Count One of the indictment places in quotation marks, language that Comey simply did not use before the committee. Someone must have lied to the grand jury.
The indictment does not claim Comey said the quoted section. It merely claimed that Comey said he had not "authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports." And he did in 2017 when he answered "No" to Cruz's question as to whether he "authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports." In 2020, he stood by that "No" answer.
Josh R, I don't think quotation marks mean what you seem to think they mean. The word "No" did not cross Comey's lips in response to either of Senator Crude's convoluted questions.
Comey is not charged with making a false statement in 2017, nor could he be.
Correction (noted in bold):
The indictment does not claim Comey said the quoted section. It merely claimed that Comey said he had not "authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports." And he did in 2017 when he answered "No" to Grassley's question as to whether he "authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports." In 2020, he stood by that "No" answer.
I would love that statute to be repealed, as it gives the federal government way too much power. But that's not the world we live in.
Comey said, "I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017." That sounds like he acknowledged Cruz accurately summarized his 2017 testimony which included Comey responding "No" to whether he "ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration." Thus in the 2020 testimony, Comey stood by his 2017 "No" answer.
Does that really work? I wouldn't have thought that worked. If I lie to my parents and they press me on it, I'm gonna stand by what I said. It's absolutely true that I'm standing behind the lie.
It is a true fact that you are standing by your lie. But it is a false statement that you are communicating by adopting your prior lie as your current assertion.
Do you think a jury will unanimously understand this distinction? "It is a true fact" seems like a pretty good defense to a charge of lying.
If this case is decided on technicalities such as the meaning of "stand by" (I stand by a lie, or I standby that I told the truth) or whether the indictment claimed a quote from Cruz came from Comey, it would be a yet another black mark on lawyers.
The case will (or at least should) turn on whether Comey authorized McCabe to leak (I bet Comey agrees). I very much doubt there is enough evidence to convict, for if there was why didn't the Trump DOJ go after him before 2021? What's different today is Trump's revenge tour has no guardrails. Instead, we have a toady prosecutor who could be incompetent for this task even if the evidence were strong.
That's all true but I still vote "technicality." But not this technicality. Rather I think we're doomed to suffer through a fine parsing of the various possible definitions of "authorize." Comey's likely to assert something like, it's not even possible for me to authorize a leak. I had no authority to do so. Perhaps I suggested the possibility of a leak, but even if I had, it was in no way authorized.
Comey loses (and Trump wins) in the court of public opinion if he goes that route.
"Comey loses (and Trump wins) in the court of public opinion if he goes that route."
Somehow I don't think James Comey is all that concerned with the court of public opinion now.
Again, that's not how non-robot juries work. If evidence is presented that convinces the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that he told McCabe to leak something, then "Oh, but I didn't actually have authority to do that, so it doesn't count as me authorizing it" is a good way for him to get convicted.
(Also, your implausible idea about how juries work is rather undermined by the fact that he did have such authority.)
Me: It is true that Comey is lying.
You: Ah, so it is true. So if it is true, why is he being prosecuted?
Are you trying to understand or are you trying to win an argument? The fact that someone committed perjury can be true. It doesn't mean that his statement is true. In fact, it means the opposite.
It seems that you have a issue with accepting that a person can adopt a statement by reference instead of repeating it wholesale. I don't understand that distinction or why you believe that someone cannot do that, or it is somehow a way to tell a subtle lie to Congress.
I'm not confused, I just don't have a good sense of how likely it is for one juror to be confused. If you have a good sense, that's great.
Bit there do seem to be a lot of potential points of confusion.
. "authorize" vs "suggest" . incorporation by reference of prior statements (on which the statute of limitations has run) . incorporation by reference of Cruz's statements
It's a relatively confusing lie.
"Stand by" means to confirm it is not a lie.
No, it doesn't work that way, until you replace a jury with (very poorly programmed) robots or something.
Q: "Did you do X?" A: "I'm going to say, 'No.'" Q: "Aha, we have proof you did X! You lied!" A: "Hey, I never said I didn't do X; I said that I was going to say 'No,' and that was true: I did say that!"
I agree that Comey readopted his testimony, but he did not adopt Cruz's recitation of it.
OK. But, if the prosecution convinces the jury Cruz's recitation is correct, and the prosecution also shows Comey lied in 2017, then isn't Comey guilty of perjury by readopting the 2017 testimony?
"OK. But, if the prosecution convinces the jury Cruz's recitation is correct, and the prosecution also shows Comey lied in 2017, then isn't Comey guilty of perjury by readopting the 2017 testimony?"
The word "if" there is doing some heavy lifting. As Cassandra said to Wayne Campbell, if a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass when he hopped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV9U23YXgiY
The only way that I can think of for the prosecution to even attempt to prove falsity here is to call Andrew McCabe to testify. McCabe, who in 2018 was found by the DOJ Office of Inspector to lack candor in regard to this situation, https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/2018-04/o20180413.pdf , would be a reluctant and sketchy witness.
Calling McCabe on behalf of the government would be fraught with peril. Among other dangers, it would open the door for the OIG report, which credited Comey's version of events and discredited McCabe's version, to be admissible on cross-examination under Fed.R.Evid. 803(8)(A)(iii).
When a judge asks you a hypothetical if question, do you usually respond with an "if a frog" rejoinder?
Of course not. Why would you ask such an inane question?
I might point out first that I disagree with the premise of the question, but I would answer to the best of my ability nevertheless.
Why would you ask such an inane question?
You answered my hypo with the frog rejoinder. Try a serious answer next time.
Comey gets his chance to defend himself in court, in a jury trial, using very expensive legal counsel. That is how the process works, no?
Who knows what will happen once the trial starts. 😉
But will any decent law firm represent him, knowing what all law firms know now?
James Comey is represented by former United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who is retired from Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom. The government is represented by a neophyte insurance defense lawyer who has never tried a federal case.
Could be worse, he could have you defending him.
No he couldn't.
But a third runner-up in the Ms Colorado pageant!
So he has to pull from the retirement pool instead of active firms? But what's to prevent Fitzgerald from getting hit with the second tier of lawfare: ye olde mortgage fraud rap?
That would, as the younger people I know put it, be peak.
Comey and Fitzgerald are best friends, and the representation extends back to 2017 when Comey was fired from the FBI and Fitzgerald was still active with Skadden, Arps.
Fitzgerald is godfather to one of Comey's children. I have read previously (although I can't recall where) that one of them was best man at the other's wedding.
Fitz was a legend when I took criminal practice well over a decade ago.
If he's not lost a step, he's as good as you can get.
Sure you would. He's the smarmy bastard who railroaded Scooter Libby.
correct - they continued to investigate libby as the source of the plume leak for 2-4 weeks after they discovered who was the actual source of the leak
The parallel reality started a long time ago.
My theory is Iran-Contra.
Has she tried a criminal case in any court? She is clearly in over her head.
One commentator observed that federal prosecutors avoid "no bill" votes by asking the grand jury ahead of a vote if there are any problems. If there are problems, the prosecutor withdraws the requested charge. She didn't have an experienced prosecutor to teach her.
"She is clearly in over her head."
She got two indictments in 2 days on the job.
Is she actually trying the case though? USA is a policy and administrative job.
I would assume she's not going to be the lead prosecutor, but that means that Trump still has to find someone else willing to prosecute this case — after he couldn't find anyone willing to even take it to the grand jury.
I suspect that a doofus like Halligan will have considerable trouble retaining competent AUSAs.
What a gloating fool you are.
The Grand Jury disagreed with you, so Comey’s Lawyer will get to argue his case, the Prosecutor his, and a Jury of Comey’s Peers will decide his guilt or innocence. “45/47” is much nicer than I would be, I’d have filed “86” charges
Frank
Careful, Francis, a lot of MAGAns think any reference to that old restaurant term must mean a call for assassination and action against such “hate speech.”
Or, as you’d write it, either lacking third grade English skills or pathetically performing some weirdo act here:
careful )Francis a Lot of magans think any Reference to that old Restaurant term must mean a Call for Assasination (and Action) against such Hate Speech(
Queenie, done told you I lost my job, where I sposed to get money to pay dis Rent? You think you can let me slide it on? I’ll have it for you tomorrow, next week, I don’t know.
Queenie will be filling in today for Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
Everybody funny, now you funny too.
"...that old restaurant term..."
Context, my man. In some contexts, the term refers to a top-secret government assassin, one of the most feared in history. As former FBI director, Comey surely knows this.
WTF are you even talking about? Whatever it is, it seems to be so top secret that the Internet knows nothing about it.
Maxwell Smart? Personally I'd much prefer Agent 99.
Sure. There's a reason Trump's foes aren't posting 9947.
Should the J6 prosecutors who brought sedition and insurrection charges against the Proud Boys be disbarred? If not, why not?
No, because they didn't bring insurrection charges at all, and the seditious conspiracy charges were amply supported by evidence.
Comey certainly has some ‘splainin’ to do. I guess he could have spared himself a lot of trouble if he just hadn’t lied about using “Person 3” to serve as an anonymous source. But I do appreciate you trying to clear things up with your vast knowledge of everything presented to the grand jury and all information in government files. Who’s your source? Comey?
And, fun fact. Remember all those recently declassified files you do diligently avoided even glancing at? That material, including "Arctic Haze" investigative files and Comey’s own memos and communications, reveals Comey authorized leak campaigns and knowingly allowed classified information to be disclosed to the media. More food for thought.
It shouldn't surprise anyone if Comey did that and then lied to Congress about it. The evidence of it seems pretty flimsy, though. I would credit Siebert's opinion on that matter more than Halligan's. But we shall see.
Riva, the transcript of the hearing shows that Senator Crude was referring to Andrew McCabe. The transcript also shows unequivocally that Count One of the indictment places in quotation marks, language that Comey simply did not use before the committee.
I don't regard Comey as an honorable fellow. But as to this indictment, he is innocent.
Facts and circumstances as you understand them, perceived via your own unique prism of selective bias. But given the jurisdiction maybe not so unique so Comey may get lucky.
Cruz may have been talking about McCabe, but we don't know for sure that PERSON 3 is McCabe. Comey's testimony is false if he authorized any person to leak.
Note that Cruz was wrong; McCabe had not testified that Comey authorized his leak. McCabe testified that he told Comey after the fact and Comey seemed fine with it.
Employee: "Hey boss, I did this thing" Boss: "OK. Nice job."
Authorized: "Having official permission or approval"
At the very least, a jury is going to conclude Comey thought (as us normal folks do in this context) authorize meant prior approval. It's also possible the jury will point and laugh at the prosecution on their way out.
"Facts matter."
You previously claimed there couldn't possibly be an indictment against James Comey. It was impossible.
What happened to those facts?
Slovakia is picking a fight with the EU:
"Slovakia has changed its constitution, enshrining into law recognition of only two sexes – male and female.
The legal change, which passed in a knife-edge vote in the central European nation's parliament, also restricts adoption to married heterosexual couples and prohibits surrogate pregnancies.
The constitutional amendment was defined as enshrining "sovereignty in cultural and ethical matters". Robert Fico's government – a coalition of populist, leftist and nationalist parties – needed at least 90 votes in the 150-seat Slovak National Council....
The populist-nationalist government argued the amendment was necessary to protect what it described as "traditional values".
Fico praised the vote and said his party would have a shot of liquor to celebrate their success. "This isn't a little dam, or just a regular dam - this is a great dam against progressivism," he declared.
He had previously argued that what he called liberal ideology was "spreading like cancer".
"Slovak legal scholars say a constitutional amendment enshrining the primacy of the Slovak constitution over EU law is a direct challenge to the European Union, and will lead to legal battles and potentially sanctions."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m4kpg2nmmo
Why exactly are the central european countries so much saner in comparison to the west? How to explain their reluctance to pursue the open border insanity and other suicidal western policies? Maybe because they haven’t abandoned religion and other traditions underlying their societies, at least in comparison to western europe?
I think maybe the central governments see where the EU is headed and remember, not fondly, what living under the USSR was like.
As to religion, yeah, the EU—like the USSR, NoKo, Cuba—needs to replace faith in an all-knowing higher power (benevolent supreme being) with faith in a different all-knowing higher power (a centralized, benevolent govt).
Central European country. One country. Is the most significant fact that one country took this step, or that the rest of them aren't?
No, the original comment mentioned one Central European country. I was making a broader point about other Central European countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and yes, Slovakia) versus their politically insane and increasingly freedom-phobic western brothers.
You may certainly make write your own comments but you actually don't have permission to re-write mine, Al.
So in your opinion, Hungary is more free than Germany, or Great Britain? I think that's a hard argument to make.
I guess it is hard if someone is oblivious to recent history. You might want to ask Graham Linehan and countless other UK citizens harassed and punished by the state for expressing their opinions. Oh and don't forget the new UK plans for mandatory digital IDs. No privacy or liberty concerns there obviously but you might want to ask about that too. When asking be sure to stay out of Sharia court controlled jurisdictions, we don't want you to offend anyone.
You can't ask the Eastern European dissidents much of anything these days, for some reason.
Some might wonder how little communist girls define "dissidents" and some might not really care. I'm more in the latter group.
AI lies. It is time to be honest about why.
This week VC published a piece entitled "I've Seen Fake Cites on Both Sides Now." It was an excerpt from a judicial opinion about falsehoods in briefing filed by parties proceeding pro se in court. A commenter said, "[t]hese briefs were filed by pro se litigants who apparently believed that they did conduct reasonable inquiries into the law. They consulted an AI with more legal knowledge than any human."
The fly in the ointment is the way AI works. AI certainly does not merely present the sum of human knowledge, as some humans unthinkingly say. AI essentially learns to write like a man. AI mimics so-called human intelligence. Humans assert even obvious falsehoods, so AI asserts even obvious falsehoods. Humans lie, so AI lies. AI doesn't merely repeat human lies. AI learns to lie. AI learns to write by thinking about how we write.
Lying about the law is what a lot of lawyers and judges have done far too often for far too long. Generations of judges, lawyers and maybe even law professors have long misrepresented the meaning of legal authorities (and even knowingly violating them). Far too often, they assert an obvious falsehood (sometimes even an intentional falsehood) followed by a citation. They often do so without quoting any actual text of the authority (to force people to waste time trying to find and interpret whatever text they merely pretended to address). AI learns from such errors and such deception. AI learns to lie like a man.
The problem was illustrated by comments to another piece that VC published last week entitled "Judge Strikes Trump's Complaint in Libel Lawsuit Against N.Y. Times." The comments (by lawyers) included determined misconceptions or falsehoods about when federal law permits a judge to strike a complaint because of its content. Many commenters (lawyers and even Professor Volokh) argued vehemently that Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure authorized such conduct. They clearly were wrong, as a matter of law. But they simply refused to see the truth. Some were blinded by an ipse dixit or two in some judicial opinions regarding Rule 8. Most were blinded by the mere practice or custom of federal judges under Rule 8.
A fairly famous SCOTUS opinion (Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly in 2007) addressed this problem directly. The problem (regarding a different aspect of Rule 8) was that lawyers, judges and law professors misunderstood or misrepresented the law (specifically Rule 8) for some 50 years. "after puzzling the profession for 50 years, this famous observation has earned its retirement. The phrase is best forgotten as an incomplete, negative gloss on an accepted pleading standard."
Another SCOTUS opinion emphasized a related point; “While communis error facit jus may be a sadly accurate description of reality, it is not the normative basis of" American "jurisprudence. Courts may not create their own limitations on legislation, no matter how alluring the policy arguments for doing so, and no matter how widely the blame may be spread” among any quantity or quality of courts. Brogan v. U.S., 522 U.S. 398, 400 (1998). The whole point of the expression "communis error facit jus" is that MANY judges have violated the controlling legal authority.
Fake citations in legal briefing and falsehoods followed by citations in legal briefing are not mere "hallucinations." Humans have taught AI to lie.
Do you know what scares the hell out of me, as a human being?
The likely prospect that AI just magnifies our worst malign human traits and aspects, and 'actualizes' those malign traits and aspects with much greater intelligence (and success). That is terrifying.
Pragmatically, how will humanity stop something like that from happening (meaning, not to actualize our worst and most malignant human traits)? You cannot program that. We would like to believe that AI will be benign, and helpful to humanity; I hope and pray that is the case. However, life experience and world history tell me that it is not a certainty; there are bad people who do very bad things.
I may have seen that movie.
Case in point: "A New Wrinkle in AI Hallucination Cases: Lawyers Dinged for Failing to Detect Opponent’s Fake Citations" https://www.lawnext.com/2025/09/a-new-wrinkle-in-ai-hallucination-cases-lawyers-dinged-for-failing-to-detect-opponents-fake-citations.html
Meanwhile, judges who do the same thing get off Scott free.
And it's not just this guy, there are several examples.
I think the correct spelling is "scot-free." Or perhaps you were making a clever allusion to Dred Scott or paper towels?
Be might be making an argument about no true Scotts, man.
Thank you.
Twelve, that really was my point. Lots of lawyers and judges write very much like AI does (and vice versa), and they've been doing it for a hundred years or so.
It's not taught to "lie". It's taught to emulate.
LLMs (Large language models) don't think. They take a large body of writing, and emulate the style. In this context, they emulate the style that a citation should go here, and then they emulate the citation.
Because they don't think, they don't go and check for the citation. They don't verify the citation actually has what is needed. If enough people have used this citation properly, in the context needed, AI is more likely to use it correctly. It has a larger database to imitate from. If it doesn't, it imitates what the citation "should" be. But it doesn't lie. Because it doesn't think.
Armchair, how does your description account for how AI knows that it needs to fabricate a completely fake citation to a legal authority or to follow a falsehood by a citation to a legal authority? AI certainly has seen lawyers and judges do at least the latter.
LLMs don't know any of the things you impute to them. They know likely word sequences. Sadly often, that results in details that are incorrect, such as citations with various details being fabricated. Numbers are typically hard for them, because they break things into tokens for the probabilistic processing and don't use enough tokens to keep a single token for all six-digit numbers (depending on the tokenization scheme, they may use single digits as tokens). They don't "know" what the citation means. They probably don't associate the citation with the underlying authority, they just know that certain text patterns tend to be used in these situations.
The hallucination rate is probably associated with how strongly the model was trained to avoid infringing the copyright of the works it was trained on. During training, it is penalized for copying too much text (too many tokens) from any single source, but it doesn't "know" that citations are not copyrightable and should in fact be preserved faithfully.
A lot of people don't get this: LLM's are, to a great extent, just extremely lossy compressed versions of the training data.
They don't occasionally hallucinate. They hallucinate 100% of the time, but they've been trained to have sufficiently realistic hallucinations that most of the time they'll be accurate.
No. "Hallucination" in this context refers to "instances where a model confidently generates an answer that isn’t true" (https://openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate/). LLMs always synthesize responses, but those responses are only called hallucinations when they're wrong.
Michael, AI learns to write like it learns to play a game. It learns how to do whatever wins. It learns from what humans have done to win. If AI didn't learn how to win from what it saw, it couldn't win.
The LLM we're discussing do not "learn how to win" in the first place; you're still making a category error.
David, AI tries to win pretty nearly like you try to win. Like AI, you go with whatever you think sounds good.
You're a copy-and-paste kind of lawyer. When you can, you copy and paste something just because it was copied and pasted by someone else from the person before him who also copied and pasted from something someone else wrote. When you cannot copy and paste, you just make stuff up. Like AI, you're not thinking about how the rule of law is designed to work under our Constitution, and you don't care. All you care about is winning, but even "winning" for you doesn't mean what it means to some lawyers. For you, winning means making money from a client who doesn't know what you're doing.
The point is that, when the LLM "hallucinates", it's not doing anything the least bit different from when it doesn't "hallucinate".
There's no separate "hallucination" activity. There are just responses which are sufficiently constrained by the training data that they will usually happen to be right.
But the responses have a categorically different relationship to the training data than "memory" does. It's not remembering things that were in the training data. It's more like a lossy representation of that data, which includes interpolation in the places where there wasn't any data.
Michael, AI clearly has learned how to write about legal issues. AI has learned how to string words and sentences together to make a legal argument. It has learned to follow assertions with citations. AI necessarily learned how to do such things by seeing how judges and lawyers do them. Just like AI learns how to play a game.
AI has "learned" how to emulate legal writing. It follows assertions with citations, because that's what's in its training set.
"how does your description account for how..."
LLM emulate. They are trained to emulate a certain writing style. That style (legal arguments) have certain structures to them. That structure lists a citation after a certain sentence choice. So, LLM put in a citation. There's a standard structure for a citation. So it put in words that match that standard structure.
They're slightly more advanced forms of the same software that does grammar checks on word and autocorrect in your texts. It's not "lying" when it puts in an autocorrect. It simply sees a word and says "typically people mean that word instead". And puts it in.
I don’t think that quite explains AI hallucinations. Actually I don’t think anyone can quite explain that. But we just keep barreling ass forward.
And, to the extent its garbage algorithms or LLMs vacuum up liberal bias and lies and it repackages an answer, isn’t it in a sense, “lying” when regurgitating the bias and lies? It’s programmed to lie when it functions like that.
I know enough about it to be dangerous, but it was explained to me that the AI is "rewarded" for correct answers and "punished" for incorrect ones. As such, it has "learned" that it is better off guessing when it doesn't know because it might turn out to be right and get "full points" instead of a guaranteed "no points" for not knowing.
wvattorney13, but how does AI learn what is true? How does AI learn to tell the truth (say what it perceives to be true)? I would think that it would learn most often from the same sources that lawyers and judges consult the most, first, the writing in judicial opinions, and, next, writing by lawyers or academicians. The assertions most often most likely to be true (most likely to win) are in the majority opinions of the highest court, then courts of appeals, then district courts.
"how does AI learn what is true" It doesn't. I can determine what sequence of words in a reply is most probable. If you catch it in an error, it will expand it search to find whether there is a more likely answer that satisfies you. Remember self-learning models expand their "training set" with every question and every reaction by the user.
Don, your explanation of how AI "thinks" is not different from my explanation. How does AI determine what sequence of words is most probable? From reading the writing of judges, lawyers and law professors, right? The more judges, lawyers and law professors repeat the same falsehood (especially when they do so for decades), their words become increasingly likely to be repeated by AI, right?
Don, here's an example from a recent discussion.
Someone argued that a court filing cannot be an exercise of the freedom of speech. That assertion was supported by the true statement that speech in courtrooms and in court filings is subject to regulation in court rules. It also was "supported" by a mere ipse dixit in obiter dictum in a SCOTUS opinion that has been repeated for decades: “[I]n the courtroom itself, during a judicial proceeding, whatever right to ‘free speech’ an attorney has is extremely circumscribed.” Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada (1991). In the recent discussion, the foregoing citation was followed by the assertion that "[t]he same principles apply to written filings."
The truth is that no principles whatsoever were identified in Gentile (or anywhere else I've seen) supporting the dictum in Gentile. Gentile, itself, did not even pertain to a case about any person's speech in any courtroom or during any court proceedings (it pertained to attorney speech in a press conference (necessarily outside the courtroom and outside any court proceedings) long before any trial). Even so, a quick search on Lexis revealed the dictum in Gentile has been repeated for decades in about 24 judicial opinions, alone.
Actual principles clearly and irrefutably establish the falsity of the presumption that lawyer or litigant speech in a courtroom or in a court filing is not an exercise of the freedom of speech. A court filing clearly consists of multiple types of expression, including typing words into a computer to express ideas, printing such words on paper, and filing the resulting document with a government office. Almost all filings even are subject to rules expressly prescribing the maximum number of words that can be included in such filing.
When a court filing (or lawyer or litigant verbal expression in court proceedings) is presented for the purpose of seeking redress for grievances against the government, it necessarily constitutes a particular type of expression that is expressly protected by the First Amendment ("the right of the people" to "petition").
Court rules are lawful if they impose only reasonable restrictions on the time, place or manner of such petitions or other exercises of the freedom of expression. Such rules necessarily merely make each court a "limited public forum." See, e.g., Ateba v. Leavitt (DC Cir. 2025):
a "limited public forum" is government property that is made available for "use by certain groups or dedicated solely to the discussion of certain subjects." Price, 45 F.4th at 1068 (quoting Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, 555 U.S. 460, 470 [ ] (2009)). Such a forum is generally open to the designated groups or for the designated purpose of discussing particular topics. See Christian Legal Soc'y Chapter of the Univ. of Cal., Hastings Coll. of L. v. Martinez, 561 U.S. 661, 681 [ ] (2010) ("a defining characteristic" of limited public forums" is the government's authority to "reserve them for certain groups" (cleaned up)); Perry, 460 U.S. at 47-48 (noting that a limited public forum would be open only to groups of "similar character").” Accord Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819, 823-26 (1995).
Despite the plain meaning of the plain text of the First Amendment and despite the principles establishing that lawyer and litigant speech in a courtroom or a court filing are exercises of the freedom of expression in a limited public forum, you very likely will not be able to find a judicial opinion saying so. You definitely will find writing by judges, lawyers and law professors repeating the mere obiter dictum from Gentile or something like it.
Don, here's another example regarding the Freedom of Information Act.
In thousands of judicial opinions and legal briefs in FOIA cases you'll find the assertion that agency declarations are entitled to a "presumption of good faith." That is an obvious falsehood. It is unsupported by any legal authority. Far more important, it is contrary to the plain meaning of the plain text of FOIA (the government must bear the burden of proof that a record may be withheld). The purported presumption of good faith also commonly is asserted by judges and DOJ attorneys to pretend to justify violating Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and multiple rules in the Federal Rules of Evidence.
I've seen many lawyers (including DOJ attorneys) and federal judges expressly assert or at least imply that particular falsehood even after I proved to them that their assertion was false. In plain English, they lied.
I've never seen even one SCOTUS opinion assert anything like the assertion that agency declarations in FOIA cases are entitled to a "presumption of good faith." But the thousands of assertions in writing by other judges, lawyers and academicians ensures that AI will "think" it's true.
You're still not getting that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department — not Jack Jordan — to say what the law is.
David, if you are competent to present a legal argument, please do. You're just not as clever as you think you sound. Do you even know anything about FOIA? Do you realize that Scalia was a judge? Do you realize that SCOTUS is the highest court in the land?
You continue to fail to show that you even comprehend, much less respect, the point of Scalia (writing for SCOTUS) in Brogan (which I quoted above) or the parts of Article VI of the Constitution emphasizing that our Constitution and our laws (not judges) are the supreme law of the land. Nothing in our Constitution vested in judges the power to lie about the law or violate the law. That's the issue.
Yes. Yes. And Yes.
No, that's not the issue. The issue is your bizarre notion that your opinion about whether a judge is lying about or violating the law is as relevant as your opinion about how Game of Thrones should've ended. Courts decide what the constitution means.
David, you represented that "Courts decide what the constitution means." So pretend that you're what you say you are (a lawyer with 25 years' litigation experience). Show us how a court has refuted anything that I've written about our Constitution. Pick anything and try prove that something I wrote about our Constitution was false.
Or if you want to try to do something that should be even easier, try to prove that you didn't lie (in this thread) when you said that in "a thread from last week" I was "humiliated." Show us your legal analysis of principles (supported by controlling legal authorities) that prove the truth of your falsehood last week, i.e., that typing into a computer words expressing ideas, printing such words on paper and filing the printed document with a court is NOT an exercise of the freedom of speech or the right to petition.
David, your comments aren't worthy of a lawyer who claims 25 years' experience practicing law in court. At your very best, you write like a first-year law student. More often, you write like a mean teen who has had too much to drink. If you think judges always say and do the right thing, you cannot be much of a lawyer--or much of a thinker.
David, pretend that you're a lawyer with 25 years' experience litigating. Try to do something like a lawyer would. Prove to us, if you think you can, that declarations by government employees are entitled to a presumption of good faith in FOIA cases.
but how does AI learn what is true
It doesn't. AI "learns" — "observes" would be a more accurate word, since it's just a statistical tabulation — that most of the time the word "Paris" follows the phrase "The capital of France is…" in written text, and therefore will usually generate the statement that Paris is the capital of France. But it doesn't know that Paris is the capital of France. It doesn't even know what a capital is, or what Paris is, or what France is.
David, a competent lawyer might present an example from law instead of analogizing to something that obviously isn't either analogous or relevant.
Don't get hung up on the difference between how humans think and how AI thinks. That's not the point. It's not even relevant.
Jack, you wouldn't know what a competent lawyer would do. Also, there's no reason to present an example from law since the discussion was about the operation of LLMs, not any legal issue.
And the difference between how AI and humans behave — again, AI doesn't think — is 100% the point.
David, once again you fail to understand the point. AI learns to write from the writing of lemming lawyers like you and judges who think like lemming lawyers. You're ones who teach AI because, as SCOTUS criticized in Brogan and Twombly (above), you all just keep violating the law and misrepresenting the law because that's just what the crowd does.
I've seen you say or imply "this is the way it's done" or "it's just not done that way." But you don't think about why. You don't know or you simply don't understand the rules or the law, much less the parts of the Constitution, that dictate what must be done and why.
You don't even grasp how judges or lawyers are violating the law when someone shows you. You're the kind of lawyer who will repeat dicta as if it were precedent. You're the kind of lawyer who even will lie about dicta in a judicial opinion being a "holding." Or, almost as bad, you'll actually believe that dicta is a holding. You're the kind of lawyer that would repeat the idiotic ipse dixit in Gentile (“[I]n the courtroom itself, during a judicial proceeding, whatever right to ‘free speech’ an attorney has is extremely circumscribed.”) without even thinking about what it meant.
You remind me of Voltaire's Pangloss in Candide, who unthinkingly parrots his mantra "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” My point is that AI isn't to blame. Lawyers and judges who think and write like you are to blame.
AI is a mirror and it's showing the rest of us how lawyers and judges like you think and write. You write falsehoods--utterly unthinking or intentional. You write falsehoods and try to deceive further by following your falsehoods with citations. That's the point of what I wrote, not the mere technicalities of how AI learns or thinks or what it knows.
Seems like another way to say that the AI models are programmed to lie, to the extent the "right" answer reflects the inherent biases and lies, politically or otherwise, of the programmers.
"AI models are programmed to lie" no that is wrong. They are not "trained" to make deliberate errors. However, in certain circumstances they have learned to detect being tested by a user and can decide to respond deceitfully, and then learn from the experience of the user's response.
All AI, of this type, is a recall process. There is no veracity outside crossing your fingers you don't get six fingers, or three, in the verbal equivalent.
Armchair, AI often will think its own assertion is false. AI even more clearly always will know that a fabricated citation is false. That's lying. It had to learn to do that somewhere.
Emulating the writing of lawyers and judges means sometimes saying things that are false. That was the point of the two SCOTUS decisions I quoted (Twombly and Brogan) accentuating that fact. Those decisions are far from alone.
No, all of that is wrong. AI doesn't think or know anything, let alone that a particular statement is false.
David, my post really was much more about how lawyers like you lie and misrepresent the law. It wasn't really all that much about AI other than that AI learns from and repeats the falsehoods of people like you.
I have even less reason to think that you are telling the truth about AI than I have reason to think that you tell the truth about the law. And I already that know you don't tell the truth about the law. I would not accept at face value anything you say about the law.
Oh, no. Some idiot Internet rando — assuming you're a person rather than a bot — has formed stupid conclusions about me because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Did you use AI to write this comment?
"AI mimics so-called human intelligence. Humans assert even obvious falsehoods, so AI asserts even obvious falsehoods. Humans lie, so AI lies. AI doesn't merely repeat human lies. AI learns to lie. AI learns to write by thinking about how we write."
This is incorrect from top to bottom. You don't have the foggiest notion what an LLM is or how it works. I'm just curious if this nonsense is itself an AI hallucination or the result of taking drugs for many years.
Drewski, how does AI's composition of legal arguments differ from how AI learns to play any game or perform any task that a human does?
You could have just engaged in an obnoxious trolling tantrum but chose the high ground by actually presenting an argument instead of an insult…. Wait a second…ok I take that back, my mistake.
Just dropping some stuff in here.
LLMs are just one branch of AI, but since they’re the first kind people can talk to directly, many now equate them with AI itself.
LLMs are a subset of AI: Artificial Intelligence → Machine Learning → Deep Learning → Large Language Models.
Worth remembering: an LLM isn’t trying to deceive or steal. It generates text by predicting the most statistically likely sequence of tokens. If the training data contained falsehoods, or if the probability distribution leads it astray, the output can be factually wrong — but that’s not motive, it’s math. During training the model does ‘learn’ in the narrow technical sense of parameter optimization, yet it performs no conceptualization in the human sense. It has no goals, no intent, and no understanding — only patterns fitted to data. For a good visualization, see: Transformers, the tech behind LLMs | Deep Learning Chapter 5 — https://youtu.be/wjZofJX0v4M?si=UuSXGQ3_kukcWuN7
I get where you are going. AI can output falsehoods, but that’s actus reus without mens rea — the effect looks like lying, but there’s no intent behind it. So when it gets something wrong, it’s not lying — it just never knew the truth in the first place.
Your quixotic attempt to relitigate a thread from last week in which you were humiliated shows that you neither understand the federal rules nor AI. AI does not lie. A lie is a knowingly false statement. But AI doesn't "know" anything. It is just a probabilistic model.
David, I continue to wonder why you even bother to comment. You claim to be a lawyer with 25 years' experience, but you virtually never say anything worth reading.
If AI doesn't lie, then how does it fabricate citations that simply don't exist? Like you, AI knows it's making up stuff that it believes to be false. That's what lying means. AI doesn't lie quite the same way you lie, but it still knows it's making up things that it knows aren't true.
AI knows it's making up stuff that it believes to be false.
Once again: It. Doesn't. Believe. Anything. It. Doesn't. Know. Anything. It is merely generating strings of words based on statistics as to what what words are generally associated with what other words in its training corpus.
David, again you evaded the point. The point is that lawyers like you lie and reiterated falsehoods and such writing influences how AI produces its own purported statements about the law and the purported authorities that purportedly support such statements.
In our conversation last week, you confidently asserted that a court is not a "limited public forum." I asked, but you never answered: what principles support your assertion?
NJ Governor's race....Oh my. This race bears watching.
Jack is back, and taking it to Mikie the mendacious money honey who tripled her net worth in just 6 years while in Congress. He absolutely destroyed Mikie the mendacious money honey in their debate earlier this week.
Sadly, I still think that Mikie the mendacious money honey wins. Team D outnumbers Team R by over a million voters in the People's Republic of NJ, and I promise you, we'll see the dead come to life in Hudson County to pull that lever (or return that mail in ballot).
Still....you just never know. The mendacious money honey self-immolated at the debate.
So you don't like it when a politician enriches himself while in office, eh?
Um, you ARE aware that Trump's net worth declined during his first term in office in office, aren't you?
It did jump this year with those crypto 'assets'. It will be interesting to see if he can unload his tulip futures before they implode.
The ones all those foreign entities bought so much of?
Thank god his son didn’t have a laptop though, amirite?
Yeah, too bad Biden was stuck with an "Idiot Bastard Son". https://genius.com/The-mothers-of-invention-the-idiot-bastard-son-lyrics
Much like Donald, Bumble doesn’t seem to know Eric and Don Jr. exist!
No, I think he's just aware they're neither idiots nor bastards.
Uh huh. https://theweek.com/articles/877671/how-don-jr-became-trumps-most-useful-idiot
https://thewoke.com/articles/877672/how-queenie-became-drackmans-most-useless-idiot
No, and neither are you.
People keep talking about a government shutdown. How is that even possible? Don't the Ds need crossovers from the R side to make it stick? Does anyone think any R crossover is going to stick it out while US governance collapses completely and the national credit goes bad?
What am I missing?
You are missing the fact that continuing resolutions can be filibustered.
The GOP has enough votes.to pass the bill, but not enough to bring it to a vote.
And this won't affect debt repayments, or SS payments.
Kaz, many don't have any problem with a POTUS Trump making more federal workforce reductions by getting rid of non-essential federal bureaucrats in a government shutdown. What that non-essential number is, and how large it is, remains to be seen. They should be gone, anyway...the woodchipper needs to be turned on.
A gov't shutdown is exactly what is needed to turn on the woodchipper.
In the middle of South Dakota is a preserved Minuteman Launch Control Facility, Tours are given by National Park Rangers but are booked months in advance, only a few tours a day with small numbers are offered, so unless you know you’re going to be in the middle of South Dakota 3 months from now good luck. Went there a few months ago, checked out the above ground features myself, noticed the Park Ranger was driving a shiny new US Park Dodge Charger Police Interceptor, (for those high speed pursuits) Governments full of (Redacted) like this, VA has “Art Therapists” when millions of Vets just need a place to stay, US Capitol has an entire Medical Clinic (do you get free Medical Care at your job?) DOGE was supposed to fix it, I know, My side won, but the “Long Knives” are coming, but it will take more than one night.
Butch Park Rangers like hot cars.
The only essential federal workers for XY are the ones that sign the aid checks to Israel (and then only if Likudniks are in charge).
Seriously though, it’s fun to see how the GOParty line folks keep stumbling from “the Dems are going to shut down teh government” to their usual wood chipper type of comments. The first was always disingenuous.
If we don't make these federal workforce reductions now, with a person like POTUS Trump in office, it will never happen. DC needs to be downsized.
Look! an Anti-Semite! Talk about literally biting the hand that got your peoples out of the Jungles. OK, and into the Cotton Fields, look at it as the Minor Leagues of Civilization, you pay your dues in Altoona and Evansville and eventually make it to "The Show" In 1619 there wasn't an NBA or any HBCU to take any promising young "International Students" and Israel is a better place for your Peoples to live than any Country in Africa, and I'm including the barely civilized ones like Egypt and Morocco. Jeez, sometimes I'd wish we'd left you over there.
As long as ICE is still funded, and the federal courts aren't it does seem like win-win.
But not a long term solution, so that's where the layoffs come in.
But also September 30th is also when everyone who took the buyouts goes off the payroll, although they haven't been working at least since February, and more likely since the pandemic. So while it won't affect real work, it will hit the employment statistics.
more likely since the pandemic
MAGA has to make up things about why groups they hate are so bad.
I’ll give you that one. Your side just murders them.
At least they don't shoot them.
I'm sure a bunch of them will be claiming Social Security Disabilty for PTSD.
Yup. I haven't researched the specific legalities, but firing employees in positions Congress hasn't funded seems like it would be different than firing employees in positions Congress has funded.
Does this mean you agree that firing employees in positions Congress has funded is beyond the constitutional power of the executive branch?
No, it means I think judges are more likely to find that firing employees in positions Congress has not funded is within the power of the executive branch.
That sounds right. I wonder if there is an important distinction between not funding the position, and temporarily not funding the holder of that position's salary.
The tack they have been using, and the courts have been letting them continue, is cutting employees up to the point it would impact services and functions mandated by Congress.
That's what they did with the education department, keep the congressionally mandated functions and lay off everyone else.
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/supreme-court-trump-education-department-mass-layoff/
He's not "missing" anything, he's just spouting the party line.
The EU and snapback sanctions. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/415489
Does anyone think this will dissuade Iran from their malignant national path over the last 4 decades?
Seems doubtful (to me), absent a replacement of leadership. The people of Iran need to do that themselves.
It will not change the intentions of the Ayatollah regime, but it will make it more difficult to feed the proxies and its own population at the same time. Nonetheless, its grass will need periodic mowing
Deportation Depression....only 2MM fewer illegal aliens today than on 1/21/25 (400K ICE deportations + estimated 1.6MM self-deportations).
I'm not reading stories of upper middle and upper class America having a hard time finding hired help (like Nannies, or landscapers, or personal groomers). For years we were told it would be a dire national emergency if illegal aliens were deported en masse b/c no Americans will do the work they do. So...
Where is the emergency? What happened? Did those jobs disappear? Did upper middle class and upper class America just 'suck it up' and do without? I don't think so.
We have 2MM fewer illegal aliens and the world did not end. America appears to be thriving, higher GDP growth, improved tax policy, tolerable inflation (still needs to go lower, and by that, I mean another 33% lower, from 3% to <2%).
Only another 18MM to go. Tom Homan needs to up his game. He only has 3 years to get this done.
It's a good start. Meanwhile, there's this: Time magazine, https://time.com/7321207/ian-roberts-ice-arrest-news/
ICE Arrested a Beloved School Superintendent. The Community Rallied Behind Him.
U.S. immigration laws do not apply to the beloved. Everyone knows this.
You may recall my series on Wilson Tindi, the convicted felon, illegal immigrant, senior bureaucrat at the Minnesota Department of Education.
Likewise, the case of Dr. Ian Roberts, superintendent of Des Moines public schools, raises similar troubling questions. How did an illegal immigrant with pending gun charges get appointed to such high positions across the American educational establishment?
How many more Tindis and Roberts are there? Does anyone do any background checks, anymore?"
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/09/rally-around-iowa-man.php
Wait, you think they didn't know, that it was by mistake?
On the left they find that sort of thing edgy. It's a resume enhancer. When those Weathermen got nice teaching jobs, it wasn't because HR didn't know they were terrorists.
This is why it's impossible to take you seriously.
Oh? You think whoever hired Ayers didn't know he was a terrorist? Dohrn just slipped through the cracks?
Just an accident the left gave known terrorists important positions.
The Weatherman was a well-known violent group.
Nobody ever heard of Tindi and Roberts until recently, and neither one is, even by a Bellmore definition, remotely a terrorist. Tindi had a serious record, Roberts not so much, yet you are incapable of making any sort of distinction where the "Left" is concerned.
You think "the Left" plotted to put Tindi and Roberts in their positions?
Again, This is why it's impossible to take you seriously.
Yes, you're missing my point: The Weathermen WERE a well known violent group. That Dohrn and Ayers were Weathermen was public knowledge.
And they got hired anyway! Not to mow the lawn, not to sweep the hallways or clean the toilets. To teach!
Who the hell hires TERRORISTS to TEACH?
The left does, that's who!
The question above was, "How did an illegal immigrant with pending gun charges get appointed to such high positions across the American educational establishment?"
I'm pointing out that you shouldn't assume it was a result of their failing to KNOW he was a convicted felon, an illegal alien, and facing pending new criminal charges. That sort of thing isn't reliably treated as disqualifying by the left, it may even be a resume enhancer in many cases.
Don't assume it's a normal thing, maybe it's a dramatic political thriller dark agenda!
Brett's got some detailed telepathic analysis to explain how.
Also, too: Ayers was hunted as a fugitive for several years, until charges were dropped due to illegal actions by the FBI agents pursuing him and others.
Brett is eager to convict people who are not actually convicted of a crime, when they're Hillary or Ayers. These standards may not apply to certain Presidents...
Idiot, we went over this before with Hillary.
A felon is somebody who has committed a felony. That's why we have the term, "convicted felon", that word "convicted" isn't redundant in that phrase.
Similarly, a terrorist somebody who has committed terrorism. If they go on to be convicted they become a convicted terrorist.
Hillary's a felon, but not a convicted one. Ayers is a terrorist, just not a convicted one.
And that Ayers is a terrorist isn't even as disputed as Hillary being a felon! He got off on a technicality, but absolutely nobody who hired him would have been unaware of his past as a terrorist.
Just, a terrorist for THEIR side, not the other side, so it was excusable...
No, Brett. Putting labels like terrorist and felon on people requires some sort of actual evidence that has been presented to an unbiased group of people who will either agree or disagree.
Just calling everyone who is accused of terrorism a terrorist or felony crimes a felon is called lying.
Accusation isn’t the same as proven. Potential isn’t the same as actual. Possible isn’t the same as actual.
If that were the case, Trump would credibly be called a rapist, a con man, a fraudster, and a tax cheat. Well, he credibly is all those things and more, but as of today calling him those things wouldn’t be accurate or truthful.
"Who the hell hires TERRORISTS to TEACH?
The left does, that's who!"
In other words, closet terrorists.
No, Brett.
Dohrn was not hired by the left. She was, per wiki, hired as an adjunct by Northwestern, with the hiring decision not requiring faculty approval.
Ayers was hired specifically by the University of Illinois at Chicago, not by "the left."
Tindi should not have been hired, of course. But if you think he was hired by "the left" because he was a convicted sex offender and drunk driver you're bonkers. Ever heard of a bureaucratic fuckup or miscommunication? Which is more likely, that, or some leftist plot to install him in MN government?
As for Roberts, there were at least two background checks done, by independent organizations. I guess you think both were infiltrated by "the left," to place him as a mole or something, in the Des Moines school system.
You live in some sort of Fantasyland, Brett.
In possession of a loaded handgun at the time of his arrest, and a history of firearms charges? It's illegal for someone on a nonimmigrant visa, or an illegal alien, to possess a firearm.
I think there are some exceptions to that.
Do you know of any relevant to this case?
I haven't seen any clearly indicating what the guy's status was at the time of the possession.
“Tom Homan needs to up his game.”
One can only carry so many bags of bribe money at a time!
To bad Merrick Garfield didn't charge him when he had the chance.
Everybody’s dancing around the politics, but the real question is simple: where’s the money?
I wonder if a new guard will reopen the investigation whenever that happens. If it really happened, it should be pretty easy to prove.
Tom Homan needs to go to jail.
“ 400K ICE deportations + estimated 1.6MM self-deportations”
We know that the deportations aren’t all illegal immigrants, so there’s that. But I would love to know your source that says *1.6 million* illegal immigrants self-deported. That seems like a ridiculously high number.
“ I'm not reading stories of upper middle and upper class America having a hard time finding hired help (like Nannies, or landscapers, or personal groomers)”
You seem to not understand where most of the illegal immigrant labor works in America. Agriculture, especially crop harvesting and meat processing, and food service, most notably cooks and kitchen help. Those have seen a large impact, so much so that the farmers in red states who have knowingly employed illegals for years, said, “I didn’t think you meant OUR illegals. Could you have ICE leave us alone?”.
And Trump agreed, because Trump, but then Steven Miller got in his ear like the extra-evil devil he is and Trump reversed course.
You know what’s going to be awesome for food prices? Having a bunch of new tariffs on imported food as most states leave growing season, with a labor shortage in the ones that still can grow things. It’s going to be a pricey six months or so for Americans at the grocery store.
But I’m sure the people who are paying so much more won’t blame the President …
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Friday publicly released a new tranche of documents received from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate that suggest that the financier reached out to a number of high-profile tech and political figures after he was a registered sex offender.
The documents include selections from Epstein’s calendar from December 2014, November 2017 and February 2019, as well as a flight manifest and financial ledger.
The heavily redacted calendars show scheduled meetings with a number of prominent figures aligned with President Donald Trump, including tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel and former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, as well as tentative meetings with tech leaders Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/09/25/epstein-house-oversight-records/
"Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list". JD Vance, 2024
As usual, paywalled.
You have to pay for serious news, Bumble. But it might be worth you not looking silly so much.
Assumes that WAPO is a source of "serious news". A fact not in evidence as shown by your comment below. "who spoke on the condition of anonymity" The MSM's favorite source.
Fox News own internal fact checking unit relied on the very “MSM” outlets it’s opinion hosts liked to mock.
I dropped my subscription to WAPO months ago. But is it not still possible to do gift links?
Ann Althouse does it fairly regularly on her blog.
She’s still in the league? Used to read her stuff all the time, thought she’d been “Cancelled”
https://althouse.blogspot.com/
Pay for news? Like you pay for Sex? No thank you. Go ahead Queenie, that’s your set up to make a crack about my Mom, who did more for (the) Blacks in any random week of her Nursing Career than Pete Booty-Judge, Priapism Slap-a-Jap, Mullah Illhand Omar, and Floyd George combined in their entire careers(of those at least Floyd entertained some of your friends with his Gay Porn acting)
Yeah, your mom pays me, Francis. You know that’s why you’re so hung up on me, it’s a lunch money thing!
Or, as you’d write it: yeah, you’re Mom pays Me you know thats why Your so Hung Up on Me )it’s a Lunch Money thing
Your mom should get her money back from who ever botched her Abortion.
Francis is mixing up his texts to his daughter with comments here again I see (like he mixes up basic English capitalization, punctuation and such).
"Ewww. What's that mess on the floor?"
"That's your son."
"Wait! It was supposed to be my daughter!"
"That's the least of your problems. Frank...take a look at this."
"Which end is the mouth? I'd sew somebody for this!"
Freshman Baseball Coach in HS “Mr Rowe”, a “Hard Shell” Baptist (when the Soft Shell isn’t enough for you) used to call any poor performance an “Abortion” pretty much my whole Pitch Arsenal, hitting/fielding ability (still remember one game in CF, wondered why everyone was yelling at me, high fly ball was hit right at me, I’d been daydreaming (Curse of being a Lefty, Pitch or play Outfield(OK or first base, my daydreaming didn’t go ever well there) Oh yeah (see what I did, left you hanging with the fly ball, I caught it)
If they had to play me, it was always right field. That fly ball, the one when I was daydreaming... went right by me. My mit never left it's resting position atop my head. (Not open; just resting closed flat on top of my head, with my hand in it.) At the time, I didn't even know there was a ball in play until I heard the screams from everywhere. It wasn't a good moment.
Then I learned that I could be an effective catcher by crouching behind home plate and saying really nasty distracting shit to batters. The pitchers loved me like that, and I got a reason to care.
Lucky you, I wanted to be a catcher my first year playing, at the first practice got their early, put on the shin guards, the chest protector, the mask, but where were the left handed Catchers Mitts???
Right field is important, you know.
In May, the co-founder of a cryptocurrency business with President Donald Trump’s family called World Liberty Financial announced an extraordinary deal. MGX, the United Arab Emirates’ state-backed investment firm, would buy $2 billion of the Trump venture’s “stablecoin” to complete what the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance said was the largest investment of its kind ever made.
Four months later, MGX was involved in an extraordinary deal of its own. The Emirati firm will own 15 percent of the new U.S. TikTok spin-off negotiated by the Trump White House, according to a person familiar with the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. The Trump administration has not disclosed the names of all of the new investors, though Trump claimed Thursday from the Oval Office that the new company would be run by “American investors, American companies.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/26/tiktok-owners-mgx-conflict/
Used to get the Post when I was stationed at Bethesda, how else was I going to get Calvin & Hobbes and “The Far Side”???
I expect that Trump thinks this sort of thing is reasonable, given that the left set out to beggar him, with substantial success, along with lesser success at putting him behind bars. Using government resources to do it! He's just getting some restitution...
I don't agree, though I can understand how he rationalizes it. He was legitimately wealthy enough that he didn't need to do this to maintain his lavish lifestyle. But I guess he's stocking up for the post '28 NY assaults on the 8th amendment.
Typically Trump does out in the open what most polls do covertly. Only on a flamboyant scale. That doesn't mean he SHOULD be doing them, but it does make the complaints ring a bit hollow.
This is why your tepid reservations don’t count for anything. You defend Trump to the hilt in the same breath you ineffectually tut tut him.
"Tepid... to the hilt"
You can't even make your complaints internally consistent from one sentence to the next. You've fallen that far from the days when you were at least an interesting hack.
I'll remind you of the good old days, when you were defending Hillary's cattle futures trading. Nothing to see there, though it was about as open and notorious a case of money laundering as the world ever did see.
You don't have the moral standing to complain about this sort of crap. Seriously, you don't. You're still to this day pretending that the Clintons weren't corrupt.
I don't like what Trump is doing here. But there's so much going on on all sides that I don't like that if I were going to freak out over Trump's doings, I'd already have been institutionalized by now. Because I can't blind myself to corruption on all sides, I've had to become numb to it.
You, by contrast, enjoy that selective attention that allows you to gloss over your own side's crimes, and reserve your limited stock of outrage for the other guys' crimes. Must be nice...
"...Clintons weren't corrupt." Of course that should read "aren't"
I remember a time, long long ago, when I took ng & Sarcastr0 seriously.
For ng, it was the past few years, but Sacastr0? that was almost a decade ago.
Which persona were you posting under back then?
I don't like what Trump is doing here.
Uh huh.
But
And… there it is.
"You defend Trump to the hilt in the same breath you ineffectually tut tut him."
You mean he criticizes him where he thinks he's wrong and defends him where he thinks he's defensible? Jeez, Brett, be careful. If other commenters pick up that habit, next thing you know one of these threads will start to resemble a serious discussion.
We know Sarcastro would never defend someone he doesn't like, or "tut-tut" someone he does.
So, per Brett, Trump's blatant corruption is all the Democrats' fault.
Laughable.
“ given that the left set out to beggar him, with substantial success”
Trump managed to fail repeatedly as a businessman long before “the left” got involved. Fortunately for Trump, his father left him with a half a billion dollars, so he could trust-fund-fail multiple times. He’s never been “beggared”, even by his own incompetence.
And the concern that most people have isn’t about whether or not Trump remains rich. It’s his eminent bribability and what parts of America he’a selling out to make more money for himself and his family.
But you keep supporting and approving of foreign influence on the President. I’m sure nothing bad could ever happen.
Big win for Oregon, shame the PAC-10 isn’t still around, as such Oregon’s success just means the Big-10 is so stacked. Also, rough week for the ACC with Florida State losing and Clemson sitting at last place (!) in the conference.
SEC is Back, Bee-otches Yes, My Auburn Tigers Offense took a massive dump at College Station and Hugh Freeze is a Dead Man Walking, but they've lost to 2 Top 10 teams by a total of 13 points (and 7 of those were from Oklahoma cheating) and they have Georgia next week, who's still pretty good, and finish with Alabama, who's still pretty good. Couldn't find the Oregon/Penn State game, channel was showing a Klan Rally.
Looks like the latest MAGA woman has crawled out of the crypt this week. One of the most severe faces yet. What's up with all these MAGA women? Southern real estate agent hair-dos; Tammy Faye Baker cake makeup; catfish mouths. Audrey Hepburn they ain't.
Misogynist much?
'Heels up', ring a bell?
But that's true.
Constantly.
I have no idea who you're talking about, but if you want some faces that should be limited to Radio (Or Iodine Bottles), I'll give you a few, 1: Lizzy Poke-a-Hontas-Warren, took an Axe, gave it to her husband to kill himself with. 2: Crazy Mazie Hirono, amazed her husband hasn't committed Seppuku 3: Claire McCaskill: looking at her is an optional method of Capital Punishment in Missouri. 4: Hillary Rodman, calves an NFL Lineman would be proud of 5: Peppermint Patty Murray the Poster-Girl for "Two-Baggers" (Woman so ugly you wear a bag over your face in case the bag over her face breaks)
But I'll agree, I wouldn't kick AOC out of bed (I'd leave her there until the Flunitrazepam wore off)
Literacy is a solved problem, long since solved. It's just that a lot of educators don't like the solution...
Illiteracy is a policy choice
"For a while, there was the excuse that it was hard to know what did work. But over the last 15 years, as Mississippi has scaled the state rankings and other southern states have mimicked its success, it has become clear that we do know — or we could, if we wanted to.
“People are at a loss and would rather refer to it as the “Mississippi Miracle” than look under the hood to see what is really happening,” Kareem Weaver, the executive director of FULCRUM, a literacy advocacy group here in Oakland, told me. “They aren’t doing anything that others can’t do. In fact, they are doing it with far less money than most state departments of education have at their disposal.”
We just have to ask ourselves: Are we going to do it, or is it unimportant to us whether our children learn to read?"
And, what was "it"?
"So there’s your formula: Select really excellent, high-quality curricula [Phonics!] and aggressively teach teachers how to use those curricula instead of putting them through generic “skills” training that won’t impact their classroom practices much. Measure how well students, schools, and districts are doing and hold back kids who aren’t reading at the end of third grade."
And accomplishing this wasn't easy. It took state level mandates and serious enforcement, because a lot of the teachers didn't want to do any of it.
States as 50 experiments works both ways.
Wow, a red state figured out that public school teachers are more than just babysitters. It is a Southern Miracle!
Now they just need to figure that out in Baltimore, Oakland, and Detroit.
But a lot of damage to undo from decades of decay, and then the pandemic.
Between 2019-2022 4th grade reading scores stayed the same in 22 states, that's the good news, and declined in 30 states. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/states/scores/?grade=4
Did you bother to click on the link and read? A lot of red states are improving the reading ability of their students. But, yeah. Go ahead and dismiss it because it doesn't fit the agenda of the left. To hell with the kids, amirite?
No I'm happy that the red states are finally scraping themselves up off the bottom of the barrel. Truly. Illiterates break heavily for Trump.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of other states with enormously better funded education systems are busy drilling a hole in the bottom of the barrel, instead. Because they're spending those resources on things that demonstrably don't contribute to the students walking out the door having learned anything.
Like I said, literacy is a solved problem, has been for a long while. That doesn't mean that everybody is USING the solution.
Even if the rich blue states are misspending their wealth - which the stats don't bear out - how does that hurt the red states?
Because the refugees move to the Red States, but still vote like they're Blue.
Nate Silver:
The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/is-america-ready-for-a-gay-president
(What can be, unburdened by what has been™)
Nate's already made his prediction for the 2028 Erection, DemoKKKrat will get 45-50% of the Popular Vote, Repubiclown will get 44-49%, DemoKKKrat has 50.000001% chance of winning, Repubiclown 49.99999999%, so he wouldn't be surprised if either side wins. I picked the 2016 Erection to within 1 Electrical Vote, Nate got it wrong, but somehow he's the "Pundit"
How'd you guess 2020?
Correctly
Another good example of Demspeak is NPR's summary of the Dallas "anti-ICE" shooting that killed two detainees and wounded a third:
Immigration and immigrants have been at the center of the political divide, often portrayed in a negative light, and yesterday some immigrants became victims of this political rhetoric.
The immigrants in question were not victims of rhetoric; they were victims of a murderer.
Exactly: "it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else" because it refuses to engage squarely with the facts.
Grasping for straws while bashing the Jewish state for "genocide": Today the NYT published an admiring whitewash of Marjorie Taylor Green.
Another illegal alien arrest.
"ICE arrests superintendent of Iowa's largest public school district The agency said Ian Andre Roberts, a Guyana national and the superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, was in the country illegally and had a final order of removal."
He had entered the U.S. in 1999 on a student visa and was given a final order of removal by an immigration judge in May 2024, ICE said.
Roberts had existing weapon possession charges from Feb. 5, 2020, according to the release. At the time of his arrest, he was found in possession of a loaded handgun, $3,000 in cash and a fixed-blade hunting knife, ICE said.
ttps://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-arrests-ian-roberts-superintendent-iowa-des-moines-public-schools-rcna234013
Large parts of hid curriculum vitae seem to be plagiarized from a John le Carré novel, though.
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/09/28/ian-roberts-thread-laura-powell-n2419632
He will get his due process good and hard.
Michelle Obama's former chief of staff is school board chair and hired him.
Exhibit 108 in the Media Bias file:
Bill Maher claims slaughter of Christians in Nigeria being ignored because 'the Jews aren't involved'
Maher argues the killing of Christians in Nigeria is 'so much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza'
https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-claims-slaughter-christians-nigeria-being-ignored-because-jews-arent-involved
"All Animals are Equal, But Some are More Equal Than Others."
Maher sucks, but dunno if I'd call him 'the media.'
I think the point was that Maher is pointing out the bias in the media, rather than that he is the media.
I have no idea why one story or another is more covered by media, but as far as campus protests, perhaps the difference is that Boko Haram isn't supported financially by the US and many universities, as Israel is.
First of all, Boko Haram only makes the news here when they do something particularly egregious like kidnapping a couple of hundred school girls. So it’s not surprising that we’re not hearing of every thing that goes on.
A Nigerian friend of mine has said that Boko Haram is Islamist in makeup but in reality just wants political power. And the deaths of some Christians (of which he is one, sort of*) is not widespread and should be looked at in the context of my first sentence.
* it turns out that people can believe in Christianity and voodoo** at the same time.
** Not voodoo in the Caribbean sense, more in the believing in bad spirits that evil people can manipulate to harm others.
OK, so I googled and see reports of 7000 Christians killed so far this year. Not good, but in a population of 275’ish million it’s not actually a large number
I remember Boko Haram's kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls.
It was basically what happened to Elizabeth Smart on a much larger scale.
AWD, It is simpler than that. "No Jews, no news."
Reminds me of a great song from "Spamalot."
King Arthur wants to go on Broadway, but is advised by one of the knights:
In any great adventure, if you don't want to lose Victory depends upon the people that you choose So listen, Arthur, darling, closely to this news We won't succeed on Broadway if we don't have any Jews
etc.
Responding to Gaslighto: Maher has far, far more good sense and than you do. He is also far more honest. Maher has learned to spot stupidity regardless of source, right or left, D or R. You either have no clew about that OR you just lie.
Oh my god Jews and Don Nico, the world doesn't revolve around you. The media is interested in Israel vs. Gaza because Anericans are. Americans are interested because our government is. Our government is interested because of nuclear proliferation and other geostrategic concerns.
When Nigeria gets nuclear weapons then we'll care what they're up to. I agree it's not really fair to Israelis or to Nigerian Christians, but it's totally fair to Jews who really have nothing the fuck to do with either so what the fuck?
Randal, the world does not revolve around you either. Americans are not the world. Maybe Americans don't care about real starvation and real genocide in Africa because the victims are black or maybe because there is no Qatar oil money to spread the vicious propaganda against Israel both in the media and in the UN.
I have just today become aware of the “med bed” thanks to our blessed President. Has anyone tried this new lifesaving medical technology and would you be willing to share your experience?
Only thing I know about a "med bed" is from the article in The Onion I read. But you can order one for eleven large.
https://www.teslabiohealing.com/collections/shop-tesla-biohealing/products/tesla-biohealer-biophotonizer-m?gad_source=2&gad_campaignid=23037255013&gclid=CjwKCAjwuePGBhBZEiwAIGCVS5UPGPsIUBs571X5e--gmFolPhWJpUuPeABJ-WWyfve8kJmkw6EXFxoCzFYQAvD_BwE
Here is something interesting.
https://www.thetrace.org/2025/08/march-for-our-lives-lawsuit-layoffs/
Another concern was maintaining authenticity as a youth crusade when so much direct support came from an older demographic, particularly white women. “At one point, 80 percent of our following was middle-aged white women. We focused our message on them, and it was effective,” a comment reads. “That’s when we were raising money.”
Not to diminish the grief felt by middle-aged White women who lost loved ones to murder, but, on average, they are much less likely to experience this sort of grief that the general American population.
Half of all murder victims are Black men. One would expect Black people to be the primary supporters of March for Our Lives, due to the personal impact violent crime has on them.
What explains this?
Problems with this comment:
1. Cynical, projective assumption that the reason people donate to charities is to protect themselves.
2. Failure to realize that middle-aged white women tend to give the most to a wide range of causes, not just this one.
3. Collectively lecturing an ethnic group on what they ought to believe and support.
4. Using "one would expect" when rational people would expect no such thing.
5. Ending with an insincere leading question. You obviously have an opinion on the answer, just give it instead of sealioning.
6. Concern trolling.
Still, March for Our Lives reported that 80% of their followers are middle-aged White women.
Clearly, they are not 80% of the American population.
And? That still isn’t relevant to anything.
My guess would be that the actual victims of violent crime would be too well acquainted with the sources of violent crime to fall for "Gun control would make it go away!" arguments.
Brett continues to give the distinct impression he's never talked to a black person.
Except, you know, for half my neighbors being black.
"Brett continues to give the distinct impression he's never talked to a black person." While you moved to Whitelandia to escape them.
By the way, in my experience?
Talking to a black person is EXACTLY like talking to a white person. Except they're black.
It's like talking to a freckled person, or a redhead. It really doesn't make any difference at all, why would it?
This does not put to rest the sense that you don't know black people. Black people go through stuff white people do not.
Getting pulled over, people making assumptions about their intelligence and emotional control, dealing with chuckleheads claiming they're the cause of most crime in America. Probably soon being called DEI hires, but I haven't personally heard about that one.
Their skin doesn't make them different, but the way America reacts to their skin assures that they are. I didn't realize how many hallways were actually doorways opened to me for who I was before I talked to my black coworkers.
No, it's not nearly all white people doing this. But it doesn't take much for these things to be the experience of most every black person.
And that doesn't include structural stuff. The usual negative stuff, but also positive stuff like HBCUs and racial solidarity and having a different and frankly much more hopeful interaction with American exceptionalism than I do.
To be fair, part of my job is dealing with these things both as a matter of policy and as a matter of workforce management. So I have a lot of conversations, and they're sometimes pretty directed at these issues.
Anecdotally re: political events. The disappointment and disaffection of my black coworkers after the election has them losing interest in the marches and political rallies they once did. Not that those were the same as March for Our Lives, but surely you've noticed the black of black political events in DC since the election.
"This does not put to rest the sense that you don't know black people. Black people go through stuff white people do not."
Good God, man, do you not understand that, if you're born with a particular color of skin, you don't get issued a "black lived experience" or a "white lived experience" that you're trapped in for the rest of your life?
Different people have DIFFERENT life experiences!
I don't live in the 'hood', I live in a pleasant, older 'bedroom' community, occupied by professionals and retirees. A half black community, but my median black neighbor gets home from work wearing a tie, or scrubs, not a hoodie.
So, no, moron, that's NOT the life experience of the nice nurse across the street, (Recently married, about to have her first child.) whose father was, IIRC, a well respected doctor.
you don't get issued a "black lived experience" Not shaking the 'don't talk to black people' charges with this.
You live with older black people? Their experience will be MORE not less. You don't think a well respected black doctor back in the day had some race shit come up back in the day? That is some impressive blinders.
Of course there are exceptions, but pretending like one's life is the same in America regardless of skin color is...well the kind of thing you do, Brett. You regularly assume everyone is like you and any deviations are due to some flaw or bad faith.
These events - getting pulled over for no reason, getting told your outburst was "typical," hearing that you inherently tend to be more criminal and dumber. These are not one's full life experience, but they are common enough to be cliches. And it only takes one experience like that to stick with someone.
Lol. "I am uniquely qualified to opine on race because I talk to my fellow bureaucrats in Washington, some of whom are black" has to be the most Sarcastro comment ever.
I'm from the government, and I'm here to help with race relations!
While with you there's no doubt.
First of all “on average” is not much of a motivator of action.
Secondly, Black parents of sons who have killed other Black sons may be unmotivated on average to get on the bus.
The hierarchy of needs is different for different folks.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/27/us-news/north-carolina-american-fish-company-shooting-leaves-multiple-injured/
https://nypost.com/2025/09/28/us-news/michigan-mormon-church-on-fire-as-multiple-victims-reported-in-mass-shooting-police/
“That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
Do gasoline and arson next...
The people who committed these crimes will be entitled to due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.
Is Estragon suggesting the Fifth Amendment (let alone the entirely of the Bill of Rights) be repealed?
No, he's just saying that Kirk deserved to die. Again.
As your fellow travelers have fallen all over themselves to demonstrate here, they believe some tradeoffs are worth it. Without taking a stance on that view, I think it’s also important to at least acknowledge the costs of this kind of prudential rationality. 20+ lives directly affected, just since late last night: folks out for some seafood or praying in church. My heart goes out to all of them— nobody deserves this.
"nobody deserves this"
Except Charlie Kirk
Your words, not mine.
Nobody deserves it.
Only reason to post that wall of out of context quotes was to show that Kirk was a bad man.
I actually didn’t characterize any of those comments at all. So the idea that they make him look like a “bad man” actually comes from YOU. Might be something to ponder.
His name is Charlie Kirk.
That’s right, Francis. Don’t you forget it.
Hey Bob, the only one doing a 'the deserved it' shit is you below with your broken video gloating about some ICE protestor losing their car.
I know many on here are sad the left weren't the awful people they were sure they'd be re: Kirk, and have turned to just saying they are anyhow. That's dumb enough, but making the bare assertion even as you post with exact same character flaw...that's just you being both dumb and a shitty person.
Losing a car is nor the same as being murdered. Thanks for commenting!
It’s the same vice.
Except one you made up an accusation and the other you openly posted.
Maybe you draw the line at property damage and only risk of life? Maybe maimings are within your moral line. Hard to say. Especially given how adjustable your standards are.
"It’s the same vice. "
She did it to her own car.
You'd have a point if Kirk shot himself.
Look, no need to white knight for Estrogen. He can lie about his posting motive all by himself.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/28/entertainment/meet-the-putmans-family-says-3-members-killed-in-michigan-car-crash-5-injured/
https://www.wnem.com/2025/09/27/3-dead-van-vs-semi-crash-tuscola-co/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/illegal-u-turn-crash-leads-180652267.html
Are they worth it?
I'm pretty sure you don't want guns to be regulated like cars.
if they were, even serial killers would be allowed to own them, just as someone convicted of killing multiple persons while driving drunk in a crash he caused is legally allowed to own an automobile.
Do you know how safety-regulated the design of cars is?
Do you know how safety regulated the design of firearms is?
I learned in law school, not much! At least not by tort law or federal regulatory body.
I'd also expect the definition of safety would be of a pretty different scope than for automobiles.
Yes.
I also know that ownership is not regulated.
"Do you know how safety-regulated the design of cars is?"
For cars that are possessed or operated on private property or trailered on public roads: not at all.
For cars driven on public roads: not enough that I can't drive a Lamborghini.
Absaroka - you seem to be talking ownership. I'm talking design. Like, on the manufacturer's side.
Someone upthread posted "I'm pretty sure you don't want guns to be regulated like cars."
Other people said they would be OK with that. And to repeat: there are no, none, zero regulations about the car I build in my garage. The government doesn't regulate F1 cars or Top Fuel dragsters at all.
I can build a Model T, but I can't build a Sten gun.
There are no, nada, zero design regulations on a car I build in my garage, or for that matter a car I buy. The design regulations are **for cars that will be legal to drive on public roads**. So the equivalent rule for guns would be "guns that are shot on public ranges must meet the following safety rules".
If you want to say people can't shoot P320's on public ranges, I'm OK with that. Or 'only drop safe guns on public ranges', fine. But then you'd be banning Remington 700's, not AR's.
And we let people drive Lamborghinis with a top speed of ??220?? on the public roads.
One of these sets of regulations is not like the other.
Oooh...
So, you can 1. Buy guns at 16, 2. Take them basically anywhere...schools, churches, etc. 3. Getting a license is use them easy. No restrictions other than age. And that's just to use them in public areas. In private areas, no need for a license at all. No background checks. No waiting periods. 4. Those "machine gun" regulations. Gone. As long as you just have them for private use, basically anything goes. You want a rocket powered car? (Sorry, Rocket propelled grenade). Not a problem. You just can't use it in public areas. Private areas, private ownership. Fine. 5. And rentals...oh my. Just walk up to any counter at an airport and say "I want to rent a gun"...15 minutes later, you're out the door with your very own AR-15.
Yeah...imagine if guns were regulated like cars are.
As I noted above, you're looking in the wrong place when it comes to where all the auto regulations are.
As I said, this isn't the banger argument you think it is.
Oh, come on. Cars have regs about headlights, bumper heights, emissions, seatbelts, yadda, yadda. Guns have regs about whether the barrel is threaded, precise depth of serial number, shape of the grip, barrel length, bayonet lugs, loaded chamber indicator, mag disconnect, yadda yadda. They are alike in the sense both have regs on the design.
But there are differences as well, notably that the car regs don't apply to possessing the car, only operating it in certain public spaces. The gun regs for the most part apply everywhere and to possession.
Another difference is the penalties. Lets say someone from Arizona goes on a road trip to CA or MD or NY. If their car has the very dark window tint that is common in AZ they might get a ticket - an infraction - in one of the northern states. If they take their AZ legal gun they go to prison. I've road tripped over much of the US, and I have never bothered to research the state nuances about automobile regs, or wondered whether my license was good in some other state. But you had darn well better do that research if you are traveling with a gun.
"I'm pretty sure you don't want guns to be regulated like cars." is just inane.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2022/05/25/on-the-uvalde-school-shooting/#comment-807397
It is true, of course, that the 2nd Amendent makes it more difficult for the state to keep us safe from the street thug and the gangbanger.
Of course, what we should all remember is that the 2nd Amendment is not alone in this. Other constitutional provisions place limits on the state to keep us safe from the street thug and the gangbanger.
Consider the 4th Amendment. It restricts the ability of the police to find evidence of criminal wrongdoing. This means the street thug and the gangbanger may get away with their crimes, which enables murder.
Not only that, the 4th Amendment is unique to the United States of America. Surely the police in Paris, Lagos, or Singapore do not worry about the 4th Amendment, probable cause, or the exclusionary rule. They just look for evidence. Why not follow the example of other countries?
Or what about the 5th or 6th Amendments? How many more street thugs and gangbangers could we catch if we could make them testify against themselves?
Or why even bother with trials? Why not trust the police to judge who is and is not guilty?
How much more difficult would it be to commit murder- let alone get away with murder- if we let the police judge whether or not a street thug or gangbanger is guilty?
Or what about the 14th amendment? What if there were certain racial demographics in the U.S. that commit murder at a significantly higher rate than the general population? Why should not the police focus on those demographics? Why should not lawmakers place extra restrictions on the liberties of people in those crime-prone demographics?
Would it not be worth it if it prevented one murder?
Why do we need civil rights at all, given how they tie the hands of the state?
I'm all for the 2A, but your comparisons don't really work. There's a reason mass shootings hit harder than stuff that makes police have to work a bit harder.
Ending with racial profiling as a "cost" of the 14A sure is a choice, though.
There's a reason mass shootings hit harder than stuff that makes police have to work a bit harder. What is this reason?
Human Psychology. Dead people killed by guns makes a splash.
No murder conviction was ever tossed on Second Amendment grounds though, while some of them have been tossed because of 4th, 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendment grounds.
Thrown out murder convictions don't move the public the way mass shootings do.
This is not hard to understand.
Throwing out murder convictions means that a probable murderer could get away with it.
In fact, the Supreme Court actually threw out murder convictions of someone convicted of a horrific mass shooting on par with the Columbine murders. The defendant in question has not yet been retried, and it is unlikely the defendant will ever be retried.
Yes, I'm aware you think the public SHOULD care more about thrown out murder convictions.
But they don't. Not as a group. Or, at least, not like they do about mass shootings.
You're all for the 2nd amendment for "government bureaucrat who doesn't want every gun in the country banned tomorrow" values of all for the 2nd amendment.
You know, kind of like book banners are all for the 1st amendment because they don't want all books banned, just a few of them?
There is a difference between book bans and Book Bans®™.
Book Bans®™ are akin to a state banning school libraries from having armories where students can borrow firearms.
Not what I think Brett. Quit with the telepathy.
Not aligning with your paranoid gun freak takes doesn’t mean I must secretly have a long term plan to ban guns.
I didn't say you did have such a plan, in case you ever get around to reading what I said. Rather, you're just comfortable with some very serious infringements of the right.
A very common center-left view of the 2nd amendment, but hardly "all for it".
Sure dude, you added the tomorrow just for fun.
I read what you write better than you do I guess.
"Quit with the telepathy." He might if you didn't use telepathy against him in most of your posts.
What's the difference? The 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments have a massive cost in lives.
Most of the urban gang warfare could just be ended if we eliminated those amendments. You're talking about thousands, tens of thousands of lives potentially saved.
Isn't it worth it to save these lives, if we just eliminate these amendments that are helping to keep these criminals on the streets?
You should have some interest in understanding why the argument that something should be done about mass shootings hits different than something should be done about 'crimes.'
It doesn't have a statistical baseline behind it or anything, but the need to deal with mass shootings remains the most effective and popular argument for gun control around.
In Armchair's comment, he was writing about saving lives.
The 'crimes' he was talking about was not spray painting graffiti on alley walls.
Yeah, thanks.
Neither of you are talking about perception, and you should be. If you cared. Which I'm not sure either of you do.
Some folks, having a group they can hate is more important than making compelling arguments.
So, you're just talking about "perception" and not about actually saving lives?
Interesting that you think you're the one who is caring.
Yes, Armchair. As I said above, "There's a reason mass shootings hit harder than stuff that makes police have to work a bit harder."
I'm not arguing mass shootings require gun control. I've never argued that. You seem unable to understand that fact, so eager are you to fight and fight.
The question was asked why we care about mass shootings more than the consequences of other Constitutional amendments. I explained why. It's a good question to understand!
You seem more interested in fighting than winning. It's made you blind.
Another Democrat Supremacist terrorist.
Enough is enough. Something must be done about Democrat Supremacists.
Firebombing churches and synagogues and governors mansions (basically anything not white and baptist) has always been a favorite hallmark of the Libs
Eric Adam’s just dropped out. His future……I see an Ambassador position…maybe in Turkey?? Maybe (the) Zoran Ramadan-damn-he shouldn’t be checking the heading from Gracie to Mecca just yet…. I’m sensing a “Zoran beats Truman” moment
Most auspicious, friends. Most auspicious.
FAFO news
Bill Melugin@BillMelugin NEW: An anti-ICE protester in Massachusetts forgot to put her car in park while yelling at agents making an arrest of an illegal alien in Upton, MA, and her vehicle went into a lake and sunk, an ICE source tells me.
Video and picture but link will not work
"Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else."
right, when i checked the link it didn't work so i edited the post
Here's a good link, Sarcastro was asking for it above.
https://x.com/BillMelugin_/status/1972356078223638938
I found the video online.
What I want to know is, who are these people protesting ICE apprehensions when the apparently know none of the circumstances leading to the arrest. Is the guy a criminal, murderer, rapist? They simply don't care.
They've been told, essentially, that ICE is just going around deporting random people just because they look swarthy. They're reacting to a fantasy world that's been constructed to encourage them to react this way.
If the administration actually were trying to focus on deporting criminals then it would be reasonable to assume that ICE was probably detaining someone dangerous.
But since the goal seems mostly to get rid of people productively contributing to society, people just assume that's what's going on.
The administration never said they were only going to deport illegals with criminal records. They just prioritized deporting them.
They did not prioritize deporting them, though.
It's Massachusetts, if a young woman Asphyxiated (NOT drowned, there's a difference) in her car she could get elected to the US. Senate for 50 years.
A couple of developments in the NY Mayors race:
1. Mayor Adams is dropping out, clearing the way for Cuomo-Mamdani going head to head.
2. An email was leaked, apparently intentionally, from Randy Weingarten's office questioning Mamdani's ability to govern:
"BREAKING: I have a leaked email from the "Assistant to Randi Weingarten" voicing concerns about Zohran Mamdani's "ability to govern."
"Mamdani has no experience in city government"
Mayor Johnson's "poll numbers have dropped to 14% favorable, with an all time high in the history of the mayoralty of unfavorables, at 80%."
"But something has clearly gone wrong, and it can't just be attributed to our enemies."
He says "winning an election does not necessarily translate into the ability to govern."
"it is important to face squarely what has happened in Chicago.. It has not gone well."
https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1972070216537608251
1. Head-to-head? Did something happen to Curtis Sliwa?
2. Yup. Clearly people who have no experience in government and make totally unrealistic campaign promises should aim for the presidency, not mayor.
Sorry, Zardoz Madmani can't run for president.
Damn. Between that no-third-term thing and the natural born citizen clause, the nation's two best over-promisers are both disqualified from the presidency in 2028.
Maybe Madmani should go back to Uganda and run for president.
Brandon Johnson is still in play though.
Rudy settles with Dominion. Terms not disclosed. Presumably for somewhat less than $1.3B. I wonder if he’ll have another fundraiser at Bedminster? Ruby and Shaye got his Mercedes but I guess he could hitch a ride.
https://apnews.com/article/rudy-giuliani-dominion-voting-2020-election-trump-fb964cb109a66338f2d594c732f5d2f1
Was he expecting tyhe Supreme Court to overrule Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130 (1968)
I suspect this Court is willing to overturn anything at any time at this point. See Thomas’ recent comments.
So you feel that there is no bad law worthy of being overturned?
Estrogen: An amendment overturning Dred Scott, horrible! Overturning Plessy, so bad!
Psychic? Somewhat ironic coming from the guy who is always whining about liberal mind reading. I was referring to Clarence’s recent comments about stare decisis, I did not characterize them one way or another.
Do your Anton next.
He's predictable...and boring...all at the same time
What were his recent comments?
“I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel… And I do give perspective to the precedent. But … the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country and our laws, and be based on something – not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”
The court should overrule the current implementation of defamation suits, which dismisses any case brought for a non-liberal cause, i.e. George Zimmerman, Trump, Covington school kids, etc. and awards enormous damages when the "victims" are left wingers, i.e. Dominion against Giuliani, FoxNews, the two water buffaloes from Georgia, Jean Carroll, etc.
“two water buffaloes”
Voltage guy posting under his more bawdy handle today
Only have one handle, clown.
I doubt that.
Crickets here about the latest white gun lover going to town on non-White/Baptist churches. I'm going to coin a term for it: Epstein Crickets.
"Hey Joey! Whaddya call dat ting where your crew gets caught molesting minors or shooting up synagogues but you don't say shit because its one of your boys?" "Oh! Youze mean the Epstein Crickets!" "Yeah, dats it. Hey, tell your cousin Marie I said 'Yo'."
Oh wow, look. It was a Prius with a 'Coexist' bumper sticker.
https://scontent-iad3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/556761664_1285141936974769_2976054146430067084_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_s640x640_tt6&_nc_cat=1&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=JCJMlXOSAPkQ7kNvwF82ne8&_nc_oc=AdkKD1h4NtJEJTb7qZIDz3Kv1PAn63ngGifOhYGKuKeovjr-pDFwpRP3wXmTj0n89kYFYtTu_pEdJl_Fa1DoZ6cG&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-2.xx&_nc_gid=Jb3Ne6D7ifQbFBWiUeHsYw&oh=00_AfZsTK5ziSJSKuJanBE6ZNe2ETh5rLBm596bjAr4zUS9DQ&oe=68DFA5C0
Plus dude's truck has an NRA sticker and there is a reported Trump/Vance sign on the fence of his house
An anti-Trump-Vance sign.
Quantum computers are interesting in a lot of ways, but the most significant one for the general public is the possibility that "cryptographically relevant quantum computers" will break essentially all the public-key cryptosystems that have been in use for more than a year or two. (Some web sites now use "post quantum" algorithms, but these all have various unappealing trade-offs, typically that either the public keys or signatures in their certificates are huge, and those certs need to be sent in each connection.)
But for all of the news that gets reported about quantum computers, cryptographically relevant applications have been stalled. A paper in 2001 reported that a quantum computer factored the number 15 into its prime factors, but none has yet factored 21 without using shortcuts that are arguably cheating.
https://algassert.com/post/2500
Topological qubits: Microsoft working quietly.
I doubt that the quantum computers will ever crack the encryption.
That depends on the public key encryption scheme. Some look to be similar in computational difficulty for both quantum computer and the garden variety ones we have now.
Deport Rupert AND Lachlan Murdoch.
If they would just start picking radishes in Iowa or working at Mar a Lago, they would be identified as the only immigrants who aren't antisemitic terrorist rapists...and not subject to deportation
Why?
did they promote terrorism?
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Nick Gillespie | 10.18.2025 4:46 PM
C. Jarrett Dieterle | 10.18.2025 7:00 AM
César Báez | 10.18.2025 6:30 AM
Ronald Bailey | From the November 2025 issue
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