I’m not sure how that’s related to what I wrote.

The actual Economist editorial is here (paywalled but archived).

Perhaps some leading election deniers are motivated by a psychological defense mechanism, but I think that many realize the strategic benefit. The members of the public who are convinced that Democrats steal elections will vote Republican. They’ll also be more willing to accept a Republican refusing to leave office after losing an election, if things come to that.

It’s unfortunate, but Leland Dudek is doing his job. Some people appear naive about what his job is.

Edit: Perhaps I should explicitly say that I’m not happy with the administration’s agenda, and what I mean is that this guy won’t be punished because he’s doing what he was hired to do. I don’t mean that this is what his job ought to be in some moral sense.

Of course as a resident of NYC I am angry about this. Not only is he a criminal but he’s also selling out the city to Trump. I would enjoy knowing how much he was squirming if the case was dismissed without prejudice like Trump wanted it to be, but I suppose it’s better that Trump has less control over him.

I do see a bit of humor in all this, because he accepted such small bribes.

From Wikipedia:

Adams took over $100,000 in bribes from Turkey in exchange for using his powers to help open the Turkevi Center. These bribes mostly took the form of free and discounted luxury travel benefits. These benefits included free hotel rooms, free meals at high-end restaurants, free entertainment while in Turkey, free and heavily discounted flights, and similarly free and discounted flight class upgrades.

I would understand why he might be tempted to give up his integrity and accept the possibility of being caught if large sums of money (millions at least) were involved, but $100,000 is less than his yearly salary would be in the NYPD and he didn’t even get it in cash! I don’t earn as much as an NYPD captain like him (but enough to be comfortable) and I would experience zero temptation to take such a risk even if I had no moral objection to bribery. If I was the mayor then I would even be offended by the offer - who do they think I am if they expect me to sell myself for so little?

He’s just a petty crook higher up in the world than he knows how to be. Pathetic.

Ah, then I don’t think we disagree. Still, the CBG might be overkill when a simple phone call would have sufficed. After all, they don’t want him. We’re paying them to keep him.

Then again, since we’re already threatening Canada and Greenland, maybe we should threaten El Salvador too? We can accuse them of imprisoning residents of other countries who were sent to them extralegally without a trial or any other sort of official procedure. It’s unethical! They would be so confused.

Such public benefits now fall prey to the whims of the president with his pardon of a cryptocurrency company that smacks of political corruption.

So a man who promised to pardon his friends and allies, once elected, pardons his friends and allies. Is that corruption or is it just government policy by this point?

I don’t think that’s a claim that the Trump administration is actually making, even though it’s in the title of the article. Here’s what the article quotes them saying:

“The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang — we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent. “Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the U.S., he should be locked up. Remarkable that The Atlantic and other MSM continue to do the bidding of these vicious gangs and ignore their victims.”

I wonder if that’s actually true, because I think that he is to some extent literally psychotic. What happens when someone who actually has enormous wealth and power still goes through manic phases or experiences something like grandiose delusions? He might really believe that he’s saving the nation and the world, and that this should be obvious to all.

It’s like those movies (I can’t remember which ones but I’m sure I’ve seen some) where the king thinks of himself as good and is genuinely surprised and confused when he learns that the common people feel oppressed by him. Except in this case the king does not (and probably can not) learn a heartwarming moral lesson.

There are certain things that a court can’t (Constitutionally) order you to do, like letting soldiers live in your house during peacetime. That’s true even if you’re alone in a huge mansion and housing those soldiers would be trivially easy for you.

I don’t think a court could reasonably order the government to threaten another country like that - a judge doesn’t get to make such major foreign-policy decisions. My very basic understanding is that the government is saying that, according to this principle, a court can’t order it to make any foreign policy decisions. (Otherwise who gets to decide what foreign-policy decisions is major?)

The government is clearly in the wrong here morally, and letting them do this would seem to authorize a lot of abhorrent behavior. (Can the government have anything they want done to you without recourse as long as they take you to a foreign country and pay that country’s agents to do it?) Still, as a matter of legal principle this isn’t entirely straightforward.

That’s not exactly ICE’s argument. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the judge doesn’t have the authority to order the feds to do that.

Consider a similar but more sympathetic example. The government accidentally releases information which reveals the identity of an American agent working in a foreign country, and that agent is arrested. The agent’s family sues the government, arguing that the judge should order the government to carry out a prisoner exchange. The government says that revealing the agent’s identity was a mistake, but now undoing that mistake would require negotiations with a foreign country and such negotiations are not something that a court can order the government to carry out. The government’s argument in such a case would seem reasonable to me.

My understanding is that Trump’s guys are arguing that the court has no authority to order them to return this guy, not that he can’t be returned. In other words, now that he’s out of the country, his situation is foreign policy rather than American legal proceedings.

A great summary of what’s going on from a lawyer’s point of view. I hope the judges see it his way too, rather than accepting “because we said so” from the executive.

Even you perceive Schumer as the person who decided whether or not to go ahead with the shutdown, or else you wouldn’t blame him for not shutting down the government.

Neither side wants to be responsible for a shutdown.

I like the inclusion of the graduate student’s stubble. Very realistic. The frequency with which I shaved was inversely proportional to the rate of progress on my research.

Mr. Trump and the mostly men he has appointed to office often behave as if rules did not apply to them. That has been part of his appeal.

They see it like a war. Even when your soldiers do something wrong, you’re not going to hope that the Germans win the battle because of it. You will, however, take every advantage if they make the same mistake.

the Trump team’s story is that no wrongdoing occurred

The point of the lies isn’t to convince anyone - supporters know or at least suspect that their leader is lying and they approve. The point is to cripple rules-based opposition, which constantly has to disprove the official story before it can do anything.

How do you disprove a story when your opponents are themselves lying about believing it? They already know it’s not true. Meanwhile, that story changes faster than you can respond. So what if this was illegal? It won’t even be in the news in a week, forgotten because of some new outrage.

I used to live in an apartment they sometimes showed up in and if I went to take a shower and one of them was in the tub, I would leave. The bathroom was occupied.

I’m not sure he actually did the wrong thing there - he has no fear of being primaried for opposing Trump (but rather the opposite) and a lot more political experience than most of his critics. Maybe it really was the smaller loss in a lose/lose situation.

With that said, the part where he opposed it before supporting it was weird. With things the way they are, I can’t even rule out that he was threatened somehow.