This is an op-ed by Jared Golden, Democrat congressman from Maine. For the record I think Trump is an underdog, as he was in 2016 and again in 2020 and it will be extremely difficult for him to win 2024. So this op-ed from a Democrat is surprising.

Holy shit.

Why the hell did ACB dissent though

Roughly, it seems to me that ACB interprets one section c-2 in isolation while the majority reads c-2 in the context of the preceding section c-1.

It was completely nutty trying to use Sarbanes-Oxley, legislation dealing with corporate financial records, to try and amp up charges and sentences for persons many of whom just walked into the capitol and back out again. Our DOJ is as corrupt as the FBI.

The awareness by other world leaders that Biden is a walking vegetable didn't just begin as of last night. I wouldn't have said Biden had dementia 4 years ago but over the past couple of years it should have been pretty obvious to anyone not captured by and exclusively watching leftist talking point media that his mental state is extremely declined below the point that he'd even be hired anywhere in the public workforce, let alone be capable of the Presidency.

Putin, Xi, et al are not idiots and they don't get their briefings from The View, they're just as aware if not more so than any of us that Biden is (and has been) mentally weak and getting worse. Everything they think they could do because of said weakness they've already been doing, whether overtly (e.g. Ukraine invasion, the Jewish massacre) or covertly (who knows whats coming next).

someone in this mental state

Stop pushing those cough cough cheap fakes!

Hey the media says it was just a cold, so no reason to replace him!

The suspect was arrested and then released by US Border Patrol agents in November last year after crossing into California illegally.

Sadly, barely two months later, little Diana was dead. Just before 12:30 a.m. on June 13, she was found unresponsive inside the De Los Santoses' SUV parked outside their home.

To be clear he's not seeking NATO membership but wants to be a NATO partner country; such countries are not part of the collective defense agreement.

It's the most schizo foreign policy.

Wait weeks, even months to try and constrain Russian finances in the immediate aftermath of the new Ukraine invasion. But then make sure Russian oil keeps getting sold anyway, going so far as to exhort Ukraine to not hit Russian energy targets.

Unfreeze and return Iranian funds even as they openly fund terror and stir up shit in the Mideast.

Threaten to seize frozen Russian funds. Russia and Iran are essentially allies. So there's zero consistency here if the argument re: Iran was, well, it's really their money.

All this schizoid policy is reflected on the left whose college age foot soldiers praise Hamas and Iran (Russia's ally) while supporting Ukraine (Russia's enemy) and hating America (Ukraine's ally and Russia's enemy) and Israel.

Finally found a policy that could be logically explained as having been planned and enacted by a shadowy cabal of men called "The Patriarchy".

Where's the supporting evidence this had anything to do with Biden? One site says he was telling a story about his 99 year old grandmother (https://www.outkick.com/culture/john-mellencamp-is-an-idiot-for-playing-toledo-on-st-patricks-day), another only vaguely describes it as "he reportedly appeared to criticize the United States".

Brigaders overheard: "Death to America!"

we want dead Russian soldiers

If we wanted dead Russian soldiers we'd pull together an Iraq War I style coalition and actually go kill them all and expel them. What everyone in power cares about is the appearance of caring to gullible idiots who watched too much Red Dawn in the 80's.

We don't want our 18 year old kids to die but we're fine with a bunch of Ukranians dying instead.

We didn't want to send troops, ok. But US/EU didn't even want to take a financial hit by blockading/divesting from Russia entirely in the first week or two when it might (only just might) have persuaded Russia to desist. Well, ok. What we have now is a black hole in the middle of a stalemate where lives and money are being lost for nothing. If we didn't want to kick Russia out by force the humane thing to do would be admit the limits of our engagement and move toward some kind of settlement. And then maybe don't go right back to buying up massive amounts of Russian energy like happened after 2014.

I don't particularly care about Ukraine

Sum it up right here. Tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians are just fine if there's tens of thousands of dead Russians too and we theoretically "restock our own arsenal". We're happy to throw money into the meat grinder yet keep the Russian oil flowing while the US and Europe wont actually send any troops to fight the country they're happy to compare with Nazi Germany.

Ukraine has the worst enemies, and even worse friends. They were damned after it became apparent the first week that the US/Europe weren't going to do anywhere close to what it would take to actually expel Russia, and everything since is just political posturing and virtue signaling.

Letter grades are fairly pointless as they treat learning as an end result and not a process.

Isn't marking a kid as having "attainment" treating learning as an end result too?

The problem is with pass/fail you get one score at the end. It's better to sample performance over a time series that gives you real data on performance and change in performance. As far as I can see that's what you describe anyway "well in November you failed. In December you did much better" but for whatever reason you're reluctant to just call it scoring/letter grades. Whether it's A-F or 0-100 or whatever you have to actually measure, score, and track. A system that tracks and measures performance over time using periodic scoring seems more focused on the learning process than a one result pass/fail system, doesn't it?

Also, letter grades can vary widely these days and an A in one school may be a C in another. The consumer model of education practically begs for grade inflation. Standards based grading basically ends that problem.

The same argument holds for the pass/fail style of grading. A teacher's arbitrary determination of whether the student passes or fails can vary wildly. When you have the whole "equity" thing being promoted now you've got another layer of teachers pressured to pass students who would have otherwise scored low or outright failed. Schools adopting that are going to wildly misrepresent true student capability versus schools that keep using measures like standardized tests.

Can you do "solve an equation for a variable" You either can or can't. Thats the idea in a nut shell.

I guess kids can either spell or they can't. Spell "cat" and "dog". Congratulations, you're equally as good at spelling as that kid who spelled "insouciant" and "maneuver"! Here's your ribbon of attainment.

When they can demonstrate with 80% accuracy that the can do a skill

This was once called a 'B-'. This seems like an attempt to avoid writing a 'B-' on a sheet of paper and actually calling it a letter grade, but it's the same thing - you've assigned a score based on a measured outcome.

But now you've got the same problem as any pass/fail scheme. No one down the road will have any idea based on just "not attained" and "attained" which children are especially adept at certain subjects like math. And of the cohort that were designated "attained", no one can tell based on that which children struggled and had difficulty finally getting the pass. Every kid comes out with the same designation, so equity achieved I guess.

Maybe that is the best we can do for special ed kids as an edge case but we need more accurate assessments of ability for the broader population where the range of talent and therefore the differences between the least and most talented can be very large.

Squatting in the barracks? It'll probably be upheld by California. "He has human rights, give him some k rations!"