The defendants in the Amish case asked the appellate court to rule that the law never applies to intra-religious disputes. This might have made sense as a matter of policy, but not as a legal matter in the case at hand. As the law is written, it covers hate crimes by co-religionists. The court instead pragmatically restricted the law’s reach to cases where a religious motive predominates.How do we know when people are co-religionists? Seemingly co-religionists have been attacking each other for thousands of years. Some of the worst disputes are over the scope of the religion — who's the heretic? — and the outsider's perception that they're in the same religion ignores the nature of the fight. Is it the same religion or different? It would be unwise to interpret the federal hate crime statute to force judges and juries to determine whether criminal defendants and their victims belong to the same religion. It's too close to having trials about religious orthodoxy. That's not what we do in America.
"In the centre of the room there was an actual mountain, a colossal jagged mountain as high as a five-storey building, and the whole thing was made of pale-brown, creamy, vanilla fudge," the chapter reads. "All the way up the sides of the mountain, hundreds of men were working away with picks and drills, hacking great hunks of fudge out of the mountainside... As the huge hunks of fudge were pried loose, they went tumbling and bouncing down the mountain and when they reached the bottom they were picked up by cranes with grab-buckets, and the cranes dumped the fudge into open wagons."...
When he called McCain to the stand, Kimberlin handed McCain a print-out of a 2009 blog post about how to get traffic, and asked him to read tip number four: “Make some enemies.” Kimberlin, having made his point—this guy was starting a fight to make money—tried to take back the document. McCain snatched it and kept reading.The right-wing bloggers win in the end, and when they win, they look like this.
“At the same time, however, don’t confuse cyber-venom with real-world hate,” said McCain, giving a drawled, dramatic reading of one of his favorite posts. “Maybe Ace of Spades really would like to go upside Andrew Sullivan’s head with a baseball bat, I don’t know. But at some point you understand it’s just blogging about politics, and you start wondering if maybe it shares a certain spectator-friendly quality with pro wrestling. For all we know, Ace is spending weekends at Sully’s beach shack in Provincetown.”
McCain plunked the document back on the witness stand. “A sense of humor is not a crime in this country,” he said.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful Oval Office... pic.twitter.com/m7N8DDQrZe
— Doktor Zoom (@DoktorZoom) August 28, 2014 
Reconstruction of the West Wing in 1930 after extensive damage by a Christmas Eve fire in 1929 included a central air-conditioning system installed by Carrier Engineering Company. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his staff experienced their first warm season at the White House in 1933, air-conditioning units were added to the private quarters on the second floor.And it should be noted that President William H. Taft (1909-1913) tried to get the White House air conditioned with a system of "electric fans [that] blew over great bins of ice in the attic, cooling the air, which was forced through the air ducts of the heating system." Like many presidential projects, it didn't work.
"We thought she should be more beautiful... so as soon as she arrived we sent her to the hospital to operate on her breasts. It's our responsibility... If she has no good nose, then maybe, if she likes, we can operate on her nose. If it's breasts, then breasts."The tiara is supposedly worth $100,000 to $200,000, but the teenager got to walk around with it? Plastic surgery required of the person after she wins? Absurd!
Mr Kim said it was then that the troubles started.
Commemorating the 200th anniversary of burning the White House. Only sparklers this time! pic.twitter.com/QIDBQTBmmL
— British Embassy (@UKinUSA) August 24, 2014
Earlier this year, she joked that the kids would serve as wedding planners, and the nuptials would be Disney-themed or feature paintball."Perception," says the psychotherapist. We adults know marriage doesn't make permanence, but the kids believe.
“It means something to them,” [Brad] Pitt said of a wedding in 2012. “We will [get married] someday, we will. It’s a great idea. ‘Get mommy a ring.’ ‘OK, I will, I will.’ ”
“Most kids have a wish for their parents to be married, even or especially kids of celebrities,” says Lisa Brateman, a New York-based psychotherapist. “I think marriage offers a perception of emotional security.”
The Streets Division was poised to add 1,600 households and 25 to 30 businesses this summer to get more residents, events and businesses used to separating organics....I added the boldface. That phrase "get used to it" keeps coming up in the context of recycling/composting. We're being trained.
Dan Schwartz, a participant in the pilot program who lives near East High School, said he does some of his own composting, but he wasn’t able to compost bones, paper plates and pizza boxes, all items allowed in the city program.
“It’s unfortunate they’re stopping it, because it will be harder to start it up again and get people used to it again,” he said. He’s already contacted his alderperson and the mayor to complain, he said.
Also, question, on diapers and sanitary products...these have plastic liners, should the interiors be removed from the liner part ew, but I'm willing to do that for the greater good or can the whole thing be dropped in?The answer is no diapers and sanitary napkins, because: "We do not want to face regulation as a sewerage treatment facility." Ironic, no? The city government doesn't like all that government regulation.
A critical part of the majority's decision is based upon its conclusion that the evidence did not necessarily prove that the victims' religion was a but-for cause of the assaults. That conclusion strikes me as untenable — indeed, deeply disturbing in its implications....The criminality of the assaults is obvious, but is it a federal crime, a "hate crime" under 18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(2)(A)? It is if it's done "because of the actual or perceived . . . religion . . . of [that] person." The problem is that the trial judge's instructions translated that into a need to find that the victims' religion was "a significant motivating factor," but the appellate court said religion needs to be the "but-for" cause (that is, without this motivation, the act would not have taken place).
[T]he assaults... came in the wake of a profound rift within this particular Amish community. [The Bishop of the Bergholz community, Samuel] Mullett had excommunicated several church members for challenging his leadership.... Mullett was angry.... The series of assaults then followed, under Mullett's direction. The victims were all Amish individuals who were apostates in Mullett's view.... As the court notes, Amish men do not trim their beards, and Amish women do not cut their hair, "as a way of symbolizing their piety, demonstrating righteousness and conveying an Amish identity.
Based solely on the undisputed facts described in Judge Sutton's opinion... it appears to be clear that at least some of the victims--those who were excommunicated or who left voluntarily, at a minimum--would not have assaulted but for the fact that Mullett viewed them as heretical. (Mullet said that beard and hair cuttings would stop people from being “Amish hypocrites.”) And that's true even if the particular assailants were motivated in the first instance by other factors, such as interfamilial disputes or anger about nonreligious actions of the victims....
[And] isn't it plain beyond any doubt that the victims' religion was a but-for cause of the type of bodily injury that occurred here — the cutting of beards and hair? The assailants obviously chose to use that very unusual form of assault because the hair and beards were of deep religious significance to the victims — indeed, to strike at a fundamental component of their religious identity, by deliberately imparting a tangible, humiliating public sign that the victims were religious outcasts.
“We could say, ‘Well, if we could move our graduation rates by X, this is how it would affect our standing,’” Freeland says. “It was very mathematical and very conscious and every year we would sit around and say, ‘Okay, well here’s where we are, here’s where we think we might be able to do next year, where will that place us?’”Via Tax Prof.
Soooo... I assumed they were all killed and the blackout was just to spare us from seeing it. But over on Television Without Pity, everyone's all confused, saying what happened, curse you David Chase, and I thought my cable went out.Then, considering the "Don't Stop Believin'" lyric "It goes on and on and on and on," I added: "maybe they do go on and on and on. Or maybe there's going to be a 'Sopranos' movie."
This isn’t always true. The likely voter population is different in midterm versus presidential elections. Midterm elections, in which there is no national candidate and less of a focus on a broad, national campaign attracts different types of voters. Specifically, non-white and younger voters have been less apt to turn out for midterm elections.That article also looks at how pollsters screen for likely voters: How do pollsters identify likely voters?
1. Screening questions: Pollsters ask respondents screening questions about past voting and/or vote intention and set a threshold of who is considered a likely voter (this is the Post’s standard method). The Post begins by excluding those who are not registered to vote and uses questions to predict voting such as past voting behavior, self-reported vote intention, interest in the election and knowledge of one’s voting place to further thin the herd. A related method uses similar questions to assign each respondent a likely voter score based on how many questions they answer “correctly” (e.g. Did you vote in the most recent presidential election? Yes = 1 point). Gallup and the Pew Research Center employ methods like this.This seems so much more sophisticated than what Marquette seems to be doing!
2. Voter list sampling: Campaign pollsters typically use voter lists to recruit respondents, targeting those who have voted in a particular set of recent elections according to voter registration files. This method is often combined with the screening questions above to establish voter likelihood.
3. Probability-weighted models: Less commonly used is a “probability voting” model for identifying likely voters. Probability voting models assign probability of voting on a 0 to 1 scale for each respondent and weight results by this. In other words, if a respondent is considered 66 percent likely to vote and another 33 percent, the first respondents’ vote choice will receive twice the weight in data. CBS News, the New York Times and Marist College polls have employed such models in the past.
The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."Even if you don't believe that data — because the scale of the criminality is so extreme — action should be taken. Or was the action always only to do another report in order to get better data?
Failures by those charged with protecting children happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 which both the council and police were aware of, and "which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham."
Prof Jay said the first of these reports was "effectively suppressed" because senior officers did not believe the data. The other two were ignored, she said.
A victim of abuse in Rotherham, who has been called "Isabel" to protect her identity, told BBC Panorama... "I think because the police were aware and social services were aware and he knew that and they still didn't stop him it I think it encouraged him. It almost became like a game to him. He was untouchable."
But just a friendly reminder – we aren’t Columbia. You don’t already need outlines for your classes. You don’t already need to be doing reading assignments (holy shit, seriously enjoy this last part of your summer because you will never have another one). Don’t be the gunner everyone hates before classes even start.Alumni email to new law students at Columbia:
But here’s some advice — we’re not NYU. Show up to class prepared. Nobody wants to be slowed down while the professors has to wait for your dumb ass to catch up. Everybody will assume you will be ready to hit the ground running. So, no need to be a “gunner” about it. Everybody has already thought of everything you are thinking of asking.
Although the federal Affordable Care Act does not compel employers to provide workers with health insurance that includes abortion coverage, the director of California's Department of Managed Health Care said in a letter to seven insurance companies on Friday that the state Constitution and a 1975 state law prohibits them from selling group plans that exclude the procedure. The law in question requires such plans to encompass all "medically necessary" care.
Seems like it was only yesterday I saw all the cool kids walking around with a copy of Dreams From My Father tucked under their arm. Everything they needed to know about The One was right in there, or so they thought. The book was as shallow as its author.And I thought, no the book the cool kids were walking around with was "The Audacity of Hope." See? It's right there on the table.
Gee, I'm single now, happily single, and thought I'd just remain that way.I don't respond, and the next morning, Meade persists:
But considering all the benefits, I guess I'd really be a fool not to take a close look if Althouse were to, just out of niceness, propose to pity-marry me.
What could I offer in return? Let's see - I could prune those redbuds, take out the garbage, trap squirrels.
I could fetch her newspaper, scrape snow and ice off her car, shovel the front walk. Draw her bath. Pick her up at the airport. Rinse and dry her wine glasses. Form a circle-of-safety to protect her from Hillary Clinton-type madwomen who randomly come up to innocent people on urban sidewalks and punch them in the back. I make excellent salads, grill superb steaks and vegetables. Play a piano sonata. Pick up dry cleaning. Wait patiently while she shops for shoes.Again, I ignore it, and hours later, but directly underneath that, I write:
I have very valuable benefits that I'm not using because I'm unmarried. Maybe I should go for a cash transaction.And Meade says:
Okay. Forget the services. I have cash - very very valuable cash.I say nothing, but — as Ignorance is Bliss says 2 comments down but a year later — "You know the weird thing is that in 1 year she actually will marry him." And a year after that, there's a comment from my son John:
So what are the benefits and just how much valuable cash do you suppose they're worth?
Wow, Meade, way to come up with a plan and follow through!The narrative arc is long, in life and in blog posts, like this one which I will end with the revelation that the cool kid with "The Audacity of Hope" who took the non-selfie on Mother's Day '08 was my son John.
Frank: I... remember... being impressed by Barack Obama who was running for president... I sometimes thought that he looked like he had what this country needed... That was a huge turning point, that moment in 2008, and my own feeling is that we didn’t turn.Another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair? That's what I hoped I might get when I voted for Obama in 2008. He never assured us he'd be a left-winger, but some people — people who wanted that — projected their hope onto him, and of course, he invited everyone to see him as the embodiment of whatever it was they hoped for.
West: No, the thing is he posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair....
West: And we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton.That's crudely stated, and I wouldn't talk like that, but that's about exactly what I hoped for. A pragmatic centrist like Bill Clinton, and as a bonus, we get the first African American President. I didn't vote merely on that hope. It was also the case that John McCain lost me. It's always only a choice between 2 (or, rarely, 3) candidates. You can't get everything you want, and you can't know everything about what you are getting.
Here at FiveThirtyEight, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to predict stuff. The science of prediction is pretty hard to get right consistently. But in keeping with the philosophy of exploring other schools of predictive thought, I decided to go to one of the classic sources of predictions — a tarot card reader — to find out what she had to say about the future, and how those predictions would stack up against rigorous statistical analysis.There are 37 more paragraphs. And 3 graphs. If you can't guess without looking, the analysis is the most obvious insight into psychics: They predict specific-seeming general things that are already quite probable. The "rigorous statistical analysis" promised in the first paragraph — presumably to palm this off as a decent FiveThirtyEight article — is the probability of the predictions the tarot card reader made to that one guy. For example, she said he'd meet a woman with "brown or red hair," and FiveThirtyEight's "rigorous statistical analysis" applies to the real-world likelihood that women are anything other than blonde.
CHRIS JANSING: And now to a Meet the Press exclusive: A journey to Guatemala with Kentucky Senator -- and Doctor -- Rand Paul. Top Republicans eyeing a run for president in 2016 have spent a lot of time in two key battleground states: 20 visits to Iowa, 10 more to New Hampshire. But so far, only Paul has turned a foreign country into a unique photo op....Footage of poverty-stricken eye patients.
CHRIS JANSING: ... A mission to restore sight, and hope, to the poorest of the poor. And if it all plays well to American voters it could further Rand Paul's personal mission, too -- to position himself for a race for president.Oh, please.
"There was nothing that could be done to save the man. Only the anti-venom could have helped but this was not given in time."A snake expert said: "It is perfectly possible that the head remained alive and bit Peng's hand... By the time a snake has lost its head, it's effectively dead as basic body functions have ceased, but there is still some reflexive action."
For the last 9+ hours, I have been answering letters from people from all over the world. The anger is off the scale and in my opinion, well placed.He acknowledges the "anger" and the "hurt" he caused, and he wants those who are enraged to see that he's taken quite a bit of time to read everything and to undertake to write back to everyone. Acknowledging that your words have hurt doesn't concede that you now see that what you've expressed is wrong.
The article I wrote in the LA Weekly about suicide caused a lot of hurt. This is perhaps one of the bigger understatements of all time. I read all the letters. Some of them were very long and the disappointment, resentment and ringing clarity was jarring.
That I hurt anyone by what I said, and I did hurt many, disgusts me. It was not at all my intent but it most certainly was the result.Even this does not take the words back or express regret. He could be invoking the principle of double effect, which explains why it is ethical to do something that has a harmful effect when your intent was to do good, to produce a good effect, even when you know the bad effect will also follow. You don't like that bad effect, but you did go ahead and do what caused it.
I have had a life of depression. Some days are excruciating.I'm sure many of the letter-writers accused him of not understanding what it is like to be depressed. If you only knew how it feels, you would not say such ignorant things. Those letter-writers are so very wrong.
Knowing what I know and having been through what I have, I should have known better but I obviously did not.Known better than... what? To predict how very angry people would get? Is he feeling sorry for himself for attracting all that hate mail?
I get so mad when I hear that someone has died this way. Not mad at them, mad at whatever got them there and that no one magically appeared to somehow save them.Here he's backing away from a demand for personal responsibility and adopting the belief that the motivation toward suicide is a separate entity beyond the mind of the person: the "whatever," the absence of magical saviors.
I am not asking for a break from the caning, take me to the woodshed as much as you see fit. If what I said has caused you to be done with me, I get it.This sounds as though he feels sorry for himself, because so many people got mad at him. He's presenting himself as the victim, visualizing the criticism as physical violence, a caning. And, as noted above, he himself suffers from depression, so he's doubly the victim. The "whatever" torments him and the people who hated his "Fuck Suicide" are beating him up.
I am deeply sorry. Down to my marrow.For what? Is this a nonapology?
I can’t think that means anything to you, but I am. Completely sorry. It is not of my interest to hurt anyone but I know I did.I say nonapology. He's sorry that what he said hurt, and he knows that being perceived as hurting others is against his interests. He's sorry for himself! And he's determined to flip the narrative: If we're supposed to empathize with the depressed and not criticize, we need to empathize with him, one of the legions of the depressed.
Rollins prides himself on being the angry Truth-teller. This works when you are telling the kids what they want to hear. In this instance he misjudged the expected reaction of agreement to his Truth, which calls attention to the importance of his audience in such events. He probably needs to go back to talking tough against Straw Men.Paddy O said:
His previous article is out of my analog world. I know it existed, yet it has nullified its existence
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