***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[Belgium]

First time a judge is no longer satisfied with DOJ arguing 'your honor, the president was just lying on Twitter, he didn't actually issue the order he said he did on Twitter, please ignore the tweets.'
He first ordered DOJ to confer with the WH about Trump's tweet but then issued the following order after refusing to accept the WH Counsel's response that the tweet meant nothing and should just be ignored.

 

[RustyShackleford]

 

[IATT]

 

[lobotomybeats]

Not really. She said only half of them were deplorable.

 

[aepps20]

Not really. She said only half of them were deplorable.

The only thing she was wrong about in describing them.

 

[gry60]

Heard that? That was the sound of the global value of American college degrees hitting the floor.

 

[IATT]

Heard that? That was the sound of the global value of American college degrees hitting the floor.

when i remember i went to high school and college in the us

 

[RustyShackleford]

Heard that? That was the sound of the global value of American college degrees hitting the floor.

It is happening in Lucia for years now. Unless you went to a top-rated school with name recognition, Canadian and UK universities carry more weight now.

 

[IATT]

 

[gry60]

What to Do About GOP Bad Faith After Trump | Crooked Media

After Trump, there must be a reckoning for the Republican Party's wholesale embrace of bad faith. Here's what that might look like.

crooked.com

"If after four years of the Trump presidency, we can’t stipulate that Republicans have been malicious rather than simply misguided, we may as well also stipulate to their implicit terms: that rules, laws, and norms apply only to those who care about rules, laws and norms. We may as well stand back as they transform the United States into a kleptocracy."

Great read from Brian Beutler. Pretty much touches on all of the points a certain poster that shan't be named (out of the best interest in a worthwhile and productive conversation) leans HEAVILY on. And why it's often exhausting to have conversations with the Ice Cubes of the world, when they deliberately avoid reading...anything whatsoever to inform them about the dangers of "both-sides are the same". A steady hotep diet of IG/FB/Youtube conspiracies isn't easily to dismantle if they're in too deep.

News outlets should feel obligated to offer their consumers truth, rather than balance and equal partisan representation. The idea isn’t that journalists should take sides in grand fights between liberals and conservatives, but should accurately portray the conflicting worldviews that drive those battles. Studiously neutral political journalists can still alert viewers to the fact that the Democratic Party is a descendent of a liberal tradition, while the Republican Party has evolved into something that more closely resembles the authoritarian parties of European democracies. That isn’t the same thing as making a choice for viewers, it just accurately describes their options.

This is very important. Americans should, as a community, do away with the reflex of seeking balance in the face of truth. However, for that to happen deep reforms to education should happen, and they should happen ASAP.

 

[RustyShackleford]

G.O.P.-Appointed Judges Threaten Democracy, Liberals Seeking Court Expansion Say (Published 2020)

A new study found a partisan pattern in rulings that could make it easier or harder to vote, fueling a debate among Democrats over court packing.

www.nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — Progressive activists who want Democrats to expand the Supreme Court and pack it with additional liberal justices are mustering a new argument: Republican-appointed jurists, they say, keep using their power to make it harder for Americans to vote.

Backed by a new study of how federal judges and justices have ruled in election-related cases this year, the activists are building on their case for why mainstream Democrats should see their idea as a justified way to restore and protect democracy, rather than as a radical and destabilizing escalation of partisan warfare over the judiciary.

 

[reformeDWS]

No wonder Lindsey is crying

somehow there are millions of dollars to inject into politics but it would be too unfair to increase taxes on corporations and disburse money to the people

 

[boris]

We have a Trump apologist in here that excuses his lies as "ignorance" and "lack of experience". **** is unreal.

 

[gry60]

It is happening in Lucia for years now. Unless you went to a top-rated school with name recognition, Canadian and UK universities carry more weight now.

You look at the fact that the first two years of college are basically remedial programs for cats who didn't bother paying attention in high school, you look at how much it costs to get educated here, and you start realizing that you're paying for the name/pedigree of the school or the generic "US diploma" if you plan to move abroad.

Add to the recipe Trump, who torpedoed US universities' foreign student programs, and you start to wonder why you should come in a country full of people who hate different people to drop 200-300k over 4 years or more.

Add his response to covid and his embrace of the anti-science movement, add the fact that leaders of prominent universities (Notre Dame) ignore the science they're teaching, and you start to wonder if you should trust your instructors.

And just like that, you won't be surprised that when you tell people that you were educated here, they may want to know if it was before or after he Obama era.

 

[gregory house]

No wonder Lindsey is crying

Donated to Jaimie a couple of weeks ago, please South Carolina do the right thing and get Graham all the way out the paint

Sincerely,
A Kale Juice Drinking Californian

 

[Mister Meaner]

I’m convinced this delk character is an agent. Mans cannot be black and strut around here the way he does so effortlessly. That is a SWM who has suffered no oppression.

 

[elpablo21]

"Quick response"

Good for the state doe

 

[gry60]

 

[IATT]

 

[whywesteppin]

All of them are despicable. History will not remember them well.

LOCK THEM ALL UP.

Obummer, Killary, Sleepy Joe, and LeBum James.

 

[lazyj10]

Fine by me since she's like 83.

 

[whywesteppin]

Got my ballot today.

This is interesting. Kanye is part of a long list of candidates, below some guy who calls himself Cancer.

Can't wait to vote for Trump!!!!!!

 

[Public Enemy]

This was a long but interesting read

Thanks for posting it. You're right, long and interesting, even if depressing. I'll post a clip of it, which is about 30% of the article.

The spectre of another “judicial selection” to settle the US presidency has intensified efforts among constitutional apostates — a growing minority in the US’s legal faculties — to overhaul America’s founding document, or even start from scratch. One such dissenter, Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas Law School, says that the failure to change America’s constitution — either by replacing it with a document fit for the 21st century, or by doing away with a written constitution altogether — will result in one of three outcomes.

The first is the break-up of America. This year there has been a flurry of books with titles such as American Secession and Divided We Fall. The two largest putative new countries often mentioned would be Cascadia, which would include the West Coast states, notably northern California, and the mountain west, and the older idea of the Republic of Texas, which would incorporate much of the south and Midwest. “Americans are used to thinking of secession as a violent act because of the civil war,” says Levinson. “But you have plenty of examples around the world of peaceful divorce, including Scotland’s possible departure from the UK, the split of the Slovaks from the Czechs in the 1990s and Norway from Sweden in 1905.” A minor hitch is that most scholars believe the constitution forbids secession, which is why America went to war with itself over slavery.

Levinson’s second outcome is civil war. Much of the blame for America’s 1861-65 civil war came from the notorious 1857 Dred Scott ruling, which said that black Americans could not be treated as citizens even if they lived in non-slave states. Black people, including Scott, a slave who claimed he had been freed after moving from Missouri to Illinois, where slavery was illegal, “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the constitution”, wrote Roger Taney, the chief justice.

Taney was unfortunately correct. America’s founding fathers expressly denied citizenship to slaves. For the sole purpose of appeasing the thinly populated slave states, the constitution defined a slave as three-fifths of a human being, thus granting the south more congressional representation than warranted by the number of its white male citizens. Hence the reputed quip from Stokely Carmichael, the 1960s black power radical, who referred to America’s “Constitu” — he could only get three-fifths of the way through the word.

Abraham Lincoln, in some ways America’s greatest founding father even though he was born years after independence, was the man who won the civil war against the south. He frequently referred to the fact that the constitution denied citizenship to slaves. Lincoln, in other words, effectively declared war on the US constitution. The Supreme Court also played a notorious role in enshrining the Jim Crow segregation of the south in its 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson ruling, which did so much to undo the results of Lincoln’s civil war victory. “Change in America has usually come from breaking the constitution rather than adhering to it — up to and including war,” says Levinson. “Not many constitutional scholars talk about that.”

Levinson’s third option, which he considers the most likely, is that America falls victim neither to secession nor to war. It simply drifts into becoming the “sick man of the west”, a 21st-century version of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire, which gradually descended during the 18th and 19th century into sclerosis. In this story, which is arguably under way, America grudgingly reconciles itself to the fact that renewal is not possible. Rather than providing a blueprint for modern reforms, its constitution acts as an ever more entrenched roadblock to change. Like the grand viziers of Istanbul, Washington’s elected and berobed elites comfortably acclimatise to a system that services their personal needs. Dynamism unconsciously morphs into stasis. A country that prided itself on its political radicalism turns inwards into a form of ancestor-worship known as “originalism” — the legal doctrine that the country’s limits are defined by the words of America’s founding fathers or the intended meaning behind their words.

“Originalism is a bit like the Protestant Reformation,” says Eric Posner. “You have to go back to the original text and read it literally.” In reality, Posner adds, originalists simply read whatever they like into the constitution. A historical reading of America’s first amendment, which guarantees free speech, would tell you that it was explicitly meant to prevent the government from closing down subversive publications in feverish 1790s America. Somehow that text has been reread into a right for corporations to spend unlimited money on elections.

Likewise, a contextual understanding of the second amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms, makes it clear that its 1790s drafters meant organised militias. Again, originalists have extracted radically different interpretations. Now the second amendment is taken to mean that Americans can carry concealed arms into shopping malls and churches, or keep small armouries designed for the battlefield in their basement. Neither interpretation of either amendment was mainstream half a century ago. Yet it is as hard today, as then, to read the actual words and match the interpretations of the originalists. “In some respects, originalism is just a fig leaf for making up what you want to make up, just like you can find whatever you like from the Bible,” says Posner. “Originalism is a licence to be creative.”

Among many others, Barrett is a devotee of originalism. Her mentor, Antonin Scalia, who served on the Supreme Court for three decades, was the jurist who did most to advance the doctrine, which is sometimes called “textualism”. Almost none of the challenges America faces — global warming, becoming a minority-majority society, producing vaccines at speed, high-tech competition with China — could have been foreseen by the founding fathers.

It was precisely in anticipation of the unforeseeable that Thomas Jefferson, the most poetic of America’s founders, recommended the US change its constitution every generation.

 

[Hahahaha]

 

[gry60]