Yes, it applies in this case -- although its usually 48 hours.

First note: The White House lied straight up about the speech being delivered "live"; it was clearly not.  How do we know this with absolute certainty?  Biden had a watch on and it is visible in some of the shot -- and was not at the time of the speech.  You'd think the production crew would have enough marbles rolling around to catch this but... nope.  It thus was quite-clearly taped and therefore the obvious question is "how many takes were done and was it continuous?"  One lie means the rest is presumed a lie.

Others have commented on the obvious use of a teleprompter; I don't care about that as there are few people who speak extemporaneously in such a setting (I might be one of them) so I don't find that troublesome in any way -- and incidentally the teleprompter is visible as a reflection in the "window" but again, I don't care and frankly neither should you.

The real question isn't so much about the optics (e.g. a "sound stage" for the speech as opposed to where it is supposed to actually be in the White House, etc.) as it is the substance.

The party of "democracy", so the Democrats claim (while smearing the GOP as having no respect for those principles) just committed an act of deposing someone they determined had outlived his usefulness despite the will of the people and coronated his successor.  I remind you that Harris received exactly zero votes for President in the Democrat primaries this time around and in fact polled around 1% in the 2020 election season, forcing her out of contention before anything really going.  Now she's presumptively on the top of the ticket despite having not received a single vote in a single primary and no, being someone's VP is not the same thing as the head of the ticket -- and we all know that.

Indeed it is exceedingly rare that a VP selection has any bearing on the outcome of a Presidential race.

The real question is how it is that President Biden went from "I'm in the race and I'm going to serve the next term" to "its time to pass the torch and by the way I'm unilaterally choosing who it gets passed to" in the space of less than 24 hours.  What Joe Biden (at the urging of his party, of course) just did may well be the most undemocratic means of selecting a Presidential Candidate in the history of the United States.  Literally no President in history has hand-picked his successor on the ticket unless I've missed something in our nearly 250-year history -- but I don't think so.  Indeed the closest analog I can find -- which did have an actual primary season and such -- was Humphrey, who lost (along with Wallace, a third party candidate) in 1968 to Nixon.

What happened is not "illegal" in that as I've repeatedly noted over the years you're not owed a choice at all on a Presidential party ticket -- that's the nature of the game for this office.  However, it remains true that to claim you're the "Party of Democracy" when your succession system looks an awful lot like Khrushchev being deposed out of the USSR in October of 1964 is far beyond the realm of "bad joke" and into the realm of actual communist control, at least within the party itself.  Indeed the parallels are striking in that the Khrushchev event was a true "palace coup" at that time orchestrated by Leonid Brezhnev with the cooperation of the party -- and of Brezhnev who succeeded him.

We just saw that identical dynamic play out in the Biden White House.

Not even European parliamentary systems play the political game this way in the modern era; if its "time" for someone to go they call snap elections to settle the question with and by consent of the people.

It is of course up to the American people as to whether they accept this sort of Soviet-era style "coronation"; I certainly will not vote for any ticket that is constructed this way under any set of circumstances.  In America we are supposed to select our leadership via fair and open elections and those who put together a ticket by other means should, in a Representative Republic, be repudiated at the ballot box and lose.  Indeed there certainly is both foreign and domestic improper influence in our elections and has been for quite some time, particularly when it comes to funding, and despite FEC regulations those rules are wildly flaunted and nobody is ever arrested at the time (and rarely prosecuted after the fact), even though detecting such games is quite-trivial in the modern era of computer databases and thus detecting that someone who is on a fixed income, has no real assets and lives in a modest home -- or is even in a nursing home -- has "somehow" managed to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to political campaigns is known within days or weeks.

But there is a profound difference in character between candidates vying for a nomination and ultimately the general election while funding for the various political jousts, including outright smear campaigns, is less-than proper and some group within a political party, after the primaries are complete, deciding that the people's choice for the ticket must be replaced and orchestrating that without again having that choice of successor made by voters.

The "claim" is that Democrats generally have overwhelmingly ratified Biden's action via donations, endorsements and accolades.  Whether that's true or not its immaterial in that in America we're supposed to select candidates who have a primary structure for their office at the ballot box and a person's candidacy does not confer the right to assign a "win" in said primary to another person no matter who that other person might be -- and I remind you that money is not supposed to vote; that authority is properly delegated to the people.

I've argued that for quite some time we're a post-Constitutional society and that the Republic, in fact, is nearly extinct.  Certainly in the economic realm we have become divorced at the federal level from the basic requirement to fund government programs with current taxation in that deficit spending is at its core assessing those not yet old enough to vote and in fact those not yet even conceived, say much less born, for the spending voters and politicians wish to do today.  That is a profoundly undemocratic act and that future generation or generations has no obligation to quietly consent to that down the road.  Indeed such an undemocratic levy has, historically-speaking, been a major factor in the collapse of nations over the course of human history.

But this is much more "in your face" and begs the question as to whether the premise of America, as established by the Founders as a Republic and at great personal cost, still exists in meaningful form within the political sphere at all.

Americans will decide in November and that decision is likely to have extraordinarily profound implications not only in the political sphere but in the economy and asset markets as well.

Note: "Coup" doesn't mean violence.  It simply means coercion; an "offer you can't refuse."  Remember that Joe Biden won the primaries (by a huge margin) so unless his stepping down was entirely voluntary its obviously void.  For the cabinet and VP Harris to sit on incapacity, assuming they did, rather than invoke the 25th Amendment many months ago and thus force actual primaries, if that's what happened, is outrageous.  Indeed, if Harris did that (since she has to be on board for a 25th Amendment filing) for political purposes, placing the nation at severe risk, that's arguably an impeachable offense.

There is a fundamental problem with Presidential primaries however: They're actually "preference" primaries.  There's a clean argument you're not owed a fair contest, or any contest at all.  As such its unlikely anyone could successfully bring suit over what the DNC has done -- except for Biden himself, which of course would expose him to an immediate 25th Amendment filing.

There is a fair question as to whether he actually dictated and signed the document bowing out.  Confidence that this was a voluntary act on Biden's part certainly wasn't confirmed when a reporter asked him why he had bowed out last afternoon, he smiled and didn't answer.

Now perhaps this all comes out in a press conference sometime this week.  We shall see.  But there are core Democrat constituencies, including BLM, that have come out demanding some sort of democratic process rather than a coronation.  Considering that Kamala got literally zero votes in the Democrat primaries for President that seems to be "fair", but again, you have no right to that in the Presidential nominating contest.

I'm not sure what to think of this; its quite-clear that Biden has certainly not been "sharp as a tack" for a long time, but is that a 25th Amendment thing?  Well, do recall that it was the assassination of President Kennedy that led to its passage.  Woodrow Wilson infamously had a stoke in office in 1919 while intending to seek a third term; his wife and physician essentially controlled him after that, hid the fact that he was for all intents and purposes incapacitated and maintained the office, albeit with essentially no major decisions, until he left office in 1921.  It was not his first; he had suffered a series of strokes during his life and in fact was plagued by them.

Did Wilson have good days?  You bet -- including one really important one when a couple of Senators refused to believe he was ok.  Isn't it interesting how history rhymes?

But today we have a 25th Amendment, and in addition we have what is claimed to have been a voluntary withdrawal.

America deserves confirmation from Joe Biden's own mouth that indeed it was, and further, those who are Democrats deserve to be able to make a decision as to who they wish to have face Trump in November.

We're not supposed to coronate people in the United States, if you recall.

JD Vance is, as everyone knows at this point, the VP nominee on the GOP side.

This story showed up recently:

Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, has left her job as a corporate litigator at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a prestigious law firm in San Francisco.

Shortly after former President Donald Trump revealed on Monday his decision to add J.D. to his ticket for the upcoming presidential election in November, Usha’s online biography vanished from the company’s website.

The couple has three children.  Vance is a Senator from Ohio which means he has to live in the State.  They met and married in San Francisco which wouldn't be unusual considering they were college classmates.

But this is unusual:

During her time at the firm, Usha practiced complex litigation and appeals in many sectors, including higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology, including semiconductors, in its San Francisco and Washington, D.C. offices.

So his wife was employed by a California firm that focused on litigation and appeals in San Francisco and DC yet Vance lives in Ohio.  That's a rather interesting arrangement you two have, don't you think, particularly with three young children in the game.

Oh by the way she clerked for Roberts and, when he was in the Court of Appeals in DC, Kavanaugh and that's a job where you have to be there, never mind that most litigating lawyers need to show up in actual court on a basically-constant sort of basis for various things, whether it be actual trials or the motion docket and similar.

This is an interesting situation because Vance has quite a history of issuing various position statements that are rather traditional-family focused, which many people find very appealing.  I can understand this, by the way, in that destruction of the nuclear family, whether you believe its been intentionally fomented or is a "natural outcome" of our economic system, is certainly a major factor not only in a clear demographic problem that nobody wants to take on but also with many of the social issues we have in the United States which have a very strong association and correlation with the breakdown of the family unit.  That we have someone on one of the tickets who has a good and long history of promoting fixing that, including a book he published quite some time ago (in other words it wasn't in anticipation of being the VP) speaks to the authenticity of his positions.

Nonetheless my first check on anyone's political positions is whether their statements reasonably correlate with their actual life in the here and now.  I pretty-much ignore the 20 years in the past because over time we all change our minds on various things -- and our mistakes (we all make 'em) if they lead to a change of heart and thus a change of actions, are exactly what you want in a politician.

I'm not sure what to think of this -- but my eyebrows definitely went up when I read it, because here's a guy who goes to college, meets a woman and they get married, they have a couple of kids and all this sounds straight up the middle of family values and very American right up until he winds up as a Senator and the correlations with who works for whom and their employment and living situation history seem rather at-odds with the "down home American family" visage being projected.

Perhaps this is simply "reality" today for a couple where both are highly-ambitious, highly capable and love one another.  If it is then what we've become is broken because no matter how you slice it there is no way you have two fully-involved parents when they're separated by 1,500+ miles.

There's a quite-serious problem with the shift we've seen in software over the last decade or so.

In short: You can't buy it anymore, only get a subscription.

The "buy it" system typically worked like this: You paid for each "seat" you wished to use at once.  One butt, pair of eyeballs and pair of hands, one license.  Most companies let you install the software on a limited number of devices (e.g. two -- since you might have a laptop and a desktop, or one computer at the office and another in your home office) but you could only use one at a time and this was enforced by having the system "check in" with some online location when in use.  Over time if you tried to cheat (e.g. give your activation code to 10 people) you'd get caught and the system would lock people out.

Here's the rub -- the companies had to innovate in this model because if they didn't you stop paying for upgrades and kept using what you had.  Innovation was real and significant -- Word Perfect was, well, not-so-perfect and integration between Word and Excel really did matter (never mind Powerpoint) and the rather rapid innovation that happened with Adobe products.

Who remembers "Pagemaker "from the 1990s?  It sucked, to be blunt, including crashing on a regular basis but it was the only tool that could reasonably do color seps and we needed that for print ads, so we put up with it at MCSNet.  I didn't like it but the other alternatives were worse.

Through the 1990s and into the 2000s Adobe's creative software got better.  The original Dreamweaver, as an example, blew big ones, but as time went on it got better.  Flash eventually got killed because it couldn't be extricated from the security problems it created holes for, but there's no doubt that Photoshop, up to about CS6, really did improve with each release and not a little either.  I bought several of those Creative Suite upgrades over the years and every one of them was worth the spend.

But then came "Creative Cloud."  I refused to buy that for one simple reason: If you ever stop paying all your existing work becomes inaccessible.  This is a ratcheting contract of adhesion and what's worse, it deliberately addictive in truth because you continue to create and thus the amount of material that you lose goes up each and every year.

Now Adobe doesn't have to innovate -- at all.  You either pay for equal capability at best on a continuing basis or all of your former work becomes instantly inaccessible.  Yes, you might able to plan for that and migrate off over time but you'll still be forced to buy.

This has to be stopped -- among other things it has destroyed the incentive for firms to innovate in their offerings, and in addition its actually regressive and operates as a coercive force on consumers and businesses.  This sort of business model is the very definition of an unfair and deceptive business practice and thus under state consumer protection laws is illegal.

Locking up someone's creative work by effectively "tying" it to a continuing revenue stream is the very definition of an unfair and deceptive practice no matter what they claim you "agreed" to.

How do we address this?

Change the law.  Specifically:

APIs, file formats and similar cannot be protected under either copyright or trade secret (irrespective of private agreement by adhesion or even negotiation) as that is deemed contrary to public policy unless the software that uses them is sold as a fully-licensed per-user product.  You can restrict the number of concurrent users but not "marry" the software to hardware nor can you prevent a reinstall if someone buys a new machine, even if the old one can't be "de-registered" (because its broken, for example.)

Abandoned versions, where the licensing check engine or any part of its authentication or other online resource necessary for its ordinary use are shut down lose copyright and reverse-engineering protection as a matter of statute and the firm is further required to publish a patch file that disables said checks.  Adobe can choose to shut off re-installs of CS6 or the "boxed" Lightroom version, for example (and they have; even if you deactivate one of your old licenses to reinstall it will tell you that you still have all of them outstanding, which is not true, and in addition a "new" install attempt fails as it apparently relies on breakage in the former "Internet Explorer" which Microsoft has retired and as such you can't even sign in to validate it on a clean install anyway) but if they do shut down verification or refuse to address breakage that then it is legal for anyone to patch out the checks entirely and distribute the file(s) required to do so.  In short if a firm abandons a piece of software, whether by subscription or not and by doing so effectively destroys the value of all the existing copies they previously sold the old version becomes freely available whether the firm likes it or not.

This prevents not only orphaning and in fact locking up people's work which the software company does not own, has no rights to and never did, that is the common practice of effectively forcing you to pay them for access to your own work that you own all rights to but in addition it prevents firms (like Quicken, who has moved to a "software as a subscription" model as well) from forcing you through a one-way door.  They can shut down support for the old boxed versions of their software but they can't perform an "upgrade" of your data file that renders it unreadable by anything else except their subscription version.  With a fully-public API and file format that capacity is foreclosed so if they refuse to sell a boxed version today (which they can) you can take the data to some other vendor because they must have the format published and available to use at no cost or use it on the older, boxed version you already own even if your existing computer breaks and you buy a new one.  The firm's choice in that situation is to either continue on a perpetual basis the infrastructure required to validate that you're not stealing it (e.g. you actually bought it and are using it within the original agreed terms) or the firm is deemed to have constructively abandoned all rights including copyright, trade secret and any "private" licensing agreement.

Restoring the imperative for firms to actually provide value on an ongoing basis, rather than abusing customers through what amount to forced lock-ins and continuing expenditures to obtain access to their own information is not just good policy -- its a hard, Constitutional requirement as intellectual property is in fact property and the Constitution protects your right to not have it stolen from you, whether by government or otherwise (if not there wouldn't be an explicit Patent and Copyright clause in the Constitution, and there is in Article 1, Section 1, Clause 8.)  Denying you access to your creative work is in fact theft of your rights in said work.  You paid for that software and you have a right to use it to access and exploit your creative content that you created with same.

Those firms that argue against this change, which must take place immediately, should be destroyed.