Not really. If Trump issues an executive order and an executive employee says “I won’t do that”, they can be fired whether or not the EO is ultimately determined to be legal. If a non-executive employee starts demanding birth certificates in order to vote, you can call the police and another less insane poll worker can give you your ballot without any personal risk, just the same as without an EO.

These news stories are treating this like a real legal issue, but Trump’s EOs have as much jurisdiction on voting procedures as they have in deciding what I’m going to have for dinner. It doesn’t need a legal challenge because it doesn’t apply to anyone actually who decides what IDs are required.

It should be reported, but as authoritarian ravings completely inconsistent with our voting systems rather than a looming legal clash where we need the Supreme Court to decide what’s right.

A memory lapse makes you forget the word, not slur something unintelligible. He went back to normal quickly, but something happened.

They’ve been systematically deconstructing all the excuses used by corporate Democrats to justify why they need to keep the system moving even though they totally oppose [insert current controversial spending]. All that stuff wasn’t an accident. It was designed that way and the regime just threw it away because they’re too dumb to recognize that it was helping them.

I think there are figures for the number of new working age adults per year that would probably be the denominator you’re interested in. That would account for both babies not needing jobs and old folks retiring. It’ll all be roughly correlated with total population though. There are generational bulges and unusual rates of retirement, but it’s not going to be a drastic change when comparing year to year stats.

The math for 2024 seems to be incorrect.

Seems like a pretty weird complaint when given 5 minutes and 3 songs to blast through, they ended the set with American Idiot.

I can’t imagine many people not understanding who “Idiot America” is. Any specific lyric inclusions would be incremental over that song itself being played.

And it’s only “many people” because I’ve seen conservatives rocking out to Killing in the Name. The same people dumb enough to buy into Q shit and think “the Machine” is vaccine mandates aren’t going to be enlightened by the full lyrics.

I don’t think this would sway my vote, but it’s a reasonable statement. Free childcare is a big deal, and if Hochul wants to ride his coattails into doing good stuff and the only cost is him giving her props for it, that seems fine.

Lots of people entering is good as a measure of democratic engagement, but lots of people in a race distorts the result of a FPTP race away from something that could reliably be declared to represent the majority. We won’t know that the person with a plurality won because they best represent of the desires of the voters or simply because an opposing ideology had more candidates and split their vote. A person with less than a third of the vote being the winner is not good democracy.

We’re on our way to having the person likely to represent the district for a decade winning with 31% of the vote. It’s a great system we’ve got.

TSA is a worthless self-inflicted wound to the country. If I could fly on “I’ll Take My Chances” Air, I absolutely would just to reclaim my time from the security theater.

This is something that literally happened during the BLM protests and against the SWAT-like CBP BORTAC units that one of the shooter was a part of. He might have been there.

Alex was killed in a 8 on 2 with little potential for external threat and every nearby actor well recognized. Turn that into an 8 on 50 with enough people that the perpetrator is hard to identify and the threat charges. Handguns aren’t magic and if they escalate against random crowd members and don’t immediately control the scene (something they can’t be guaranteed happens) they can’t be sure they come out of that alive. If they do they may have just started the revolution and their fun cosplay power trip job turns into hoping they don’t catch a sniper shot during patrols.

Unarresting is risky as hell even without the threat of gunfire, it literally involves performing a felony, but if they’re attacking people at polling stations things are serious enough for people to not just continually back down.

They’re not going to try to make a voting barrier, they’re going to be circling it trying to intimidate citizens and hoping to grab a non-citizen they can claim was trying to vote even if he was really just showing up to his shift to clean the school. They don’t need to arrest people, they just need to suppress the vote where it will matter.

The vanguard who doesn’t have to fear ICE can go vote in the morning then just start gathering next to wherever they’re hanging out. By midday the concept of anyone being stopped by the voting station will look infeasible.

Also, wherever MAGA is not firmly in control, protect vote by mail and early voting. And make sure people send their votes early enough to avoid postal manipulation.

That’s exactly how it works. You don’t let them get to the back of the SUV in the first place, but there are more of us than there are of them.

Few people here are talking about radical reforms that would change the existing power dynamics and politicians are even less ambitious. Centrists are continually looking for off-ramps so that we don’t “go too far” (e.g., don’t abolish ICE, reform the courts, ban money from politics, reestablish the balance of powers). Even with a blue wave and a reformist president, expect there to be enough of those sorts to bog down any momentum for change and enough voters eager to reconcile and return to business as usual that nothing changes.

Other countries should be planning to insulate themselves from us, because we’re not going to become safe to trust. We may go back to Obama levels of foreign engagement and the slow grind of neoliberal economic policy, but we’re going to be teetering on the edge of another Trump for decades at least. His 40% of supporters are fanatical and have no exposure to outside viewpoints that would deprogram them, and the judges he’s put in place will allow insanity to stay mainstream.

A reminder that using chemical weapons is literally a war crime. Our non-cosplay soldiers are banned from using chemical weapons on opposing forces, but ICE can flood American streets with it because someone wasn’t standing where they wanted them to.

Musk wanted to bring his wife to the pedo island and when Epstein warned him she might not like the “ratio” he said she wouldn’t mind. Spouses of famous and powerful men may either be so beholden or devoted to them they will excuse their actions, or they might also be just as bad. Epstein’s girlfriend was his primary co-conspirator.

I don’t know that Chomsky is bad, he could just be a clueless professor, but inviting his wife along isn’t an indicator that he didn’t know what the island experience was.

In her video announcing it she said she consulted with her lawyer and it’s not actually illegal to spend donations on doing good things rather than just pissing billions of dollars away every election. The key is that it can’t be conditioned on voting.

One of the interesting tactics she’s been using in her campaign is spending donated funds to help the residents of the district. I don’t know how much she spends on traditional campaign ads and consultants, but it’s less than the 100% most do and she’s held events that were just volunteering for public benefit.