Jack Lechelt

Hoping to learn things from people free of hate.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@aairwaves @IntlAirportCLT @FAANews @USDOT Sitting in Charlotte Airport terminal waiting for flight to IAD. Should have landed by now. Had to deplane bc gangway wouldn’t separate from plane. No answers on plan B. Do they care at all?

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@aairwaves @IntlAirportCLT We should be landing at IAD now, but we’re sitting in the terminal waiting for plan B at 11:05pm. Gate C19 can’t disconnect from plane. So how much longer do we wait?

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@aairwaves @IntlAirportCLT So again, they tell us to deplane but won’t let us off. In all this time of them trying to fix gangway, they didn’t come up with a backup plan. So we’ll sit in terminal waiting for next plan at 11pm. How long will they make us wait? They don’t care.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@aairwaves @IntlAirportCLT They tell us to deplane but then don’t open the door to let us out while it heats up here. We booked a direct flight from LA to IAD, but American rebooked us for this nightmare.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@aairwaves @IntlAirportCLT They now have us deplaning. No idea what comes next. Pure chaos. These people don’t care.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@aairwaves @IntlAirportCLT These companies do not care about customers. We’re cattle to them. How much do CEOs make? Leave us just sitting here. We’ll be deplaning & it’s 10:50pm. No idea how this ends.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@aairwaves @IntlAirportCLT Sitting here at C19 gate bc can’t depart plane from walkway. They just leave us all sitting here.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@SeanTrende This might be the most iron of laws an out politics. About ten years ago I read fascinating book by Dem oppo researchers. They’re all tenacious.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@michaeldweiss @RadioFreeTom Doesn’t he sadly have some leverage here, with the deadline for taking his name off on Monday?

[Matt Grossmann @mattgrossmann]

How Strong Is the Evidence for Peaceful Resistance? Not Very.
https://t.co/aef8ilxFug

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

A note to my friends who still back Trump:

I am not here to dunk on you. I am writing because you have a working brain, and this story insults it.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got a $14 million paint job. Shortly thereafter the water turned green and the new “American flag blue�� coating started peeling off the bottom in sheets. Trump says vandals did it. He claims, without evidence, that someone took a knife and cut a 300-foot slit, a number that grew to 350 feet while he was still talking.

Back on May 4, Trump bragged about that same coating and said, if you had a knife, you could not even cut it, so strong, like powerful rubber. He cannot have it both ways.

And the green water?

A George Mason scientist tested it and found ordinary, non-toxic algae, the kind that blooms in any shallow sunny pool. To fight it, crews dumped hydrogen peroxide into the water.

Hydrogen peroxide is also a paint stripper.

That, not sabotage or vandalism, is the obvious reason the paint came off. They wrecked their own paint job, then blamed phantom vandals for it.

The lone "vandal" they paraded is a 67-year-old Olympian who touched a flap of paint already peeling on its own.

Here is the thing. If they will look you in the eye and lie about something this small, something you can see with your own eyes, ask yourself what else they are lying to you about.

Again, you have a working brain. People like Karoline Leavitt are counting on you to stay loyal instead of exercising independent thought.

Prove them wrong.

[Gerardo L. Munck @GerardoMunck]

The Myth of Authoritarian Efficiency

Political scientists Jørgen Møller and @seskaaning argue that democracies – with all their problems – outperform autocracies.

Let's not fool ourselves about the possibility of ​a benevolent and efficient dictatorship.
https://t.co/lRJAlRCci1

[Dan Shapiro @DanielBShapiro]

Until the text of the US-Iran deal is signed and released, there is going to be a lot of spin on both sides. But here is my initial take.

This war was a mistake, and it needs to end. The President thought that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly, but it did not. In fact, it has been strengthened strategically by its survival against a heavy US-Israeli assault and carrying out some effective counterstrikes. Many countries in the region are now courting Iran and looking to deescalate and rebuild ties. A sign of which way the wind is blowing.

Getting the Strait of Hormuz open is the most important outcome of this MOU. Of course, the Strait was open before the war. Now we are paying to reopen it with sanctions relief. Iran has taken a theoretical point of leverage and turned it into a very real and powerful one, imposing costs across the global economy and rattling President Trump.

As for the nuclear issues, there really is no agreement, other than to negotiate over the HEU stockpile and an enrichment moratorium. Iran knows how to drag out those negotiations, and try to pocket concessions along the way. It is possible that no deal will every be reached, and very likely that if one is reached, it will be worse than what we could have achieved through diplomacy before the war.

Iran is not likely to take seriously that the US would return to war, certainly before the US midterms. So that means we will be conducting diplomacy without a credible threat of force.

If any agreement ultimately reached actually safely puts Iran's nuclear ambitions out of reach, I'll acknowledge it. It's just too early to make that judgment.

Trump is mainly focused on comparing his deal favorably to the JCPOA. But we are a long way from being able to make that comparison, and it may end up no better, or weaker than that deal.

But in some ways, Trump's deal and the JCPOA are already similar. Nothing on ballistic missiles, nothing on proxies, nothing on weakening the regime or helping the Iranian people. And plenty of sanctions relief that will strengthen the regime, and be poured into the missile program and proxy network. Honest critics of the JCPOA will not twist themselves into pretzels to defend Trump's approach.

Israelis are deeply disappointed in this outcome, but they should not be surprised. After some initial overlap of Trump's and Netanyahu's interests, there was a strong divergence. The United States needed this war to end. Netanyahu wanted to continue.

Trump's claim to include Lebanon in the ceasefire and his harsh shutting down Israeli attacks on Hezbollah is also a win for Iran. After the JCPOA was signed, Obama and Netanyahu worked together to strengthen Israel's campaign of strikes in Syria to intercept Iranian weapons shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So let's hope we see the removal of Iran's enriched uranium and a long-term suspension of enrichment, with full verification. But to achieve those goals, Trump's team is going to need to engage in far more sophisticated diplomacy, backed by qualified experts, than they have to date. If it is a phase one splash with no follow-up on implementation of later phases, like in Gaza, we will be much worse off after, and because of, this war.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Boy, if only some experts had been around to warn people that this might not work out so well

[American Political Science Review @apsrjournal]

From our May Issue: Race, Democracy, and Public Support for War by MICHAEL TOMZ and @jessicalpweeks. https://t.co/7yLFQrtSJf

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@SeanTrende Thanks for sharing.

[Matt Grossmann @mattgrossmann]

Election law cases have long had more partisan voting than other Supreme Court cases, but no longer stand out because now cases overall have more partisan voting
https://t.co/rqLs2Mn9WT

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@SeanTrende @JonahDispatch Or Strom Thurmond in SC.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@DavidAFrench @RadioFreeTom All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

[Jack Lechelt @JackLechelt]

@TimWhitehe95547 @DavidAFrench All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.