Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@qoto.org

@CStamp @hasani @StillIRise1963 We don't have to imagine it. It's what Nixon did and got busted for. He had the FBI spying on opponents.

@hasani @StillIRise1963 Exactly. This was brought up by one of the justices.

I mean, why was a pardon appropriate? What's more, why did Nixon accept it? Everyone at the Supreme Court today was a lawyer and they all know that accepting a pardon is a tacit admisson of guilt. Nixon knew this too, of course.

A pardon is not the same as an exoneration.

@StillIRise1963 Or the nation that wants to slide into totalitarianism.

An ever-present feature of all dictatorships is immunity for politicians. This legacy still poisons many Latin American countries that used to be ruled by dictators. The immunity laws are often still on the books. Why would politicians get rid of them?

Because of the history, many of the people take it for granted that politicians and judges have immunity.

This is gradually being fixed in places like Guatemala but it takes decades.

And here we are in the U.S.A. talking about it like it was a reasonable thing to consider and argue about. This is crazy. It's not.

@lovelylovely As you can see, Trump does a fine job by himself. Problem is his followers think it's genius.

As I've long said, this kind of thing says more about his followers than it does about him.

@dev Thanks. That one goes into the "groaners" pile.

@bitsavers It's been almost 30 years but I used to write a LOT of Z80 machine code and design the hardware around it.

I don't know about a 40-pin DIP, drop-in replacement with an 8-bit ALU, but in later years I designed in quite a few 64180 chips. Those ran much quicker and had a 20 MHz clock speed. But those didn't come in 40-pin DIPs. Lol.

@ai6yr Bahahaha. "Glamping", I like it.

@healyn I guess one can also be too old. 70 here and I've never heard the term before.

@ai6yr Neato. But too heavy for portable ops.

I use an aluminum lap-desk with my key stuck to the top right corner with magnets. A towel on the ground for the electronics.

@cdarwin Yes, those "politicians" are not acting like politicians. They're acting like spoiled children. Politics is the art of compromise.

They've missed the whole point of government by consensus. I don't think that's an accident. They and their constituents don't want consensus, they want a dictatorship or they think they do.

@OkieSpaceQueen Thanks for posting this.

@Free_Press Yes, it looks irresponsible to us but not to those who have her loyalty.

@randahl Good. ATACMS missiles are great for this kind of warfare. I hope they also send some Mk84s for use with the F-16s the Ukrainians should have by now. The Russians need some discouragement. Mk84s are very effective for that.

After all, there are reports that the Russians are using fuel-air bombs or so-called thermobaric weapons against Ukrainian targets. Okay, then the Russians have no cause to complain about Mk84s.