They should be terrified of what Trump would do to them with this power, though. History has shown time and time again that, just because Trump likes you today, that doesn’t mean he won’t fire you tomorrow. Or in this case, should I say “fire” you tomorrow.

If Biden were to use his powers to force the 6 conservative Supreme Court Justices out, then there wouldn’t be anybody on the court who would disagree with the minority interpretation.

Important meetings? During his presidency, Trump skipped most of his daily intelligence briefings.

Forget staying awake, Trump doesn’t even show up.

Because this is politics, and the US has only two possible options in November, it is good to remember that Trump told Israel that it should “end the problem” of Gaza.

Even if you don’t like Biden on this issue, it is imperative to vote for him in November. A non-vote for Biden is almost as bad as a vote for Trump.

I can guarantee MAGA will have no qualms voting for Trump despite his genocidal tendencies. If you don’t vote for Biden and Trump wins, you will be responsible for a lot of suffering.

More background on this “non-partisan” commission.

The CPD was established in 1987 by the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Parties to “take control of the presidential debates”. The commission was staffed by members from the two parties and chaired by the heads of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul G. Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf. At a 1987 press conference announcing the commission’s creation, Fahrenkopf said that the commission was not likely to include third-party candidates in debates, and Kirk said he personally believed they should be excluded from the debates.

It is not non-partisan. It is bipartisan. That’s an important difference. Saying that it’s nonpartisan is misinformation.

Third parties have often criticized exclusion of their candidates from debates, due to the CPD’s rule (established in 2000) that candidates must garner at least 15% support across five national polls to be invited to the national debates. The last candidate from outside the two major parties to participate in a CPD-sponsored debate was Ross Perot, who polled sufficiently high in his 1992 presidential campaign to debate George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton in all three debates; Perot’s running mate, James Stockdale, also participated in the vice presidential debate. When Perot ran again in 1996, the CPD declined to invite him to the debates, finding that the Reform Party candidate had no “realistic chance to win” the election.

So, it’s an organization run by the two major parties that explicitly tries to keep third parties from participating in the debates.

Based on McConnell’s past actions, I suspect that the reason he is standing by his previous position is that he doesn’t find it politically beneficial to change his opinion. I don’t think there is any other type of meaning to McConnell’s political positions.

There should be some penalty for filing lawsuits like this that have zero merit. Like, pay the fees that you caused the taxpayers.

If that’s how they felt was the strongest opening argument, it reveals how weak that whole angle was.

Well said. I can’t believe how long that article was for the quality.

I have this strong suspicion that nobody read the whole thing, even the guy who challenged us by saying “Have you read his essay?” and linked it.

Okay, I started reading it, and I had to stop because he lost his credibility to me. Here are the notes I made for the beginning of the article.

First, he cites statistics to show how the demographics of listeners moved left between 2011 and 2023. He mentions Trump as related, but doesn’t consider how Trump’s lies about “fake news” caused a massive shift in what news people consume. And he doesn’t mention how during that time all news outlets were being affected by the rise of social media.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

This is what Burr’s summary of the Mueller report said. It’s right wing propaganda. The report actually found all sorts of evidence, but concluded it couldn’t call them crimes because of a policy of the DOJ.

There was really no point in continuing reading once I got to actual lies. It’s not journalism and the author doesn’t come off as credible to me.

Having heard Cohen speak a few times, I’m almost sure that he’s called Trump a petulant man child many times before.

Since Trump’s criminal trials are already ongoing, politically, he needs to use this appeal to avoid convictions now, though. Many polls have said that a lot of people wouldn’t vote for him if he’s convicted. I suspect some percentage of those people were telling the truth.

This would be giving Biden absolute power. It’s difficult to predict what any specific person would do in those circumstances.

There’s a lot of evidence that Biden hasn’t abused power when he’s received it in the past, but imagine he’s given absolute power, and then Trump wins the election. And then Trump threatens Biden and his entire family.

I don’t know what Biden would do in that situation, but I know what I’d do.

Why not both? They could have something on those politicians and also be envied by them.

Unless everything we know about Russian intelligence is wrong, Putin almost certainly has kompromat on many politicians. There was an article recently from a politician about how after he was elected, he started being approached by young beautiful women, and he realized after talking to other politicians just how trivial an effort it would be to get compromising material on most of them.

According to George Clooney, he always saw Trump in NY bars trying to sleep with random women in the early 2000s. Trump was already a world famous “businessman” at the time who was into politics. Exactly the sort of person Russia could target and who would be easily compromised.

The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.

Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.

When you look at what she’s done, she’s beyond obvious.

She had an order overturned early on, and then, rather than changing the types of things she’s doing, she changed the format that she’s using to do those things. She started using these paperless orders that are more difficult to challenge.

She’s favoring Trump as much as she thinks is possible to get away with. And if Trump is elected, some have been saying that he plans to appoint Cannon to the Supreme Court.

Another thing is that I feel like the era of the private phone number has passed. I see the use case for phone numbers for businesses, but people just don’t use them very much anymore otherwise.

Like, we don’t memorize them. We don’t dial them. They’re just entries in our contacts.

At this point, we could create an alternative way of contacting private phones. Something based on whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Something that can be easily shared but not easily guessed. Something that would be easy to trace who called you.

All of these phone scams rely on the idea that a stranger can just up and contact you without any effort. It’s ridiculous. If we got rid of that, we’d save people from untold billions of dollars of scams almost instantly.

“Bi” seems an apt description of her party affiliation.

There is no reason to think this would be legitimate grounds for a mistrial, although Trump’s team will probably pretend like it is.

I hate this entire topic.

For one, I feel like debates are usually very important, but in this specific case, we have two candidates who have already served as President. There is no chance to learn anything about these candidates from a debate.

Not only that, but they debated before, and it was an absolute shit show. But we’ve already seen them debate. It’s hard to imagine what benefit we’d get from repeating that mess.

And Presidential debates have been useless for decades now. They get asked a question, and if the question has any bite to it, the candidates just ignore the question and try to make soundbites from partial speeches that they prepared ahead of time about any adjacent topic.

Trump bucked that trend by not being prepared, but just being an asshole and talking stream-of-conscious gibberish over all of his opponents. Biden more than held his own last time, but it seems to me that he’s become more soft-spoken lately. I imagine just from appearances, it would seem like loud-mouthed Trump would come out on top this time. But being a loud-mouth is not really what makes somebody a good President.

That’s pure evil, but one part stands out, not as the worst part, but somehow still stands out.

“and they are discovered.” What’s that got to do with anything? If this is from the religious point of view, then surely God knows what he did, so why would it matter if they’re discovered. If it’s from a legal point of view, then of course you can only redress crimes that are discovered, so there’s no need to include that phrase.

So, including that phrase doesn’t seem to have any relevance or benefit. Conversely, including a phrase like that does imply that if they’re not discovered, then God doesn’t care whether anything happens to the man. The girl has been violated and lost her virginity. But since they weren’t discovered, there’s no penalty, even from God.

The other thing this makes me think about is, “If the penalty for breaking a law is simply a fine, then the law really only applies to poor people.” So, a person who can afford fifty shekels of silver can just pick any maiden he wants to marry, as long as she’s not pledged to be married, even if he’s old and gross. All he has to do is something terrible and then get “discovered.” This section simply seems to legalize rape for rich people.