Biden’s campaign proposed that the first debate between the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees be held in late June and the second in September before early voting begins. Trump responded to the letter in an interview with Fox News digital, calling the proposed dates “fully acceptable to me” and joked about...
To be fair, though, three debates is excessive this time around. We know where these people stand. The debates are really a chance to assess their mental fitness, and two will be fine for that.
The non-partisan commission shot itself in the foot by not taking early voting into account in its scheduling. If we are going to have debates, it makes no sense to schedule them after voting starts in some states.
It’s not Biden who is giving Trump viability as a candidate, it is the Republican voters who are giving him viability as their nominee. They have seen all the stuff he has done and say “We need more of that!”
No, they contain relevant information, and they are important. But they only have meaning until tomorrow’s poll comes out. The one in November is the only one that counts.
But the composition of the school board is different now than it was during the 2020 decision – all six seats are held by different people.
School boards are the most boring thing in the world. (Like I tell my kids, they even have “bored” right in the name"). But it seems like Confederates and racists have realized that, even though their racist views are rapidly receding into history, if they get elected to local government positions they can throw little local power trips to make sure all “those people” still know their place.
JAGGER: We’re an inclusive group. We like to include everyone. The governor is here, and we’d like to include him, even though he’s trying to take us back to the Stone Age....
The Biden-Harris ticket is set in stone, and Harris is the sitting VP. If God exercises His Ultimate Veto on Biden, then Harris gets thrust immediately into the job, while also taking over the ticket and trying to pick a VP that can pass ratification in both houses of Congress. And the optics of picking one VP for a few months and a different one in the campaign are poor, so Harris will be saddled not only with a new job and a boring personality, but with a compromise VP that was picked to siphon off three or four Republican votes in the House.
While if Trump eats one too many hamberders before the convention, Republicans have more options, because he doesn’t have an announced VP yet, and even if he did, that choice isn’t as permanent as the current VP. Since Trump has installed his people in the RNC, though, we shouldn’t expect much of a change. We’ll probably get Don Jr. to run in his place – they wouldn’t even need to change the banners.
As ridiculous as Junior is, he will have an army of MAGAs who now revere his dad as a saint, while Kamala Harris is kinda meh. I don’t wanna see the result of that.
I’d like to know what is in those papers. I wonder if they are just complementary news stories about him. I bet the only subject that can hold his attention is himself.
It didn’t mention it in this article, but the NY Times reported that Bolick directly referenced her own pregnancies in debate, one of which was not viable:
Before casting her pivotal vote, Ms. Bolick stood up and began a long, deeply personal speech describing her own three challenging pregnancies, including one that ended with an abortion procedure in her first trimester because the fetus was not viable.
“Would Arizona’s pre-Roe law have allowed me to have this medical procedure even though my life wasn’t in danger?” she asked.
Like a true Conservative, she only came to her decision because it affected her personally. Still, it was enough to push it through.
Right, but then he left and pressed on, and then the article uses “ejected”. It wasn’t cleared to me whether “withdrawn for a day’s sitting” was the same as “ejected”.
The US is not helping out because it feels sorry for Ukraine, it is because the US does not believe Russia would stop at Ukraine, and would press on to the other former territories of the USSR and it’s allied countries, several of which are in NATO.
The US is sending munitions to Ukraine now because they have a population willing to fight, and if Russia escalates, that will involve sending US troops to protect NATO countries. We are bound by treaty to do that, as long as an idiot President doesn’t find a way to leave NATO…
The general economic metrics are positive, but skewed. The pandemic disrupted huge portions of the economy, and some fared better than others. Prices are up across the board, but wages aren’t up to match.
Before the Pandemic, I remember getting 1-3% raises and getting told “we do this to match the cost of living”. Now the increase year-over-year to the cost of living is much higher, yet the raises (if they are there at all) are the same magnitude as before. Some people are much better off, though: the increased spending in the economy isn’t coming from thin air. There is a portion of the population who is doing much better, but it doesn’t extend to everyone.
Then, you have the mess of the Housing market here. Prices have skyrocketed across the board, as well as interest rates, at least in part due to the pandemic - the government had to print a lot of money to get through it, and the corrsponding rise interest rates came so fast it even caught some banks by surprise. People who were lucky enough to buy in at the right time are doing much better.
Now, the economy being in the state it is now is better than the alternative. Democrats need to make the case that their policies have the best chance of improving everyone’s situation, and that it would be best to have all the levers of government to do that. So it’s not just the Presidential election that is critical, but all the downballot races as well.
Hey, lighten up! She’s not even the first Republican VP to shoot someone in the face. It doesn’t make her unelectable, but quite the opposite. Trump is guaranteed to pick her now.
Donald Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity for criminal acts taken in office as president is an insult to reason, an assault on common sense and a perversion of the fundamental maxim of American democracy: that no man is above the law....
From a purely academic standpoint, I think there is some merit to debating the limits of how and why Presidents can be held to account. The Conservative judges were quite concerned with the fate of former Presidents after their terms were over, even though most Presidents managed to not get indicted after leaving office. I think it’s quite clear that if this Court would have just let the lower court ruling stand, the idiots in Texas would have found some reason to prosecute President Biden over his “handling of the Southern border”, no matter how much bullshit that stance is. So in a way, the Court needed to take this up.
To me, it would have been sufficient to say “A President can’t be held liable for executing laws that were in place at the time he was in office, but can (and must!) be held liable for breaking any laws while acting outside his official capacity”.
Even though they needed to take it, they have been deliberately slow-rolling it. I predict they will rule much like I outlined above, but do it in a way where there is no way for the trials to go forward before the election.
An “official act” cannot be simply anything a President does. It should be either enumerated directly in the Constitution (like the pardon power, or the right to make cabinet and judicial appointments), or an authority given to the Executive through legislation.
There is no role for the President in the electoral process at all. The Constitution offers him no role at all. He is not responsible for ensuring elections are fair, the elections officials in the different states are. I see no possible way that provisioning alternate electors, which were not the ones that were ratified by the States, could possibly be within his official duties.
The whole system relies on at least some number of people having good intentions.
Which is why we’re in the trouble that we are. Have you seen how the GOP is acting lately? Anyone who holds the country above their King is being purged.
The Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments on Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity.” Several news organizations are carrying the arguments live (including the linked article). You can also listen on several YouTube channels, including:...
Right, and the Court could easily release a ruling on the very last possible day in June that gives guidance to lower courts saying exactly that, in such a manner that the rulings on those lower courts are still appealable, and Poof! The Supreme Court hands Trump a resounding loss, in such a manner that delays all of his trials to past Election Day.
Shanae Smith-Cunningham arrived at Memorial Regional Hospital on Dec. 21, 2022 — five days after her water broke, only halfway through her pregnancy. Despite her pleas for treatment and the risks to her health, staff at the Hollywood, Fla., hospital turned her away amid the state’s new abortion restrictions....
From reading all of the coverage this morning, I think there is a chance that even this court might rule against Idaho here. Recall that one of the reasons why they overturned RvW is precisely because it wasn’t legislation, and they felt the court ruling went too far in establishing practices that really should be established by statute.
But here is a Federal statute that says emergency rooms need to do whatever is necessary to stabilize patients when they show up. It doesn’t mention abortion at all; it was written to make sure hospitals didn’t turn patients who needed emergency care away because they didn’t have insurance. But the statute is quite clear that these emergency rooms can’t turn away the patients, yet that is exactly what is happening in Idaho, when a pregnant woman shows up with a critical condition that can only be resolved by ending a pregnancy in distress, where the fetus is extremely unlikely to have a positive outcome regardless of any action. The action is to save the mother’s life (or her future fertility).
The Idaho lawyer seems to argue that now that abortion is fully illegal in Idaho, it is not an acceptable method of treatment in any case. But there have been several briefs from doctors that have been filed stating the opposite.
I am optimistic that they can pick off enough of the conservative majority who will give deference to the plain text in the Federal law, and give doctors there the power do do what they need to do to fix the situation. We’ll see, though.
The prosecution made a point of not asking for any jail time in this hearing, but rather a warning that future violations will escalate to that. I don’t think the Judge really wants to jail Trump while the trial is ongoing. Trump will get a hefty fine as well as that warning. Well see how long it takes for Trump to end up in Rikers.
All a short term trip to jail would do is play into the Martyr complex that he and his supporters have. He would complain that he’s not getting a fair trial, and low-information voters who are not paying attention will believe it.
While the judge doesn’t care about Trump’s political prospects, he does care that the trial is fair and that public perceptions don’t make it into the jury’s deliberations. But marching Trump off to a holding cell will be such an event that it would be impossible to keep it from the jury, and could give Trump a valid avenue for appeal.
However, if the judge establishes a paper trail that proves Trump was given every chance to comply, then it would make it harder for the appeal to succeed. Trump can’t very well argue that the court is biased against him when they gave him extra opportunities to comply.
It’s not just the special treatment. It’s the fact that he’s gonna turn around and say he’s the one being treated poorly, and a good chunk of the population will agree, in spite of the plain evidence.
They were laughably easy to hack. If you go back to the early 2000’s, you can read up all about the Diebold voting machines and how vulnerable they were. Plus, it didn’t help perceptions that Diebold’s CEO was a major donator to GWB’s campaign:
Since then, many current Voting Machine companies have taken the advice of their detractors, and have worked to increase security on their devices while also providing a verifiable paper trail. (They also saw what happened to Diebold, who lost so many contracts due to the bad publicity that they had to let themselves be acquired in order to purge that name). The companies were basically shamed into doing a better job by all the voting security researchers (many of which are highlighted in that Wiki article).
The voting process is so much more secure and trustworthy than it was 20 years ago, mainly because of all the people paying attention to it.
He wouldn’t be in the general population at Rikers. They put his CFO in an isolation ward originally built for contagious prisoners. Still, all the facilities there are decrepit, and NYC is actively looking close it down and replace it.
M.U.L.E. Online (puzzud.itch.io)
For those who loved the classic Ozark Softscape game.
Trump brushes off Haley primary voters: ‘Those voters are all coming to me’ (thehill.com)
Live Updates: Cross-Examination of Michael Cohen Continues in Trump Trial (www.nytimes.com)
RFK Jr. accuses Biden and Trump of 'colluding' to exclude him from debates (www.nbcnews.com)
Biden challenges Trump to 2 debates but won’t participate in nonpartisan commission's debates (apnews.com)
Biden’s campaign proposed that the first debate between the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees be held in late June and the second in September before early voting begins. Trump responded to the letter in an interview with Fox News digital, calling the proposed dates “fully acceptable to me” and joked about...
Biden vs. Trump: Who is leading the polls? (www.reuters.com)
Polling sets off fresh alarm bells for Biden (www.thehill.com)
Trump campaign considering Nikki Haley for VP (www.axios.com)
IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million (www.propublica.org)
Virginia school board votes to restore Confederate names to two schools (www.cnn.com)
Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger, Governor Jeff Landry trade barbs at Jazz Fest in New Orleans (www.shreveporttimes.com)
JAGGER: We’re an inclusive group. We like to include everyone. The governor is here, and we’d like to include him, even though he’s trying to take us back to the Stone Age....
deleted_by_moderator
Trump slurs words, struggles to gain crowd enthusiasm as he takes to campaign trail (www.salon.com)
"Number of different devices" fail to keep Trump awake in court (www.salon.com)
GOP-led Arizona Senate votes to repeal 1864 abortion ban, sending it to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs (www.cbsnews.com)
FTA, Courtesy of u/LethalSmack:...
‘Wacko PM’: Canadian opposition leader ejected for Trudeau insult (www.theguardian.com)
What 10 Years of U.S. Meddling in Ukraine Have Wrought (Spoiler Alert: Not Democracy) (www.realclearinvestigations.com)
Voters don't like Biden's economy — but why? (abcnews.go.com)
Trump DOJ lawyer behind fake electors plot should be disbarred, disciplinary panel says (lawandcrime.com)
Are Arabs in Michigan Really Prepared to Hand the Presidency Back to Donald Trump? In a Word: Yes. (www.yahoo.com)
Live Updates: Judge Holds Trump in Contempt of Court, Fining Him $9,000 (www.nytimes.com)
Washington Post coverage for comparison
"Cruel and Insane": Republicans condemn Kristi Noem's dog-killing revelation (www.salon.com)
This whole King Trump thing is getting awfully literal (www.nytimes.com)
Donald Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity for criminal acts taken in office as president is an insult to reason, an assault on common sense and a perversion of the fundamental maxim of American democracy: that no man is above the law....
deleted_by_moderator
Supreme Court arguments on Trump immunity case (www.cnn.com)
The Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments on Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity.” Several news organizations are carrying the arguments live (including the linked article). You can also listen on several YouTube channels, including:...
Pre-Mac OS X games
Hopefully this is the right place to post:...
Opinion | The Supreme Court Has Already Botched the Trump Immunity Case (www.nytimes.com)
The fate of emergency abortion care rests with Supreme Court (wapo.st)
Shanae Smith-Cunningham arrived at Memorial Regional Hospital on Dec. 21, 2022 — five days after her water broke, only halfway through her pregnancy. Despite her pleas for treatment and the risks to her health, staff at the Hollywood, Fla., hospital turned her away amid the state’s new abortion restrictions....
When can doctors provide emergency abortions in states with strict bans? Supreme Court to weigh in (apnews.com)
Live Updates: Prosecutors Say Trump’s Attacks Are Threat to Trial (www.nytimes.com)
Other coverage for comparison:...
Supreme Court waves off Kari Lake lawsuit over electronic voting (www.cnn.com)
Can Donald Trump Save Speaker Mike Johnson? (www.thedailybeast.com)
'They've Taken Away My Right to Speak,' Trump Says While Ranting to Reporters (www.rollingstone.com)
The former president got very mad about his inability attack witnesses and jurors before reportedly dozing off in court again...