My non-joke answer is apprenticeship. Kids could actually learn how to do a valuable job rather than graduating from high school with almost no useful skills.

Hah, I expect that Mitch McConnell is still going to vote for him.

defense attorneys argued that Manhattan prosecutors had placed “highly prejudicial emphasis on official-acts evidence,” including Trump’s social media posts and witness testimony about Oval Office meetings

It’s unclear to me why an official act cannot be used as evidence that a different unofficial act occurred. Let’s say candidate Trump shoots Bob on Fifth Avenue and then, after being elected, threatens to “kill Joe the way [he] killed Bob” during his State of the Union address. He can’t be held accountable for threatening to kill Joe, but he did just confess that he killed Bob while he wasn’t president. Why couldn’t this confession be used as evidence in his trial for killing Bob? Or, for that matter, in his trial for killing Joe if he went on to kill Joe after he was out of office?

I wonder if Watergate would have been an official act according to this new doctrine.

Then it becomes “okay, call this prick the c-word. Now I need to also cite this fact that is part of my border security answer. And then I need to talk about… jesus christ are we actually talking about global warming right now?”

That would be an understandable reaction from the average person but the president should be a lot more capable than the average person. Even if this specific sort of thing isn’t something he needs to be able to handle, he still needs to handle things a lot harder than this and his performance here isn’t reassuring me that he can. Trump is so predictably rude that Biden should have been totally ready for it.

I’m not old and I think I might forget some of the words, especially since I would be so anxious.

I also responded, “So, you are saying that property rights have priority over human rights?”

In this vein, I enter another definition of “trespassing” as “an unlawful act committed on the person, property, or rights of another.”

When university presidents and chancellors call in campus or municipal police officers to dismantle peaceful tent encampments and arrest demonstrators, they commit trespass against “the person” and their First Amendment right to “freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Not quite at the Sovereign Citizen level of legal misunderstand but getting there…

There are already solid-red states with no blue urban areas. I suppose it’s technically true that people die in these states (all humans are mortal) but the implication that everyone there except rich landowners is likely to die prematurely is ridiculous.

The same thing that already happens to most of them now, I suppose: their basic rights are protected by the Constitution but if they want to live in a community that welcomes them then they might need to move. In the specific situation this article is about, the queer people in eastern Oregon would have to deal with the same issues that the queer people in Idaho already deal with.

In general, I sympathize with the desire to rescue people from the customs of their community, but I don’t think that doing so by imposing our customs on their community is a good idea except in the most extreme cases. It violates the golden rule: I wouldn’t want outsiders imposing their customs on me, even if someone in my community was being mistreated according to the customs of those outsiders. It also doesn’t seem to work very well in practice. It has failed in extreme cases like the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and I fear that it is currently failing in the USA.

Democracy works well when people have similar general goals and just disagree about how to accomplish them. It doesn’t work well when people have opposing goals. Thus I have a lot of sympathy for these people even though I disagree with their politics. Why should they have to follow the rules set by culturally dissimilar coastal cities far away rather than the rules set by much more similar and much closer Idaho?

If I could remake the US government from scratch, I think I might create something like the self-governing cities of medieval Europe. The Democratic/Republican divide is largely an urban/rural one, and this way both the urban and the rural areas would have the local governments and the representatives that the majority wanted. Real-world state lines do a poor job of demarcating regions where most of the people have similar values. A better system is possible, but in practice there’s too much inertia to make such large changes.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Another Supreme Court wife causing trouble, eh?

I assume the genie’s rule is “if I help you, I help him twice as much” rather than simply “I do to him twice as much of exactly the same thing I did to you” because otherwise it’s way too easy to kill the other guy while helping yourself.

You make a good point. In my experience, American society is a meritocracy - my family started out with almost nothing and now we’re upper-middle-class. I know plenty of other people with a similar experience; this experience is one reason why so many immigrants want to come to the USA. However, it’s clear that my experience isn’t universal. I don’t identify with the many people here who don’t think we’re living in a meritocracy, and I don’t identify with people in generational poverty despite having experienced poverty myself. I admit I don’t understand the former group (are we living in the same country?) and my understanding of the latter group is only academic. I can see why people in these groups wouldn’t want a representative with a life experience like mine.

That’s simply not true for the upper middle class - look at the statistics for Chinese immigrants. They start out much poorer than the average native-born American but they quickly end up earning significantly more than the average native-born American does. Plenty of them go from poverty to the upper middle class in one or two generations.

“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” I know I sound like a jerk here, but I expect someone with the ability to be an effective politician to have the ability to reach the upper middle class, generally by becoming a lawyer, even if starting with nothing.

I’m still angry about that. We have the eight Justices of the Supreme Court and Neil Gorsuch, IMO.

That was painfully unfunny.

The crate apparently had a “windshield”. I’m a dog lover, but I’m prepared to believe that Romney’s dog was OK with travelling like that. I’m not saying that every dog would be OK with it, but I trust him to know his own dog. I mean, my dog would watch fireworks shows with me. Most other dogs would probably hate doing that, but that doesn’t mean that I was somehow abusing my dog by bringing him with me.

I’ve gotten laid off myself before. It was disappointing but not a major financial setback - I had been getting paid enough that I could then live comfortably on my savings until I found a new job. I think that overall, as long as tech companies keep making those even bigger profits, tech workers will be doing well.

I’ve worked in tech (but not in the Bay Area) for over ten years and what I say has been my own experience. I’m not claiming that every tech job is great, but good programmers are in such high demand that there’s no reason for one of them to settle for less.