7:00 PM Eastern, Henry

The real question is not how Acosta "got away with it for so long" but how Epstein did. The blackmail story makes internal sense, but it makes these billionaires out to be pretty stupid to get caught in Epstein's net. If they are paying excessive fees to Epstein for managing their money, this is a pretty high price for hookers. I hear they can be had for a lot less. Are billionaires really that dumb?

sorry to be late to the reparations discussion, but i just have to add: the forced labor field system on plantations in the South resulted in a lowering of the price of cotton, most of which was exported to England. The economic benefit of slavery went primarily to the consumers of cotton cloth in England. They are the ones who should pay the reparations.

Gus, I don't know why coaches of top sports teams don't require pre-approval of all social media posting by team members. Too many chances for sustaining damage from crazy tweets. Same goes for Roseanne's employers.

Fox News has the report that Bill was on the Lolita Express over 20 times according to "flight logs", but the Clinton statement says only four times and always with his security. Does anyone know how good this flight log info is or whether Bill can continue to deny visiting the island?

Regarding the border bill that just passed, I was listening to some analysis yesterday that said the Senate bill, which just passed the House, was what Trump wanted because it provided more money for resources to process the immigrants. This would open the bottleneck where the narrowest point was, and allow us to process and remove more of them. Don't know if this is right. The House bill, on the other hand, expressly prohibited more spending on resources to process the immigrants.

after Porch mentioned it, I spent some time on the_Donald. It is much more focused on Trump, and JOM is pretty clogged with personal stuff lately, but I like JOM for having more character. There are some real characters here, in fact.

the insanity of trying to seize the private records of Trump's grandchildren will be a really good addition to the legal effort to defeat this.

The dementia that is Trump hate is on full display as Venezuela burns. the White House tweets a video of Maduro's armored vehicles running over the people, and the thread is peppered with idiots who can only scream about Trump/Russia and calling for the overthrow of the "Trump regime" while ignoring the plight of Venezuela https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1123311544446726145

Maybe Melinda and Clarice are both right. A quick internet search says that the question was on the long form until 2000 but not on the form everybody received since the mid-50s.

HaHaHa. Yahoo story by Rick Newman was headlined, about an hour ago, "The Mueller Report Thoroughly Indicts Trump" I just looked for it again, and now it is titled, "The Mueller Report Thoroughly Impugns Trump." but the link has not been changed. Words cannot describe these people. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-mueller-report-thoroughly-indicts-trump-193651086.html

JMH: My version of Adobe Acrobat DC has a function that converts.

JM Hanes you can download the pdf and run OCR. I am doing it now. It takes a while

One of the bones the press is knawing on is the claim that Barr was acting like Trump's personal defense lawyer. How I understood what Barr was saying is that when deciding whether someone is engaged in obstruction, you look at the circumstances other than just an isolated instance of a Trump statement. Trump's outbursts can be explained as frustration with the attacks he was getting from the press, as an alternative to saying that his statements were intended to obstruct the investigation. After all, the White House provided all the documents requested by Mueller, and White House counsel spent endless hours meeting with Mueller's investigators and answering questions. In that context, Barr is saying it doesn't look like Trump's statements were obstruction as opposed to frustration and anger.

i want to vote against Vandy for science undergrad and in favor of UCLA. My youngest is graduating there in June with pre med bio and chem. She had great access to faculty as well as helpful grad TAs. The experience couldn't have been better.

JIB, my experience was similar. I was interested in the econ ph.d. at Chicago, but was in a different department. Econ told me they could admit me, since it was a sink or swim type program, and then said i should take the GRE, even though they didn't put much weight on it and thought a lot of the questions were wrong anyway. It was so much fun being at the school that thought everyone else was wrong.

OL, i did see the med school answers in the last thread. I appreciate all the responses. I copied them to a Word doc and will send them to my daughter.

thanks all, for your help with med school. JIB, I had an experience like you, with graduate school paid for because of a perceived shortage of university teachers. How well did that work out? My daughter is very liberal in most ways. the first time i mentioned the navy, she snorted and my wife tried to kill the idea. But since then daughter has mentioned it a few times, as well as international schools.

JIB, i wanted to ask you, since you have a graduate degree obtained in the military: should my youngest daughter, graduating in June, consider getting her med degree in the Navy? the cost of med school, at $80,000 per year just for tuition, is insane.

JIB, have you considered Purdue? Great school, and there are some great Hoosier JOM'ers

Trump is famous for the names he gave competing candidates and the humiliating things he said about them. i wonder if he will use the same strategy in 2020. How would he refer to Kamala or Beto or even Biden? I would not be surprised if he was more hands-off towards his opponent, because they can destroy themselves without any help from him.

new post!!

Glad to hear that the Dem convention will be in Milwaukee. That should help Trump carry the state again. I have not watched a Dem convention since 1968, but i'm planning to catch every moment this year. Instead of boring speeches by candidates claiming to be for all the traditional American values, we may see out and proud nutty socialists calling for medicare for all and arguing over Israel. I can't wait to see the prime time speeches by AOC and Ilhan. There may never be a time like this again.

"Cap'n I don't focus my worry on the messenger, but I do worry about how many will accept her message. If this spokesmodel flames out, the left will tap another one until they get to critical mass with enough voters in enough places to flip the table on us." I can't see AOC's program going anywhere at any time. The only way Obama got his healthcare monstrosity passed was by falsely claiming it would not cost a dime. AOC's programs cost hundreds of trillions, and the green energy program can't work and everyone knows it. So to me, her popularity just looks like leading a bunch of suckers down a dead end road. It helps the right to have such craziness on the left.

I think that a good compromise would be for Trump to promise that none of the funding would go for a "wall." the funds could only be used for "non-wall immigration deceleration facilitation."