Yup, this was one of the central debates with gay marriage vs. civil unions, so many LGBT+ couples were absolutely screwed pre-Obergefell by one of the partners getting sick or dying, and the surviving partner either having no say in medical decisions or getting screwed out of inheritance because the sick/dead partner’s family was anti-gay and froze the surviving partner out of everything.
They did use them as best they could. They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators (Sinema and Manchin) who refused to support getting rid of it, making killing the proposition of killing the filibuster DOA. As a result, their only choice to pass legislation was budget reconciliation, which aren’t subject to filibuster. The issue is that reconciliation has several big limits:
The bill has to be related to government spending, revenue, and the debt ceiling. You can’t toss in things like minimum wage increases or voting rights legislation.
You can only pass one of these bills per year (theoretically you can do more, but additional reconciliation bills have to go through the budgrt committee and with a 50/50 senate the GOP can just skip those meetings to deny quorum and keep it stuck)
Whatever passes still has to get at least 50 votes, which means either appeasing Manchin/Sinema or getting Republican votes (which ain’t gonna happen)
And despite that, we still got the CHIPS act, an infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which–even with Manchinema throwing as many grenades in the process as they could get away with–was the biggest climate change bill in our country’s history. Not perfect, no, but a sizable step in the right direction, for once.
God, the unrelenting misery is killing me in this platform. I think the thing I’m most sick and tired of more than anything else is the constant stream of The Usual Suspects butting in with “But what about Gaza?!” on Every. Single. Post.
Post an article about Biden proposing a ceasefire agreement in the war? Complain about Biden giving support to Israel!
Post an article about Biden celebrating pride month? Complain about Biden funding Israel!
Article about Biden forgiving another batch of student loans? “BUt Biden supports israel!”
Article about Trump getting convicted of felonies? “But Biden! Gaza! Israel!”
Article about a small town library fighting LGBTQ+ book bans? “GAZA! ISRAEL! BIDEN! BAD”
Article about a goddamn random topic completely unrelated to Biden, Trump, Israel, politics, or the US at all? “GENOCIIIIIIIIIIDE!”
It’s at the point where I’ve cut back on Lemmy usage entirely because every comment thread I click on is like navigating a fucking minefield of misery. Nothing good can ever happen, no policy changes can ever be celebrated, no events can be remarked upon, without someone butting in with a reminder that Genocide Mother-Fucking Joe is personally shoveling coal into the palestinian child incinerator. No post can ever leave you with any emotion other than the thin veil of doomerism settling upon your shoulders, a pall of depression casting itself over the tragedy of the world, and a sense that modern society is an Aristocrats joke that has long since crossed the line from “horrifying” to “funny,” then back to “horrifying,” then back to “funny,” before settling itself so firmly in “horrifying” that the audience is casting nervous glances and hoping that someone else is the first to call the police.
Don’t bother, he’s one of the many trolls whose entire purpose on Lemmy is to shit on biden
You seem to have mistaken my post as defending or supporting Garland’s appointment. Please rest assured that is not the case.
He doesn’t need to be a fighter. The only reason J6 got so bad is because Trump’s administration actively and directly prevented any security measures from being prepared ahead of time, and then stalled and refused to call for help when the skeletal security guards were overrun.
The default posture of everyone who handles security for these institutions and would be in charge of fighting off another J6 attempt is that they want to protect the Capital and prevent something like this from happening again by preparing adequate measures in advance and having backup ready and available. All Biden has to do is not actively block the national guard, capital security, and D.C. police.
At the time, picking Garland as AG was a giant fuck you to republicans to get revenge on them denying Obama the supreme court nomination in 2016, a way of saying “ha, ha, you denied him a seat and now we gave him one that’s almost as good.”
Unfortunately, in hindsight it turns out that when you put a very moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican in the cabinet, they will run their department like a moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican, and that resulted in the DOJ focusing on the mooks more than the masterminds out of fear of being seen as a political hatchet man.
The second contempt hearing was over statements that were made between the first contempt hearing and the judge’s initial ruling–i.e. they were statements made before he was initially sanctioned. The judge hasn’t backed down, he’s just not jailing him until he makes a statement made after his warning.
They can’t delay it that long, they have to issue a decision by the end of their current term, which ends when they go into summer recess in late June/early July. Granted, they could theoretically say “screw the rules” and not issue a decision until after the election, but that’s literally never been done, and if it did everyone would start ringing the alarm bells because it’s a crystal clear sign they’re corruptly abusing their power for Trump’s benefit. (Yes, I know they’re already doing this, but what they’re doing right now is blowing hard enough on a dog whistle to draw side-eye glances from passers by, while delaying a decision past the end of term would be like blowing a train whistle right next to your face.)
If they do decide to help Trump, the most likely path will be waiting until the last minute to issue a decision and then punting it back to the lower court for further review.
And this is why any pro-forced birther who says it should be “left up to the states” should be treated as if they’re lying. If they truly believe it’s murder, then there’s no world in which they would tolerate a state choosing to keep abortion legal, and if given half a chance they would immediately ban it everywhere.
“It should be left to the states” is code for “I would happily sign a national ban but I won’t say it because I know it’s political suicide.”
Looks like it was mostly unrelated to Trump, he likely chose to do it outside the courthouse because there were more people and news cameras paying attention there.
Oh, okay, he’s a garden variety nutjob who went off his meds for too long. Glad it could be cleared up.
EDIT: I realized this was a bit flippant after thinking back on it. It’s obviously tragic that this guy wasn’t able to get the help he obviously needed before it was too late. I’m relieved it wasn’t because of obvious partisan leanings (i.e. he was protesting the trial in one way or the other) and that it appears his decision to set fire there appears to have been more to draw attention to his message. I won’t even say that his ideas are entirely wrong–it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if billionaires were pumping crypto as a rugpull, but there’s a lot of obvious delusions (like claiming that the Simpsons, the Beatles, George Orwell, and various pop icons were part of a conspiracy to normalize doom-and-gloom sentiment). I just hope this doesn’t delay the trial too much, and I hope it’s not a sign of things to come.
No, but you do need enough votes that the people who like the status quo can be overriden. The last time that was the case was the brief period between 2008 and 2010 where there were 59 (and a 3-week window where they had 60) democrats in the Senate, and during that period McConnell’s “block everything and don’t give Obama any wins at all” strategy wasn’t fully apparent yet, so there was no appetite to get rid of the filibuster because it hadn’t yet been so widely abused. Then the 2010 midterm came in and democrats went from holding 59 seats to 51, and we’ve been stuck with Manchin (and later Sinema) having effective veto power on the Democrat agenda ever since.
Notable is NPR’s rebuttal to this essay: NPR responds after editor says it has ‘lost America’s trust’
In particular, this portion stands out:
“As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry’s long-standing lack of diversity,” Alfonso says. “These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done.”
After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso’s characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.
“I never criticized NPR’s priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not ‘denigrated’ NPR’s newsroom diversity goals,” Berliner said. “That’s wrong.”
Nah, he just talked about how “Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace” and how a bunch of employee groups based on identity started up, and then directly linked that to the “absence of viewpoint diversity.” Totally different. 🙄
I’m really tired of this weasel wordplay that constantly happens, where someone talks about X and then uses that to lead into a point about how this bad thing happened, and when called out, backs off and says “I never blamed X on this bad thing happening.” Fuck off with that shit, we all know what you said and we can fucking read, you just don’t want to admit it because you know that saying it makes you look racist as all hell.
Yeah, happy to help. Sealioning really fucking sucks, because the only ways to counter it are:
Insult the troll until they go away
Refuse to play their game and give short, pithy responses without doing any research (or not linking the research you did)
Ignore the troll entirely
Copy your response and paste it whenever you see the troll asking the same question (which someone is doing in this very thread)
Create and maintain a collection of ready-to-go arguments with citations that you can copy/paste at the drop of a hat, which is a fair bit of work in of itself
In case it’s not obvious, most of the counters for sealioning look almost exactly like trolling itself, and it’s almost impossible to tell a sealion from someone apart looking for a legitimate discussion at first glance–short of keeping track of individual usernames and watching them in multiple threads, the only way to know if someone is a sealion for sure is for at least one person to feed the troll at least one good response. It’s what makes sealioning such an insidious technique, because fighting a sealion almost always results in a lower quality of discussion itself, giving the sealion another type of victory.
It’s a specific form of trolling/bad-faith argument based on this comic. The idea behind sealioning is that you feign politeness and badger someone with seemingly-simple questions (that in reality require spending a sizable amount of time to answer) to get them to try to debate you. This can take the form of asking someone to elaborate a point, or provide citations to support a claim. If the victim takes the bait and responds legitimately, the troll ignores most of the message, claims any citations are invalid for some reason (biased source, misrepresenting what the article says, or just ignoring it exists entirely). The troll then cherry picks a few statements, and asks more questions about those, continuing the cycle, If the victim refers to previous posts, the troll pretends it either didn’t happen or didn’t actually answer their question (it did). If the victim refers to previously linked articles, the troll dismisses them and insists the victim provides “better” articles (that the troll will also dismiss out of hand). If the victim ever tells the troll to fuck off, the troll claims the moral high road and says they just “want a civil discussion” and “reasoned debate” over the topic.
The goal is something like a reverse Gish Gallop. Where a gish gallop aims to overwhelm the victim with more arguments than can be addressed quickly in the hope that your opponent can’t/won’t take the time to respond and walk away, allowing you to claim victory, sealioning aims to trick the victim into spending hours writing a messages that you can respond to in under a minute with a few simple questions, creating a kind of denial-of-service attack.
He says himself that he was there to protect businesses, but he had no relation to the business beyond that of a standard employee, and his help was never requested–he didn’t know the owners, his family didn’t own the business, and he wasn’t even a frequent customer IIRC.
The most charitable interpretation is that an untrained, underage civilian took a semiautomatic rifle across state lines, to a protest happening in a town he didn’t live in, to guard a business that he had no special relation to, and that never asked for his help.
The more probable interpretation, given posts on his social media before the shooting (that weren’t allowed to be shown in court), is that he wanted to play action hero and shoot some scumbags, and he got exactly what he hoped.
EDIT: Apparently he worked at the business he was guarding, but the point still stands–he never got permission to defend the business, nor was it ever offered.
At this rate we’re going to start getting memes about Lemmy reading comprehension lmao
Lmao, from an NPR article on the same topic:
They filed an affidavit from an insurance broker saying it is “not possible” to find a bond that big. The broker was an expert witness for Trump during the trial.
The trial judge already noted in his decision that this broker was a “close personal friend” of Trump’s and had a financial interest in the outcome. A decision could come from the appeals court later this week.
I’m sure the judge will give the broker’s opinion all the deference it’s due. /s
Or worse yet, they split the vote and a solid blue seat sends a Republican to Congress with 35-40% of the vote. I just love FPTP!